Episode 281 Transcript

The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 281

Jennifer Gonzalez, Host

GONZALEZ: This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to Episode 281 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, we’ll explore why school improvement initiatives keep failing — and what school leaders can do to be more successful.

Imagine this: You go to your first faculty meeting of the school year, and after a few welcoming remarks, your principal says, “This year, I just want you to keep doing what you’re doing. No changes.”

If that has ever happened anywhere, at any time, I’d love to hear about it, because as far as I can tell, every school for all of eternity has been trying to improve in some way. It’s part of our nature as humans to keep looking for ways to make things better. And schools are such complex ecosystems that there’s always going to be room for improvement.

These efforts vary in size and scope. Sometimes we’re just fine-tuning, on our own or with a group of colleagues, reflecting on our practice and making things a little better by degree. This kind of improvement tends to be pretty organic; we identify a need, make an adjustment, see how it goes, and keep refining.

Then there are the big, school-wide or district-wide efforts: a new curriculum, a branded leadership program, a whole new set of practices everyone is expected to start using. These often follow a familiar pattern. The initiative rolls out, everyone invests time and energy into it, and a few years later it’s replaced by something else. The churn can be exhausting.

Some of that is inevitable. We’re working with complex problems, the solutions aren’t always obvious, and there’s bound to be some trial and error. But a big reason these initiatives keep getting replaced is that they often don’t get the results people hoped for.

In recent years, schools have turned to improvement models that work differently. Rather than bringing in a prepackaged solution and asking teachers to implement it, these frameworks give the people closest to the problem a process for studying it, trying possible solutions, seeing what happens, and adjusting from there. In theory, these approaches should get better results: The people doing the work have a hand in figuring out what needs to change, and the solution develops through a process of learning and adjustment.

But they don’t always work that way in practice. Sometimes the framework itself becomes just another thing handed down from above, another set of steps people are trained to follow, with more attention paid to following the process than to creating the conditions that make real problem-solving possible.

And yet, in some places, they really do work the way they should, leading to the kinds of improvements people were hoping for. 

So what’s happening in the places where it’s working? What allows this kind of improvement work to actually become a way for people in schools to solve problems together, rather than just another program that eventually gets replaced?

My guests today, Jal Mehta and Max Yurkofsky, have an answer to that question. In their new book, A Chance to Solve Their Own Problems, they take a close look at how these kinds of problem-solving approaches play out in real schools and districts, examining why they succeed in some places and falter in others. Through that research, Mehta and Yurkofsky identified a set of conditions that seem to make the difference.

In this episode, they’ll explain what those conditions are, why so many well-intentioned improvement efforts fail to create those conditions, and what schools can do differently if they want improvement to become something people actually do, rather than another initiative they’re asked to implement.

Before we get started, I’d like to thank Brilliant for sponsoring this episode. If you’ve recently watched a student give up the moment something gets hard, you’re not alone. Building the tolerance to sit with difficulty and push through it is truly one of the hardest things to teach right now. Brilliant.org is built to address exactly that. It’s a math and computer science learning platform powered by the belief that students learn by doing — that means trying, sometimes struggling, persisting, and eventually solving rigorous STEM problems. Every lesson is interactive and visual, designed so students in grades 5 and up can work through real challenges that deepen conceptual intuition and develop durable problem-solving skills, not just the ability to follow a procedure or memorize a formula. And through their grant-funded schools program, K-12 educators and their students get completely free access to all of Brilliant’s Premium content. Find out why we included it as a Top Tech Tool to Try in our annual list! You can claim your free account at educator.brilliant.org and start sharing it with your students today..

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Now here’s my conversation with Jal Mehta and Max Yurkofsky about school improvement.

GONZALEZ: Welcome, guys, and thanks for coming on to the podcast.

MEHTA: Thanks for having us.

YURKOFSKY: Thank you for having us.

GONZALEZ: So let’s do a quick background check on both of you in terms of just like where — that sounded very, that sounded very legal. Tell me a little bit about just where you’re positioned in education. Jal, let’s start with you.

MEHTA: Sure. I’m Jal Mehta. I’m a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I do most of my research by spending time in schools and trying to cull wisdom from leading practitioners. So essentially I go and see what people are doing well and try to write it down so that other people can do it. I find that both personally a lot more satisfying than sitting in my office running numbers on my computer, and also it just responds better to the complexity of how the world actually works.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Okay, that’s great. Max?

