This podcast episode delves into the concept of coherence within human systems, particularly in educational environments, emphasizing that genuine coherence manifests not in strategic documents but in the daily decisions made by educators. We assert that coherence is often compromised under pressure, as adults may inadvertently make choices that deviate from their stated priorities, leading to a phenomenon we refer to as "drift." Through our examination, we highlight the critical importance of aligning daily practices with the core values we espouse, as these small choices cumulatively shape the student experience. The episode challenges listeners to reflect on how innovation can either enhance or detract from learning, depending on the consistency of adult decision-making in high-pressure situations. Ultimately, we posit that meaningful change in educational settings arises from a deliberate focus on the humanity of both educators and students, fostering an environment where innovation can flourish and all learners feel valued.

Additional Notes

The discourse surrounding coherent human systems is pivotal in understanding the dynamics of educational institutions. We posited that coherence transcends mere strategic formulations and resides in the quotidian decisions made by educators, particularly when faced with pressure. The discussion elucidated that schools do not diverge from their intended path due to a lack of commitment; rather, they stray as incremental decisions, often made in haste, yield cumulative consequences that undermine established objectives. I emphasized that coherence is not merely a product of visionary statements; it is cultivated through the alignment of daily actions with professed values. This episode also examined the vital relationship between innovation and the learning experience, asserting that for innovation to effectuate profound learning, it must seamlessly integrate into the daily fabric of educational practice rather than exist as an isolated initiative. Through a series of reflective inquiries, we explored how daily choices, whether in instructional strategies or behavioral management, either reinforce or erode the coherence that educators strive to establish. Ultimately, it became clear that fostering a coherent educational environment necessitates a persistent and deliberate alignment between the values we espouse and the actions we take. This alignment is critical in ensuring that the student experience reflects the ideals we profess to uphold, thereby enhancing the overall efficacy of educational systems.

Takeaways:

1. Coherent human systems are defined by aligned adult decisions that foster a consistent student experience.
2. The true essence of coherence resides not in strategy documents but in the daily choices made by adults.
3. Under pressure, adults often make small decisions that contradict their stated priorities, leading to drift.
4. To deepen learning through innovation, it is imperative that it survives the mundanity of daily school life.
5. Daily adult choices significantly impact whether innovation effectively enhances student learning or merely exists alongside it.
6. The patterns of decision-making established by educators ultimately shape the educational environment more than any inspirational moment.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. StudentsMatter
2. LearnHarbor

Last episode, we defined coherent human systems.

This week, we test them.

Because coherence doesn't live in strategy decks.

It lives in Tuesday.

It lives in the daily decisions adult make, especially under pressure.

If innovation is going to deepen learning, it has to survive the ordinary.

A new episode of the wheelhouse begins right now.

Last episode, we defined coherent human systems not as control, not as uniformity, but as aligned adult decisions that consistently produce the student experience we claim to value.

If that's true, then coherence doesn't live in vision statements.

It lives in Tuesday.

It lives in adult daily decisions.

Schools don't drift because people stop caring.

They drift because under pressure, adults make small decisions that contradict their stated priorities, and those decisions compound.

When time is short, what gets reinforced?

When energy is low, what gets protected and what quietly gets lowered.

When innovation is introduced, does it reshape instruction, or does it sit beside it?

Coherence is not built in moments of inspiration.

It's built in patterns of decision making.

Today, we're not introducing a new program.

We're examining alignment.

We're examining humanity.

We're examining the daily choices that determine whether innovation deepens learning or quietly drifts.

Welcome to episode two.

Good morning, and welcome back to the wheelhouse.

It's another day in the wheelhouse recording studio.

I'm Dr. Grant Chandler with my partner of my amazing wheelhouse team, Dr. Monroe is unable to be here with us today.

So Kathy, Moni, Michael, Pipa, welcome back to the wheelhouse.

Yay.

Good morning.

Good morning.

You threw me off, Michael.

Sorry.

