Turnaround 4C Plan: Connections

The last piece of the Turnaround 4C Plan is Connections. Bryan and Mark discuss how Connections is the interwoven piece that makes the other three components; Climate, Culture, Curriculum successful and sustainable part of the process. In addition, they share how relationships between teachers, students, administration and community build connections and how each group buy-in contributes to the success of improving a school. 

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

 Welcome back to Educational Relevance, a platform for experienced educators to share proven successful strategies to educate today's students. I am Bryan Wright. I am currently a adjunct professor at Concordia University. I'm here with my friend Mark Macbeth, my friend and partner. He is also a former turnaround principal, an administrator in central office, and an author.

Okay, We've spoken already about climate, culture, and curriculum. Welcome Today we're going to talk about connections. Connections is the interwoven piece that makes the other three a) successful, but make it also sustainable. Mark, what'd you think about that? I'd 

Connections is one of those pieces that allows a school administrator to be able to really convey the code that we talk about a lot and allows us to have that code received and heard by others.

Um, because we're making a connection to them, but at the same time, we're making a connection across the entire movement. Connections varies a little bit during climate, varies a little differently during culture, and has its own uniqueness during curriculum. But those connections are really powerful. And for you, We've had a lot of conversations how connections go everywhere from students all the way across the board into the community, the school boards, to other school administrators,

teachers and et cetera. So it's a pretty big topic in a way with connections.

 

Oh, absolutely. Let's talk about connections at the beginning. When you first take over a position, we talked about how we're going to have connections interwoven in what we're trying to accomplish. I'll give you an example, when I became an administrator in one school, what we did the very first week of my official capacity as a principal, assistant principals and I went and visited  different companies in the community.

We walked those stores, those different places to go. We introduced ourselves, talked about our mission, talked about the code, the code we were going to have and made sure that everybody, we gave copies of the code out. If you want to know the truth, we gave, copy them right there to them, and we were really pleased by the feedback we got from all the businesses and what we're trying to accomplish and how happy they were, uh, that we came to visit them in their, in their site, not our site, but in their site.

And right there, Mark was a perfect example of how you used connections in order to  establish a foundation with our community saying this is what we're about and having them support what we're trying to accomplish. Yeah, I think that's outstanding and something that I personally didn't do within my turnaround that I feel like I totally my interactions during turnaround efforts.

I would have interactions with community members, not at the same level that you just talked about.  One of the things that I do remember when, when you and I were working together at a school district was you also created a network of people. Then you even brought him in to work with kids that were struggling on on Saturday mornings, things like that.

How does this this giving the code and then? Making these connections really with the community support your school effort? 

You're right. We had a Saturday morning breakfast club where we had at risk youth community leaders come in and join us in basketball games, talking, then we took them out for breakfast so we can have some fun.

We've done things of this sort because we want the connection piece, but that goes right back to four goals we discussed.  Culturble viable curriculum,  student teacher engagement. The fourth one was leadership density, leadership capacity. This is promoting leadership density, leadership capacity. So now the students themselves, at risk students saw outsiders as business leaders, as leaders, helping them out,

supporting their efforts and trying to be successful in the school, so they had more avenues of how to get that going. I'm a big believer in getting things in print. We always had contracts. We already talked about having the contracts and what we're going to do and having a five by five parent contract that we used to always have parents sign when they talk about connection between school and parents.

But even in that regard, with the Saturday morning breakfast club, it became highly successful because we helped build leadership capacity and students saw, outsiders outside the building as leaders of people. 

So going from that community level, now you've started talking about this five by five with the parents.

So why the connection with parents when you're really trying to turn around students? 

Well, make sure I say two things. Students are in school approximately seven, eight hours a day. The other 15, the other 17 hours, the 16, 17 hours. They're with their parents and with their families, with their friends and things.

So what we want to make sure that we're trying to accomplish all these different things in the school, and we're trying to make sure we're changing the positive climate. So we would bring out the five by five parent contract. And that's basically five things that we had parents do throughout the year.

So they can bind to the school and the program that they're going to bind to their child. One of them gave example. One of them said, Hey, you making sure you always constantly check your students grades. Okay.  And second one, always make sure you get in contact with your student's, teachers. Do a monthly call.

We try to say five contacts with coming into school five times, either via basketball games or parent conferences. When you come to the school, you always come to visit. So we always ask parents to sign off. And if they sign off, then they're basically saying they're approving what we're trying to accomplish.

