Summary:

Dr. Jim chats with Dr. Jeff Gorman, interim superintendent in Robbinsville, NJ, to explore the nuances of educational leadership and organizational transformation. With three decades in education, Dr. Gorman shares insights on fostering trust, dismantling silos, and leveraging talent to drive academic success. The discussion highlights the importance of consistent leadership, clear communication, and the impact of past educational frameworks. Listeners will gain valuable perspectives on enhancing leadership capabilities within the K-12 system, focusing on cultivating enduring educational environments.

Key Takeaways:

• Trust and Transparency: Building trust through transparency and communication is paramount in transforming educational leadership and operations.
• Leadership from the Front: Effective leaders model the behavior they expect from their team, demonstrating commitment and reducing the gap between saying and doing.
• Breaking Down Silos: Overcoming fragmented communication and action across districts requires a strategic approach to unify efforts and drive successful teaching outcomes.
• Systematic Improvements: Creating systems that support sustainment of successful practices across transitions encourages continuous improvement in educational environments.

Chapters:

00:00

Transformative Leadership and Student-Centered Educational Reform

04:12

Building Trust and Leadership in Organizational Transformation

10:07

Building Trust and Leadership in a School District

18:55

Leadership Strategies for Unleashing Talent and Building Trust

27:50

Effective Leadership in Small School Districts

31:46

Building Lasting Educational Systems for Future Success

38:01

Leadership and Community Engagement in Education

40:28

Building Trust and Transparency in Leadership

Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung

Connect with Dr. Jeff Gorman: linkedin.com/in/jeff-gorman-88a63114

Music Credit: Shake it Up - Fesliyanstudios.com - David Renda



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Is there too much of a top down structure that needs that ends up stagnating the district? And is that structure keeping us from being effective when it comes to teaching and learning? These are all important questions to consider, and today's conversation will walk through how you find out the answers to those questions.

Finding out those answers will help you build the proper foundation for teaching and learning success. So who's going to be guiding us through this conversation? Today we have Jeff Gorman. Who is joining us and he's dedicated over three decades to public education, and he's gone from teacher to principal and now he's serving as the interim superintendent of Robinsville, New Jersey.

Outside of education, Dr. Gorman is a devoted family man and long time coach, balancing leadership with a passion for growth and meaningful connections. Jeff. Welcome to the show.

[00:01:22] Dr. Jim: I'm good. Thanks for hopping on I am looking forward to this conversation because I think there's a lot in terms of Foundation setting that's going to be relevant to a lot of superintendents and leaders in K through 12 Who are listening to this discussion? But before we dive into that and have that conversation about setting ourselves up for success I think it's important for the listeners to know a little bit more about you and i'm particularly interested In understanding some of those key moments in your career that help shape your leadership philosophy and how you showed up So share with us a little bit more about that.

So the foundation always goes back to the basics of teaching and learning and the impact that we have on Children. And sometimes you don't even realize I didn't realize that impact until many, many years. I'll share a little bit later of a great example of that from one of my former students. So teacher always at heart became an assistant principal.

And actually the first day of my principalship was on nine 11. And so welcome to administration and took the very similar approach that I even look at now. And that's more of a situational approach. Like why, what is going on? We haven't been here, but we're going to figure it out together, and we're going to be a learning community.

And in each in each instance, we did some major reform work, improved academics double digits. Each time we walked into a district built trust and relationships passed bond referendums and really Had a knack for transformative and reform type of work. My last two stints, one was in Bergen County, which is an affluent school district, and had an incredible impact as an interim in a year and a half.

And in the six months I've been here in Robbinsville we have sort of really right at the ship and are moving forward with a real strong academic focus, and we are student centered, and that's one of the questions I always ask our organization, student centered or the adult centered, and the goal is always to move them towards the student centeredness, and, and that's the approach, and like we discussed even before we met, student centered.

[00:04:20] Dr. Jim: There's a lot of interesting tidbits and what you just described. But I want to zone in at a relatively high level on something that you mentioned from your experience in transformations.