Yay.

Two of my favorite humans.

So missing my sister Alicia.

Dr. Alicia Monroe.

So greatly missed.

We missed her last week, and we missed her.

We're missing her again this week.

She's out there just doing phenomenal, phenomenal work as always.

Yeah, I guess we can say, okay,

we will get her back.

You can't join us.

Absolutely.

We will fix our schedule.

We'll do whatever we need to do to bring her back for episode three.

So, you know, the season opener was a really, really powerful conversation around what we mean by coherent human systems.

Right?

Not as control, not as uniformity, but as aligned adult decisions that consistently produce the student experience we claim to value.

That seems pretty simple and yet, oh, so complicated, right?

If that's true, then coherence doesn't live in a strategy statement.

It lives in Tuesday.

It lives in daily adult choices.

Because schools don't drift because people stop caring.

They drift.

Which means they move away from that coherence because under pressure, which we talked about last week, didn't we, Michael?

Adults make small decisions that contradict their stated priorities, and those decisions compound.

When time is short, what gets reinforced.

When energy is low, what gets protected and what gets lowered.

When innovation is introduced, does it change instruction or does it just sit beside it?

Coherence is not built in moments of inspiration.

It's built in patterns of decision making.

I love that.

Coherence is not built in moments of inspiration.

It's built in patterns of decision making.

Today, again, we're not talking about new programs.

We're talking about alignment.

We're talking about humanity.

We're talking about the daily choices that determine whether innovation deepens learning or quietly drifts away.

Any thoughts?

Well, you said a lot.

You tend to do this to us.

You put so much out there in such an element, eloquent way.

What'd you like?

You know, the.

The drift piece.

You know, I. I wrote that.

That word down in.

In my notebook here in all capital letters.

And that's really about moving away from coherence and that it lives in daily adult choices.

So thinking about, sometimes things happen pretty abruptly, and in our educational systems,

there

are things that happen that seem to halt or stop adult choices.

But more often than not, it really lives in those daily.

The daily choices, those very small, subtle, sometimes unseen, unnoticed until we're in this space of, oh, my God, what happened?

How did we get here?

What did that look like?

So that those patterns of decision making, that was another peace within everything that you.

You opened us with.

It's.

I just have so many examples experiences running through my.

My head around those small daily adult choices.

Yeah, I love the word drift.

As I developed this thing called tactical leadership, which is part of the whole students matter ecosystem.

That word is huge.

Drift.

I think it's just powerful image because we can all envision being somewhere and drifting away from this line, drifting away from our values, drifting away from what we intend to.

I love that word.

I think it's powerful and very.

It paints a really, really strong picture.

Right.

And it's absolutely about the small decisions.

Right.

Every decision that we make either moves us closer or by contrast.

Right.

Begins that drift process.

Michael, any thoughts before we jump in?

Yeah, I think about the beginning of every school year for leadership teams in schools across the country and the new initiatives that are on the docket, on the agenda, and the rollout that must happen and the anticipated pushback from a returning staff that, you know, thought that the prior season's initiatives were.

Were going to be continued.

But yet here's a fresh batch like rocks in the farmer's field.

Every spring, the thaw gives us a new crop of stones.

If you don't know your North Star, if you don't know that central cluster of things that are non negotiable, that we all hold dearly together, then you have no thread of to weave the newest necessary effort with everything that is currently operating.

You have no way to weave it in.

And so it becomes one outlier after another that people are supposed to, like plates on the end of sticks keep spinning magically and it's exhausting.

And we feel ourselves moving and we mistake that for purposeful progress.

But it's drift because we have no center.

The center can't hold, we don't tend it.

You know, those are the thoughts I'm having.

Yeah, I mean, tactical leaders again, we'll talk more about that term later.

But tactical leaders, leaders who do this work really, really well, they understand intimately what their moral purpose is.

They understand what the North Star, what their guiding North Star is, and everything that they do is aligned to that.

