Blog

Reflecting and Reframing: How a mindset shift helped this school leader focus on what matters most

Principals are key players in the delicate and ever-evolving ecosystem of a school’s culture and growth.

School leadership matters. Second only to teachers as a primary in-school influence on student success, principals are key players in the delicate and ever-evolving ecosystem of a school’s culture and growth.

We had the pleasure of catching up with a passionate educator, leader, and member of the Mira Education community: Vanessa Valencia, former Assistant Principal at Vista Peak Exploratory in Aurora, Colorado. Vanessa shared important insights from her leadership journey with us.

Read on to learn how a shift in mindset has helped her remain joyful, flexible, and solution-oriented in the face of systemic challenges and competing demands.

Q: What’s a typical “day in the life” of a school leader? How has your view of the role shifted from your first year as a school leader to the present?

A: Every day is different. Like teaching, your best “plan” doesn’t always (or ever) go as planned. You can have a full schedule of commitments, and one event, emergency, or unexpected hallway conversation can take the day in a completely different direction. The role requires immense flexibility. When I first started, I struggled when a day didn’t go as planned. I felt like I was always letting someone down. Now I approach the day from an ‘I don’t know how this day is going to go’ mindset. This has impacted how I show up — in classrooms, meetings, and one-on-one conversations — in a positive way.

I’ve come to realize school leadership is incredibly creative work. I’ve been at my school since it opened seven years ago, which has allowed me to observe growth and improvement over time. Schools are constantly iterating, refining, and co-creating systems. This is why staff retention and growing leaders committed to the school community are so important. Focusing on this, the fact that at its core, school leadership is about creating better learning experiences for kids helps me remain flexible and responsive to each day’s demands.

Q: What brings you joy in your work?

A: Witnessing the development and growth in a teacher’s practice and its impact on student learning. For example, one member of our staff was an effective teacher, yet very traditional, a few years ago. Her classroom was always on-task and compliant but didn’t necessarily reflect the cognitive engagement she knew was possible. I worked with her, initially as her coach and eventually as her evaluator. Today her classroom is completely different. Every day she offers students opportunities for interactive and hands-on learning, and cognitive engagement is high. Seeing authentic student engagement and the growth in her teaching, and knowing I played a role in impacting her practice, brings me great joy.

While instructional leadership has always been really important to me, I made it the primary focus of my daily work. As an assistant principal, I spent as much time in classrooms as possible. When I started working as a school leader, I was so worried about completing tasks as they came in that my inbox consumed large chunks of the work day.

Through reflection and conversations with my colleagues, I realized a clean inbox is never going to impact student achievement! This shift in mindset helped me reframe where and how I should be spending my time.

Prioritizing being in classrooms resulted in stronger relationships with staff, a deeper understanding of each educator’s professional growth goals, and an increase in timely and specific feedback to each staff member I evaluated. This feedback has resulted in more risk-taking and implementation of the feedback by teachers in classrooms. It shifted the culture from one of compliance to one where teachers say, ‘I’m trying something new today. Can you come watch?’

Q: Mira Education believes unleashing the collective capacity of teachers and administrators is the key to creating an equitable public school system that serves all students and their communities. What is your reaction to this? How does this value show up in the work you do?

A: I couldn’t agree more that we must work to remove the line that still exists between teachers and administrators. We cannot be divided if we are serious about serving all students. We must view and respect each other as professionals and leverage the collective genius that exists within our system.

One of the ways we’re doing this is through our professional learning studio structure. As a teacher, it was frustrating to me when professional learning didn’t mirror the instructional practice expected in classrooms. This made me realize our professional learning must model what we expect — if we want differentiated and personalized learning for students, we must orchestrate what that might look like with adults. Choice, and teachers’ real inquiry questions and problems of practice, should always drive professional learning. All studio-based learning that happened in our building happens through other teachers, including collaboration with practitioners at other schools.

Keeping a “teacher mindset” at the forefront and constantly reflecting on what it was like to be a full-time practitioner helped me co-create meaningful professional learning experiences with staff.

Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Image of Vanessa Valencia in front of a book shelf with the quote

by mira-mariah

Building Sustainable Leadership Practices

When I’m not working, I’m often running — for exercise or after a young child – and I’ve had my share of injuries, including a pulled hamstring that wouldn’t heal. When I complained to the doctor, she shook her head at me.

