Episode 19: Coach'EM Up Leadership Series: Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement!

This episode explores the journey from good to great in education by fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Key topics include adopting a growth mindset, the value of professional development, recognition of staff, effective communication, and collaboration for better student outcomes.

• Discussing the concept of a growth mindset 
• Emphasizing the importance of being 1% better every day 
• Highlighting meaningful professional development opportunities 
• Recognizing staff achievements to boost morale 
• Building a fun and collaborative educational environment 
• Implementing collaborative practices for school improvement 
• Focusing on reflection as a tool for growth 
• Ensuring transparent and effective communication 
• Understanding the significance of trust in educational leadership 
• Encouraging incremental changes leading to significant results

Chapters

• 1:07 Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement
• 17:00 Fostering a Collaborative Culture for Improvement
• 23:47 Journey to Greatness

Transcript

Principal JL: 1:08

Hey everybody, it's great to be back with another episode of the Coach Em Up Leadership Series. In today's episode, we're going to talk about going from good to great and building that culture of continuous improvement. I actually just finished recording an episode with Kurtis and Lorna Hewson from the Building a Culture of Collaboration on their podcast. So that was a great experience and it's kind of awesome that I did that recording. We talked about building a culture of collaboration and then I'm going to talk about today's episode about collaborating. So if you haven't had a chance to check out Kurtis and Lorna's work, I would encourage you to listen to their podcast called Building a Culture of Collaboration. So I'm just going to plug them up a little bit so you guys can go ahead and take an opportunity to take a listen to all the great work they're doing.

Principal JL: 2:03

Now we're going to go ahead and we're going to dive right in today's episode it's building a culture of continuous improvement. Now, this is something, as educational leaders, that we got to do a really good job of. Now, when it comes to building a culture of continuous improvement, there's a lot of things that got to come in play. We got to talk about hey, how did you build that relationship, do you have the trust of your staff, and then when you start building this continuous culture of improvement, it's having a certain mindset. So this takes time to do. This is something that's not going to happen overnight. The first thing we want to be able to build into this culture of continuous improvement is a growth mindset. Everybody A growth mindset is basically everybody is willing to learn and grow, and they can learn and grow from their mistakes and their successes. It's not one thing that we are doing that we are learning and growing from. We can learn from mistakes, we can learn from successes, but we have a growth mindset and a way we want to do that.

Principal JL: 3:06

And here, where I am the principal at, we talk about having a growth mindset, of being 1% better every day. It's actually a mantra that is said after every daily announcement is to be 1% better today, and I say it a lot on my podcast. But what is the meaning behind it? Why am I asking you to be 1% better? Well, this is the reason why it is to be 1% better is to find one little thing that you could do better and over time, you're going to make incremental changes that are going to happen to be big changes in a result of those increment changes. So you've got to find something. So we ask our students, we ask our staff, our teachers. Even me as a leader, I ask myself what can I do better today? What little thing can I do better to make myself better as a leader, to help make those incremental changes that will stack up into big changes?

Principal JL: 4:08

And so that's where that growth mindset comes in, to, where what can I do today to get better as a teacher, as a student, as a staff member, as a principal? What can I do to get better? I always look to how can I communicate better with people? I always look to how can I lead better? How can I get out and make sure I go see a staff member today and check in on them? Things like that is what I kind of look at and teachers can look at is hey, what one thing can I do to get better today? Could I try this new teaching strategy that I've been kind of hanging on to? Can I try something different that I haven't done and learn from that positive or negative effects from that thing that I'm trying? Students could be like, hey, I'm going to turn my homework in on time. Or hey, I'm going to make sure I am doing the things that the teacher asked me. Or I'm going to learn something new in my class day that I haven't learned before. What could I take from that? Or hey, I'm just going to make sure I'm in all my classes on time and I'm not tardy. I mean, there's so many things that you can look at when you're trying to get better every day. So we always talk about be 1% better, and I always talk about that at the end of my podcast is hey, always look to be 1% better.

