4 FOUNDATIONAL SKILLS FOR MANAGING CHANGE WHEN LEADING CYCLES OF CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

First, this is not a course on cycles of continuous improvement. If you are a school leader, I assume you are already very familiar with the concept. However, if you are not a formally trained school leader or if you're new to being a member of a school-based team responsible for achieving performance goals of some type e.g. a teacher, council member, athletic director, dean, coach, etc., then I will give a quick overview of a continuous improvement cycle.

This course, and many more to be shared in this academy, is meant to increase school efficacy by accelerating learning for new or aspiring school-based leaders. The person that is interested in this topic is trying to answer the question, "what do I need to know and be able to do to go from theory to practice quickly and effectively?"

The objective of this course is to introduce and simplify 4 foundational skills for school-based adaptive leadership for driving change and helping others adopt change that results in organizational and personal growth. 

When I was completing my leadership studies, that was always a burning question. Coming from the field of computer science, I was always eager to apply and test different variables. Without experience or reading plenty of lengthy research articles, the only way to learn those variables was on the job. Most of the time, school leaders don't have time in the middle of the day to sit and reflect on the secret sauce of their successes from the day. I am talking about the macro wins that result from your leadership which ultimately leads to progress on goals.

One example might be a quick conversation that you may have had with a teacher that led to greater participation at a meeting. Another example may be the way you framed the release of a short article on grading practices that resulted in a genuine conversation among the staff about collective responsibility for trying a specific classroom strategy so that students persist when writing. In both scenarios, you may have nudged someone to act by making a suggestion. What you did not do is say, "this is what you need to do."

The former requires the recognition that you are always operating within a cycle of continuous improvement (COCI) and that no situation is ever executed in isolation. In other words, as a leader, you are charged with leading and/or developing a culture for continuous improvement. Your daily responsibility, in a nutshell, is to model experiences and tease conditions within cycles of continuous improvement that lead to increased efficacy of the people doing the work and ultimately improves school efficacy.

That said, let's briefly review what a cycle of improvement is. If you do an internet search of the term continuous improvement cycles in education, you will discover multiple publications defining a 4-7 step process for effectively strategizing to meet a goal. I like this more formal definition of continuous improvement by the online source Education Week:

"Continuous school improvement is a cyclical process intended to help groups of people in a system—from a class to a school

district or even a network of many districts—set goals, identify ways to improve, and evaluate change in a sort of continuous

feedback loop." (https://www.edweek.org/leadership/continuous-improvement, 2022)

Did you do the search? I hope so. You should have seen hundreds of results of cycles and phases. Do the search again, but this time search by images. This type of search will allow you to see the similarities in the cycles. Each of those cycles has a series of steps and requires the individual or team to have a specific set of technical skills (draft reports, presentations, data gathering, etc).

The most common phases you will see are:

4-Phase

• Plan
• Do
• Study
• Act

5-Phase

• Identify the Problem or Research
• Analyze the Data or Root Cause
• Plan or Strategize
• Implement or Monitor
• Reflect or Assess

A team or individual should always begin COCI by setting or revisiting a SMART goal. They will then plan to make some improvements by stepping into (designing or implementing) a version of a COCI.

Given that, let's revisit this idea of reflecting for your personal growth. Other than reflecting on the fidelity of the execution of the cycle of continuous improvement, you are reflecting on the leadership moves that you made and will need to make in order for the school, team or individual to make progress toward a goal. Sharpening your ability to reflect often will lead to you becoming a much more strategic and disciplined leader of processes and people. Yes this could be a frustrating process, but what I have learned and ask you to consider here, is that aside from the technical skills taught in formal COCI trainings, there are adaptive skills that you need to become adept at in order to lead the design and implementation of cycles of improvement.

Once again, if you perform a basic internet search on adaptive leadership skills in education (scholarly articles), you will find similarities in the research on defining the term, but there are varying beliefs about which adaptive skills lead to more efficacious leadership.

For this course, our collective understanding of adaptive skills in education leadership will be possessing the necessary competencies to "consider external factors in the environment" (Glover, Rainwater, Jones, & Friedman, 2002), their potential impact on processes and people, and applying strategies to change behavior(Yukl and Mahsud, 2010) (Kahn, 2017).

I will not be surprised if you as a new or aspiring school leader gets overwhelmed with figuring out which adaptive skills you need to prioritize in your personal development and situational context. I am here, as a coach, to make the suggestion of which adaptive skills will be foundational in your leadership journey.

In this course, these four high-lever adaptive skills will be referred to as primers and you will be primed to coach and lead cycles of continuous improvement (of all types) skillfully toward increased school efficacy.