YURKOFSKY: Yeah, so I’m Max Yurkofsky. I’m a former elementary school teacher. I taught in Detroit. I’m now an assistant professor at Radford University, which is in southwest Virginia. And I mainly teach in an EdD program where I kind of work with full-time teachers, school leaders, district leaders as they get their doctorate. And the way we structure it is they kind of do a continuous improvement project as their dissertation. So they spend their time trying to identify, understand, and address a problem in their systems. So I’ve done a lot of — just like Jal learns a lot from his research from educators, I learn a lot by trying to work with them as they solve problems in their systems.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about this book. What question were you trying to answer when you initially set out to write it? And then after doing all the research, what would you say is the most important answer you came away with?

MEHTA: So the initial name for the project was called Design Meets the Real World. And so we were looking at a variety of processes that exist, like continuous improvement processes and design thinking processes and things like Data Wise and instructional rounds and things that I suspect that many of your listeners have been part of or tried or seen over the years. And when we started the project about 10 years ago, there were a lot of practitioner books that told you how to do these methods, but there was a lot less research about what happened when you tried them in actual settings with all of the constraints that come in trying to improve things within normal public schools. And I would say that also, Max mentioned his own work in improvement and with Data Wise, and I’ve done some work in design thinking, and I think there’s kind of a honeymoon phase where you learn one of these methods, and it seems like it really is amazing and will take on and solve a problem for you. And then as you go on and you look up a year or two later, you’re like, oh, wait, we did this thing a year or two ago, but our organization doesn’t seem as changed as we hoped it would be.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

MEHTA: Like, why is that? So we had some optimism about places where it had succeeded, but we’d also seen some places where it hadn’t succeeded, and we wanted to know the difference.

GONZALEZ: Okay. And so this was the goal heading out into the research. And we’re going to get into a lot of what your takeaways were later. But was there sort of one main lesson that you pulled from all the studying that you did of various situations in schools?

YURKOFSKY: I think, in a phrase maybe, we would say these methods don’t implement themselves. These tools are all, I think, quite good. They have a lot of really neat ideas baked into them. But you can’t just plop them into a school and expect them to work perfectly every time. Doing these methods well requires leadership, and it requires a lot of the human relational practices that are essential to leading schools and teaching students every day. So I would summarize it like that.

GONZALEZ: So a lot of people listening are probably involved in some kind of school improvement effort right now. I mean, these are things that are happening all the time. If they held their current process up against what you have learned, what are some common ways they might discover they’re doing it wrong? We’re really hoping people are going to hear what you’re saying and go, oh, that’s something I’m doing, and maybe that’s why things aren’t working as well as I hoped.

MEHTA: I have a friend who’s a consultant and does this kind of work all the time. And I was talking with her a lot as we developed the findings for the book. And one thing that she said from what we’d written that really resonated with her was when she started doing this kind of work she would lead with the tools. She would say, hey, we have this awesome process, and if you use this process, things are going to get a lot better in our world. And she said that over time she had learned through experience that you have to kind of lead with the relationships, with the problem that people are having that this process is going to solve for them, that it’s not about the process it’s about the content. So I think that’s one really big one. Like, are you addressing a problem that teachers think that they have, or are you addressing a problem that you think that teachers have? Because if ultimately this is a process that’s going to be taken up by educators, educators need to feel really connected to the problem. So one of the most successful examples of this was the Chicago “on track” work, which was an effort to track which ninth graders were failing classes and text them, and communicate with them, and create credit recovery options, and get them back on track. And that has led to a 15 percentage point or so increase in graduation rate over like 15 or 20 years. And I think one of the reasons that it has had such staying power is that the teachers really believed that it was important. Like the difference between getting a kid back into school in ninth grade and not could be the difference between a low-wage job and a middle-class job. It could be the difference between any job at all and having a really bad outcome in life. And the teachers really believed that, so that sort of sustained the commitment to the work.

GONZALEZ: Okay. So the people closest to the problem need to be part of identifying what that problem is, and they need to believe just as much as the people at the top in this specific problem needing to be solved. 