They're going to join us in this mission to help change their children's learning, and we're going to be working in tandem as to build a relationship with their child that eventually be successful, help them graduate. 

So student learning didn't end at the, at the door when they came in and when they left that door, it was 24 seven. 

Well, what it helped was if you didn't have the parent contract, we had a lot of time when students say. I'm going to tell my parent and wait till my parent gets here.   Now with the parent contract We say, please call the parent. Cause we got the parent right here on contract.   Mom and Dad,  You said you do this. Yes, sir. We'll, we'll support what we say we do.

So now that students cannot use the parent against us. Matter of fact, they understood that the parent and the administration, and the teaching staff working hand in hand  to motivate them to become better students . 

I think that's key, what you just said there, working hand in hand. It's not like the contract is trying to hold parents accountable,

it's asking parents to be a partner in what's going on. 

Oh, absolutely. And again, this is all a volunteer thing. In one school, we had over 65  percent of our parents sign. The parent contract at the beginning of the school year,  and as a result, the improvements we're seeking were much more effective because parents are buying in throughout the entire year. 

Another situation we have when we talk about the five things we want the parents to do, we have parents to join the PTSA, Parent Teacher Student Association. In one school we started, we had nine parents in the parent teacher student association. By the end of the year, we had 95 parents signed up for the parent teacher student association.

We ended up winning an award, uh, for PTSA program of the year, but we also found more avenues where parents had to come in and voice their concerns and voice their ideas and say, Hey, we'd like to try these things. And they felt comfortable having a place they could speak, a place they could speak their concerns and the avenue where we can say, Hey, let's try something different.

And now they were a part of the leadership density we spoke over. 

And I think that the  five by five, uh, plan. We could go more in depth on another time too. I think it's really a tool that could be really powerful for other school administrators, teachers, leadership teams, and stuff to know more about.  

As we're going on, we are finishing off the climate, culture, curriculum, and connection piece.

After we're done with this fourth piece, we're talking about the tools we have utilized to make sure these have been effective. Throughout the school time. So basically that would be the time we'll discuss like that and discuss that a piece of five by five. But we also going to talk about our matrix, our discipline matrix, talking about the five step plan.

We got so many things to discuss,  but I also would say when you're talking about leadership density in the community, we've done the ethnic festivals. In the community, we called it Ethnic Fest in four different schools where we built t shirts, kids became part of it. We had activities throughout the week.

We brought this into our classrooms. We had project learning. These days we call it evidence based grading. We had evidence based EBG there. And all these things came out of the connections piece we had, Mark. So now we're getting the community involved, not only in positive things of, of, of building community and building climate, but now we're talking about how it directly

impacts education,  impact student learning. And we thought that was a great thing.

 But one of, one of these things that impressed me was the connections piece. I think that you made way more  powerful movements in that world than, than I ever did, or I've seen any other school administrator really do. And we're talking about a large school district.

We're not talking a huge urban. You've done that in urban districts as well. But it was a big school district and yet you were having all this connections with the community. I even remember that you spent time with just male male figures and had them join and do groups together. You had people of color

coming together and and collaborating to work for better student environments, those type of things that we could talk so much more in depth about has just been what separates you and then adding that connection piece here to educate people is really powerful, just like just throw that out there.  

An example, at Christmas time, we did a shoebox Christmas.

Now, I think you remember that the shoebox Christmas was an opportunity where we were at, where we had schools that were lower income  and kids did not receive as much. So they may have been considered less than as far as financially, but less than as far as kids not getting the same things as maybe a wealthier district.

So we gave them shoebox Christmas. We put three gifts into a shoebox. We went to, and here's the funny thing, we went to dollar store, went put bought three gifts. We thought. When we first did it, we only did it to like 70 kids in the school and we found out, wow, a lot of those kids, that might have been the only gift they received. 

And so we did it with our students and our students became student leaders. Matter of fact, we had one of the students play Santa Claus and we had that sort of thing and it became a real big thing. So the next year we had over 200 kids who said they wanted to join us. I mean, we wanted to help out and yet the, was the Colorado National Guard  helped get us gifts.

Then  parents came in and parents started knitting  gloves, scarves. So then we had the local dentist give us toothpaste, toothbrushes. So all of a sudden that shoe box became three gifts.  One big gift,  toothpaste,  toothbrush,  ski cap,  gloves. 

Wow. 

We put all that. We put all that in a shoe box. So a kid had a lot of things to open that day, a lot of gifts to have, and we found that was such a wonderful thing, but that was also a example of a community working together  and saying, we're doing this for our children, in our community, in our schools, it may not have affected the  curriculum that day. 