We know that there's a lack of coherence in so many places and people trying to do really good work, but there's a lack of.

It's easy to say.

It's easy to say in the summer when there are no students around and you know, and you're trying to figure out what it is you value, right?

I've led people through these conversations and they're very, very powerful, right?

Because adults in education care deeply about what they're doing and they can define what they value.

And then the world hits.

Teachers come back, kids come back.

There's all these clamoring pressure, right?

Pressure that can, if we're not careful, can cause drift, right?

But here's the reality, right?

Every one of us, whether we're a classroom teacher or a leader, we're in control of all the small decisions we make on a daily basis.

And so let's think about for a moment some examples, some commonly seen examples of gaps between what we say we value and what students might actually experience.

What are some examples of some of those gaps?

One that comes to mind, you know, in conversations I've had with instructional staff across districts around empathy as just an intentional schooling practice.

Every last educator I spoke with talked about the importance of understanding the student experience and then trying to achieve that understanding in a 45 minute period where a scope and sequence must be attended to and all of the interruptions that are going to occur in that 45 minute class, all the content that must be covered.

All the pressure to prioritize that content day in and day out, and all of the students who populate that classroom.

And that number tends to grow.

It never tends to decrease.

So a gap begins to grow between the things we are told and pressured to attend to because we have to, and the things that we hold inside our hearts as what we feel ought to be the true priorities that do not get acknowledged.

Not publicly, not by leadership, not materially, maybe in terms of lip service, but not in terms of practice and leadership support of instructors in the instructional environment.

I think about that.

And so some of the gaps come from leadership pressure, system pressure, but some of the gaps come from the decisions that we make as classroom teachers.

In the classroom, how do I.

How do I grade student work that is far from the goal and yet make sure that that student feels that they belong, that they value, that they matter, that they can do it?

Right?

How do we do that?

How do we do that in a way that affirms a student but also letting them know that their performance was.

We got some work to do.

Right?

We got some work to do in that area.

How do we decisions we make about instruction?

How do we think about each student's progress if we rely heavily on whole group direct instruction?

Those are decisions we make.

That's right.

Those are decisions we make.

Nobody comes into my classroom and tells me, you know, that I can't put kids in small groups.

Right, right.

I've not heard that before.

Right.

Kathy, what are your thoughts?

What are some common gaps that we see between what we say we value and what kids actually experience in our classrooms?

I think as Michael was talking, I was thinking about, you know, those, the scheduling.

Right.

We control scheduling and what that looks like.

And we control as leaders, especially what we.

How we either value or we do not value that time.

So if we're locked into that 45 minute period, how often am I interrupting that as the leader?

How often is the office interrupting that?

How often are we making announcements?

How often are we scheduling various assemblies that don't need to happen, you know, for.

Why are we thinking through those pieces?

So simple things to me that scream, well, okay, you're telling me one thing.

You're saying we have to adhere to this timeline, to these pieces.

I'm attempting to do that.

I'm attempting to provide the highest quality of instruction during this time.

But then your actions as a leader are interrupting that.

The simp to me, one of the simplest changes within what we say versus what we do.

So what I hear a lot from teachers is when they feel the pressure of time, whether it's a 45 minute period, whether it's.

It doesn't matter.

Right.

It doesn't matter what the pressure, what the specifics of the pressure are.

But when they feel the pressure of time, they feel compelled to focus on the curriculum and not focus on the humanity.

And I want to talk just a second about why they feel that.

Because their kids get measured.

Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And when the kids are getting measured, they're vulnerable in so many ways.

So when time is short, I.

We feel this as teachers.

Right.

All of us have felt this we are going to do for our kids in a way that makes them less vulnerable in all these other ways.

So this is where we put our focus.

The other thing I think about is of all the professional development that is afforded when there isn't a clear cluster of values at the heart, at the center, that that elevates and focuses on humanity and dignity as core components of the student experience.