When you look at organizational transformation in general, you said that you have experience in a couple of different districts doing transformation work. Oftentimes those things can be daunting. When you look at that type of work or that type of turnaround efforts, what are the things that you're prioritizing first in terms of what you tackle when you set foot in those districts?

And then building trust and easier said than done. And so being authentic and meeting people and learning about them and what drives them and who they are as people I've, I've rarely met Actually, I've never met an educator that didn't want to help children when they went into the field. But sometimes, like many jobs and many things in our life, we tend to drift, but the core is always there.

So I, I always try to find out who people are what their family is about. What's that? What is working really well here? What are things that we could improve on that energy and that passion? Those 22 focal points really helped me drive and sort of set the script for the district.

And here comes the new guy or gal, and they're going to go try and do something. And. I'm going to be very hesitant. If I'm in that environment to share anything, I'm probably going to be inclined to keep my head down and keep my mouth shut. So when you're looking at trust building as a key element of the initial stages of a transformation effort, if you've experienced what I'm describing, how did you get over that and get around that so that you could have more of a collaborative, unified team that's moving towards that end goal that you want to move towards?

And so, for me, the way you do that is you model expectations. I would never ask somebody to do anything that I wouldn't do. I am an active learner, and Jim, as you get older, you sort of get wiser, right? And the ego starts to move away, hopefully. And it's not about me. It's about, it's about children.

So often I talk about a say do gap, right? Things that you say and things that you do. And I try to keep that gap as close as possible. So I rarely say things that I won't do. And I think that's part of the trust. So if I tell these people that I'm going to do something, then I'm going to do it because I, because I said, I'm doing it.

And, and if I keep that lens on people have told me that I'm playing it right down the middle, right? I'm not, I'm not showing favoritism to central office, to principals, to teachers, to union leaders, to politicians, mayors, whoever it is. I'm assessing what it is and we're going to make best decision and we're going to lead forward.

I do think that when we get into components of leadership, that's a really important piece because as the head of an organization, people are looking at you and they're looking at your actions and they want to make sure that you are doing what you're saying you're doing.

So that's really strong stuff. And I wanted to highlight that. One of the other things that I'm curious about now, you mentioned this when we first started the conversation was that. Even in the district that you're currently in, there's a bit of a turnaround effort. Give us a picture of the landscape of the district in terms of the things that you saw when you initially started there and how that influenced some of the things that you had, you got on your radar as potential action items.

Grounds and [00:10:00] facilities. Beautiful floor, clean cleanliness. And I'm like, okay, this is really, this is really very positive moving forward. So I, I didn't feel like my work needed to go towards micromanagement or working individually with departments. They were on really, they were doing their thing.

What they were missing was the cohesion and the unity and the trust of the, of everyone working together. Towards the end product, which were Children. So I'll give you a quick story, Jim. All right. So on opening day, they asked me, you know, usually when you come to a new district, you do a convocation.

You got everybody around and you give them, you know, words of inspiration and wisdom. And based off of my assessment, I didn't think that was the appropriate action. So what I told the building leaders is that I would come to each of their thoughts schools with our board of education president. And we would sort of do a more intimate dialogue.

And, but I wanted to make sure we were very transparent. The other thing is I tried to get. People to believe that we were here to quiet the noise from the outside and focus in on children and teaching and learning and the impact that educators have on kids. Sometimes in society, in the world, we sort of get lost in the sauce a little bit.

So what I did is I, I read a couple of clips from students that I've had an impact on over the years. I got an email from a kid that I literally taught 25 years ago and she said she reached out to me and she said, your words have stayed with me my entire life.

I thought about you when I purchased my first home. I thought about you when I paid cash for my 2023 BMW. And I was wondering if she thought about me, why didn't she just drop one off to my house as well? But anyway, so I got, I got, I got some chuckles and, and the point is. You don't realize as an educator the impact you're having on children.

And my goal was to remove barriers so teachers can focus on building those relationships and getting kids to the highest academic success so they can prepare themselves when they're no longer in our schools.

