Turnaround 4C Plan: Culture

Welcome to Educational Relevance, a platform for experienced educators to share proven successful strategies to educate today’s students. 

Bryan Wright, who has over 25 years experience as a lead school administrator, along with Mark McBeth, who also has experience as a school administrator, will continue sharing the Turnaround 4C Plan to improve any school. The 4Cs stands for Climate, Culture, Curriculum, and Connections. 

Climate is who we are. Culture is what we do. Culture is when climate's expectations become norms. It’s imperative to build a strong school climate and culture to make improvements long lasting. 

Every school needs to have four goals to attain as well as be able to measure in order to embed the culture. The four goals are first, to enhance the culture, second, set up a viable curriculum, next, student engagement, and finally build leadership density, 

For more information about the the topics discussed,
Bryan Wright: brwright44@gmail.com
Mark McBeth: mark@educationalrelevance.org

Thanks for listening. If you would like to share your thoughts or topic ideas, or would like to be a guest, you can find Educational Relevance on Facebook, YouTube or contact us at oliviaw1201@educationalrelevance.org

Transcript

bryan_1_07-24-2024_090734: 0:00

Welcome to Educational Relevance. This is a platform for experienced educators to share proven successful educational strategies. We share these things with other educators, be it administration, be it teachers, be it district leaders, just to make sure we give you some ideas and things that we think can help you become successful at the next level. My name is Bryan Wright and I have been a lead administrator for 25 plus years in education. I'm currently working as a professor at Concordia University. My partner in crime here is Mark McBeth who has served as a district administrator, but also as an author in education and as a true educational leader. How are you

squadcaster-f6fh_1_07-24-2024_090716: 0:39

Doing well, doing well.

bryan_1_07-24-2024_090734: 0:40

Excellent. Now we are going to continue this series, Mark, on the Turnaround 4 C plan and let's review those four C's again. We talk about climate, culture, curriculum, and connections. Now, last we spoke about climate, building a positive school climate, and why that was so important in the changing of a school. Today we're going to talk about culture. Now, mind you, climate is who we are. Culture is what we do. Culture is when climate's expectations become norms. Mark, I'm going to turn this over to you, I think you may want to say a couple things about culture. I really want to incorporate the four goals we're going to discuss. But you said something about code earlier, and I want to make sure you review your code, and talk about that a little bit

squadcaster-f6fh_1_07-24-2024_090716: 1:20

more. Yeah. Thanks, Bryan. So culture is the essential ingredient to move a school from being an underperforming school, why they need turnaround, to becoming the direction to becoming enhanced and better at what they're doing. It's essential movement between there. If culture is overlooked and we jump ahead, like curriculum we talked about before, if you jump ahead you will have a ongoing failure. So culture is essential. We're going to talk about that today. Code. Bryan, you've, drilled code home to a thousand school administrators out there through your lessons at the university and otherwise, but my code is student learning first, and then I go rigor, relevance, relationships, generates results, and we talk about those things. In culture, it becomes live, So we talk about those things throughout climate. We talk about our codes and we try to embed them in their, their psychic. But this is where we start to live it. So we start giving them strategies to be able to use it. How to develop their own thinking around that. So student learning is what they're having the conversations around. It's not just a word. or statement student learning first. Okay, whatever. Now it's like, oh, we got to have a conversation about student learning first. What's that mean? Rigor? What's that mean? Relevance? What does that mean? Relationships? What's results? What are we talking about when we say results? So that's the essential part of why we have to have code from climate. And now we. Bring it to life in culture.

bryan_1_07-24-2024_090734: 3:07

Okay. Thank you, Mark Every school needs to have goal attainment. We understand that. To to reach your success and you want to make sure it's measurable. Four basic goals that we have used in the past the first one we talked about enhancing culture to make sure I didn't say changing culture. We talked about enhancing culture. Every school that we go into, it'll make some changes. We talk about turnaround schools. They already have a

squadcaster-f6fh_1_07-24-2024_090716: 3:29

Yeah.