Then we don't have professional development that helps teachers share strategies that create through quick protocols and routines throughout a class, a sense of belonging, play, fun, joy.

Each of us has seen it when we've gone into classrooms where the content that gets covered is mind boggling.

But the playfulness, the joy, the ongoing conversation that shows really vibrant relationships among the students and the lead instructor is so clearly evident in that room.

Those practices about how we do a little bit of all of the essential things every single day.

And on days where we can we dig in deeper on the stuff we know matters most that isn't part of the professional development.

Most often when I'm going into schools.

So of course I argue.

Absolutely.

I argue that curricular learning and humanity are completely intertwined and cannot be separated.

Correct.

You cannot teach algebra and forget you're teaching humans, but

you can.

And it happens.

We've seen it, sir.

Maybe, but it doesn't work very well.

It doesn't.

It does.

It doesn't work very well.

Before you finish this, like when I thought you were ready to jump through this.

Oh, sir, sir, sir.

Yes.

So this is one of the points of innovation rooted in humanity.

Right.

That we can't separate or we have to stop separating.

I should say, let me say it differently.

We got to stop separating the curriculum from the humanity.

Right.

That we have.

That they're not.

It's not one or the other.

Even though our teachers feel pressured, even though.

Right.

There's a lot of pressure to separate those two things and to say, oh, I can't do this, I can't build these relationships with these children because I've got to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

We can do it.

At the same time, we may have to rethink some things, we may have to learn some new things, but it's not one or the other.

And even if it were, focusing on the curriculum alone has not provided the results that we thought it was gonna.

Right?

So if we just focus on reading in third grade and we forget the humanity part, our kids aren't going to be readers.

The solution to increasing test scores is not just found in literacy strategies alone.

It's this other pieces that go with it as well.

Our last episode or opening episode to season 12, you had a line that you shared with us about theatrics.

Yes, ma'.

Am.

What was that line again?

That line, Mrs. Moni, was innovation.

That doesn't change.

The student experience is just theater, which

is what you just described.

Right.

So those theatrics lead to more absenteeism, students not feeling a sense of belonging, those chasing of shiny objects which we talked about previously, and this disconnected experience for the adults.

So, Michael, you were talking about that professional learning and what does that look like?

And how are we spending our time?

Our teachers know when you know, everyone within the organization knows when they, when they start back at the beginning of a school year, it's the whispers in the room are often, okay, what's the next shiny object going to be this year?

Where's.

Oh, the pendulum swinging yet again.

What does that look like?

Because we're not innovating in a way that changes that student experience, but instead performative.

We're being, you know, we're, we're performing and our students are the ones that are failing.

And those test result results often show that because I don't.

It's mind boggling to me how you can separate the two.

So back to us pouncing on our dear friend Grant.

I'm a big boy.

I know.

We know that.

So that's why we could do it both of us, at the same time.

How you can separate that and knowing that when students feel that sense of belonging, when they know that they matter, all of the other stuff comes.

I don't know how we aren't getting that.

What is it?

What's the shift that needs to occur in order for this drift to stop, for those daily adult choices to stop?

I'm going to give a shout out to just an incredible educator.

I had the honor of working with Michelle Crisafoli, who used to Say to me, you know, our job is to learn the dance of every child.

That's our job.

And when we begin to understand not just the moves the learner is making, but why, and we stay with it until we get a greater sense through that conversation and dialogue with the child and everybody who works with the child and the family, and then all of a sudden we can do the dance with them, we can dance with them.

Then the child is ready to feel the belief we have in their potential.

And that belief becomes the game changer again and again for learners of all sorts.

It doesn't matter whether you're a struggling learner or whether you're a highly competent learner who's gained the system.

But experience, oh, the tragedy of an incredibly rare failure at something which causes a massive spike in anxiety that you can't control.

It's every learner who needs this.

Everyone.

And I'm just going to be, I'm going to gently, I'm going to gently challenge all of us.

If you're listening to, think about that, right?