And how that leadership shows up and empowers people to be effective in their [00:13:00] jobs. So tell us a little bit about what your observations were when you took over the district As far as what the leadership landscape looked like within this district as you started getting getting started As you started doing the work of transformation

This district didn't want that. They were craving leadership. I was able to see it right away. And when you walk into school, sometimes if the doors are open or the doors are closed, they tell very different stories. And when doors are closed, it usually means that the leadership hasn't been there consistently over time, which is really important.

To a superintendent who they hired to put in charge to run the district to administrators, to parents children community members. And sometimes public schools sort of they want to be more than what they are and their goal is to educate all. Every every child, no matter what level they're at rich, poor and and everyone in between ability wise.

So when we go back to what we talked about earlier about trust, how do you do that? I'm an open book. There's nothing that I won't tell you. As, as long as I'm not breaking confidentiality about the transparency of the school district and our mission and the work that we do. There's no, there's no hidden secrets in my mind.

And sometimes people think that there are, but if we're about the business of educating kids, then that's yeah. Why would I keep anything from you unless it applied to you as a person or an individual with confidentiality. So that helped. And I also believe that the way you communicate is really important, right?

And I think that's where we started in the process. But they did not want me to just sit back. They were asking and craving for more. And that was where the leadership really started to excel.

I need to build trust. So if you have a low leadership environment. And you have a requirement to build trust. Those things can often be at odds because if you have poor leadership, people are always in either survival mode or protect yourself mode. So it's going to be difficult to bridge that.

[00:17:01] Dr. Jeff Gorman: Great. Conversations were happening in in silos. They weren't happening. Collectively meetings were being held just for the sake of having meetings. And so without a purpose, I don't want to waste people's time. So I noticed a couple of things I noticed I noticed that at the board level. The first thing I did was brought in some professional learning on the roles of the Board of Education that they're there to set policy and to refer academic issues to to the superintendent and the school district.

And so we changed sort of the way we worked on our agendas. We became sort of We drove the strategic plan based on the Board of Education goals, as opposed to reacting to to individuals. So we put in a nice structure of communication and the other thing that was really important is that I communicated to the Board of Education regularly.

So they don't hear it from someone else from constituents. So once that's in place and I have the support of the board and the trust of the, of the board of education, they can allow me to do the job that they hired me to do, which to make sure that every kid succeeds academically. So when they get.

Emails, they push it towards me and they allow me to address it. And obviously what I do is an indication of how much trust I get. We had talked about low to low leadership, but one of the things I shared with you is that I thought we have great talent here. So in that situation it's called the law of the lid.

But they were sort of stuck because they didn't have the leadership to enable them to go to the next level.

Is there something there that we should know about or am I reading too far into it?

So we know the business of education on at different levels. We need to bring people along with us. And so I am always learning and I'm always teaching and engaging in the learning process. I think when you do that, your actions reflect that, then that becomes the way we do business in the last two months.

All of our conversations at, at level wise, at the central office level wise and with principals have been focused on instruction, not problems. Our job is to reduce variability, so we get consistent outcomes across K 12.

If we just look at it, time is actually all we have with these kids. So we have to sort of put the blueprint out for people to sort of follow.

So I thought that's a really interesting Thought process that you applied within within the organization. One of the things that I'm curious about you, we've talked a little bit about, Hey, these are the things that exist in the organization. You had a sort of friction that was keeping your talent from being tapped appropriately and being leveraged appropriately.

[00:22:03] Dr. Jeff Gorman: Yeah, I think it comes over time and there's usually you know, there's usually a tipping point. And just as an aside, Jim, it's funny. We're both talking And so I think it's a combination of theory and then actual pedagogy, right? And so for me, when I'm able to tap into theory, it helps me explain what's happening.

And so when I see it, and when I know that the four systems of the four components of a well run districts are Leadership systems, culture and and instruction. And when I see that in place, it sort of helps me guide my path that we're on the right track. You talk to, we're both sort of indirectly quoting different Boats of theory in educational leadership, which is really important about, for example, the variables, right?

[00:23:09] Dr. Jim: When I'm thinking about the landscape that you're in we talk through. What did you walk into? What did you identify? One of the things that you mentioned on a number of occasions was we needed to break down silos within the organization and make sure that everybody is communicating effectively and acting effectively.