We, we guarantee that those kids who got those gifts felt proud about their school and their community for quite a long time after that. 

Yeah. And I played Santa before I've, uh, been in schools where we teachers even sit down and make gifts for the kids and everything. It was a lot of fun as well. That's a connection with kids, uh, in a, in a little different way.

I know that we really wanted to touch on the academic components of Connections too.. And so, we, We've had conversations before about the climate and how, like, from day one, when you get up there in front of kids, you set the stage for climate, but you're making connections too. Could you talk a little bit about your student assemblies and kind of what you think about there and how that works? 

Yes. The first day we have school, we have student assemblies. Now, if this is just middle school, we got 6th, 7th, and 8th grade assemblies, we break those down. If it's high school, we go 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th. And in those assemblies, we bring them down to the auditorium, and then we talk to who we are,  and we talk about expectations.

This is the expectations of our school. This is the expectations of our building. These are the rules we're going to follow. So, by the end of the day, and the end of that week,  everybody in school, every teacher, every student, Every parent who wants to have heard what we're trying to accomplish for the rest of that school year.

So we are now all aware of what we're trying to accomplish, what we want to do. And we're looking for leadership in that capacity. But even before we have that first day of school, Mark, we make sure when we first meet with the teachers, when they come back, we have that meeting saying these are our expectations.

We also have our parent group. We meet with our parent group. These are the things we're trying to accomplish. They get a copy of the goals. Everybody gets a copy of the school improvement plan, Mark. Everybody. So by the end of the first week, every student, every teacher, and any parent who wants to,  has heard what we're trying to accomplish, what we want to do.

We found out that's been pretty successful. Then at the end of the first semester,  we've gone, beginning of second semester, we've done exactly the same thing. We have meetings again. How did we do in the first semester? What did we reach? What do we need to improve upon? And we ask kids, what can we do to help you out?

Then at that time, we're talking about high school seniors. You are our leaders. Show us how you're going to help us out. Remember, talking about leadership capacity again. How you want to make sure we get you to finish off the school year strongly. We want you to graduate. That's our goal. Then we want to make sure we celebrate.

And that's the key point, Mark. We want to celebrate all the kids when they do things right. 

I like the celebrations with the kids. That that's really important. So a few years back, No Child Left Behind. And that statement alone, whether you agree with all the policies and things, it was a lot of holding people accountable.

It was hard times for educators too, but that statement, No Child Left Behind still rings very home for me. I don't ever want to give up on any kid. I think we got to set that expectation from day one when we're talking to anybody and everybody, whether it be all this, these connection groups that you were just talking about.

You and I know that something, sometimes we got to move a kid along to an alternative situation because it's a better fit. But if we don't really go in under the best positive intentions of trying to support every kid, every teacher, then we, we draw lines and say it's acceptable losses.  And that's what I never want to happen.

So for me, the connection is teachers got to have a connection with kids. Administrators got to have connections with kids, got to have connections with teachers.  So, Shifting to laser conversations   and going back through the four C's.  Early on, we're trying to change climate  and we're in a turnaround situation.

So, Most of my experiences are middle schools and high schools. The same concept works for elementary. I've coached a number of administrators through it. But, The idea is I, I do what's called laser conversations. I walk around and pick a teacher or a location to have conversations with teachers between passing times of classes.

I just talked to them about what are you doing this weekend? What's your interest? You know, and I just kind of nonchalantly have the conversation and I have it shoulder to shoulder. Never face on.  My conversations always is shoulder to shoulder. If they're leaning against the wall by the door, I'm leaning against the wall by the door.

I'm mirroring their behavior and I'm just having conversations. Making those connections. And then maybe sharing.  Yeah, I'm not a golfer. I know you like the golf. That's great. You got a tournament coming up. How did the tournament go? I shoot sporting clays. It's kind of like a hobby. Golf, but I get to use a shotgun, you know, and so those are the kind of conversations you have early on as you're really trying to shift culture that laser conversation goes to the observations

I'm making in classrooms. I'm still coming out between classes and I'm having those one to three minute long conversations with teachers. That's all they are. That's why they're laser conversations. I'm asking leading questions. I'm trying to get the teacher to think at a deeper level. And it always relates to rigor, relevance, relationships, or results.