YURKOFSKY: Yeah. When a lot of people hear “continuous improvement,” they often think, you know, like data-driven practices, right?

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: Looking at data, finding problems, addressing those problems. And that is part of continuous improvement. But this key difference between how typical data practices look in schools and I think what these methods offer is an emphasis on systems over people. So go into any given conversation in a PLC or an evaluation meeting, and you might be looking at data and saying, oh, you know, this teacher struggled with this standard, this standard, and this standard, or these students struggled with A, B, and C, or this team struggled with A, B, and C. And that’s how the data looks. It’s easy to start there when you’re looking at it, but actually what’s more helpful is to go one layer deeper and think about, okay. Well, why is this particular teacher struggling with those standards? What part of the system is contributing to that outcome continuing to happen? And ideally, data can be used in continuous improvement to figure out, what are those systemic barriers that are getting in the way? So we’re not looking at, you know, this teacher is to blame, but we’re looking at, how is our instruction set up to support this teacher? How are we coaching and onboarding? What kinds of curriculum are we using? Where might that be falling short? So instead of being curious about deficiencies in individuals, being curious about where the system might be falling short. And that way when you address that, you’re not just helping that one teacher, but you’re trying to make an improvement for anyone who’s impacted by that system.

GONZALEZ: What happens when the focus is too much on individuals?

YURKOFSKY: A big one is, I think it kind of gets in the way of the kinds of psychological safety and trust that’s necessary for improvement. If you want to be able to have a candid conversation about data and a reflective conversation of practice about practice, you need to feel safe. And if the goal of the conversation is to identify which teacher is struggling the most? Which standard are we the weakest on? That’s not a place that’s gonna, that’s not going to garner safety and honest reflection. So I think it can turn into a kind of evaluation or compliance exercise when the focus is on individuals.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: But when it’s on systems, it kind of liberates folks to say, hey, it would actually be nice, you know, I’m struggling with this, our curriculum is actually not that strong here. Or, you know, the activities we are using as a team could be improved here. And I think it can liberate folks to feel safer to actually share where they’re having trouble and what they might like to do differently.

MEHTA: You could probably see that just in your own household, you know? “Why didn’t you X?” It’s almost never met well by a kid or a significant other or anybody in the system. 

GONZALEZ: Right.

MEHTA: “But it seems like we as a family are having trouble getting places on time” or getting out the door in the morning or whatever it might be. Hmm. Why do we think that is? And are there things that we might change in our process and our routine? Maybe it’s not, I think I’m waiting for you and you think you’re waiting for me, and so neither of us is quite getting out the door, but actually it’s a communication problem. So it’s actually neither of our fault. It lies somewhere between us. So trying to create a little bit of space to have those kinds of conversations generally, they land a lot better. Not speaking from personal experience, but just —

GONZALEZ: No, but it reminds me of advice that I’ve seen before about these kinds of things. It’s not you versus me. It’s us versus the problem. And that’s sort of what you’re describing.

MEHTA: Yeah, exactly. That’s a good way of putting it, yeah.

GONZALEZ: But to take that into a larger context, yeah. I think what I’ve seen in my own experience as a teacher, whenever something new comes along, some sort of an improvement, there’s always defensiveness from somebody at some point, almost out of the gate. Okay. So we’re focusing on, you know, people instead of looking at the system as a problem. And then you guys had identified two other problems that you typically see in these initiatives that are just not working.

YURKOFSKY: One thing we see a lot is a focus on fidelity. Fidelity to a plan, to a curriculum, to an initiative, rather than learning.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: I joke in my classroom that fidelity is the F-word in my course.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: That’s a bad word.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: I get sad when you say it.

GONZALEZ: Teachers are going to love that.

MEHTA: We’re going to get a non-clean rating, Max, from Apple.

YURKOFSKY: Yeah. Sorry in advance. GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: I think an emphasis on fidelity actually misses an important insight from a lot of research and experience with continuous improvement, which is basically the idea that if you develop some kind of standard, some kind of best practice, and it stays the same, that’s just evidence that you’re not learning as an organization. Any time you articulate some kind of standard, whether in Virginia right now, we’ve got the Virginia Literacy Act. There’s a lot of high-quality instructional materials. A lot of folks are worried because they think they have to implement that with fidelity to be in line with the law. And there’s this emphasis on, okay, we got to do everything exactly as it says, right?