Principal JL: 5:32

But you guys really don't know what I'm talking about until, actually, today, I wanted to really kind of talk about what that is and what that means. And so being 1% better is to find incremental changes over a period of time where they stack up to lead to big gains, and that's kind of what our focus is as a building, and it's something that is said every day after daily announcements, and something that we do and we try to do, and it's something we want to keep up to the forefront. Hey, what are you doing to get better today? And that's the number one thing. That's part of that growth mindset that we have to have is how are we being growth-minded and how are we trying to find something to get better at every day as we go? Because, as leaders, if you're not learning and growing every day, you're not getting better. So what can you do as leaders to do that? And there's so many different things you could do when you're trying to get better. And then, with that growth mindset, as a leader, you have to model that.

Principal JL: 7:13

You have to go out and be growth minded, and I like to share my stories with people about hey, this is something I learned today. Hey, I did this, I failed at it, but I learned from something. From it, I learned this is what I need to do differently, because I'm not perfect. I'm always going to learn and grow, and when your staff and your students see that you're trying to learn and grow, they're going to be more encouraged to learn and grow with you, and so that's going to help encourage the growth. So that's the next thing. First thing is let's talk about being growth mindset. Let's not be afraid to fail. Let's go out there and try new things, because that's the way we're going to learn and we're going to figure out things as we go through our ups and downs of this job, of ways we encourage growth.

Principal JL: 8:07

I talk to my staff about professional development. If there's a workshop, if there's a conference or something they want to go to, I would love to know what that is, and then I let them go do it. I have a science teacher that came to me and said hey, I'd really like to go to this workshop. At this time I'm like great, let's go. If you're going to find something valuable out of it, let's do that. But, as myself, as'm like great, let's go. If you're going to find something valuable out of it, let's do that. But as myself, as a principal, I try to find things that I can go to and conferences and workshops and different things to help myself learn and grow, and also this podcast is dedicated to that. So this podcast is to help other people out there that may not get to those workshops and conferences, so they can learn and grow. So hopefully you guys are finding value in this podcast and the things that are talked about, because if you do, I love that. You just subscribe to the podcast and listen and follow as we go here. So, as we get going on the learning and growing, let's talk about professional development a little bit more.

Principal JL: 9:01

As a building principal, I try not to waste my time with stupid things that teachers don't need to do. If it's something that could be put in an email, I do daily reminders every day to where hey, these are the nuts and bolts of our operations, these are the things that we do and these are things that you need to be aware of and these are the things that you need to know. That's pretty basic stuff and there's a lot of things. We've got a lot of systems in this school to where we just reminders of what's going on, what's going to happen, what's coming up on those things. But when I talk about professional development, I want to find things for my teachers that are important to them. So one of the things I did we actually just finished up a professional development in the month of February here, february 10th, and then I found some professional development I wanted my staff to do, and it all surrounded with the idea of how can I, as a building leader, help my staff save time prepping and planning and doing the work that they do that they're really good at right? How can I help them save time so they maybe they could take some of the workload and stress off them.

Principal JL: 10:13

So with one of my episodes, I interviewed Principal Mo and she talked about this product called Spatial School AI, and so I kind of looked into it. I interviewed Principal Mo and she talked about this product called Magic School AI, and so I kind of looked into it, I dived into it and I learned that, hey, this might be something that might be valuable to my staff and my teachers. And so we ended up going ahead and we're doing a pilot right now we're doing a trial on it. And then I went ahead and did a one-hour training with my staff to where, hey, here's magic school way. I want you guys to give this a shot. I want to see if this really saves you time. Is this something that you guys find valuable? And I'll be honest with you the staff you know the response I got from them was very positive. Like, hey, I can see how this could help me be better at what I do with this. I can see how this saves time. And so right now we're in the middle of that pilot and I'll probably share more as we go here.

Principal JL: 11:06

But at the same time I found a professional development opportunity for my staff that they found value in, and I had a lot of teachers tell me hey, I really like this, this is what I'm doing with it, this is great. Where has this been? I mean, those are the comments I'm getting from them just doing this pilot. So that is what will happen. If you find professional development that is meaningful, is your staff's going to find value into it? And I always have to think as a leader what's the value of this training? And sometimes there's training that you just got to do and it's understandable, but at the same time, it's a valuable training. But if you're just filling up time for them to do all these trainings and it's not valuable to them, you just wasted their time where they could be doing something more valuable with their time, and it could be something as simple as getting in their classroom and working on their lesson plans and creating better strategies for them to go out and teach and learn or just to go out and to utilize within their classroom. So I always try to make sure on that professional development piece and I wanted to give you guys an example of what that might look like when it comes to making sure that it's professional development that will actually encourage growth and it will encourage them to find the value in that professional development Because that's how, as a leader, you can help your staff learn and grow is by having meaningful professional developments.