So what were the steps that you took to fix those gaps or fix those those issues with communication and action so that you had much more consistent leadership being demonstrated across the organization?

Thank you. But I started this conversations by saying that me and my wife were camp counselors and I'm a teacher by nature just because my positional authority is at a different level. It doesn't mean I've changed who I am, but people perceive you different based on your, your positional authority. And so That's a really important also because sometimes people need the positional authority to help support them.

I felt like sometimes middle management was out on a limb by themselves without the right support. So that's part of the trust building process. So I started with the teachers and the professional learning days. I also brought the team together and I We started with a learning activity at every at the beginning of each meeting way, and they were leadership activities, and I gave them an assessment on organizational structure, and we found that trust was lacking in a lot of ways.

So I was very strategic in my in my meetings. We're, you know, I'll give you another example of really modeling what your expectations are. We're looking at an artificial intelligence policy, which I'm sure is current in all districts. The high school was running a professional learning community with teachers, high school teachers on, Helping to develop an artificial intelligence policy for the district.

I never went into education and said, I'm going to be a superintendent schools. That wasn't that was never the plan. It's sort of evolved based off of different situations.

And when we look at all those things that we want to accomplish, and I take inventory of your answers, here's what I heard. When I think about the things that I did. It was important for me to break down my positional authority, break down my psychological size so that I could create more trust within the environment and also demonstrate what leading from the front looks like as a leadership practice. So when you look at all of those things. Where do you rank that in terms of its level of importance when [00:27:00] you're doing transformation work, when you're trying to come into a new district and make an impact, but also build a leaderful organization? Is that the most important thing or are there other things that you would say are more important than what you just described?

That was fine, but I was making decisions at a I wasn't letting it wait. But of course, I would wait until I got all information because, of course. If you don't give it some wait time, you start hearing different versions of the stories. But I thought it, I really didn't see big problems in the district.

And so coming to a school district that has three schools and even though it's about 3, 000 kids, which some might think is a decent size I think it's a relatively small district. So I could get more intimate in the work that I'm doing. Any parent that wanted to call me, I'm like, please come to my office.

I'll set up a meeting and let's talk and discuss. Let me meet your child. Let me be, you know, let me hear what you have to say. So there's nothing that one of the Things that I determined here is that I'll meet with anybody at any time, as long as I can move my schedule around relatively easily. So that would be the situation as it is here, right?

This district needs to really polish its curriculum and instruction and focus on those pieces and keeping the outside noise in. And they, their potential is off the charts here. They, they, I don't know what their ceiling is. They, they have no ceiling as far as I'm concerned right now that I've been able to identify as it, as it talks to excellence.

Or doesn't happen as often.

So that was important, that that was important. That every issue that came up was not pushed out to everyone. And I also instructed the board or, or worked with the board to understand their role, which we've talked about that any type of issue that they received from their constituents, they passed on to me and, and I.

Immediately or quickly within 24 hours answered or gave them some type of communication, whether it was, let's talk about this further. Come on in. Let's meet or this is our criteria. And this is where we stand here. And unfortunately, we're not going to be able to be flexible on this issue. So I think that was really important in, in, in de escalating issues before they became anything.

Also, right? You have to have the width of this. You have to be able to see outside in as opposed to inside out and just you know, sort of, you know, fixing something for the sake of fixing something. You need a bigger picture. And I think That's the inner leadership that sort of drives people differently.

And I've said this. It's not about me. It's just about the legacy that I'm providing or my footprint in this district that will hopefully continue and be more than just, you know, a bleep or it'll help move the district forward independent of individuals, which I think is really important.

So when we talk in those sort of terms, we're talking about systems and processes. So when you look at setting the stage for. Getting to the basics of teaching and learning and tapping into the potential that exists, what sort of systems and processes did you put into place? That are designed to outlive you and really make the district go to the next level in terms of performance.