“Look,” she said, “the hamstring is actually a bundle of muscles. The way you’re moving yourself forward is using some of them more than others. Until you’ve got them all engaged equally, you’ll be hurting. And you won’t be running — at least not as fast as you want to.”

Running the change leadership race

Aches and pains in moving forward — and struggles to move forward at all — are an everyday challenge for education professionals and for some of the same reasons. No matter the role, we’re charged with moving others from point A to point B. We change how students engage with content and master the work of learning, how fellow practitioners guide young and professional learners, and how fellow leaders exercise sound judgment.

Put another way, moving change forward is our work.

But that doesn’t make it easy. Whether it’s greater emerging needs among student enrollment, staffing shortages and budget cuts that ask public schools to do more with less, new faces on a team, or rapid shifts in standards and other mandates, it all adds up to nearly constant pressure for educators to make complex shifts in how they do every aspect of their work.

Fatiguing the muscles of leadership

The pace of these changes can be difficult to manage and sustain — sort of like trying to run a half marathon on a hurt leg. In fact, 70 percent of change efforts fail due to isolation from a supportive team, conflicting priorities, confusion about why change is happening or what it looks like, and a lack of individual or collective efficacy in navigating the change.

Schools and districts often tend to resort to single solutions and single leaders to turn things around. The idea is that pushing on the same programs and people will accelerate progress toward a goal even though the change failure rate and the rising frustration levels among teachers and administrators show us we’re wrong.

Pressing on the same “muscles” to power change over and over again while others atrophy is a recipe for slowdown or worse. And it’s not as if we have a shortage of options. With one in every four teachers ready to take on school-wide leadership work alongside teaching, schools and school systems have lots of leadership “muscles” they can engage. We know collective efficacy is a key to instructional improvement, and research shows that engaging educators in collective leadership is the key to sustaining transformational change in schools.

Moving forward together

So where do we start? At Mira Education, we find that the educators and leaders who are successful make three big shifts to retrain those leadership “muscles” so they work better together:

  • From leaders to leadership.
    Traditionally, leadership development has been about developing individual leaders, usually administrators. Given high rates of turnover in these positions, it’s difficult to see the path to ROI or sustainability in that approach. In fact, three-quarters of all principals agree their work is too complex to be done by a single individual anyway. Stone Creek Elementary and others with which Mira Education has worked think about how they develop larger and more robust teams to share the leadership load. That way, if one leader leaves, change doesn’t lose its momentum because every leader creates more leaders.
  • From compliance culture to rethinking resources.
    Every school and district lives with mandates to implement programs, manage budgets, and fill Full Time Equivalencies (FTEs), each of which can feel siloed at best and incoherent at worst. Good leadership manages them well, but great leadership figures out how to reorganize them into a coherent whole. Led by a team of administrators and teachers, Walker-Gamble Elementary did just that. Today, every teacher at Walker-Gamble has at least five hours of weekly learning and collaboration time, staff report increased collective efficacy, and students are meeting both their own learning goals and state standards.
  • From siloed to networked.
    These schools didn’t learn how to build this kind of capacity or get this kind of results on their own. They learned from one another. Teachers and administrators from each school’s leadership team visited partner schools as part of a network hosted by Mira Education. Likewise, we partnered with Northwest Independent School District (ISD) to help them find more effective ways for schools to set goals aligned with the district strategic plan and Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) goals, break down barriers to collaboration among schools, and engage more of their staff in ongoing innovation and improvement efforts.

We know through these partnerships and others that collective leadership works where traditional improvement programs have not. And we know that teachers and administrators are equally important in putting practices in place to create sustainable educator leadership pipelines that have been challenging to build in other ways. But we also know that it takes many, many more stories of those successes to make a movement. Otherwise, we’re working with lone runners instead of a real race.

What is your school or district doing to build the power of teachers and administrators to lead collectively? Find tools and insights to power your work on our website, and share what works with us via social media using the #collectiveleadership hashtag.

by dandi-admin

I Remember, I Believe: One Teacher’s Networking Journey

The educators who taught and shaped me in my first years of schooling back in Detroit were Black teachers from the South, most of whom had been displaced by the South’s massive resistance backlash to the Brown decision. Along with the adults in my family, they gave me a love of education. That’s why as a new teacher in 1990, I was deeply troubled by the dissonance between those formative experiences and the stereotypes in popular culture (and within my teacher education program) of Black students as perpetually at-risk of academic failure, along with caricatures of Black educators as inherently inept. Networking with other teachers helped me confront those stereotypes and changed the course of my own career.

