Sofi Frankowski:
Look, schools are under a lot of pressure everywhere, and they have been for a long time, and so sometimes, there are well-intended efforts to bring in an expert from somewhere else for professional learning, and often, teachers experience that as being told what to do. So our design is evolving to disrupt that experience for teachers and to remind them, as Taqwanda so beautifully said, of their own expertise and wisdom and knowledge of the students and the school and the community, and that they are exactly the people who are needed in this moment. So over and over, folks in our networks, particularly the classroom teachers, have come to us and said, “Thank you. You don’t think we’re broken. You think we are the solution.”

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and you just heard the voice of Sofi Frankowski. Stacey Caillier sat down with Sofi, Dana Diesel and Taqwanda Hailey to talk about their organization, Schools That Lead, which runs networked improvement communities of schools across North Carolina.

Since Sofi and Dana co-founded it in 2016, Schools That Lead supported over 70 schools across four cohorts, each cohort lasting three years. Their work is funded primarily by the North Carolina General Assembly, with additional support from some local foundations.

In fall 2019, Taqwanda was working as assistant head at a school that joined their second cohort. In June 2022, she joined Schools That Lead as the chief analytics officer.
Stacey wanted to talk to Sofi, Dana and Taqwanda because they developed a unique approach to running an improvement network, and it’s pretty exciting. Here’s the interview.

Stacey Caillier:
Taqwanda, Dana and Sofi, you are Schools That Lead, and I am so excited to talk with you. You all lead several networks and work with over 60 K12 schools to improve on track and graduation rates for North Carolina’s most vulnerable students, and you have the most compelling statement of the problem you’re trying to solve that I just have to read it out loud first so everybody can hear it.

Too many kids don’t make it out of 12th grade on time, and then don’t ever graduate, and then they have fewer choices, and they have unnecessarily difficult lives. We know as early as kindergarten who is off track. We have the opportunity and the responsibility to intervene. We can do better.

So every time I see it, it just… But this interview has been a long time coming. We’ve known each other for years. Every time we talk, I find myself marveling at the ways your approach challenges some common assumptions about what the work can look like and what’s needed to support it. You all, I think, have really figured some things out. You’ve found a way to make improvement accessible, engaging and really empowering, and you’ve gotten great results by keeping things simple. So I’m really eager for us all to learn from you. So welcome.

Before we dig in, I’d love to invite each of you just to introduce yourselves and share a little bit about who you are and what brought you to improvement, and Taqwanda, if you don’t mind starting us off, that would be awesome.

Taqwanda Hailey:
Hi, my name is Taqwanda Hailey. My role is the Chief Analytics officer for Schools That Lead. I was born, raised and educated right here in North Carolina. I have about 15 to 16 years of experience as a classroom teacher in high schools, middle schools, and one community college. I have taught math and science for years. Most recently, [inaudible 00:03:38] the principal at a charter school in North Carolina, and I came to improvement science through cohort two of Schools That Lead.

Stacey Caillier:
Awesome, and we’re going to dig into that a little bit more in a moment, but Sofi or Dana, you want to go next?

Sofi Frankowski:
I’m Sofi Frankowski. I serve as chief learning officer for Schools That Lead. I am a white woman born and raised in the deep south in Mobile, Alabama, and I am the daughter of two people who forged their own path. I’ll tell you about them, and then I’ll tell you why that matters.

My dad was an immigrant from Poland who fought in the Polish underground and escaped after World War II. My mother was brave enough to apply for and graduate from college, even though her dad said that girls didn’t need to do that. She went on to start one of the first title one public kindergartens in the state of Alabama, and her classroom was a place of wonder and joy and curiosity, and that shaped my picture of what all classrooms could be.

I highlight that because they demonstrated to me what it looks like and feels like to find a way to see possibilities and learn your way into a picture, and that seems especially important in improvement work.

I have been a teacher all over the United States, in California, in Connecticut and DC and North Carolina, and for the last 20 years, I have done work with schools that centers on three key beliefs. Number one, I believe in the power and brilliance of every single child. Number two, I believe that schools should be places that see, honor and nurture, that inherent power and brilliance, and number three, I believe that authentic adult collaboration is the way to get there.

Dana Diesel:
I’m Dana Diesel, I’m president and chief executive officer, not sure what that really means, at Schools That Lead, and I came to the work of education a little bit late, because I couldn’t bother to graduate from college till I was 31, and began my career as swim coach with kids who didn’t know how to swim. Then I became a teacher, and then an assistant principal, and then a principal, and then a district office thing, and then a superintendent, places all over the country, and solidly in the camp that I’m here to help the kids that need the most help and access the best of a life post secondarily.

Stacey Caillier:
All right, thank you so much. Taqwanda, so you mentioned that you were a participant in the network before joining the team, and I’m curious to hear what appealed to you about the Schools That Lead approach and what felt new or different to you.