Principal JL: 12:36

The next thing that you can do to encourage growth is to recognize your staff doing awesome and amazing things. I like to recognize like right now we're in the middle of the implementation of our attendance policy and, man, we're getting some really good results. But guess what? It wouldn't work without the work of the leadership team, my assistant principals and our attendance coordinator. They do a lot of the leadership team, my assistant principals and our attendance coordinator. They do a lot of the hard work behind it when it comes to figuring out which kids are missing, how do they intervene with systems and supports. We also have a community liaison. That's a part of that team that really does an awesome job, and I try to make sure I recognize those people in front of other staff.

Principal JL: 14:07

Like we had a professional development, I said, hey guys, I would like to take the time to recognize these people for the awesome things they did, and so I recognize the attendance coordinator, our assistant principals, our community liaison for the things they do, because I want people to know that you know what they don't get to see the hard work that goes into some of that. They need to be recognized once in a while, as well as recognizing teachers for when they do great things, because really it takes a collaborative effort, this thing, and let's you know, let's give them a big round of applause because that wasn't easy and we really appreciate the efforts. And so when you're able to recognize the efforts of other people, that is huge to do and you can celebrate that internally. You can celebrate it by doing a social media post. I know we have a team of people that will actually put social media posts out there for you know, secretary Day, for Counselor Week, for School Resource Week. You know they do a great job of recognizing the people that do the great things within the school that you don't think about, and so that's really another huge thing you would like to do is recognize people when you could do that, because that's going to encourage them to continue to go and do the work that is really hard to do at times.

Principal JL: 15:38

The next thing I would like to talk about is hey, in this job you got to have fun, right, you can't be afraid to have fun. I want to make sure people know that. Hey, yes, I am the building leader, I'm the principal here, but at the same time I am a person. There are some things I like to do. I like to have fun, I like to joke around, but that also keeps that culture of just everybody knows that we're in it together. We're going to have fun in the process, and so I like to crack jokes. I like to do things. I like to set up times during, times where staff can get together, get to socialize and get to see each other outside of their departments once in a while. So there's those things, and so we try to do those things to where we're trying to build just that collaboration but build that community as well, just not as just teachers and educators, but as people in general that can come together and socialize and have fun together, and so we try to do those things as well. There's times where I will rent out a place. We had some pizza and we just come together and we just hung out after a work day or after a professional development time. I've done that a few times, but that's just an idea that you could do to try to just have some fun and do some things that are just a little bit different outside of work.

Principal JL: 17:01

The next piece here that we want to talk about that helps build that collaboration of continuous improvement is to have collaboration right. There are things that we do, that we collaborate on, that work together. Our school improvement team is another team that I give shout outs to because they do a really good job of bringing issues in and finding solutions to that. Bringing issues in and finding solutions to that, and so with them, they are a huge collaboration tool or piece that helps our building find solutions to the issues we're having Now. Outside of that, we also are a PLC school. We have dedicated time where our staff will meet once a week and there's similar response teams where they're talking about students. They're talking about student learning. They're talking about hey, these students are doing this target, these students have it done. For hey, I see you over here. Your students are doing really well at this target. Hey, would you like to have an intervention session with these students and help them, because maybe I am missing something, maybe I am not explaining it the way you are. Maybe they'll get value out of that. So the teachers will actually coordinate which students will go to an intervention piece, which teacher are going to lead those sessions, and so that takes a lot of collaboration to do.