And so, when I got here I didn't realize that it was part of this district, but it was a very small part. And so when I met with the folks and we talked about it and I told them that I'd love to be their thinking partner one of the things they said to me is that we'd love to see [00:33:00] AVID in another school

well, the school district that I worked in 17 years ago knew that I was sort of back in the area because I had gone to New York for about 10 years. And they're like, we would love to have you and your team come visit us. And we went to see The AVID program and the student agency and the systems that we had put in place 17 years ago were thriving.

And it was some of the main people were there and that's important. So you do have to have passionate people that are committed to the process. Having those legacy people in the organization are important. You can't just continually just throw a new group of people together and think you're going to get the same expectations.

But setting the how you do things. In place is really important. So when you talk about transition to the next superintendent I'm meeting with him off site next week. I'm going to spend at least two or three days with him. In in December. And here are some of the things that I think I've left in place in a really good place.

We've talked about the way we structure our minutes in our agendas. And we've talked about the what our work really entails. And so I am. I am steadfast to believe that the model we're putting forward is going to continue because I have those people in place. One of the things that I'm making sure that I did last week is I actually went into one of our schools with the principal and we went to, to look at the math curriculum in, in 10 different classes, not evaluative wise, just feedback.

There's this foundation is really strong here. You could you could build off of this foundation, but the foundation has to be there.

What's been the impact as you start thinking about the handoff process to that new, a new superintendent.

So we're being you know with it's cliche is that we're lifetime learners and that we're adult learners But it's true. I read I'm up to date. I'm current a current Sometimes appears to be visionary, but it's really not because schools are really based about 40 years behind what's really happening to society.

So if you just a current network, look at best practices, look at other schools that are doing things in a really good way and look at the outcomes. Always look at data as much as you know, this is an educational piece. I don't want to get into a theoretical piece, but data really drives you. What are the results that you're getting and how do you assess those results and.

[00:37:03] Dr. Jim: Great stuff. We've covered a lot of ground in terms of what you've done within this district. I want you to take a step back and talk to that K 12 leader that's listening to this show that is, could be staring down a transformation effort that they need to do. So when you think about the experience that you went through, what are the key things that You would advise that other leader to keep in mind when they're working on their own transformation initiatives.

full support of my board of education, even though I believe that I earned it. So your actions are important. I was very strategic that there were impactful things that I did that the board would take note. For example, I put two students at our board of education meetings at every board of education meeting.

You exude leadership. I'm doing a presentation next month, and I'll work right to the bell no matter what, because I think it's important because the product is not money. The product is Children in the future and legacy like we've talked about. But I think it is important to tell your story to promote.

To to have people engage and interact with you, to bring in media, to meet with law enforcement and, and local authorities and people that are vested in, in the school district and a part of the community. I think it's really important to go to football games, you know, support the soccer team. We're in our group.

So if we either like that or don't like it, it's up to us to be able to sort of change that.

[00:39:23] Dr. Jeff Gorman: My phone number. I'll be authentic is 732 850 6026. You could find me on my own website at www dot learning deep dot org. And and I have a strong linkedin profile as well. So if you want me, it's very easy to find me. Just google me. Actually, if you google me, Jim, you'll, you'll, you'll probably get something about my little league coaching years, seven years ago, when we were able to take a team all the way to the United States championship.

And we touched on that pretty early in the conversation. I think if you're a leader, who's looking to build trust within an organization, you have to do a couple of things really well. You have to lead from the front.

And you have to make it clear that you're not going to ask your people to do anything that you wouldn't do yourself. So I think that's an important practice that leaders need to get in front of. Oftentimes, as you move higher up in the organization, there's a trap in thinking that you can do all of this stuff from behind spreadsheets, and that's just not realistic.

And you actually have to demonstrate it in a way where even when it's something that you don't want to hear, you're still receiving the information and then acting accordingly. That creates the cultural momentum for you to actually tap into. The people within your organization. One of the challenges that you mentioned was that you felt that within the organization, people were stifled a little bit, and there was a leadership gap in it.

One of the ways to overcome that is to be as transparent as possible and then respond appropriately and accordingly. To what you're being told. So those are the things that stood out to me that I think is worth calling out. So I appreciate you sharing that with us. For those of you who've been listening to this conversation, we appreciate you hanging out and and giving us a listen.