Taqwanda Hailey:
So a little about my experience in education. I have worked in schools that are classified as low performing title one schools most of my career. So of course, this means rollouts, initiative, learning plans, improvement plans, et cetera and so forth and so on. What I took from that was, “Okay, the answer must be in a box, it must be in a program, it must be within someone else, not within me,” but when I met Sofi and Dana in cohort two, improvement science, it made sense to me that starting small just made sense. I was treated as the expert. I know what’s best for my students, and I felt an increased sense of agency immediately.

Stacey Caillier:
Thank you for sharing that. I’m really excited to dig into what made that happen for you and for other folks.

Okay, so Sofi and Dana, before Taqwanda, and I feel like this is almost like a BTAT situation. You guys talk almost like… There was the time before Taqwanda, and then there’s the time after Taqwanda, but before Taqwanda joined, it was just the two of you supporting 50 plus schools, and when hearing about how you lead your network, some folks are often surprised by what you don’t do and the impressive results that you get. So you don’t provide coaches, you don’t do site visits. Can you share with us how your approach to the work has evolved and how you’ve managed to keep it simple while still making it impactful?

Dana Diesel:
So I really liked the work that we were doing in cohort one. It was rich, it was deep, we really built that sense of network and community in the room, and what that looked like with the teachers [inaudible 00:08:07] leaders, was we’d be with them for eight full days of PD a year, three years. So pretty high dose, and then came along this thing called the pandemic in March, and it was March 13th. We were going to be with some schools, and we’re like… A superintendent in college says, “We’re done, we’re closing down.” So it was like, “Wow,” and we did meet with some people and they were a little shell shocked as everybody was, but from that experience, the rest of that little of the year, and then the next year, we were like, people are fried, people are exhausted, people are overwhelmed, all the things, and we cannot do Zoom calls with them for a full day, and thus, what is it that has to go, and what is the one thing that we would do? Because we’re going from eight full days to maybe five 90 minute sessions for the year.

So we landed on PDSAs. I guess people could argue there could have been better or worse places to start. It made sense to us to get them to keep doing the testing small, “What are you learning? What’s your theory? How are you learning to collect that data?”, and they were amazing. Some of the things that they got done through that experience, I would never have said it was going to happen, but now that we’re back out of that pandemic, I think what that really helped us identify was the key, key, key, the needs to have, not the nice to have, and I kind of hate some of the nice to have that we’ve lost in the work, but it was that experience that I think really has made us better, more focused, and we see that in the work, because people are moving faster in terms of what they’re getting done, and I think it was also from that, I think we’re going to talk about these four processes later that we got really clear about what were the big, big ticket items that we had to pay attention to.

Sofi Frankowski:
Look, schools are under a lot of pressure everywhere, and they have been for a long time, and so sometimes, there are well-intended efforts to bring in an expert from somewhere else for professional learning, and often, teachers experience that as being told what to do. So our design is evolving to disrupt that experience for teachers and to remind them, as Taqwanda so beautifully said, of their own expertise and wisdom and knowledge of the students and the school and the community, and that they are exactly the people who are needed in this moment. So over and over, folks in our networks, particularly the classroom teachers, have come to us and said, “Thank you. You don’t think we’re broken. You think we are the solution,” and I feel like that’s really important in the message that you are valued.

Dana Diesel:
I’d add to that, when they say that, most typically it’s with tears in their eyes. So it’s coming from this place that they initially don’t feel is empowering. It’s just like there’s someone who gets it, and someone who bothers to care to think that we are not the problem. It’s amazing.

Stacey Caillier:
So I feel like you’ve given us such a beautiful sense of what it feels like to work with you. So I want to start digging into your guys’ approach, and I’d love to have you walk us through a little bit… What are school experiences when they join your network? Maybe we could start with how you all work with leaders early on to build and ensure that they’re invested in the work, especially during this super tricky time when leaders are being pulled in so many different directions. So I’d love to hear you guys talk about your process for that.

Dana Diesel:
Well, I think that begins with how we recruit schools or recruit people, and without getting to all those details, the primary push is to the principals and that is because there’s a lot of them, and we want a lot of schools, but it’s also because they’re the decision makers, sort of as middle managers in the hierarchy of a system, but they are significant decision makers, and that’s important because we want people who think they want to do the work. They’re choosing this. So right from the drop, we’re starting off with this flexibility. “You can come, you don’t have to come. Would you like to do it? Here’s some things to read about,” and so we get these applications from all over the state, and we’ve got smart recently and asked them, “Where did you hear about it and why are you signing up?”, and some of those responses are hysterical. One woman said, “I read it in the bill, in the legislature,” and we’re like, who does that? She kind of thought there was value in the work, right?

Then what we do is we ask them to save a date, tell them they’re in, you’ve been selected, and then ask them to save a date where we do not even a full day, I think it’s maybe two and a half, three hour launch is what we call it, and it’s this onboarding. The people come, so be the principal, and usually we say bring somebody from the district office or somebody else from your school so you have someone to bounce some ideas off of as you drive away that day.
It’s a really interactive session. It’s not just sit and get and hear about the work, but we do talk about what the work looks like, and now with previous cohorts, you can expect this, it’s about this many days. We tell them the research behind the work that gets at that problem statement about, we can do better and we want to get kids on track early on as early as kindergarten and keep them that way, and give them lots of rooms for questions. They always ask, “How do I pick my team? How do I pick my team?”, and all this other kind of good stuff, and that’s pretty much it.