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: But obviously, these curricula were not written for Virginia educators. They were not written for a particular school division or a particular teacher or a particular group of students. They are imperfect. So the only way we’re going to make them better is by trying to do what we can, hollering when something’s not working, and sharing that. And then hopefully, adjusting and revising it in how we’re using it so that it can be better tailored to our system. So that does involve some kind of joint commitments to, hey, let’s try some of this, right?

GONZALEZ: Right.

YURKOFSKY: Let’s try to give this a good shot. But then it involves that continuous sharing of where it’s falling short and updating the standard. Fidelity is never the point. Fidelity means we’re not learning. What you really want might be integrity, but it’s really, the term I like is adaptive integration. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: You’re integrating something adaptively into your system to make it work for your system. And that’s a continuous process.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, it sounds iterative, from what you’re describing, not just, “we do it right the first time or else,” you know. And it’s a process. It’s a back and forth between this set of standards or this program and then us as real people. 

MEHTA: If I could build on that a little bit, I think there are a kind of set of balances that need to be held in this work and that’s where it really requires judgment. You might have heard from Silicon Valley, “fail faster.” And you might have also heard, “go slow to go fast.” So which is it? Should you fail faster or should you go slow to go fast?

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

MEHTA: The answer is it depends. It depends on the context. It depends how much energy the people you’re working with have. Sometimes you’re caught in analysis paralysis, and you should just try something. Sometimes you’re caught on a hamster wheel, and you’re just acting and acting and acting, and what you really want to do is get back on the balcony and reflect. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

MEHTA: So I think it’s hard, because people tend to have a tendency towards one or the other. They’re either doers, like “let’s get in there and get it done,” or they’re kind of reflectors and like, “okay, we need to really think about what we’re doing before we do it.”

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

MEHTA: And processes can get stuck either way. And so it’s a big challenge of leadership and something that we saw good leaders as being good at is they listen carefully, they read the room, they assess the context. And then they know that both moves are right some of the time, and they try to figure out, okay, for this moment, which move is going to help us move forward?

GONZALEZ: Right. And that, in a way, kind of leads to the fourth piece that we pulled out of the book as a common problem, which is choosing a solution before fully understanding the problem. So Jal, can you talk a little bit about where you’re seeing that?

MEHTA: Sure. I mean, just this morning as it happens, I was having my students do a design thinking exercise because they’re going to do a design project over the course of the whole semester. And I just wanted them to, in an hour or an hour and a half, get some experience doing it. And so their project was to redesign our ed school, our physical space, and so they went and interviewed people in the library and the cafe and so forth. And they said, what’s going well, what’s not going well, etc. And they came back, and they said, well, we need to have phone booths or small rooms where people could make Zoom phone calls. And I said, well, let’s try to separate the problem from the solution. So the problem is that people need a private space to hold Zoom calls. I’ll accept that as the design problem. But from there, we can build a terrace on the roof. We could bring back ‘80s-style phone booths. We could buy everybody a pair of AirPods and tell them to do it on a walk. We could, we could, we could. 

GONZALEZ: Right.

MEHTA: So I think there’s this sense where it’s easy to sort of jump to the solution. But what you want to do is define the problem in a way that opens up enough space that there are different solutions, and then you want to try and see which one actually helps you move forward.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: And I’ll just push that one level further and say one trap that I think people in the continuous improvement or design world can fall into is we will say that all the time to educators: Don’t start with a solution. But when we engage with educators, we might be starting with the solution that, hey, what you need is my particular continuous improvement method to be done exactly as I say.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: So I think it’s symmetric. It’s at all levels, that problem. We too need to be thinking, hey, is the advice I’m giving you around continuous improvement, the ways I like to engage with it, is that actually what you need for your problem right now or your context?

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: Or might you need something a little bit different? 

GONZALEZ: Right.

YURKOFSKY: And I think there’s some humility that’s needed from folks in our world — researchers, coaches, technical assistance providers, leaders — that the method we might like that may have worked for us in the past might not be the solution to the problem educators are facing.

