Unleashing Collective Efficacy: A Superintendent’s Guide to Growth

Dr. Jim: Thanks for joining us today. This is your friendly neighborhood town strategy nerd, Dr. Jim. In order to execute any successful transformation, you need to be equipped with a PhD. Pig headed discipline. It's easy to fall in the trap of trying to boil the ocean. After all, you want to make an impact when you get in the big chair, right? What if it's the opposite approach that gets you the big wins? Pig headed discipline around a key thing is the way to make an impact.

One of the approaches to make massive impact is to focus on designing and launching a collective Efficacy program in the K through 12 space. In this con-versation, we'll walk through how you design and launch a program and what you can expect to encounter during that launch process. So who's going to be guiding us through this journey?

a teacher, coach, and school [: 00:01:00

He's a proud triple graduate of Concordia. University in Chicago, earning his bachelor's in 93 masters in 98 and his doctorate in 2014. So we have two doc-tors on the show. This is going to be nerdy as all hell. And all of his continuing education has been in the field of education, leadership and education.

He's interested in learning new things in the field of education, practicing serv-ant leadership. Promoting effective systemic change and developing collabora-tive relationships in order to build people and foster success within learning communities. He and his wife, Amy are the happy parents of three children and reside in Oakland, Illinois.

Paul, welcome to the show.

[: 00:01:39

[00:01:41] Dr. Jim: I think this is going to be an interesting discussion because we haven't done a deep dive on collective efficacy. So this should be pretty in-teresting to dig into. I think the first order of business before we actually dive into that part of the conversation is to get behind the scenes a little bit and un-derstand a little bit more about [00:02:00] you and the district that you serve.

One of the things that I'm curious about is beyond what was mentioned in your bio, what were some of the key moments in your career that helped shape your leadership philosophy

[: 00:02:13

And one of the things that he taught me and some of some of those who I've looked up to in my life, have been, through the lens of the servant leadership I think to lead effectively, you have to be able to, communicate, collaborate and connect with people and really seek to serve them first.

coach, as a prin-cipal, and [: 00:03:00

[00:03:01] Dr. Jim: So it's interesting that you describe servant leadership as part of the leadership pillars or principles that you stick to. And what's interest-ing about is that just about everybody talks about how they want to be a servant leader or they adhere to servant leader principles and then you watch them in the wild and it can be a completely different thing.

So tell us a little bit more about how you built. The capability or the discipline to actually execute servant leadership versus just talk about it. How does that show up on a day to day basis throughout your career?

[: 00:03:33

And that, through the lens of being a district level leader, creating structures that allow for collaboration and making sure people know offhand how you That level of collaboration is ultimately going to impact your decisions namely in ad-vance to ensure that if if you ultimately need to make a command decision, that you try to be transparent with that, and you try to let people know that you're listening to many things, but as you're listening to things, ultimately you're go-ing to make a decision, maybe in isolation of that but then you could also, at some points, talk a little bit about, the idea of creating a shared vision or a shared decision around something.

So I think trying to get ahead of it, but I think it's about creating time and creat-ing structures that allow Communication and collaboration to flow and as a leader provides you that opportunity to listen more than you talk.

[: 00:04:57

So tell us a little bit about how you've weaved all of that together to make sure that you are leading the person sitting across from you in the way that's appro-priate to their capabilities.

[: 00:05:36

So learning about them and making sure that you're speaking and leading peo-ple with development in mind, I think is crucial to, to that information. Cause you're absolutely right. Not everyone understands servant leadership. It's not everyone's frame in any way. And but I do feel like people are inherently moti-vated by wanting to improve.

Wanting to get better and trying to find people who can help them get better at what they do. And through a perspective of servant leadership and your ability to be able to communicate with people. I think if people see that you're trying to work to help them improve individually, improve their career, improve them-selves as a person.

I think it's really motivating and I think that really helps. with trying to build that capacity from, to that person across from you or that group you're trying to lead?