Lunch. Of course, food always works, but why that’s so important is because we want someone who doesn’t want to be there to have the opportunity to say, “I’m not doing this,” because that’s important now, and I don’t think it happened this last launch, but it did happen with a couple people, usually right in that session with cohorts one and two, that decide, “Yep, this isn’t for me,” or, “I’m not ready for this,” or, “I think you all are weird,” or whatever the case may be. We don’t want hostages, right? We don’t want people that feel like they have to go, and you know this, Stacey, because if that is the case and you’re planning to be with them for three years, it is nothing short of painful. For them and for us. So we’d just like to, “This is what it is,” and be real about it and appreciate that it is not for everybody.

Stacey Caillier:
I love just that notion of onboarding is also a chance to offer an off-ramp, and that there’s this two-step process of, “You’re in,” and then, “Are you really in?”, before you bring the whole team, and getting that leader on board even before bringing the whole team together. That just seems so smart to me. I think we’re going to start doing that too, so thank you.

You’ve also mentioned four key processes that you hope all schools in your network embrace, and I love the simplicity of this, of just knowing these are the four key things, and you’ve said that they’re huddles, PDSAs or inquiry cycles, testing ideas from what you all call the menu, and having a watch list. Can you describe what each of these entail, why they’re essential, and how they work together?

Sofi Frankowski:
Once the principal goes back and opts in and selects the team, they come together. The team is typically three teacher leaders and the principal, relatively small, and the first thing we want them to do is get clear on the problem in their setting, which is the watch list. So this is built on the research of Bob Balfanz. These are the indicators of being off track for on-time graduation from high school. We know as early as the first quarter of kindergarten. So we share those thresholds for attendance, behavior and course performance, and then we help the schools create a list of children in their care, by name, by indicator, twice per quarter, and update it throughout the year so that we all know who exactly we’re focused on.

Then the huddle, the second process, is just the four team members coming together, 15 minutes every other week, single item agenda, and the purpose of that huddle is just to maintain the learning momentum. They literally talk about one agenda item, and then break, go.

The PDSA or inquiry cycles are short cycles of improvement. They are the four people on the team focused on one indicator. They can choose different ones, they can choose the same ones, but we say choose attendance, behavior or course performance, find a small set of kids in your care, and test your idea and gather the data, and then once a PDSA shows promising results for kids, we at the hub level put those PDSA ideas into a menu, and we share it with the whole network so that others can learn if that idea will work for different kids in different contexts, and we go ahead and share that data collection tool that the initial teacher inventor came up with.

So those are the four processes. Watch list is the list, the huddle is the people meeting to talk about their progress, the PDSA is learning through inquiry, and the menu is the collection of ideas that other people in the network might want to try.

Stacey Caillier:
Awesome, thank you. I heard somewhere that Dana, you’re a sports fan, and that at some point, you had declared that every huddle had to be standing and no longer than a football halftime, and I’m curious, is that true? I love that it’s like one item happens in the huddle. Can you give a couple examples of what those items might be like? What might folks talk about in a huddle?

Dana Diesel:
So we want them to huddle with one item for two reasons. When Sofi and I first said, “You’re going to have…” We didn’t call it a huddle, but you’re meeting, clearly it was an indicator that we’d been out of school for too long, because when they heard “meeting” what they did… “Who’s bringing the coffee or the donuts,” and we could do it after school, after the school improved, and it became a thing, and no one needs that, right? We just didn’t anticipate that they were, and we should have, turning it into the construct of what a meeting looks like in a school.

So we’re like, “No, no, no, no, we don’t want them to do that.” We just want them to have a touchpoint. These short meetings, which a lot of times now happen at the bus loop or some other place where they’re all going to be. A, to keep momentum going. They’re really busy, they’re doing a lot of things, they have a lot of initiatives. Can we just keep somewhere closer to the top of the list of things that are in your head? So what we do is we give them a list to say, “Here are some possible agenda items,” and that could be one person talk about your PDSA. We can all talk about, “We just looked at the watch list. What really jumps out at us?” So they’re not problem solving, right? They’re just adults listening to each other think out loud about what the work looks like as they’re moving through it.

Stacey Caillier:
Sofi, in a previous conversation when we were talking about PDSAs, I think you said people do PDSAs on a six week cycle, and that pretty much all data collection for PDSAs comes down to a simple table, and it’s so funny, because we hear people talk all the time about, “Oh, the data collection is so hard at the PDSA level,” and I love that every time that comes up, you just shake your head, you’re like, “It’s just a simple table.” So can you give us an example of how you… What’s an example of a table that an educator might create, and how do you all support folks to keep it simple?

Sofi Frankowski:
Sure. So we share some examples before we ask folks to do this themselves, but let’s just walk through an example from our work. So we start with the driver, right? “Do you want to work on attendance, behavior, course performance, and then which students in your care are you thinking about for this idea? What’s the idea? When’s it going to happen?” Sort of the construct of the PDSA.