GONZALEZ: How often have you seen, in looking at all these different schools and districts, I’m imagining that a common scenario is that a district sort of falls in love with or has a relationship with someone who creates some sort of a packaged something, whether it’s a solution, a program, a discipline thing, a curriculum type thing, and they get locked onto that or even buy it, make a financial commitment, and then everything ends up having to point to that, regardless of what actually might be a better solution. Do you see that scenario play out?

MEHTA: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

MEHTA: Full stop.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

MEHTA: I think that is a common, everything in the world happens through relationships and people go with what they know and who they know. And my friend did this in their district, and it seemed like it, they said it was good, so I’ll do it. And that’s not necessarily always bad, but we do emphasize in the book that different methods have different advantages and disadvantages. And thus in an ideal world, you would think about what kind of problem you have, and what sort of resources you have, and what sort of strategy you’re pursuing, and then you would draw on a process that was aligned with what you were doing. But I think the picture that you described is definitely a true picture, and if I could be permitted a very brief soapbox.

GONZALEZ: Please.

MEHTA: I mean, I think that’s like part of how, that’s related to the under-professionalization of the sector, and the relationship between administrators and teachers. Most senior administrators on average are male. Most teachers on average are female. There’s something that’s fundamentally not right here that we’re not actually trusting the people who are closest to the ground to say, hey, I have an inquiry question. Our kids aren’t writing as well as we hope they would by sixth or seventh grade. So what could we do about that? Is it a problem somewhere along the way? Is it something we’re not doing in connecting the dots? Is it things that are happening outside of school with all the technological stuff we’re all talking about these days? Okay, well, what can we do about it? Like, what does the research say? What have we tried? Where are the bright spots in our school? So you can imagine a process that was much more professional, organic, grounded in educators’ interests and perspectives and expertise on their students. And we sort of, public schools sit within these bureaucracies which don’t have those dynamics, and I think that’s a big part of the problem. A couple of the examples that we pull out as our most, the examples where it sort of went the best, it was voluntary. Like, teachers signed up to do it, and a couple of the ones where it was more troubled, it was required.

GONZALEZ: I’m glad you did that soapbox, because I think when you said that, probably teachers listening all over the country were like, yes, thank you. Because I hear this the most. They say that administrators never ask us. They never ask us what we think the problem is and what we think the solution. We get left out and then expected to make all these changes, and we can see why they’re not going to work, because we’re missing this big piece that nobody’s asking us about. So, okay. So we’ve talked a lot about the problems and why things aren’t working. What you did basically was identify three things, three factors that need to work together no matter what a group is trying to do to improve. We need mindsets, routines, and practices in order for things to work well regardless of the program we’re trying to implement. 

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GONZALEZ: So let’s talk through these one at a time and what does it look like? Why are each one of these essential, and what does it look like when they’re happening?

YURKOFSKY: So maybe to ground us, let’s imagine a specific initiative. We’re trying to improve literacy, let’s say, in K-3. A lot of districts and states are pursuing reforms. One of our successful cases was trying to improve this. So think about what you might need to improve literacy. The most obvious one is practices. It is really important to have a vision of what good literacy instruction looks like, to have resources that are aligned to that vision, to have coaches who can support teacher learning related to that. All that is essential. And I think we kind of often know that when we think about an instructional reform. Something that often gets overlooked on the instructional angle, though, is routines. And by that we mean ways that educators and adults kind of work with one another in a repeated way over time.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: So with literacy, it might be routines around looking at one another’s practice or looking at data. It might be routines around grouping or regrouping students. It might be routines around kind of doing rounds and looking at how other teachers are approaching a problem. So we think those routines play an important role. And then there’s mindsets. And by that we mean, what are the kind of key assumptions and beliefs, sometimes unstated, that underlie educators’ behavior. So if your mindset is, this is more secondary, but if you’re a secondary teacher and say, hey, it’s not my job to teach literacy. It’s my job to talk about books.

GONZALEZ: Right.

YURKOFSKY: Well, that’s going to be a big barrier if a lot of your kids are struggling to read. So thinking about, what are the mindsets that need to go with a particular aim?

