Robyn R. Jackson - Stop Leading, Start Building!: Turn Your School into a Success Story with the People and Resources You Already Have

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Thank you to Charles, Sheri, Saundra, John, Genny, Katie, Jo-Jo, and Nola. We did it again.

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To builders everywhere.

Your school success story will come.

Keep building.

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I'm just going to start bluntly, OK?

"Leadership" is dead.

There.

I said it.

And as much as it pains me to say so, we all know it's true.

For years, we have tried to use leadership to move our schools forward. We're trying still. We get into classrooms more, we adopt new programs, and we conduct data meeting after data meeting. We create ambitious school improvement plans, we organize teachers into professional learning communities (PLCs), and we bring in outside trainers. We tinker with the master schedule, and we stand in front of our staff, year after year, working hard to create a sense of urgency around the things that matter most.

And yet, each year, we just grow more frustrated as the outcomes we seek still seem so far away. We progress toward our goals in inchesif we progress at all.

I want you to know it's not your fault. It's how you were trained.

If you're like most school administrators, you were trained to be a leader. You were given the tools of leadership, and you were told that they would help you transform your school. What they didn't tell you is that because "leadership" was created by the institution, it's designed to maintain the institution, not transform it.

In order to transform your school, you need something more.

This book is about that something more.

Each year I help thousands of administrators stop wasting time and energy trying to drag their teachers toward their goals. I show them a new and better way. Now I want to show you.

If you're like most of the administrators and instructional coaches I work with, you want to make a real difference in the lives of your students. You want to grow your school. You want to be able to look back on your work one day and know that you did something meaningful in your job, and that students' lives were changed because of it.

But most days, you don't feel that way. Those grand goals are obscured by the daily grind of putting out fires; chasing, checking, and correcting people; and digging your way out from under a steady pile of "to-dos." What matters most recedes in the face of what's happening now. You work nights and weekends, sacrificing your personal time just to keep up. You face enormous pressure from both above and around you to perform.

I get it. I used to feel the same way.

As an instructional coach and a middle school administrator, I truly wanted to help the teachers I was supporting become better teachers. I desperately wanted to make my school a better schoolone in which all my students would be successful. This meant I would go to the trainings and then try to apply the new strategies I'd been taught when I returned to my school. I would spend hours devouring leadership books. The leadership strategies I encountered always seemed to work in the trainings or in the books, but they rarely worked the way I'd envisioned when I tried to use them with actual teachers. And I'm ashamed to admit that when those leadership strategies didn't work like I was told they would, I often blamed my teachers. I thought they were just too resistant to change, too invested in the old ways of doing things, too focused on their issues instead of the kids.

Other times, I blamed myself. Maybe I was the problem. Maybe I wasn't the leader I thought I was. I'd reach for another leadership strategy, to make myself a better leader. I'd go to another training. I'd read another book. There was always the chance that this next new thing would be the key, the answer I sought. But it never was. Hope would turn to frustration, and the cycle would repeat itself.

I remember working with someone I would conservatively consider to be the worst teacher I've ever met. I'll call him Mr. Smith. Not only was Mr. Smith gravely ineffective in the classroom, he was resistant to any suggestion I made to help him. I had tried modeling lessons, giving him resources, and having him work with a coach. I sent him to trainings, gave him more and more feedback, and had him co-plan with a veteran teacher. I took him with me on walk-throughs to observe other teachers, gave him inspirational pep talks about how important it was for us to better serve students, and put him on a performance plan. All those tactics I'd encountered in trainings and read about in books? I tried them all. And yet Mr. Smith didn't get any better.

The day came when I finally reached my limit. After another observation of another dire instructional performance, I decided that enough was enough. There I was, sitting in my office with the mountain of paperwork I'd already collected on him and the form that would start the very long dismissal process. This wasn't my first time dismissing an ineffective teacher, and I knew the road ahead would be complicated: months of filling out more paperwork and negotiating with him and possibly the teachers union while the students in his classroom would continue to pay the price. I told myself that I was doing it for them. I told myself that Mr. Smith hadn't taken advantage of the resources I'd given him. I told myself that he was taking up time that I should be spending on doing other work.

While I was thinking all this, another teacher walked into my office and asked if I had a second. I put the paperwork aside and invited her to sit.

"You know that I've been having a lot of trouble with Kelly lately," she began.

I nodded and arranged my face into a neutral expression. Kelly had become an almost daily complaint for this teacher. She would constantly send Kelly out of class for various infractions. We had called Kelly's parents, conducted several parent conferences, worked with the guidance counselor, and tried numerous interventions, but none had worked.

The teacher continued, "I was thinking today how unfair it is that I am spending so much time on one student who clearly doesn't want to learn and neglecting those who do want to learn. I think that maybe you should just remove Kelly from my class."

I bristled when I heard that. How dare this teacher give up on Kelly! Immediately I launched into an impassioned speech about how they are all our students, and how we have to work to make sure that they all learn. I told the teacher that I knew it was hard, that I too had a "Kelly" when I was in the classroom, but it was our job to find a way to help our "Kellys" succeed.

When my platitude-filled speech was over and the teacher had left my office, I pulled out the dismissal paperwork and resumed looking for a way to get rid of frustrating, intractable, ineffective Mr. Smith. And then the hypocrisy of what I had just said hit me.

No, a part of me protested, Kelly is a kid, and Mr. Smith is an adult. We are paying Mr. Smith to be here and do a job. Kelly isn't here by choice, and she isn't getting paid. But another part of me wondered, if I expected my teachers to persist with every student until they found a way to reach that student, shouldn't I do the same when working with teachers? They weren't allowed to give up, but I was? And yet, when I mentally scanned all the leadership strategies I'd tried, I couldn't think of anything else I could do