bryan_1_07-24-2024_090734: 3:29

So they already have one, and they may be doing some things as well. So we want to make sure we enhance not talking about a total change. Set up a viable curriculum. No matter, we can come in there for climate, but the first year, but we still got to have a curriculum. We still got kids to learn. So we got to talk about a viable curriculum they got to have to make sure those things are taking place. The third thing, teacher- student engagement and getting administrators involved with teachers, getting teachers involved with students, getting administrators involved with students, having that engagement. So there's that conversation. So kids feel comfortable about what and how they're learning. The last one we're going to talk about is leadership density. And I think that's a key that some people don't discuss. Leadership density is quite simply building student, teacher, and community leaders to help you reach the goals you want to attain in your school. Mark, let's talk about enhancing culture in a way where we're not talking about embedding it at that time, but enhancing it. So it becomes embedded and maybe you may have a story

squadcaster-f6fh_1_07-24-2024_090716: 4:22

Yeah. So enhancing culture. Now, I always say enhance and change practices because the practices that we're doing inside of a culture defines what we're doing every day. So when we talk about enhancing culture, we're looking at leadership practices. We're looking at how teachers are teaching in the classroom, what they're teaching in the classroom, how they're looking at whether students are learning or not. So one of the things I really love doing is what I call laser conversations. What I do is I go through and I do walk through through the school and I'm going in and out of classrooms and I have a protocol, how we do that. I'm looking always are, what are students learning in the classroom? Are they learning? And then what I do is I go back and I have laser conversations with teachers between classrooms. So in, middle schools and high schools, we often have this passing time. And, and during elementary, it's when the teacher has passing time, when they got kids going to specialties, or their prep time or whatever. Those are the times we snag it there. But what I do is during climate is I just stand there and I talked and I say hi to kids and say, hey, welcome to this classroom, and and we talk about the teacher's life. I'm having those conversations of whether students were learning inside their classroom and I'll ask simple questions. I'll just say, I was in your class and I noticed that you had all those kids in pods of four, and they seem like they were having conversations deeply about the Declaration of Independence. They were just conversing about it. Where was your thoughts going when you put that together? So now it's a value statement. You know, it's like I've already identified good things. They're having conversations, and I'm now generating conversations among teachers. So laser conversations start to have conversations about rigor, relevance, relationships, what they're doing in there. I can ask a simple question about the results. How did that go? I didn't get to stick around the whole time. How did that end up? How do you know they learned it? Those are the kinds of conversations you can have during those laser conversations. I love them. They're only like, two minutes long, but they're great conversations.

bryan_1_07-24-2024_090734: 6:52

Well, I use laser conversations all the time. So I agree with that. But a wise man once told me, make sure you always start lasers conversations with something positive. Making sure we talk about, something positive first, so teacher, won't be afraid to see you walk down the hallway, start running back into the rooms and trying to hide

squadcaster-f6fh_1_07-24-2024_090716: 7:11

I think that was me.

bryan_1_07-24-2024_090734: 7:12

mind having you. And that's exactly the case. So we want to make sure we keep them positive at first and then talk about, some things, how they motivate them, but also let them explain their teaching process so we can see how we can assist them in that regard. I think that's a great way. That's a great conversation about

squadcaster-f6fh_1_07-24-2024_090716: 7:27

enhancing culture. Now, another thing with that, Bryan, is when I see that and I have that conversation with the teacher, guess what I get to talk about when I walked to the next teacher, what I saw down the hall. That was so cool. What was the positive things that's happening inside of our school that starts to shift the culture?

bryan_1_07-24-2024_090734: 7:48

Oh, then you start sharing ideas, sharing thought processes, and people feel comfortable. I'm saying you're not doing anything wrong. We're just talking about some things that you may want to try. And Hey, we saw this being successful in one place. You may want to use this in another, but again, that's exactly what we're talking about. So little by little you're enhancing the culture by making sure people feel good about what they're doing and learning. It also ends up turning out to be getting some degree of student success, which is what we're looking for. Okay, the second we're going to talk about is viable curriculum. Now, this is where we're discussing data teams. But also I'm talking about leadership, positive leadership, communities, these sorts of things. We want to make sure the kids are still learning, reading, writing, math, all the requirements they need to have and reaching these and standards that we want to see improvement in, but not at the same time, forcing this upon teachers and students saying, you better do this. That's why I want to make sure it's viable, so we could help with some adjustments that first year. Mark. Is there another piece that you made me talk about how that turns into culture?