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

YURKOFSKY: And I think what we found with our methods is that most of them help with one of these things, right? Continuous improvement, you know, really helps in giving folks good routines. And it helps in fostering certain kinds of mindsets around learning, around kind of trying something and seeing how it goes, around using data. But what continuous improvement often will not provide is that vision of where you want to go. So if you’re leading this work, you need to think, okay, I’ve got some good routines and maybe some helpful mindsets, but now I need to find some instructional experts, coaches, reading specialists, folks with pedagogical content knowledge who can kind of help teachers and educators use those routines to actually start to try new research-based, evidence-aligned practices, experiment, and actually learn from their experience. So we see a really powerful positive feedback loop happening when all three of those elements are in place.

MEHTA: It’s easy to get excited about part of the picture. So one place we worked, the superintendent was really good at developing mindsets around experimentation and innovation and try new things for kids, and the district will say yes and not say no. But the absence of clear routines meant that people who were innovating felt like they were a little bit on an island, and that they weren’t in common conversation with other people in the system. We’ve seen a lot of places where they lead with routines. But to the point we were speaking about before, the teachers never really get fully convinced that this is something worth investing in. And so this sort of inquiry and curiosity that we’re seeking isn’t there. We’ve seen a lot of examples of what I call the optimistic constructivism of some of these methods, which is kind of like, if you observed the problem, you would then be able to fix the problem. And if the problem is getting out the door in the morning, maybe that’s all you need. You just eat breakfast five minutes sooner or you go to bed half an hour earlier or whatever. But if you’re trying to change your literacy instruction or move from procedural math to more conceptual math or something like that, you’re not gonna PDSA cycle your way from one to the other. You really need some infusion of disciplinary expertise. And that might, you know, in some schools there may be teachers on the third-grade team who have that. Maybe it comes internally, but it has to come from somewhere.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

MEHTA: Yeah, so I guess it’s getting these things right in concert that seems important.

GONZALEZ: So even with a lot of the improvement sort of philosophies that you looked at and went over the Data Wise and design thinking and all of those, even with those as routines, and even with the right mindsets, if there are not actual solutions at the end of that, actual practices that teachers can go to to make the improvement, you can just end up sort of spinning your wheels with all the right intentions. Does that sound accurate?

MEHTA: I think that’s right. A lot of the literature on innovation says having somebody in the room who has a real experience from another area can be helpful. The research on innovative teams says bring together people with different kinds of expertise. And I think that’s because rarely do people come up with ideas totally out of whole cloth, you know? Might develop an idea because they’d seen it over here in this other context, and they think oh, maybe this will work over there in this context. So the ideas have to come from somewhere, and so building a team that has access to different kinds of expertise is going to increase your chances of success.

YURKOFSKY: Yeah, just as an example, you know, I studied Data Wise in two districts, seven different teams, and it really often depended on, the success of the teams really depended on, did they happen to get access to some kind of infusion of new knowledge that was kind of rich and useful that could guide their work? One team just happened to pick up a book on number sense routines that was perfectly written for teachers trying to solve the problem they wanted to solve. And they were able to go so far because of that.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: Another team just happened to have an assistant principal who was also a former reading specialist, and they were trying to improve reading, right? So those kinds of nice coincidences can happen. But in many cases, that alignment of the stars may not happen. And again you’re going to have teachers who are working really hard to solve a problem, but will have not a clear idea about what kinds of actions, what direction they need to go in to solve it.

GONZALEZ: So you’ve identified these three sort of essential components: mindsets, routines, and practices. But you also talk about other conditions that sort of surround those three essential ingredients. You talk about relationships and trust, psychological safety, time, collective purpose, and what you call a relational container. So what does a leader need to do to create and protect the kind of environment where this kind of problem solving can actually happen?

MEHTA: Well, I think the first thing to recognize is that teachers are time-starved.

GONZALEZ: Yes.

MEHTA: There is no greater scarcity in our system than time for teachers. And so these processes require, you know, it seems like continuous improvement, who could be against that? But to actually do these things well, it’s a little countercultural, right? It’s saying don’t just try to get ready for tomorrow. Try to look at patterns of what’s been happening and think about whether we should change something in the system or more consistently change something in your practice. And so, A, who has time for that?