When it gets down to the measurement, we provide examples and talk through process measure, outcome measure. So an example, a principal has an idea that some students in her school have poor grades, and that some subset of those may not have a sense of belonging at school. So she’s going to choose six kids who meet the criteria for poor grades, and she says, “I’m going to start a lunch bunch once a week to build a relationship with these six kids.”

So the process measure is, does the lunch bunch happen, and do the children in question attend? That is simple, by name, column is Stacy, Sofi, Dana, Taqwanda, did it happen? Did they come? For six weeks or eight weeks, or however long this principal wants to run the idea.

Then the outcome measure, the same kids, what happens with their grades? Their starting grade was D, F. After six weeks, they came reliably. Sofi came six out of six times and her grade moved from a D to a C in ELA. So very, very simple, and we give multiple examples, and also go ahead and provide a template for the table so that they can change the names of the children in their care and the vertical column of what is it that you’re measuring.

Stacey Caillier:
Love that so much. Okay, next one’s for you, Taqwanda. So before I even met you, Sofi had told me that you guys had grappled with the data problem for a while around the watch list, and that you came on, and within six months of joining the team, you “solved” the data watch list problem. Can you describe what was the problem and how did you solve it?

Taqwanda Hailey:
The problem is people may or may not know that they already have the data they actually need for the watch list already in their position and within their reach. So I definitely believe that my experience in the classroom of their driven instruction with student data, that really played a part as well, and then going up into leadership and having data from the state’s perspective, school’s perspective and all in one place, and then also, it helped that I understand how the school’s database or the state runs as well. Perhaps the most helpful has been the data manager, making sure that we have that strong bond with them, open communication, because many times they have the key to get that data turned around quickly, because they have the all access. So that’s been definitely helpful in making that process much easier.

Stacey Caillier:
Who is the data manager? Is that somebody that’s already been designated by the school, or does it tend to be somebody in a particular role?

Taqwanda Hailey:
So most schools, not all, but most schools have a person that kind of controls the school’s database, but they can go in general reports that give attendance information, behavior information and grade information all on a spreadsheet or a CSV file, and then we can turn that around into our data for Schools That Lead.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah, when I first heard you talk about this, Taqwanda, I was like, “Oh my gosh, all these other folks, ourselves included, are creating these fancy dashboards that are not owned by the school,” and just the simplicity and beauty of you just going in and sitting alongside somebody and helping them develop kind of like, “Okay, here’s the process for pulling your watch list, and here’s how you’re going to do it,” from their system, I just thought that was so beautiful, and sustainable too, in a really powerful way.

Dana Diesel:
This is how… What an AT, after Taqwanda moment, this is. Before Taqwanda, BT. If we got a decent watch list from a school, some we never did, by April, we thought we were just rocking it, like, “Woo, aren’t we great?” We got a little bit better with cohort two, but never did we have all of them. Never. Not even close to all of them. Maybe 50% and other people with things that were like, we didn’t even know what they had created things, and this year, we just began with cohort three in October, I want to say. We have one from every school, and multiple data points from all but I think two of the schools. So it’s just incredible, and it’s helping us think about what’s going on in a way that we never could before.

Stacey Caillier:
I love that so much. I also love… That leads us to our next question. I love how you all speak about teachers as inventors, and I know that that belief guides your work in powerful ways, and I asked you to come talk with our team to share your approach to all of this, and you must have used that phrase multiple times, and folks were so struck by it and in love with it, and I’ve heard you share that while you have a change package of ideas, that menu, that have bubbled up from the network and from research, you have chosen not to give that to teams initially, and I would love to hear you just share what do you do instead, and why?

Sofi Frankowski:
I want to start by echoing something or referencing something that Taqwanda said, which is that when she was in cohort two, pretty quickly, she learned that we thought she had the answers. So that is the message that we want, and the experience that we want teachers to have. So before we go, and we do share this menu with them a little bit later in the process, but before that, we want them to sit with the problem and the children in their care, and have a little bit of quiet space to look inside and be like, “Okay, what’s my idea? What do I think is getting in the way for this set of three kids? I have a theory, and so then I can come up with an idea that I can try, and it may or may not work,” but we want them to really experience that process of invention and get practiced at the way of thinking about solving problems so that they don’t experience, “Here’s a menu of a lot of other ideas that a lot of other people have come up with that we think you should try,” because that is another way to say, “We think you’re not expert.”

So everybody in the network tries PDSAs themselves first with a small set of kids in their care, and then eventually we share the menu both as a resource and as an aspiration, because then it’s an example of when you have a PDSA that leads to promising results for kids. Then it will go into the next menu and will be shared with network wide educators, and you will be able to impact kids that you will never even meet, and so it’s sort of lifting up their professional impact by having the discipline to sit quietly for a little while and just figure out their own answer.

Stacey Caillier:
I’m really…

Dana Diesel:
At this sort of transaction. If we just give you the menu and you go, “Oh, I’ll pick that one and I’ll go do that,” you could have gone to a wiki. So we really want to stay away from, “The answers are here and they’re known,” and simultaneously say they are, and you know them.