squadcaster-f6fh_1_07-24-2024_090716: 8:51

Yeah, so I think Tiered instructions is a really deep in conversation We could have way more but basically what I'm trying to do with teachers is Identify what we want to teach to every kid and so they really understand the system standards that they're trying to teach. What are they really trying to accomplish? And I want to have a bigger, deeper conversation to get them start thinking about. That's kind of that rigor and it's the relevance relation conversations with the teachers and trying to create leadership groups. You know, we talked about in the last one, Bryan, we talked about climate and I talked about management teams were essential in changing climate. When we shift into the Culture. I like to use teacher leader groups. I like to try to get the curriculum teams on board PLC teams that might already exist in the school. I like to try to enhance them having this deeper conversation. What do all students need to learn? That's, the tier one instruction. What happens if a kid doesn't learn that? What are we going to do? What, what can we do to enhance that to ensure that kids learn? That's the results base of the hours that we're talking about in my code, right? Hey, we look at the results. Hey, they're not getting it. What are we going to do? And how are we going to enhance that? And then, hey, there's going to be some kids that really are struggling. how do we do that? And sometimes in a turnaround school, it's totally shifted. I mean, we're going 80 percent of our kids should be getting it through general instruction. Yeah. 15 percent give or take should be that tier two instruction and 5 percent needs that intensive tier three support. Sometimes we see that inverted. We're going, oh my 80 percent of our kids qualify for tier three and two. That's where we're having a deeper conversation about the culture, the curriculum and those type of things. And that data gives us that. And that kind of goes back to your conversations about how we have conversations about data. So that's tier three instruction and it really gives the shape, literally the shape to have deeper conversations with. adults about how we're going to generate and move kids forward. By the way, my model also has a tiered instruction support for teachers as we're shifting culture and administrators, as we haven't talked a lot about assistant principals and other leaders positions inside the building, but how we shift that too, to make sure that we have the intensive support they need as well.

bryan_1_07-24-2024_090734: 11:34

Also we're talking about, viable curriculum, Mark. This comes where we can talk about standards based learning. Or standards based grading as you see fit as far as the school you're in. We want kids to meet standards of excellence. We can change the climate and we can raise test scores 10 to 15%, 10, 20 percent just by changing climate alone. That way we can still have. Learning taking place, but at the same time not trying to force some certain particular sort of learning down somebody's throat where they're saying, I feel uncomfortable with this. That's why we also got to make sure, Mark, we always have those small wins we got to incorporate. And some of those small wins we do, especially when it comes to teachers and how they feel about their school and what's going on. The third goal is going to be student engagement. And this is where it becomes fun to do. And we're talking about engagement in the classroom, between teachers and students, engagements in the classroom between administrators and teachers. Also about engagement and sometimes we miss between administrator and student. I'll give you an example of that. I went to a classroom, went to a student. I'm watching the class and I asked the student, what are you learning? And the student says I really don't know. I'm like, okay. I said, what grade are you getting in this class? He says a B. was like how do you, how are you getting a B you're not learning anything. So that's, that now that's questioning what's going on. So that leads me to have a conversation now with the teacher saying, Hey, what's going on? How's it going? How are you feeling? Tell me about what you're teaching and how's, how are you communicating it with the, students? I wouldn't have done that, if it wasn't for that engagement piece between the administrator and the student and me asking, and the student feeling comfortable enough to say, Hey, this is what I'm doing. This is why I'm not learning. So Mark, I'm sure you have something to say about that engagement piece though, because that's, you know, one of two things as well.