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

MEHTA: And B, well, maybe the state wants your test scores to improve immediately, or maybe the parents are really upset about what’s happening with Johnny and Jane or whatever it is. And so a big part of the success of these efforts is somebody with some authority has to protect the space and time to really do this kind of work. And then on the relational part, we have a pretty — depends on what school you’re in, but because of the way that history has unfolded, and because of the nature of bureaucracies, there’s a lot of distrust in a lot of these organizations, and learning requires trying things and sometimes failing. And we definitely came across some folks in our study who said it’s just not safe to fail here. Like, when you’re on the line with district, you better have all your I’s dotted and your T’s crossed because they expect everything to be going well, and that’s not the kind of environment that will produce learning.

GONZALEZ: Right, which, you know, it makes me think back to what you were saying earlier, focusing too much on fidelity over learning and or the program over learning, you can’t have learning if people don’t have the trust and the relationships to actually make mistakes and talk about them. 

MEHTA: If I could add one more thing. I think also when it’s most successful, there’s some sort of strategy constructed by the school, the district, maybe the department that has some direction and purpose and has the sort of needed resources to achieve that purpose. So your goal is to improve early literacy, and you don’t want to just dump in phonics. You want to change your curriculum, but you also want to adapt, you want to do some professional learning about teaching reading, and you know that you’re going to need to troubleshoot. There are going to be ways that it’s not landing for some learners, but it’s not differentiated enough, or whatever it is. And so you build one of these processes into your strategy, but there’s a strategy which has a goal, a set of resources, like a reasonable chance of achieving that strategy. And I think, same with the freshman on track, right? You’re like, you have a problem, which is kids aren’t graduating. You have some data showing that the really important thing is whether they stay involved with school in ninth grade. And so you’re going to sort of target how you’re going to work on that. Whereas I feel like sometimes people are like, well, we’re gonna do rounds.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

MEHTA: Like, okay. You did rounds, but was there something you were trying to accomplish through that? Did you have some theory of how you might accomplish that of which rounds was part of that solution? So when we talked with Liz City, who was one of the authors of Rounds, she made, I mean, she has more experience than we do with all the different people who’ve tried rounds over the years. And that’s basically what she said. She’s like, some people just do rounds to do rounds, and other people make rounds part of a larger strategy. And that second group is much more successful than the first.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

YURKOFSKY: I think it goes back to the point on judgment and dualities that Jal mentioned at the beginning. It’s often going to be about reading the context and figuring out what’s needed in this particular place at this particular time. And sometimes that might be we need to slow down and build trust because people are not raising problems. And sometimes it might be we need to start taking action because people are frustrated and feel like we’re just admiring the problem instead of doing something. And we need to just, let’s just go do something, right?

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: So I think it’s tricky to give generic advice because I think so much of what we’re learning is about how do leaders find the right strategy or implement the strategy in a way that kind of makes sense for their context?

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. I want to acknowledge that most of the people who lead these improvements, and that the teachers also that are sort of coming along for the ride most of the time, everybody is genuinely trying to make schools better for kids. Everybody wants to see things get better. So in listening to this, if a leader hears some of this and starts to recognize some stuff about themselves that they might be doing wrong, what would you want them to hear? And maybe what is one place they could just get started to do things differently?

YURKOFSKY: One thing that I might recommend starting with is trying to reframe the way you think about problems in your organization. I think often it can be helpful for leaders trying to make this transition to really view problems as a gift. And I mean that in a few different ways. One is we can’t learn if we’re not raising problems, right? That’s what drives improvement. So I think that’s one way. But also, think about the issue we just raised around trust.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: If none of your teachers trust you, they are not going to tell you what you’re not doing well as a leader or that you’re approaching the wrong thing. So by hearing problems from folks, if you’re a leader, hearing problems from teachers, if you’re a teacher, hearing problems from students or families is a sign of trust.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: Is a sign that they’re willing to go out on a limb and kind of name for you something. And then I think in those moments, the way you show up for those problems can make a big difference in whether you are going to repair trust that might have been broken at some point or to make things worse.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: So you can respond to complaints or frustrations or setbacks with curiosity, with being willing to say, “Oh, this problem you raise actually reflects some initiative that I’m fond of. But thank you for raising it. That’s really helpful. Let’s dig into that.” Rather than being defensive. So I think leaders can go a long way in really focusing in on those moments when a problem gets raised to them and thinking about how they show up in response.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: And whether they lean into curiosity and appreciation or defensiveness. And again, it’s an easy thing to say. It’s a harder thing to do. I can say all I want about teaching, but at 2 p.m. on a Friday, are you going to show up as your best self when something goes wrong? Who knows. But I do think that is a powerful way to start.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: The other one I’ll just say is something that Jal and I think both do in our teaching is a practice of empathy interviewing, which means learning from those who are closest to your problem and whose perspective you often understand the least well. And that might be teachers. It might be a certain kind of teacher who you see as resistant. It might be students. It might be a certain kind of family member who you see as non-engaged. But try to have a conversation where you have no agenda but to understand their perspective on the world, and I think that one practice — especially if it becomes a routine rather than a one-off practice — can go further than anything else I’ve ever seen at helping someone shift how they see a problem, and how they relate to those who might report to them or who they might have some sort of power over.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