I'm always having all those questions are associated with that. But once again, I'm shoulder to shoulder, non threatening, just trying to get them to grow. You and I walked in classrooms at your school. And I would go in and observe. We walk out in the hall and I have a laser conversation. So that's where the laser conversations come in.

They're extremely powerful. And then they can even grow more. When we start doing curriculum, I start taking teachers in and out and having teachers have laser conversations with other teachers. And so it creates a community. 

Well, two things that came out of what you're just talking about. The first one,

and I love the fact that you, and again, you mentioned code. As we were talking about those meetings, we have the staff, those meetings, we have the students code came so important. Hey, this is our code. This is how we go in development. And then you work on building that code. So we had those meetings. We all talk about respect is earned.

At that time I was trying to earn respect of the students are trying to earn respect to the staff when I met with the staff, I was trying to earn the respect. Of the community when I went out there, but common courtesies demanded of everyone,  I've made sure any feedback I got, which brings us right back to the layers of conversations, because you allow feedback.

And so whether you agree with it or not, you allow me an opportunity to have that. And that's what we did. And that's what we continue. We're discussing.  Talking about these meetings. We always made sure students, staff, community leaders had a chance to give, provide feedback to us that we could use and make sure we thought was valuable

so we can make some adjustments in our schools so it make it better for our students, which is our bottom line. And so the second thing, when I talk about, when you hear about this is it's opportunity to give, uh, teachers a chance to be leaders,  giving students a chance to be leaders, giving community members a chance to be leaders.

All we're talking about when you're talking about a turnaround situation, you're building leadership. And as you start that first C is climate. And we talk about making the climate change. Those connections are so important to build those connections that are positive. And things are going to work for you.

Now. We also talked about the naysayers.  Those people say what we can't do. And how do you want to work with those people when we talk about connections, Mark?

 Yeah. So, uh, one, you, you always take it back to your code. Seriously, the naysayer, every time they say something, they go back to the code. So, so how's that helping rigor?

What's that got to do with relationships, you know? So, it's the, the naysayer is, is the barrier. Now, early on in changes,  you continue to dwell on your code over and over again. You share data, you share support. You, you support the teacher whether they, they want it or not. But you constantly are supporting them.

But you really empower the teachers that are moving forward, the ones that are ready for the code, the ones that already have adopted it, but have been the silent partner in the school doing their own things. Those are the guys and ladies that you empower to move into leadership positions.  One of the things I always did as a school administrator is I had that assembly.

But I always talked about leaders and like you talked about, right? But what I wanted people to do is feel confident and, and that they're all part of this together. So I always did an activity on my assembly at the beginning of the year that got everybody actively engaged, doing the exactly the same thing at the same time,

that could be embarrassing if done by themselves. So, I actually at times had every kid, every teacher come down to the gym floor and do a dance together. I would teach them the move and then I'd have every single person do it.  And everybody was taking a risk at the same time. And I started simply by saying,  I'm going to count the three and everybody in the room is going to stand up on three.

Don't stand up as your Michael Jackson. Yeah, no, We did the sprinkler. We did the lawnmower, we did the grocery shopping, or we'd take stuff off the shelf and I teach him these little steps and it was so silly. And I tell you what, the community would come to me and say, Oh my God, my, my daughter talked for four hours about taking groceries off the shelf and, and putting them into the shopping cart.

What a dance move and how exciting and fun that was. But what I did was,  As I tried to capture those moments of everybody being a leader, everybody can do it together. We can all be successful. Every one of us was successful that whether you were in a wheelchair or not, we worked with every single person.

We did it right? and it didn't matter what gender you were, what color you were, what age you were. Everybody was able to accomplish this.  And then every quarter, those expectations were laid out again, and we would celebrate them. So one of the things that happened was, at one of the schools, I had academic success awards at every quarter.

And the first quarter,  it was  Mark Mcbeth and secretary show. The secretary put all the awards together, we went through all the data together, and we went in and presented. By third quarter, It was entirely teacher led. It was a middle school, so the teachers were then presenting their own awards at that time.

They were having their group of kids coming up and give them the awards, and they would celebrate how much growth that they made throughout the year. It shows the difference between connections early on to the expectations that we outline in the code, and then how people start to live it through climate, culture, curriculum, um, 

 Well, I agree with you.

We had a lot of celebrating students success. We also celebrated staff success, but we also had the quarterly grade, the quarterly awards at the same time. We also gave the local newspaper an invite to come and watch what we were doing. We always had a saying in our schools. 10 good things will negate one bad comment in the newspaper.