[: 00:06:55

[00:07:12] Dr. Paul Enderle: Sure. I, first and foremost, I feel absolutely blessed to be in a district where I believe to have the greatest students, the great-est families, the greatest staff in the world. And I believe that. And our commu-nity the Oaklawn hometown community is located in the Southwest. Side near Chicago, Illinois.

We actually share a border with the southwest side of Chicago. We are a subur-ban school system that's relatively landlocked. The village of Oak Lawn and the city of Hometown comprise about 60, 000 total people. Our, my district alone, we have currently seven attendance centers. We have an early childhood center, five elementary schools that serve children from kindergarten through fifth grade.

iddle school that serves our [: 00:08:00

We have a growing English language learner. Demographic in our district. Over the course of the past 20 years, that demographic has grown about 20%. Back in 2005, we were about 5%. Now we're about 25%. So about one in four of every one of our kids in every classroom is an English language learner.

And we are growing, our demographic and our free and reduced lunch popula-tion has been growing slightly as has our Hispanic population in our communi-ty. Our demographics are very consistent with those districts around us but we just have. Great kids, great families and something special about our communi-ties.

t's very connected excellent [: 00:09:00

Drama. Music. We just have our, we're very blessed to have a great community where our kids and families are engaged in a lot of different activities not just school related, but community related.

[: 00:09:22

Walk us through that process of how you identified the critical piece that you wanted to focus on during your time in in the district.

[: 00:09:57

I felt like we were doing a lot of very good things. Some of those things didn't seem to have firm foundations and seem to come and go rather quickly. So one of the things I did as a new superintendent is I worked collaboratively with the board, the community to develop a pretty solid, Strategic planning process and that strategic planning process was more geared towards not only planning in the moment, but looking at the school district and what the school district could be.

hree to five years. And this [: 00:11:00

We have four key goals. In District 123 that have been longstanding now for the past six or seven years, and that's whole child success, active, engaged learning, operational excellence and community spirit. Everything we do filters from those pillars. A great example would be a number of years ago, we identified a need for getting more of our three and four year olds engaged in preschool learning.

our kids more ready for the [: 00:12:00

But I can say that if it wasn't for, Yeah. The long term vision and the visionary planning and the financial foundations we've set, we would not have been able to do that. I really feel as though, when I came on board We're a school district with a strong reputation, with great people, but I felt like we lacked a little bit of that long term vision.

And I think that's something that I would highly recommend to any district looking to be progressive and to move forward. To really spend dedicated time with the board and with the community to draft long term strategic plans.

[: 00:12:36

[00:13:00] When you say that? Tell us a little bit about what you mean.

[: 00:13:03

Seeing some of those gaps and then, of course, seeing the data and the incon-sistent levels of data we saw at some of our schools, we knew we had to bring bring the district together and create more. Thank you. More of a unified vision around what we did in the school system. We were also having some issues with finances as well and doing some deficit spending and some questionable ways.

e set some priorities. About [: 00:14:00

So that's where the, like the genesis of that came from. But the efforts we've made with our strategic plan have really helped fortify and keep that alignment strong

[: 00:14:30

What was the genesis of that decision? What was happening that had you think-ing that this is the direction that we need to shift to in order to build a better dis-trict?

[: 00:14:56

And if we focus on those things and really get laser focused on that, how can we, how could that serve to, better develop and grow our system? And we know, and research would indicate that the greatest influence that the greatest influence on achievement at any level is the influence of a teacher.

We've always been committed to developing our staff, and I felt like that was a strength of our district even prior to, to, to myself stepping in as a superinten-dent, and I wanted to build that. I wanted to grow that. I wanted to take that strength even more, and I started looking at, research from Marzano, research from Hattie that showed that the value of this idea of efficacy.

s, secondly, a belief in our [: 00:16:00

And, Here in our strategic plan through much of my leadership and encourage-ment, I built in one of our goals was, through, growing a qualified. Teaching staff. One of the elements we wanted to look at through that plan was, how do we operationalize collective efficacy? I started reading a lot of the literature and some of the things done by author Robin Jackson, who advocates for a 90 day school improvement planning process.

at immediately caught my eye [: 00:17:00

This is too grand. That this doesn't have really the practical chops that I think a good actionable strategic plan needs. But as I read more, I realized that the de-velopment of a 100 percent goal in connection to a 90 day plan, Is set in place to create a mindset around which the staff believes.