squadcaster-f6fh_1_07-24-2024_090716: 13:15

Couple things with that. We had an outstanding couple sessions with Jerry Valentine. People should go back and listen to that one about when we're talking about student engagement. One, it's a way of measuring student engagement in the school, but it's also there was a lot of conversation in there about engagement and how that higher order thinking of students generates results and learning inside those standards. I think you hit the nail on the head and trying to engage teachers in those dialogues. I think when, when you walk into the classrooms, you're always asking students, what are you learning today? Kids should always know what they're learning. They should know what standard they're addressing, why they're doing what they're doing unless they've been put into a disequilibrium type of instruction, which is cool too. I'm going to, you're going to do something and you don't know why you're doing it, but you're going to tell me at the end why you did it. That's always cool too. That's that's a higher order of thinking, but but that's part of where we don't make judgments about the teacher. We have the conversation with the teacher later and we discover that. But the. Interactions I wanted to share a story I had, a 1st year teacher. He was 1 of those continuing ed teachers that actually had a different career and came in and teaching that when he was 35 years old we were talking about engaging kids in the classroom and he was struggling with it. He knew his content inside and out, but he just wasn't engaging kids. He couldn't get them excited. Here's a little simple strategy that he ended up incorporating through through my support. He would listen to kids and have conversations with kids all week, and then on Fridays, he would give them progress assessments to see if they're learning what he was teaching during the week. So he's checking for results. So he was teaching rigor during the week, that was his goal. He was really good at rigor. He was trying to make a connection to relevance and relationships through this little strategy. He, he would put in the test questions directly related, a math test directly related with the kids. So he would say, Bryan. Is on the B team of the soccer team, but he has a higher percentage of goals than Mark, who is on the a team soccer team, who's the better player. And he would give the statistical numbers and then they would have to actually determine through using the formulas that they learned the week and figure it out. Kids love coming to class to see that Mark and Bryan made the test. And then Maria and Susanna and etc were on the test and it was real life relevant type questions associated with math. Kids would arrive early to class ready to go wanting to take an assessment. It was so exciting. It was a really cool little strategy and with him doing that, he started to shift the culture inside the school too, because it became not only kids were excited about the curriculum and instruction, but other teachers started seeing that strategy and why kids were so excited that they couldn't wait for math class that day. it was fun.

bryan_1_07-24-2024_090734: 16:40

I want to make sure I talk about engagement. You know, we're talking about learning objectives I'm a real big person about posting learning objectives in the school students SWABAT will be able to so and so and so and so they can do that stuff. So I think that's always a good thing. Having learning objectives posted, I always think it's a good thing. And that's something where it's not, trying to change curriculum, just saying, Hey, getting kids to feel comfortable with what they're learning. So they know what they're learning and they can say, Hey, so you see a learning objective, say, Hey, what'd you learn about that? What'd you learn about today about in, history, about civil war, and at certain parts of the civil war and they can say, Oh, we're learning this about it. And you can say, Hey, that's cool. All right. The best thing I always like to see when I go into a classroom, Mark, and I ask a student what you're learning and the kid tell him what he's learning. So what you getting in the grade? He says, I'm only getting like a D or C or a D. like, well, you're pretty smart. How come you can learn all this stuff? And he says, Hey, I'm learning something in the classroom. That's just on me. And that's something where we can say, hey, that's a positive thing and how we can

squadcaster-f6fh_1_07-24-2024_090716: 17:36

make that

bryan_1_07-24-2024_090734: 17:36

work. work.

squadcaster-f6fh_1_07-24-2024_090716: 17:37

So I was,

bryan_1_07-24-2024_090734: 17:38

the

squadcaster-f6fh_1_07-24-2024_090716: 17:38

I was at a school district talking about shifting and enhancing culture. They already had that they had to post their standards. What they're going to teach that day, but they posted them outside the door. So when kids came in, they would see them. But when you would go into the classroom and ask them what standard they were learning that day, they had no clue. They weren't looking at him. And so the, enhancement was let's post them inside the room so as you're teaching, you can always reference it. Oh, right here. Here's the standard we're addressing today. You've been in classrooms. It's kind of cool where you walk in and you say, Hey, what are you learning today? And they go, Oh, it's right there, Mr. Wright, we're learning about this, this and this because they know where the standard is. And so those little enhancements sometimes really can shift the culture by just thinking about the practices that we do.

bryan_1_07-24-2024_090734: 18:35

And again, now we're talking about just getting the kids engaged to what they're learning actually having them having to have a say so When you talk about learning objectives. You know, I'm a big AVID guy as

squadcaster-f6fh_1_07-24-2024_090716: 18:44

Yeah,

bryan_1_07-24-2024_090734: 18:45

that and so we've always talked about how we do use Cornell Notes to bring back and how we gonna start reviewing the work at the end of the day and of course that goes all the way back to Oh, man. Some of the things we're discussing, we're talking about you want to do that at the beginning of class, exit tickets, this sort of thing, entry level quick notes So all that works about getting a student teacher engagement. The last thing we're talking about, of course, is going to be leadership density. This is one of the fun things we talk about because the whole idea is when we talk about embedding cultures, building up more leaders in your building, building up teacher leaders, building up student leaders, building up your assistant principals, make sure they feel leadership capacity. So one day you may want to have them become principals in their own accord. Building up leadership, where it's not just your vision or it's not your code, it becomes our vision. I'm sure you can talk about one of those things that you've done and how you helped principals, make sure we had that building up that density. And I can tell you a story after