Stacey Caillier:
Two things just really struck me in what you both shared. One is, Sofi, when you were talking about, teachers have a theory and you want them to sit and look at this list of three to five kids and think about, “Based on my understanding of these kids, what do I want to do?” So it’s not this abstract understanding of the field of research and what moves attendance and all of that. It’s really like it’s a theory based on your understanding of particular kids. I’m really struck by that.

Sofi Frankowski:
I think that’s important, because nobody else in the room has that, right? There isn’t anybody else in the room who can answer those questions about those particular children in their care. So sometimes, when teachers come to the work, they do, because they’ve been conditioned to, look to us for answers, and we always say back, “I don’t know your kids. I don’t know your school. You know important things that I will never understand. Let me ask you some questions about the kids in your care.”

Stacey Caillier:
I’m so glad you elaborated on that, Sofi. The other thing that I heard that I’m sitting with is this idea that you all start by having educators invent their own ideas first, and this is something we grapple with, we’re currently grappling with. We found that it can be helpful to launch a network with some clear high leverage practices, that we have evidence work, gives people a place to start. They don’t have to start from scratch. Hopefully they can get going more quickly and experience those early wins that we know are so important for sustaining that momentum, and we’ve had educators tell us that they appreciate this approach. They like not having to figure it out on their own at first sometimes, and yet I’m really drawn to the approach you’ve described, where you are clearly communicating this value of teachers as inventors from the beginning, because I think ultimately we want both.

I want people to eagerly adopt and adapt ideas that have worked in other contexts to be those eager first followers, and I want them to develop new ideas that they believe will work for their kids and their context. As you said, they know it best. So clearly there’s a reason why one of my favorite books is called Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It. I don’t want to choose, and I don’t think we have to, but the ordering is important, and so I’m just sitting with this question of, what values are we prioritizing in our choice of where to start? So yeah, I just want to thank you all for troubling it for me a bit, and I’m going to keep sitting with it.

Which gets to the next question about core values, because we’ve talked quite a bit in multiple conversations about how improvement, the way that folks sometimes experience it, teach it, lead it, can feel very transactional, and you guys are all about making sure it feels very transformative, and I’m curious how that belief and how you’ve all talked about it, you’ve kind of already surfaced some of your core values, but I know you’ve been doing some work trying to articulate, what are our core values that drive this work so we can be super clear with everybody in our network about what they are, and can you just share your most current thinking on those?

Dana Diesel:
Yes, knowing that it’s still emerging. So I’m going to back up a little bit. With cohort one, we used to always have this part where we talked about a cycle of adult learning, and Sofi would say, “The expert Dr. Diesel is now going to talk to you about that,” and she sweetly calls me expert because it was my dissertation, was about adult learning in a school culture, so I became an expert, and in that, things have to happen for the way the adults learn. They like to start with the problem, “I’ve got this problem I’m working on,” they pose the problem, and then they want to talk to people about it, and, “I was thinking about this, blah, blah, blah. Ask me some questions. My thinking’s not clear. What do you think about that?”

So they have this conversation with another person, a back and forth, and then they think, “I can go do something.” So they have to have an action orientation, and this is where a lot of people lose from PD, and now we’ve got them to be their idea that they’re going to go do something, and then reflect, and all of those, if you think about it, in a way, mirror a PDSA pretty nicely, but when we think about that… I think you’re right. We were thinking about this trust, empathy, respect, expertise, and flexibility as sort of the values initially, but then when I thought back about how I wrote about it in my dissertation, because these two pressed me on that, it was really they’re the conditions that have to be in place for really solid adult learning to happen. That room, that Zoom call has to work in a condition where there is trust. So we work on building trust where there is empathy, where there’s mutual respect, understanding of expertise, again, they have expertise that we’re trying to tap, and then flexibility is sort on lots of different ways.

From the menu, you can choose the idea that you want to do to. So you can choose what your PDSA is too. If it’s not working at your school, and we have to adapt our structure and routines to get you to do that, we have the flexibility to do that and the want to do it. So I think as we continue to talk about this, and we will, I’m thinking about it as the conditions and how we reflect that in our work so that high quality adult learning can happen so that we can get these kids off these ding dang watch lists.

Stacey Caillier:
Which is a great transition to West McDowell Middle School, because I really want y’all to talk about West McDowell, because I think it’s such a beautiful case study of how those four kind of key processes and the core values you just named, how those come together to pave this way for a system level change, not just kind of here and there. When we’ve talked about this, you shared that within two months, the school saw a 45% reduction in students on their watch list. So can you tell us what happened? How did they do that?

Sofi Frankowski:
Yes. So first let me share a little bit about West McDowell. This is a middle school of about, I think 700 kids in western North Carolina in the mountains, serves lower income population, and many of the teachers have been there for a long time, or they had been at this juncture. When you say this radical improvement happened in two months, that was not in the first year. So in the first year, the four members of the team, the principal and three teacher leaders, worked together to build their own capacity and to get these four processes routine. The watch list, the huddle, the PDSA, the menu, and over time, they felt more and more competent and competent in those established processes. So in the… I believe Dana, was it the third year?