Because no leadership mandate can prevent you from doing that.

These are choices that leaders and teachers make every single day, right?

Sometimes we're unaware of them, sometimes we're completely unaware.

But that's what this podcast is about, right?

It's about bringing awareness to these needs.

We have to think about this.

Because what becomes really important becomes really important is this innovation that changes the student experience, especially for students who struggle.

We're responsible.

We're capable of making those shifts of nurturing the human.

I think about powerful student care and I think about, well, wait a minute.

If we approach every student recognizing their innate human desire to do well, if we approach every student and we're trying to build for them self efficacy and agency and provide joy filled learning experiences all wrapped up in an environment where they belong, where they're valued and where they matter changes the trajectory.

It does.

It changes how I think about them.

As a student learning to read, for

example, and a student whose personality is prickly and difficult and exhausting.

I mean, I feel like I just want to say to all of our colleagues, it's necessary and okay to say I cannot do all of it.

I can't do it all every day.

I feel like I fail every day at this.

I think it's okay to start there.

I think it's okay to recognize that someday day we wallow for weeks at a time, not just a day in that space, because there is so much claiming our attention and commitment.

It's never just one Thing one philosophy.

That philosophy is incredibly complex, Incredibly complex.

And it takes a willingness to try and fail and to experience fail, failure epically in ways that dispirit us.

And to keep going.

To keep going somehow.

Because the student.

Because that student matters.

Because that student matters.

And there's our North Star.

I've submitted myself to this exhausting trial of a profession because this life is in the balance and this child matters even when they have jumped up and down on my very last nerve for the umpteenth time.

Yeah.

And I. I think it.

I believe.

Nah, I think I believe it becomes less and less challenging when we minimize or remove the drift.

Because it's not about just me figuring it out.

It isn't it that those prickly behaviors, as you called it, are not for me alone to respond to support, to determine how we best support that student and each of our other students.

It's not mine alone.

And it becomes less daunting when I.

When I know that.

When I experience that in every corner of the organization.

Yeah.

When I feel part of a team of people who are ready to respond instead of reacting and support.

Yeah.

And when we feel as competent as instructional technicians as we do as compassionate educators who know how to create a sense of belonging, who know how to elevate and attend to student voice and student experience and know how to weave that in to our daily practices and routines.

I think you're right.

I think the anxiety over time lessens because a sense of competency grows.

But it doesn't grow accidentally.

No.

This is hard work.

Innovation rooted in humanity, built by coherent human systems.

Right.

It ain't for the faint of heart.

This is hard work.

And it really requires that we look at ourselves, not to beat ourselves up.

That's not about that, but about saying, how do we think differently about what we do every single day?

Right.

Every single day.

Coherence isn't built by intention.

It's built by repetition.

Right.

It's built by those daily decisions that we make.

Students experience our patterns, our decisions more than they experience our philosophy or our values.

If we want future ready schools built through coherent human systems, then the real work isn't launching an initiative.

It's not about the shiny object.

Right.

It's about.

This is the hard part.

Right.

This is the heartbreak because everybody gets defensive now.

It's about examining the daily adult choices we make, especially under pressure, because that's where innovation either deepens learning or quietly drifts.

My friends, we'll see you next week in the wheelhouse.

And that's a wrap of episode two of season 12.

A sincere thank you to the Wheelhouse team, Kathy Mone, Michael Pipa, and Dr. Alicia Munro for continuing this conversation around Future Ready Schools.

Innovation rooted in humanity, built through coherent human systems.

If this episode prompted reflection, please share it with a colleague.

Because coherence doesn't spread through slogans, it spreads through shared examination of practice.

You can connect with Students Matter on Instagram or LinkedIn, or reach out directly to Kathy Mone, Michael Piper, Dr. Alicia Munro, or me, Dr. Grant Chandler.

Additional resources and links are in the show Notes.

Until next time, protect the pattern, guard the rigor, and keep your doors open and your hearts even wider.