“Leadership is the job of forging coherence”—Michael Fullan
Schools are hard organizations in which to develop coherence. Individual classrooms are highly idiosyncratic places, each governed by their own priorities and the relationships within them. Which is how they should be. The challenge for school leaders is to create consistency and coherence—to have a palpably seen, heard, and felt school culture—without undermining every teacher’s responsibility to do what is needed for their students on any given day.
In many schools, compliance masquerades as coherence, but it’s not the same thing. Compliance quickly becomes toxic when it prevents personalized instruction and in-the-moment problem-solving for the good of the students. No wonder many teachers grow suspicious of administration demands for compliance, and no wonder administrators often see teachers as being unnecessarily resistant to uniform expectations. It is a setup for conflict.
There is a way to coherence that goes beyond compliance to collaboration and creativity.
But there is a way out, a way to coherence that goes beyond compliance to collaboration and creativity. I learned this path when I was the principal of a high school for students with many significant challenges. The most common challenge our students shared was an epidemic of disorganization; they struggled deeply with executive functioning skills. The faculty and administration knew we needed to intervene and provide better support as a school. But how to do so without compromising the creative skills and discretion of the teachers who knew their students best?
Step One: Shared Interests
The teachers were coping as best they could with their students’ partially done assignments, lost homework, and forgotten deadlines—but since they were implementing solutions independently of each other, the students were not getting the consistency they needed, only adding to the exhaustion of the faculty. It was clear the administration needed to step in to provide some common ground.
William Ury and Roger Fisher’s great negotiation book, Getting to Yes, had taught me that it was important to first articulate to the faculty our shared interests, instead of unilaterally imposing my “solutions.” In this case, literally every teacher affirmed their shared interest in giving students more support to counter their challenges with organization. So I had a starting point for coherence.
Step Two: Tactful Uniformity
Uniformity is essential for elements of critical safety in systems, whether it’s stopping at red lights when we drive, allowing people to defend themselves in court, or following the exit procedures during fire drills. Uniformity can also define and unite communities, as with prayer rituals in religions or the morning routines in classrooms.
Uniformity is binary: you do it, or you don’t do it. When I became a principal, one of my mentors advised me to keep the number of uniform demands to a minimum because teachers require flexibility to meet the unpredictable needs of their students, and they may balk at too much bureaucratic restraint. For its part, the administration must be able to put its full weight behind the demand for uniformity. So to work well, uniformity has to be imposed with great tact.
To work well, uniformity has to be imposed with great tact.
At its best, uniformity from grade to grade and class to class can save educators time and energy; that’s the inherent beauty of routines. I go into every schoolwide initiative explicitly stating that I want to limit the level of uniformity only to what is absolutely necessary to help educators be successful collectively and only for what the administration can consistently support. I also aim to ensure that the required uniformity will not create needless busy work for the staff. What would be the point of that? I still remember how hard it is to be a teacher; as administrators, we need to develop job expectations that do not require sainthood or soul-crushing compliance.
For the initiative on executive functioning, our discussions as a faculty led us to define three elements of uniformity. These three elements could be easily implemented by all teachers, a key component of gaining traction with a new initiative. They also allowed the students to exercise independence within a supportive structure, a deep priority of our work to help them navigate the difficulties of their lives. Each student in their own way could use the resources readily available to them without feeling micromanaged. With these three consistent elements in place, every day in every classroom, we would then be able to identify which students needed more individualized attention to address their executive functioning needs:
- In every classroom there will be an executive-functioning station, where students can find copies of worksheets, schedules of upcoming events, and lists of past and current homework tasks. Our students carry enough stress already; our support in this area will help them harness their efforts on their academic output, not their disorganization.
- That station will be somewhere to the right of the door inside the classroom. This little bit of uniformity from room to room helps students to more easily find the materials they need and places no additional burden on the staff.
- The station will include an identical size and shape bulletin board. Initially, I didn’t care whether the bulletin boards were uniform in dimensions, but when I suggested that I could save the teachers time by bulk-purchasing bulletin boards and asking the maintenance crew to install them, the staff strongly opted for this bit of standardization. Here was a case of uniformity conserving adult time and energy.