Dana Diesel:
Yes.

Sofi Frankowski:
They felt confident enough and made a clear enough plan that the principals actually stepped away, and the three teacher leaders stood in front of the faculty, and what they had to say is that it’s the end of the first quarter, it was October, they had 218 kids on their watch list, they taught the faculty what the watch list was and the research on the early warning indicators, and that they could tell right now who was off track for on-time high school graduation, and then they asked each staff member to silently picture a student in the building that they thought would be on the watch list, and after sort of softening the ground, they then shared the watch list digitally, and what they told us is that there was a collective gasp in the room, that they created interest and commitment and desire to help.

So they made it an option, completely optional. They said, “If you have a relationship with any kid on this list, if you are currently teaching them, if they’re previous students, if you’ve coached them, if you are the administrator who manages student government, and you know them in that way, if they go to your church, choose a kid on the list if you want to, and see if you can help figure out how to get them off the list.”

So these are all children, 218 kids who appeared for one or more reason. Attendance, behavior, or course performance, which is Ds or Fs, in the first quarter of middle school, and two measures were important. One, 88% of staff chose to participate at the first invitation. So almost everybody in the school, and that included the librarian, assistants, front office staff. 88% of folks said, “I’m going to help somebody,” and they set a goal that I believe they said, “We hope that by winter break, 20% of the kids will be off the watch list.” Well, lo and behold, by the end of quarter two, 45% of kids no longer met the thresholds for those early warning indicators. In other words, they had, by their involvement, not mandating, not telling teachers what to do, 98 children got back on track in one quarter.

Stacey Caillier:
Do you have a sense of what were people doing when they were like, “I’m going to take this kid, I’m going to take this kid”?

Sofi Frankowski:
Yeah. It varied pretty widely. What they told us is one teacher met with two or three students weekly about grades and attendance and set weekly goals, and it worked because the kids needed positive reinforcement. Somebody else said, “I did weekly check-ins and gave extra support to the kids who were not in my class.”

So sometimes it helped to have somebody who was not responsible for giving them grades to be their check-in person. Sometimes they just got to know what was going on for the kids. So there was a child who didn’t come to school because she didn’t have clean clothes or a warm coat, and they felt safe telling that to one person, but didn’t want all of their teachers to know that. So they just sort of met the kids where they were and figured out, “What does this relationship look like such that you know that I care, and we know together that we’re going to look at your progress on a regular interval, and I’m going to be proud of you when things get better, and if they don’t get better, I’m going to walk alongside you and figure out what else we can do.”

Dana Diesel:
What’s sort of the amazing outgrowth of this work, because we still work with that school, it graduated, the cohort that we have, some schools that we’re still working with, is that the community now wants to be involved. “We want to adopt. How can we do that?” From businesses to churches, and so on this continuum… I don’t know if it is a continuum, but it’s transactional or it’s transformational, to me, that says a transformation is happening around that school about this sense of students as kids and not half grown people, but they’re kids, and they need support and we all want to be a part of that.

Sofi Frankowski:
They belong to all of us. There’s a real community, shared sense of belonging, I think so.

Stacey Caillier:
So because I think this story is so powerful. I feel like you’ve touched on several kind of takeaways or lessons, and it’s like, if you could sum up what are the lessons that we should take from this story about how we approach this work, what would you say those are?

Dana Diesel:
Well, I’d say one of them is build people’s capacity to do the work, because if you rush them into it, then what’s going to happen? It’s not going to work, and then what happens? They go, “Well, that didn’t work. We tried that.”
Teacher leaders leading the work is really, really important. It doesn’t mean the principal’s not important, but when teachers can stand up in front of fellow teachers and say, “Hey, I tried this thing. It didn’t work so great at first, and so I kept working on it. I’m having some pretty good success. Do you have that problem? Would you like to try?”, it is just, again, a completely different way of receiving information about how we can work together to solve these thorny problems of practice.

There’s a million things we could say about it, but I think one of the things I think about is A, first, the results, because I’m all about some results, but B, our process with the schools and how the pace and the cadence… You cannot rush into this stuff. You’ve got to move people step by step, build their understanding. They know it like we know it, and so that year three really becomes a pivot where they’re the ones who are literally leading the conversations, literally showing us how it’s done, and when we see that, you see the kind of things that we saw at West McDowell.

Sofi Frankowski:
I would add one thing, which is that we don’t, from our hub perspective, ever, ever expect everybody in any school to do any one thing. That is, there’s not a school rollout of improvement science where people are PDSAing themselves into oblivion. This school took it slowly, built their capacity, and then invited colleagues to participate, and the invitational tone, I think, was super important, because they said “Yes, no, not yet.” All of it is an okay answer.

Stacey Caillier:
I was really struck by how, because it came from teacher leaders, it was an invitation, not a mandate, and I often think of Becky Margiotta, who I know we’re fans of. She talks a lot about how whenever she makes a request of somebody, she’s also very clear about saying, “And your no is as good as your yes to me,” because she wants people saying yes and really meaning that yes, and not just saying yes out of a should or guilt or whatever sort of thing. So I just love that invitational piece feels so important.