In 100 percent of our kids and that we believe that we can make a difference for all of our students And in right away that you know that triggered in me Hey, here's a way a possible gateway into us creating some of an operationalized sys-temic approach into developing more collective efficacy in our system.

adership level of our school [: 00:18:00

At a high level and that's where we began that journey of looking into Robin Jackson's work and studying it picking it apart Analyzing it seeing how it could add value to our school system.

[: 00:18:15

And then you pivot to The new strategic plan, a focus on collective efficacy where they're focusing in on one thing. That had to be a pretty big shift in think-ing. So how did you get everybody else on board with shifting from all of these different targets in your previous plans to, what I talked about, what I described as pigheaded discipline around one thing in the beginning of the show.

[: 00:18:59

On the topic. So we were able to talk a little bit about and open the door up to that self doubt and to that that thinking that, maybe this was impossible or really hard to do. We sometimes as educators we have a lot of data. We look at and I find that some of it, and it's great to have all this, these layers of data, but some of it gets a little bit overwhelming and sometimes irrelevant.

I found that as we were looking at this and saying, Hey maybe if we just focus on our student growth, maybe that's the one metric that if we were to have one thing, what would it be? And the leadership team, looked around and said, it would be, we want our kids to grow.

we like many school systems. [: 00:20:00

Pathways to individual growth goals for students and we're very easy very simply able to track the growth of our kids. So I think one of the ways we were, I was able to get some buy in with my team was through the simplified ap-proach of just simply looking at growth data because we know that if the kids grow, other positive things are going to happen.

We're going to see happier kids. We're going to see happier teachers. We're go-ing to maybe see more satisfied parents. We're going to, hopefully, maybe even see a stronger response to some of the social and emotional needs of our kids. Confidence levels grow. So using data. And using a more simplified approach to data, I think, helped with that.

[: 00:20:47

And once you're aligned there that's [00:21:00] one part of the process of this transformation exercise. But the other part of the process is you might want to do all of these things, but there's going to be an obvious set of skills gaps. That exists across your leadership team that need to be bridged so that you can actual-ly successfully execute because this is a pretty different way of thinking or act-ing within the district.

So what were the things that you did to help bridge those gaps and knowledge and capabilities so that everybody on the leadership team was equipped with the right tools to execute this well?

[: 00:21:34

really need a level of coaching as well. On top of some of the work we did with our book study and with going to workshops and just simply talking about this we hired a coach for our leadership team and her role, it's a part time role, but her role is to work individually with our building level leadership.

ucational leadership is very [: 00:23:00

So we felt like a coaching model would be one to help us provide that in the moment support for our leadership team to help encourage them and to help de-velop their leadership capacity to implement this process with fidelity.

[: 00:23:27

How did you get over that? obstacle when you presented the idea of, Hey, we need to get our leadership tier coaches or coaching so that they can better exe-cute.

[: 00:24:11

I think it is greatly valuable. We are going to be looking at measuring our school improvement process, this 90 day process in a variety of ways, not just looking at the conditional growth index of how our students are performing, which is probably the number one metric we're going to look at, but we're also going to be doing some.

ive our staff, which doesn't [: 00:25:00

How safe do people feel in school, or how safe do they feel to share ideas, in school? What, what do people believe about the direction of the district? Is the district providing clear vision and support for staff? These are the things, some of the things that we measure on an annual basis.

We also use something here in Illinois called the five essentials survey, which is something that, that our staff takes and provides us with some really great feed-back on. So we're hoping after a year of implementing this 90 day SIP plan, im-plementing this 100 percent vision, we're hoping to see some of that climate.

