Jay Westover: Leading Sustainable School Improvement with Collaborative Inquiry and Coherence
Dr. Bob Maxfield and Dr. Suzanne Klein welcome Jay Westover, Chief Learning Officer at Innovate Ed and author of Districts on the Move, the subject of a multi-session book study conducted with educational leaders in southeast Michigan, sponsored by the Galileo Institute at Oakland University.
Jay Westover’s educational background followed a similar pattern to most administrators: classroom teacher, assistant principal, and principal. “I was lucky enough in my first principalship to meet Rick DuFour with whom I became good friends. My career continued at the district office and then in California, the County Office focusing on leadership development; keeping that idea of how we improve schools from Rick's DuFour’s vantage point. In about 2000, I noticed that most of the school improvement work wasn't sustainable, so I left my job and started InnovateEd, and was lucky enough to find another mentor, Michael Fullan, about 2013. The book, Districts on the Move, was something that emanated from working in partnership with Michael, and what we found was how to make coherence happen in action.”
“The idea of coherence or systems thinking is really using collaborative inquiry, which is how you seek out solutions in a way in which you really don't know an answer, to shape that coherent path of improvement. The key has to be district leaders with principals and teachers working together to find solutions, not only for their schools but for their district.”
“We found there are four key drivers that connect Fullan's work on coherence. The first key driver is clarity of focus. Using the analogy of a pendulum scale to determine the weight of a rock using pebbles, you need to work together to calculate it, work together to figure out how to move it, and keep working at it. So how do we work collaboratively to create movement or have an impact? The second driver, shared leadership, requires a very strong communication and collaboration model in order to share the vision and priorities to take action. The third driver is the idea of collective expertise or collaborative inquiry, but I think of it as more like improvement cycles. You know you can go all the way back to Bryk’s work, thinking about a short cycle of four to six weeks of inquiry; what's the problem, what's the solution, let's figure it out, what have we learned, and how do we keep moving in an agile manner? And that last driver which I think is most important, you have to have a feedback loop. If you want continuous improvement maybe every six to nine weeks, you have to come back together and as a system figure out: what's working, what's not working, and how you overcome problems of practice? I would say if you want to build coherence and be a systems thinker, you have to be very intentional in how you transform climate, shape culture, and build capacity to create coherence, and the end game has to be equity. That's got to be in the forefront and it's got to be your long-term focus.”
Jay Westover observed, “a lot of times in school districts, schools are doing good work in isolation and not necessarily in partnership with each other or with district leaders. We have to move away from an isolated model of schools improving by themselves into more of a network structure. I think that concept probably goes back to the idea of a community of practice. So if a district has nine schools they may be grouped into three groups of three, to work together on a problem of practice with a district liaison supporting them. Then they come back together throughout the year to learn across functionally.”
To establish communities of practice within and across districts, “we have to be open to partner and establish broader networks among school districts, especially if there’re areas which we all feel are important. We call that big idea collective impact; how you collectively try to find impact versus individually? If we can create that internal network of the districts, we can really accelerate change and improvements. I've talked to superintendents that said that they feel they've accelerated for example, math improvement by three to four years just by co-learning with others that might be already ahead of them.” When responding to overcoming individual school identity,the difference in talent distribution, and competition between schools and districts, Jay Westover clarified “part of that comes down to what's the purpose? Simon Sinek, we know The Golden Circle, talks about ‘the Why, the How and the What’. I think what you may have described is ‘the What’, where we feel good about our outcomes, about certain practices, but that moral imperative happens to be student equity or equitable growth. So some of those successful districts aren't seeing equal gains for all kids and John Hattie really pushes that idea. If we can find common ground which is how do we achieve equitable growth in student learning, then it becomes an issue bigger than ourselves individually, and we're moving towards something that is collectively important.”
In the splinter between management versus leadership for time, energy and commitment, “if you're doing management you're really attending to urgent demands, if you're doing leadership you’re attending to important things. If you go back to the book Districts on the Move, the reason why we put the rubrics in the back is because when you actually look at those four key drivers you start to see if you really have clarity of focus. Chris McChesney in his book, The 4 Disciplines of Execution, said that internationally only 15% of individuals in any organization know the priorities. Well, the problem is when you start to attend to the urgent demands and you don't know your key priorities, everyone's going in a different direction. I think the idea of calibrating against something common like a rubric, being reflective about what's in place, what's not in place, really, really is important or else everyone else's opinion's right.”
Jay Westover’s advice to new leaders, “I think I would come into the job with a very strong collaborative inquiry mindset and I would shape some very key questions to get my organization to focus in on and identify some of those priorities. Therefore, we can shift away from the urgency of current demands into the importance that really's connected to sustainable improvement.”
Jay Westover commented on what he saw as some of the unique challenges that have surfaced in the last year and a half. “If you strip away the logistics that are connected to COVID, and whether it's the social-emotional or safety issues, I think what we have unveiled as the most significant problem in education in the United States is its variability. I mean we now really see that there is variability in student learning. I think the real dilemma is how to overcome variability. My new book coming out in March, Schools on the Move, is a little bit more of a school-level look at the question, how do you overcome variability? In this work we're looking at it just a little differently; it's about climate, culture, capacity, and coherence. How do we develop leaders who are able to navigate change and reduce variability? I'm not saying it's easy, but we have to begin to really pay attention to some of these causations of variability in learning and begin to recognize that some of our systems, practices, processes, culture are at the root of it and support our schools to figure out how to overcome it, not individually but with district leaders leading the charge of what's at the root cause of the variability and how do we reduce it in a way in which it's going to lead to better growth in student learning.”
“I would suggest to reduce variability you have to have an inquiry cycle in your school or district. And the first step is to analyze the evidence; figure out what's the problem of practice; what's getting in the way of student learning. Then design some improvement strategies that are going to overcome it and how do you know if they're working. Implement, be agile, make adjustments, and then come back and figure out what works best, why, and move forward more intelligently. What I’m noticing is the urgent demands are preventing school districts from leading from an inquiry stance to figure out how to navigate change and improvements. We have to figure out how to get space and create opportunity for that because the management is taking over the leadership, unfortunately.”
For Schools on the Move, Jay worked with the Long Beach United School District, “recognized as I think number four in the world, and Chris Steinhauser, Superintendent, with an unprecedented eighteen years as the longest-serving urban superintendent in America. In writing the book with Chris, we “merged the pragmatic voice of the superintendent and district leaders and principals, ‘as boots on the ground’, with not necessarily theory but more research from studying. I just want to reinforce that we've tried to figure out what's the solution for the current challenge. If you visualize a simple square divided into four boxes. In the center is the idea of collaborative inquiry, so we're collaboratively inquiring about what should our focus be; we're collaboratively inquiring to develop that really strong shared leadership of how we're going to overcome that challenge. We’re inquiring about how to build expertise, you know to figure out how to be successful and then inquiry implies we have an improvement process. If you could take the big tenets of Districts on the Move and try to get it down to the simplest nuggets, the starting point’s going to be collaborative inquiry.”
website: https://innovateed.com/
Westover, Jay, Districts on the Move: Leading a Coherent System of Continuous Improvement, Thousand Oaks, CA., Corwin; 1st edition, September 17, 2019.
Westover, Jay, and Christopher Steinhauser, Schools on the Move: Leading Coherence for Equitable Growth, Thousands Oaks, CA., Corwin, Release date March 2022
Fullan, Michael & Quinn, J., Coherence: The right drivers in action for schools, districts and systems, Thousand Oaks, CA., Corwin, 2016.
McChesney, Chris, et.al. The 4 Disciples of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals, Free Press; 1st edition April 1, 2012