I’m also really struck that you guys, I think, have really mastered this idea of convincing people about the power of small, and one thing that we talk a lot about is this tendency for folks to want to roll things out big and fast. I’m thinking, Taqwanda, of even what you were talking about at the beginning of your experience being involved in all these reforms, where it’s like this rollout, this initiative, this box or something that you’re trying to get everybody to take on often real fast, real big, and I know that you all talk a lot about the power of small and not seeing something as this silver bullet, and I know, Taqwanda, you especially have done some really cool things to make that clear to teams and to help them, even when they feel this sense of urgency to kind of zoom out and be like, “Hey, if we start small, we can get the impact we want.” Can you share an example of how you help support that?

Taqwanda Hailey:
Yes. So it is called the power of the huddle calculator. It’s a simulation on a spreadsheet that allows you to put in numbers and measure impact, and it really evolved out of a conversation that me, Dana, and Sofi were having about how people see the power or small, helping to see where it can go and whether it will go.

So in year one, we don’t expect dramatic results in year one, you don’t expect that. So it can be hard to see where it is going. It can be hard to see year two or year three on the road. So what I did was I created a calculator that would allow you to input your numbers. I have so and so kids on the watch list, and I have people who want to try an idea at my school. If I put these numbers in, how could they impact my watch list down the road two or three years from now?

We rolled it out about two months ago within our cohort, and it was quiet for a second, and [inaudible 00:44:46] people saying, “Oh! Oh, so we can do this. Oh, when you look at it this way. So you’re saying just five people per person… You can do that?” So really being able to have that visual… I’m a visual person, being able to see that and manipulate that, that simulator gives you that forecast, that future impact and gives you that big, “A-ha! Yes! I can do it! Start small.”

Stacey Caillier:
I love what you just said, and I think when we have talked about it before, I missed a critical piece of what you just described, because you’re not just kind of saying like, “Hey, all four people on a team, if you each take five kids, look, it’s 20,” or whatever. You’re saying, “No, let’s look across multiple years and see what happens to that impact of who is off that watch list if we cumulatively work together in this time,” which is super powerful. I love that.

Taqwanda Hailey:
But it starts as an individual. Input your numbers year one, “Oh, that’s great, just me,” and then if I [inaudible 00:45:47] huddle, “Oh, that’s great, that’s our huddle,” and then as you begin to tap individuals from your school who want to do the work, what happens with I can [inaudible 00:45:55] impact them as well. So I’m excited about that and how that goes forward and how that shares and builds momentum and gives the extra push.

Stacey Caillier:
Yes, I love it. Okay. I have one last story that I want to dig into, because one of the challenges that we face in improvement is determining which ideas actually have evidence, and then finding a way to spread those ideas, and again, I think you all have kind of cracked the code on how to support educators to systematically test each other’s ideas, like develop their own, but then systematically test each other’s ideas, sharing that data, and then bringing that learning back to the network. So can you tell us about Jess Gibbons and her checklist idea and what happened with that?

Sofi Frankowski:
Sure thing. So Jess was an eighth grade ELA teacher at Neuse River Middle School, and she had some kids who were failing her class. Shocker. The nice thing, though, is that Jess approached that circumstance with curiosity. She looked at her grade book and said, “Why do I think these particular children are failing this particular class at this point in time?”, and she looked at a subset of kids who had poor course grades because they had so many zeros. They had assignments that were never turned in, and it occurred to her, “I actually don’t know if the kids understand the content. If they did the assignment, if they threw away the assignment, if the assignment’s in the backpack, if they don’t know how to submit it to the platform. I’m not actually giving them a grade that measures their understanding.”

So she challenged herself around that and said, “I have a theory that some of my kids are just having trouble organizing themselves and keeping track of work.” So she created this checklist that was real simple. It was assignment, and then three columns. “I turned it in and I’m happy with my grade,” “I turned it in, but I am not happy with my grade,” or, “I have not turned it in,” and she gave the kids time in class, and each of the kids put a check box by the assessment of their assignment, and so she was focused on seven kids in her care who were failing, and after that one activity, all seven kids improved their grades. All seven turned in one or more missing assignments, and five of the seven kids who were previously failing immediately moved to passing grades.

So that was seven kids in her care. She tried it again the next quarter to see, “Huh, was that an outlier, or can I repeat this performance?”, and those who were failing moved from a 41% average to a 71%. So she saw, “Oh, it really is this organizing problem and a chance to redo and resubmit.”

So at that point, she reached out to a colleague in sixth grade and said, “Hey, you want to try this? Are you having any kids who have this problem?”, and the sixth grade colleague tried it within her own school, and by that time, she had collected the data over time in her class and her colleague’s class, and we at the hub level put her idea in this menu of improvement and shared it with our whole network.