YURKOFSKY: So that’s one kind of concrete thing that we found to be really powerful.

GONZALEZ: I think that’s bigger than any program that could be brought into a building. I just have always believed that most of the answers to our problems are right there in the building, we just have to be talking to and listening to more people. And what you said, especially about if your people don’t trust you, they’re not going to come to you with the truth. And that’s the unfortunate thing is that the more defensive a school leader is, the less they’re going to know about what the real problems are in their schools. And they’re not going to improve because they’re never going to get that feedback so, yeah.

MEHTA: I’ll just pick, if I could answer the same question, I’ll just build directly on what Max said. Yeah. Margaret Wheatley says to solve any problem in an organization connected to more of itself. So I think that’s, Jen, some of what you were just saying. I think one thing to remember is that all of this is fractal, right? So what you do on a smaller scale reverberates out to a larger scale. So essentially as a leader, every interaction you have is an opportunity to model your values. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

MEHTA: Every time you have a one-on-one conversation, if you are really listening and focusing on what the other person is saying, that will help you. You need to have those conversations anyway. So just a question of how you have them. If every time you have a meeting, there’s a chance for like a bit of a personal check-in and a little bit of an opportunity to reflect on what went well and what didn’t or what people’s hopes and fears were, you’re modeling in a small way what you’re hoping to see in a bigger way. Every time someone brings you a problem, and you don’t blame, but you act curious and you are sort of interested in well, what’s the system, and how could we help build a different process that might lead in a better direction, you’re showing a certain way of thinking. So I think sometimes people are like, we don’t have time to do this. And I’m like, you’re already there all day from before normal people get up to after. If you’re the principal, it’s the most thankless job on the planet. You’re already there 10 hours a day, so you have endless opportunities to do this because you have endless conversations, problems, processes etc.

GONZALEZ: And that stance or that tone, I mean, that sets the tone for how the teachers also could be engaging with each other and with you. And so there’s a lot to those smaller interactions in terms of just how it spreads through the culture of the school.

GONZALEZ: So the book is called “A Chance to Solve Their Own Problems: Inside the New Method Seeking to Remake Public Schools.” Before we go, if you could both just give us a quick share of where people can find you online.

MEHTA: So you can find me on LinkedIn probably most centrally these days. That seems to be where the conversation is happening. So Jal Mehta at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I’m not hard to find. And I also direct something called the Deeper Learning Institute at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. And we do various things with the field including a summer camp, so if anyone wants to come do this with us in person, come join us next summer in Lone Rock, Colorado.

GONZALEZ: Oh fantastic. Okay, Max?

YURKOFSKY: Yeah, unfortunately my answer too is probably come find me on LinkedIn. Gives me no joy to say it, but it is the easiest place. I also have a Substack where I’m trying to write about these ideas in a more accessible way, which I link to on LinkedIn. But yeah, Max Yurkofsky.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

YURKOFSKY: And yeah, if you want to get your doctorate, you can look up Radford’s EdD program and do this stuff for three years straight, and you’ll get a real taste for it.

GONZALEZ: Fantastic. Thank you both. Thanks for all the work you did for putting this book together. I hope it helps schools start pointing themselves in the right direction. And thanks for your time today.

MEHTA: Great. Thank you so much.

YURKOFSKY: Thank you so much for having us and thanks for doing this podcast.

GONZALEZ: Thank you.

To read a full transcript of this interview and find links to the book, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 281. To get a regular email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses, products, and speaking services, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.