When I then suggested that every bulletin board be uniformly divided into quadrants, with specific information, such as homework, displayed in each quadrant in the same format from class to class, that was when the faculty said, “No.”
Step Three: Smart Guidelines
My suggestion to divide up the bulletin boards with a rigidly defined section for homework was an overreach too far down into uniformity. Many teachers of elective courses, who did not see their students every day, did not assign as much homework as core curriculum teachers. They did, however, want bulletin board space for posting instructions for use of specialized equipment in their rooms, which was not the case for the English teachers. An art teacher wanted to use space on her board to post information about exhibitions in local galleries and museums. A good number of teachers weren’t sure yet how to make the best use of their boards. They wanted the freedom to experiment until they found the right balance for their curriculum and their students. My suggestions for dividing up the boards in a uniform fashion would have limited the faculty’s ability to best serve their students. I appreciated their wisdom. I had to trust the inherent creativity of the staff.
This is where guidelines become critical to building a school culture. Guidelines are a menu of strategies and activities to carry out the level of the work that happens just below absolute uniformity. To support the executive-functioning initiative, we developed a menu of guidelines teachers could use to organize their bulletin boards. We allowed a wide array of possibilities for implementation, leading to one more uniform expectation: every teacher was responsible to employ explicit practices that supported their students’ executive functioning, chosen from the set of guidelines. So this was a uniform expectation to make decisions that helped the students in ways the teachers knew best.
Step Four: Inventions
There are inevitably students whose challenges are too complicated for absolute interventions to be absolutely effective. Even guidelines that provide great flexibility will often not meet the needs of some students. These students often need more of this and less of that, ultimately adding up to an entirely new approach.
We need to encourage staff, over and over, to experiment. We need to support 'test runs.'
To support capacity for this, the job of the administration is to foster a climate of creativity and invention. We need to encourage staff, over and over, to experiment. We need to support “test runs.” We need to share with teachers the experiments that we as administrators are trying in our own positions, and what we are learning. Faculty meetings can be organized to have staff in small groups share their test runs, experiments, and inventions—with no expectation that they have to be successful, only that they share what they have learned.
One of the best inventions in my school’s executive-functioning initiative was when a teacher began to design personalized homework assignment planners for students. She started when one student complained that he couldn’t find a planner with large enough spaces to jot down directions, so they sat together at the computer and designed such a template, and they printed it out. Other students wondered if they could have a page that displayed the whole month; others wanted an area with the evening hours laid out so they could better schedule their after-school demands.
Eventually, the option to design one’s own assignment planner became a favorite option among the students. We know personalization matters for student motivation; it matters for our staff, too. We need schools that support in every way the inherent passion and commitment that just about every teacher brings when they enter the profession. We need to unleash their inventiveness for our students.
Leveraging Collective Wisdom
If your school has an initiative to implement restorative justice circles, or executive-functioning supports, or opening and closing rituals of classes, be explicit that “we are a school that values experimenting to reach every student,” and back that up with resources, supports, and celebrations. We start with a shared interest; we establish the uniformity that makes for efficiency; we distribute guidelines; we celebrate inventions that meet idiosyncratic student needs. In a dominant culture of standardized testing, required curricula, and uniform compliance posing as coherence, teachers need to hear loudly and clearly that experimenting with new inventions in the service of every student is an essential part of the job.
Our students appreciated that we created this schoolwide effort to support them, a big step in our practice to build trust with these often-cautious teens. As a school leader, I became much more successful at leading an initiative from conception through implementation. I grew confident in holding firmly to the interests of the school without getting rigidly fixed on any single strategy; the collective wisdom of the staff was always greater than mine. The staff bonded in supporting our limited demands for uniformity, knowing that the opportunities to work from guidelines and to be creative were critical to our shared success.
Jeffrey Benson has more than 40 years of experience as a teacher, mentor, and school administrator, with a focus on supporting schools that can work for all students. His books include Improve Every Lesson Plan with SEL, Hanging In: Strategies for Working with the Students Who Challenge Us Most, and 10 Steps for Managing Change in Schools: How do we take initiatives from goals to actions? His website is JeffreyBenson.org.