Because the menu is organized around attendance, behavior and course performance, there were naturally a number of people across the network, across the state, in different systems, in different schools who were curious about the idea and said, “Hey, that might help my kids.” So a bunch were actually in McDowell County, and that idea got taken up in an eighth grade math class, with strong success, where kids moved from failing to passing, in an eighth grade social studies class where kids moved from failing to passing, in an eighth grade EC class where kids moved from a 40% average to a 70% average, and over and over and over.

So we have, I think, 10 different contexts in which students reliably moved from failing to passing with this one 45 minute intervention. Now there are folks in Delaware testing this idea, and I believe maybe some folks in California are thinking about this idea. So it is a process of measuring small at the classroom level, collecting over time, and then sharing to see, does this idea work for different kids in different contexts? We now have evidence that in middle school and high school, in ELA, math, social studies and EC, at different grade levels, this test has reliably led to improve student performance.

Stacey Caillier:
You essentially provided them, also, just the template for, “And here’s how you collect the data. You’re going to test this…” That’s one of the things that really struck me about your change package or your menu, is it’s not just, “Here’s the thing to do. Here’s some tips on how to do it.” It’s also, “And here’s the table where you’ll collect your data.” So you’re making it very simple and scaffolding that process, which I love.

Sofi Frankowski:
We check in on that data. Those are in Google Sheets, and we go in and look. “You said you were trying this idea. How’s it going? Look, you’ve got three weeks of data here. What does that suggest to you?” So it really gives us an awful lot to learn alongside the teacher leaders in each huddle to say, “Look at you! You’ve tried this idea, and look how kids are moving off the watch list! You did that!”

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah. I loved seeing the name of the inventor of the idea, also, in your change package. Can you all, just so that… I know you have this fancy digital version coming soon that will be on your website, but we loved how you organized your menu, and especially your table of contents. We’re in the process of actually revising several of our change packages to be like that. Can you just share what your menu looks like and how you hope folks use it, and how you set it up to make it easy for them to use it?

Sofi Frankowski:
Sure. We set up our menu around the drivers, so they’re clustered by attendance ideas, behavior ideas, course performance ideas, and social-emotional learning ideas. These are a combination of ideas that were invented by teachers in the network and those that have come from other sources of research and were tested by folks in the network, and then each idea is connected to the teacher author, the teacher inventor, has a title and has a digital data collection tool in which new testers put their data.

Stacey Caillier:
What we especially loved was you have a beautiful table of contents that doesn’t force people to read through a 60 page document.

Sofi Frankowski:
Oh, right, right, right. Yes. We learned our way into that, honestly. Our first attempt at this menu was a hundred page PDF. The good news was we had tons of ideas that had come from teachers that had led to successful student outcomes, and that was really a bright spot, but we learned to only initially give folks the table of contents and not any of the ideas, so that they could just look at what was interesting to them, and then we would share the idea, because it’s overwhelming.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you also did something beautiful where you were like… You color coded the ideas. So the ideas in green were those ones that had a lot of evidence. I think it was evidence of more than five contexts, reliable improvement, and then you had different color codes for ideas that emerged from the network that are promising, but just in a couple contexts, right for testing, and then you had ones for research. So I just love that you had that color coding, kind of lifting things up to the top a little bit, and also inviting people to hear some that are ripe for testing. Please do.

Sofi Frankowski:
Yeah, it’s always interesting to see where people choose to go. We can make predictions, but I would never be right as to what’s going to appeal to the teachers in the classrooms. So it’s fun to see which ideas get the most uptake.

Stacey Caillier:
Any final words of wisdom or advice to share, or things you wish you would’ve known five years ago or anything?

Dana Diesel:
There’s probably a whole nother podcast about that, but I think the thing that is kind of rolling around in the work and how Taqwanda talked around the power of small and that calculator… So we know starting small is a key tenet of improvement science, and the calculator idea is to help people see how starting small can really grow, because I wanted to give voice to the sense of urgency we all feel as educators. “It’s not good today, it’s got to be better tomorrow,” but we stay with people for three years, and that whole first year is real super small, the opposite of super size. This is super teeny minuscule improvement, because what we’re really improving is our ability to understand the work, building that confidence and competence.

So we say to people, “You’re not going to see a bunch of kids come off the watch list in year one,” and there’s some nods and the principals are sort of like, “What did I sign up for?”, because we want things to be better the next day. So I think it’s always important, however you go about whatever work that you do with schools, is to, just like you’re still in them, have this palpable sense of the urgency for things to be better, and I want them to be better tomorrow, while thinking about how are we equipping people to get to a place where they can take on any problem that they want to and be successful in that?

Sofi Frankowski:
Just as a last word, I would like to give a shout-out to teachers everywhere, educators everywhere who are working to improve the lives of kids in their care, especially the most vulnerable. They need us. They need us to do this work, and I’m grateful for all that teachers and educators are doing.

Stacey Caillier:
Perfect note to end on, and scene.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Sofi Frankowski, Dana C. Diesel and Taqwanda Hailey for taking the time to talk to Stacey about their work. In our show notes, we have a link to a really cool image that shows the whole process of participating in the Schools That Lead cohort. Thanks for listening.