Principal JL: 18:21

And that is something that we do weekly, every week, to where we're trying to stay on top of, be proactive in the student learning, so we understand or we know where they're at and we're utilizing data to drive that collaboration and to drive those expectations and to drive the learning of the students. And so at that time it might feel like some experimentation as well, to where, hey, we're going to try some things, especially with our attendance policy. This was something that we worked hard together and we implemented, but as a leader, I was nervous. I was like I don't know how this is going to go. But since it was a collaborative effort and it's implemented and we have all these systems and things in place, we have people that have their roles in it, it's really great to see the effectiveness of that collaboration come into fruition. And so even this might start something as like we don't know how it's going to go, but if you collaborate with your people, you're going to be successful because you've built that buy-in with that collaboration process.

Principal JL: 19:27

And then the next thing we're going to talk about is reflection. There's times where we got to sit back, reflect on the work we've done as leaders and go what did I learn from this? What can I take from this? So if I see this again, I can implement something even better. Or, hey, what did I learn from this failure or this mistake? Because, as a leader, I'm going to mess up, I'm going to make mistakes, but I have to be able to reflect and show my staff that I can reflect and learn from my mistakes as well. And what that does is it models that, hey, as a leader, I'm going to reflect on my stuff. As a teacher, you reflect on the things you can learn and grow on. And that's kind of the whole piece where I talk with teachers about hey, what can you do to get better? What can I help you, support you with to get better? So, if they're being reflective and they're learning from hey, this went really well and I really like this. Or hey, this didn't go so well, so maybe there's something I need to think about to do better. And so when you have the principal or the building leaders reflecting and getting better, you have your teachers and your staff reflecting to get better. That's just going to trickle down to your students to be more reflective and to learn from their mistakes. And so that's where building that collaborative piece for continuous improvement trickles down from the top all the way down to the bottom.

Principal JL: 20:51

Because if everybody is reflecting and trying to get better and, like we say, we're always looking to be 1% better every day, that is the essence of building that continuous improvement in your building is to have that understanding and being able to reflect and do those things. Finally, you got to have great communication, and those communications need to be transparent. As a leader, you need to do what you say you're going to do. If you say this is what's going to happen when this happens, you better do it, because with that, the teachers need to know, or the staff needs to know, that hey, he is going to, he means what he says. And it comes down to not from an authoritarian standpoint but from a collaborative standpoint is, when you collaborate together and you communicate what that is and you have clarity, you're going to have that buy-in, you're going to have that growth mindset, you're going to have that continuous improvement through collaboration. That is going to be valuable and it's going to permeate throughout your building, where people feel empowered to be the best versions of themselves when they are doing the job, and so being able to have concise communications and clarity of what those things are is important.

Principal JL: 22:13

Then, as a building principal, my job is to hold people accountable when those things aren't going the way they need to go. Or another thing is a big thing is the support teachers when they're struggling, and to support staff members when they're going through, going through tough things or things are struggling with. How can I support them, because I always want to come through. How can I help you not do this? I'm not going to tell you what to do. You're you're an adult, like I'm an adult, and I want to support you through the things that you're learning and growing on.

Principal JL: 22:45

And my final thought is creating a collaborative culture of continuous improvement does not happen overnight. It takes work, it takes time to do, and before you can really build that collaborative culture, you have to build trust of people within your building. You got to be able to understand how they work, how they tick, building relationships with them, not just on a professional level, but get to know them as people and they get to know you as a person because they need to understand your heart as a leader. You're here to help. You're here to support because you want everybody to work together for the common goal of helping students learn and helping them become the best versions of themselves and as leaders. If we're helping, if we are doing the things to make ourselves the best version of ourselves and our teachers and our staffs are doing the same work where they're being the best versions of themselves, our students will become the best versions of themselves and they'll have a great experience within their educational journey.

Principal JL: 23:47

With that said, guys, I really appreciate you guys tuning in for this episode on how to go from good to great, building that collaboration of continuous improvement, and I hope you guys get something out of this. If you did, I'd love to hear from you guys. Please follow the podcast, reach out, email me Everything is in the bottom of the show notes that you can reach out and connect with me on these different topics. And so, with that said, hey, this has been a fun journey. So far, I have actually only got one episode left of the Coach Em Up Leadership Series. I really hope that you guys have enjoyed the Coach Em Up Leadership Series and you find value in it. And to end on that note, I hope you guys are always looking to be 1% better. Bye.