Survey data come back in a way that shows that the efficacy in which we oper-ate has actually increased.

[: 00:25:54

What are the things that you're going to be looking for that indicate that you've made progress and you're shaping the district in this new way?

[: 00:26:19

What are we doing right? How are we using that data when we see kids or we see teachers or classrooms thriving? What are they maybe doing that sets them apart? It'll also ask, help us ask the question of what are we doing when kids aren't learning? At the levels they need to and growing at the levels they need to.

So we're definitely going to [: 00:27:00

We tend to our students perform very well locally, and sometimes not as well on state national tests. We're looking to compare those. We're also looking at a number of climate surveys to survey our staff we're hoping to develop a similar type of survey with our families to see if they're seeing a difference in the moti-vation levels of their students when they're coming home.

e're going to be engaging in [: 00:28:00

From the district level from the school level to really focus on that data. I just alluded to and to really take a look at it, but more importantly, to make sure that as an outcome of that conversation, we're developing action plans that we feel can align to making our system stronger and stronger as we go.

So we're looking forward to systemically, maybe simplifying. The level of data we have a bit but also looking at both the. The quantitative achievement growth of our students compared to some of that qualitative data of the adults in our system, like our staff and our families, to see if that will help us determine next steps.

[: 00:28:46

or [00:29:00] build a collective efficacy program. When you think about what you did, what are the key pieces of that effort that leader should have in mind if they want to do this themselves for their district?

[: 00:29:10

In nature, but it's something that research time and time again says is effective and it's one of the, gives us one of the biggest shields to, to not only do your homework but also, talk to people in your system. And start having conversa-tions and getting some of your folks who are more centered on research and de-velopment to dig into it, some of the people that you trust sharing them the work of not only Hattie and people like Jen Donahue when it comes to collective effi-cacy, but also looking at someone like Robin Jackson has created a system that has really helped School [00:30:00] systems align and operationalize the con-cept a little bit.

But to really not have a ton of fear in the fact that, this isn't a tangible thing but it's something that you could definitely, you know, foster. It fosters continuous growth, continuous improvement, continuous reflection. I believe in the right things. And I think any time you feel as though you're doing the right work, I think that is motivating and that's something that can really serve to help a sys-tem move forward.

[: 00:30:28

[00:30:33] Dr. Paul Enderle: Sure, you could definitely shoot me an email go to the Oklahoma Hometown School District 123 website and feel free to fire me an email at any point. I love to talk collective efficacy. I love to talk change and leadership in schools.

So I'm always open to talk to any anyone out there interested in those topics.

[: 00:30:52

That I think serves as a general philosophical foundation for anybody that wants to execute a transformation of any kind, regardless of the methodology that they want to put in place. Now, you're obviously talking about the impact of collec-tive efficacy within your district, and that might be the decision that many other districts go with as well, but whatever transformation effort that you're trying to.

Implement and execute. There are a few things that you mentioned that really stood out. One was the fact that everything that we talked about was under-pinned by a development mindset. And I think if you generally apply a devel-opment mindset to whatever you're working on. How can we improve? How can we use this to get to the next level?

nking between the old way of [: 00:32:00

To one thing with a disciplined level of focus. So I think that was an important element of the conversation that stood out to me. The other element of the con-versation that stood out to me was that your emphasis was focusing on asking the question, how can we multiply our strengths? Now we're talking about a transformation effort that happens at a district level, but if we're asking the ques-tion, how can we multiply our strengths across?

All the people that are working within our districts, and that includes district employees, students, faculty, community, that really gives you an ability to think differently about how you can get people working in a more collaborative way and use that as a force multiplier to impact change. So those two things really set the tone well, and I think that mindset.

l for a lot of organizations [: 00:33:00

If you like the discussion, make sure you leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. If you haven't already done so, make sure you join our commu-nity And tune in next time where we'll have another leader hanging out with us and sharing with us the game changing insights that help them build a high per-forming team.