Network connections have paralleled my teaching career and propelled my growth as a teacher leader. About four years into teaching, as part of my graduate work through the Bread Loaf School of English, I helped pioneer the use of online exchanges to develop literacy skills among rural students via what was known then as the Bread Loaf Rural Teachers Network (BLRTN).  Bread Loaf also introduced me to classroom action research, launching what would become a ten-year self-study about the teaching of Standard English to African American students. That research led to invitations to share at various venues. These opportunities mattered because there I could give voice and homage to the contributions of great African American teachers who had been denied their place in the professional legacy.

By the late 1990s, I was active in multiple teacher networks. One day I was invited to join the newly formed Teacher Leaders Network (TLN) sponsored by the Center for Teaching Quality, now Mira Education. Through TLN, I began my education blog, TeachMoore, and started working on Teacher Solution projects, tackling issues such as performance pay and teacher preparation. My participation in TLN and other networks also increased my opportunities to work with various groups addressing educational policy.

However, even years of professional accomplishments did not count when it came time to make the decisions that affected my own school and students. At one crucial juncture in my local school district, despite our students’ rising test scores, graduation rates, and college enrollment rates, the district hired a white consulting firm. The other teacher leaders and I were not just ignored but ordered to implement generic classroom practices from people unfamiliar with our students or our community. The high-quality, culturally-appropriate curriculum guides we had developed over two years (much of it on our own time) were discarded. The consultants were given the authority to monitor our classrooms and make sure we were teaching from the scripts they had given us. I share this cautionary tale because I’ve heard too many such stories from teacher leaders, especially from teachers of color, around the nation.

During this period, teacher networks were blooming, particularly on social media. Many were subject or location-specific, but most were true grassroot developments of teachers, particularly teacher leaders, trying to find each other and informally overlapping in membership and purpose. I think the growth was fueled by the joy of finding access to like-minded folk, or colleagues willing to share and listen.

I realized there were two significant differences between my highly accomplished African American teacher predecessors and me. Under the system of legal segregation, Black teachers (who were concentrated mostly in the South) had developed an extensive, sophisticated professional development network centered around the Black teacher associations (reverently referred to as “The Association.”) I had heard of this network and experienced its pedagogical products, but I entered the teaching profession after its dismemberment. The other difference between my highly accomplished mentors and me is that I have had access to venues and opportunities formerly closed to Black teachers, thanks primarily to their sacrifices and struggles. I vowed to use the platforms now opened to me to challenge the racist misperceptions of African American educators and our students.

A crucial step in that direction was the 2014-16 collaboration between Mira Education, the National Education Association (NEA), and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) to develop a social justice curriculum that eventually became part of the NEA’s Teacher Leadership Institute (TLI). While helping to develop and teach that curriculum, I witnessed the powerful potential of uniting three teacher networks (of which I was part) around specific work that would directly impact student learning and create more equitable learning environments for potentially thousands of children.

Black educators’ work and voices are still blocked at many levels. I risked censure or worse for my research and teaching practices which unapologetically built on the work of distinguished Black educators and researchers. Yet, my limited work on national and state levels suggests that one Black teacher from the Mississippi Delta can have some impact on policy and teaching. Imagine what an engaged network of such teachers could accomplish for the profession, for students.

It is significant that many of the most vibrant teacher networks and movements of the past decade, such as EduColor, had at their core people who crossed paths via the Teacher Leader Network and Mira Education. The networking of networks not only amplifies the work of those who are already teacher leaders but the healthy (often challenging) cross-pollination helped produce more leaders and networks. Networking with other teacher leaders and helping to mentor new ones has also provided critical leverage against marginalization and isolation, especially for those of us in rural settings.

Teacher leadership still remains widely underutilized and unrewarded in most school systems. However, unlike when I started teaching, we now have a generation of educators who believe becoming highly accomplished teachers, and teacher leaders are normal career expectations. It is also assumed that teacher leaders should intentionally grow in cultural proficiency and develop as advocates of social justice within their schools. Due in part to the work of teacher networks over the past twenty years, other Black teachers and I are reclaiming our pedagogical heritage and re-asserting its value for broader educational policy and teacher preparation.

To paraphrase the song “I Remember, I Believe” by Sweet Honey in the Rock, I do remember the struggles and contributions of my pedagogical elders, and I believe their work prophetically points us to how the teaching profession should look.

by dandi-admin