You got to have 10 good ones. So our ratio was always good. Try to be 10 to one.  One year, I think we were 22 to one. We had 22 things written in the paper or in a year that all positive. One thing that was negative. So the whole idea is to make sure we celebrate wins. We say, Hey, this is what we're doing,

this is what we're accomplishing, so that community would know that this was going on in your school. This was going on in your area where you may have heard rumors about how the school was so this or that before. We're changing the mindset. We're changing the thought processes of what the school is now.

That's why we always made sure that when you talk about before having that five step test, as you come into the school, five steps into the building, what do you see? We wanted to make sure you saw something positive and cultural when you walked in those five steps. We always have parents, communities take the five step test.

Tell you what you saw about our school. Then we asked for their feedback. 

So that reminds me, I had a school district that I was turning around and it was a small rural community. It was stagnant. It wasn't totally lost, but they were very stagnant. And that five step rule. When you first walked in that building, there was a bulletin board I put up there says caught doing the right thing.

What I did was I'd go in and out of classrooms and I'd ask kids what they're learning, what they're doing. But I would go in with a camera at that time. It was actually pre cell phone, real heavy use. And, uh, I'd walk in with a camera. And if they acknowledge me or said, I had the camera before I even asked a question of a kid or anything, I just wouldn't take a picture, but I take pictures of kids doing the right thing.

According to the code that I had outlined at that time. I just had something right?  And then I also took pictures of teachers and I give the camera to my secretary and she'd download them. And then she'd say, Okay. Hey, this is looks like a picture of Bryan. What did you see Bryan doing? And I would say, well, Bryan was doing this, this, and this.

She would then put a label under it and she'd go post it on the board.  And the board became a collage  and between classes,  kids that knew I was doing my walkthroughs would go to that board to find out if they made the board.  So it was a really cool initiative that I carried on to some other stuff, but this is where it was born. 

The local newspaper  come to me one day and said, can I publish those in the paper?  And so every week we had anywhere between five and 10 caught doing the right things, pictures of kids and teachers in the paper, doing the right thing. 

You did get parent permission, right?  

Yeah. Yeah. We did that a little signature at the beginning of the year.

Actually, we did the reverse. If you don't want your kid's pictures taken or published. Sign here. Otherwise your kids pictures or whatever will be published, right? And so it was kind of cool. And then one of the other things I did with that I had the golden book  and I would catch a teacher doing the right thing and I would write up a whole page.

And, and The front of the book was all gold. I presented to the teacher during one of her classes or his classes. And they were to keep that up to two weeks, but within two weeks, they had to pass it on to another teacher.  They had to go observe classrooms during their time and observe a teacher and then find something that they wanted to acknowledge another teacher for, and then generate the same page.

This past spring, on the school I was in, we were acknowledging teachers. We go. take the big boom box and make the noise and play a song and give them certificates in front of their kids, but also give the gift cards to the teachers so they can be recognized for their services. I've worked with freshmen this past spring, make sure we had meetings with the freshmen as well and giving them awards as well.

And again, celebrations are so important when it comes to connections, celebrating the people who help you out, people who've done the good things for you. And again,  connections are the interwoven piece that builds the other three C's and make sure a, they become successful, but B, uh, they become sustainable. 

Not just you and I doing it, but others doing it after we leave and doing some of the same positive things. 

Can I, can I jump back just a little bit on another topic? I know we're running long, but can I jump back just slightly? 

 So, so earlier I was making connections with teachers during climate and culture, but I really didn't make the connection in curriculum as well.

So, assessments in there. One of the things I did, I remove all student names from data early on and turnaround,  and we just talk about the data.  Now we implement.  The strategy without knowing the name to begin with. And then within that, we say, well, what is it that really is causing them not to get the standard?

Is it rigor? Is it they don't get the relevance? Is it that they don't get the relationship associated with it? And then that's what we work with and try to do making the connections to kids as well, and not giving up on every kid. 

Well,  we've had that discussion about not giving up on every kid, but at the same time, I would say we, we tried to save them, but we can't save them all.

Yeah, but we can do our best to do it. Mark. Thank you for talking about connections today. I think, I think we had a heck of a conversation with connections about some things and told some stories. We talked about the Turnaround 4C Plan. We discussed code, we talked about how it affects climate, how it affects culture, it affects curriculum, and now we're talking about the connection piece.

Next we'll be talking about a framework, some of the different individual ideas we use to make sure these formats become successful.  Mark, I want to say thank you again.  Really appreciate you being here. Take care.