squadcaster-f6fh_1_07-24-2024_090716: 19:38

yeah. So this is essential in any turnaround. You have to build leadership capacity inside of a district, inside of a school that can carry on whether you're there or not. So for our history our expertise is turning around underperforming schools. Once we got it turned and we got it on the right path, we want somebody else to take over to continue to enhance and develop into a system of practice. Just the daily routines. It's great. It's a, it's a blue ribbon school. We want it to move to that direction. I always say, plan for your own demise. The only way you can plan for your own demise as a turnaround principal is enhancing student teacher leaders enhancing other formal position leaders, like assistant principals and you have to engage them in your thinking all the time. You have to engage them in the culture. Once you engage them in the culture, the values that you have as a, principal student learning first. Once you, get them having those in depth conversations, you start getting teacher leaders to have in depth conversations in an avenue where they're thinking rigor, relevance, relationships and results, and they're having those conversations on their own, you've built some of that capacity. But if you don't do that that school will fail in the long run. You can, enhance whatever you want. If you leave, and it's reliant on whoever is that principal, it's just going to fail again. So we have to build that capacity. You do it really well with the entire community. You engage community way more than I ever did as an administrator. So you've got the whole culture wrapping around the school, in the school but you're building that capacity for it to exist. Funny you say that, I was going to tell the story about me going out in the

bryan_1_07-24-2024_090734: 21:42

community and I've done this in every school I've taken over, which is several. Go out in the community and meet the people out there. Have them tell me what they think about the school, what they think is going right, what they're going wrong. Ask them how they want to help participate how they want to become a community leaders in our, our building, become part of a we thing, not a me thing. But also, within your school, You know, we talked about Code. Now, again, mine is of course, respect is earned, not just given common courtesy demanded of everyone. We talk about code and having administrators building their own code so they can have a code so they can go out having teachers build their own code. So if they want to become administrators, they can have something making sure we're gauging. That's what we're talking about, embedding the things we're discussing so that they too can become leaders of people and then give them opportunities quite frankly, Mark, put them in places where they can succeed. It's not uncommon for me to use my assistant principals, for example, to make sure they build up leadership programs. One may run the PTSA, for example, parent, teacher, student associate. We had one school where we built up a student organization. talking about student run programs, we had the principal leadership council. They become president in different programs, different officers, but at the same time, teachers want to have that. You know, I'll let you laugh at this one, Mark. At one time in one of my schools, I was principal. I was the president of the guitar club. Our kids wanted to start a guitar program. And so I told them, you give me 10 kids. I will, we'll have a guitar program. Now, you know, I can't play an instrument. I can't read notes or nothing, but I was the advisor of the guitar club because our kids wanted a guitar club and sure enough, he had the president, and the vice president and they did great work because they were in charge and they said, Hey, we'll get this. They got the kids, they ran the meetings. I just sat there and make sure I had to do an administrative work and they're going to job. So, yes. That's

squadcaster-f6fh_1_07-24-2024_090716: 23:31

a valuable point during the turnaround. We become in charge at the beginning when we're shifting climate. Then, we got to slowly start shifting to being a facilitator of learning. That's a really good point. They got to be able to engage where they start to feel like the ideas and processes are theirs. That's, a major shift. And, by the guitar thing is simple. It's the idea you are just facilitating, Hey, you get the people together, I'll facilitate it enough to make it happen,

bryan_1_07-24-2024_090734: 24:05

Indeed. I'll tell you what, Mark, I think the next piece we're going to discuss as we're talking about climate, culture, curriculum is going to be curriculum. What we're doing is trying to make sure we enhance somebody else's learning. We've done this before. We've done it successfully. We have both done some pretty good things in education, but at the same time, the only reason we're doing is so we can share with somebody else and help somebody else to continue some of the positive things that maybe we started, or we can enhance the learning you have. And Mark I want to make sure I can give you the same, as far as this is concerned regarding what we're trying to accomplish by having these programs.

squadcaster-f6fh_1_07-24-2024_090716: 24:41

And that, really is our purpose is, not to brag about what we know. It is really to continue to have impact on student learning and engaging learners out there to be able to utilize some strategies that we've found successful over the years.

bryan_1_07-24-2024_090734: 25:00

Absolutely. Mark, I want to say thank you again for joining in this conversation. As always, we'll have our emails down in the comments section below. We want to appreciate everybody who's listening to this and we hope that you'll continue listening to this series. Mark, Thank you very much.