Leading With Learning: A Webinar Series Full of Guidance for District Leaders

Public education leaders face unprecedented challenges in today’s political climate, with every decision under scrutiny and public trust in schools declining. This environment has led to high superintendent turnover, as politics tops the list of stressors for educators. To address these issues, the Center for Innovation in Education (C!E) and Getting Smart have partnered to offer a webinar series, “Leading With Learning,” designed to equip district leaders with practical strategies to navigate political volatility, build trust, and foster a durable leadership legacy through an inclusive co-designed community visioning and strategic planning process. This series is rooted in C!E’s community-centered strategic work with districts and is a strong example of addressing the Why (Community Vision) and What Next (Strategy) components of the Getting Smart Innovation Framework.

The series kicks off with “Make Politics Work for You,” emphasizing that politics can be a lever for positive change rather than a liability while building a community vision. This session provides tools for strengthening credibility, building trust in divided communities, and leading with integrity under pressure. It highlights how shifting from positional authority to legitimacy rooted in relationships, consensus, and trust through co-creation can unlock a shared community vision. 

The series continues with “Strategic Planning for Legitimacy, Impact, and Survival,” which explores how inclusive and purpose-driven strategic plans can provide a roadmap to make the Community Vision become a reality. The final session, “Your Strategic Plan is Done—Now What? Follow-Through that Builds Legitimacy and Support,” focuses on implementation strategies that engage the entire community as co-implementers, fostering shared ownership and meaningful progress during implementation. We are joined in these webinars by leaders in Burlington, Vermont and Bellevue, Washington, who share about their firsthand experiences with leading this work. 

We hope that this series provides actionable insights and real-world strategies for those districts who are interested in building a community vision and connected strategy, and are looking for collaborative, highly agentic and co-designed models. View the individual transcripts below.

Make Politics Work for You (Part 1)

Transcript

Nate McClennen: Welcome, everybody. We are excited to present this webinar today on “Making Politics Work for You: Building a Leadership Legacy that Withstands Political Volatility.” This is a partnership between CIE and Getting Smart, and we’re excited that you’re all with us today. For introductions, my name is Nate McClennen. I’m a senior partner for Strategy and Innovation at Getting Smart, which is an advisory and advocacy team that focuses on the future of education. And Doannie Tran.

Doannie Tran: Hi, everybody. Thank you so much, Nate, for having us. We’re so excited to be partnering with you on this. My name is Doannie Tran. I’m a partner at the Center for Innovation in Education, where we try to make the next generation of policy alongside families, communities, and educators.

Nate McClennen: Great. So today our focus is really thinking about systems change, and we’re doing a series of four webinars that will focus on system change. In this particular case today, we’re talking about how do you build a community vision.

We wanted to start from the beginning and say, what are the things we’re headed for? While every community determines the goals they have and the vision they have, we have started to see some real patterns emerging, and those include broader outcomes. So how do we move from standards to standards and broader, durable skills and competencies, better learning experiences that are engaging for every student and not just some, stronger signals of what types of achievements the students are communicating to higher ed or employers about what they achieved and what competencies they have demonstrated, and then expanded learning systems beyond a traditional school.

The school system is how else can students learn in the larger ecosystem. We really appreciate Learner Studio’s vision of this quote around “we must build together a future-ready education ecosystem that will ensure each learner has access to the support and guidance of a robust community in which they’re known, connected, engaged, and have agency to define their own path and pursue their goals.”

So these are lofty ambitions. This is the direction we think the patterns are indicating that we’re headed, yet things get in the way. There’s all sorts of challenges, and the Center for Reinventing Public Education came out with a great report and research brief over the last year when they looked at a number of districts and said, what gets in the way of these particular system changes?

Leadership changes are one of the significant ones. If you have a change in principal or change in superintendent or change in board, all those things get in the way of change initiatives. Buy-in is really, really important. Buy-in at the educator level, the family level, the community level, and the leadership level. How do you make sure that people are all seeing the challenges that need solving and are agreeing that those are the particular directions that the school district wants to head in?

The quality of professional learning continues to be a challenge. How do we make sure that every teacher gets what they need to help accelerate shared vision data systems that give real-time feedback rather than once-a-year data systems that give feedback in a delayed manner?

So how do we do much more formative type feedback loops, policy, and political constraints? How do we get around the particular policies that have been established at the state level or the demands and requirements at the federal level and the political winds that tend to move education in one direction or another?

And then, of course, competing priorities. Running school districts is hard. Teaching in school districts is hard, and there are all sorts of things that get in the way. These are all challenges to systems changes. However, there are some great levers, and we really appreciate the work of learning to improve continuous improvement models, which is when you start thinking about being problem-specific.

So what’s the challenge that the community has identified and user-centered? Who are the people that are most affected by these particular challenges that can make a difference in making systems change and pushing towards a stronger and more forward-thinking model of education? Second is to attend to variability. Every student is different. We know that, and if we don’t think about variability in students when we think about our solutions and helping communities understand their needs, we will have less of a chance for those visions coming to fruition.

We need to be able to see the system and think about the system as a whole and how the different parts of the systems interact with one another, especially in larger systems. We need to think about how do we improve measurement and address those data gaps, and how do we get real-time feedback on is this working or is this not working?

This ties directly into a great classroom technique of using inquiry. How do we do that when we’re doing innovation and systems change? How do we ask good questions, make good observations, carry out whatever innovation we want to try that’s based on the strategic vision, and then quickly learn from it and make changes as needed?

The final lever that I think is really important is how do we connect people, whether it’s within a particular school, within a particular district, within a larger system of districts, or regionally or nationally? Anytime we can create improvement networks, whether they’re professional learning communities or any other type of network, at Getting Smart, we thought a lot about how do we put this into a unifying framework we call the Learning Innovation Framework.

So, on the left, you’ll see a general approach to thinking about when we’re trying to move a system forward, what are the things we need to think about? We start with observing and reflecting, and that carries on throughout the process. We end with what’s next, scaling, and sharing. What do we learn? How do we share it with others? How do we make sure good innovations go and transfer to other places and systems? We just walk through a why, a what, a how, a for whom, and a where.

So identify community vision, identify the clear set of outcomes, build a learning model around those outcomes, clearly articulate the signals that the students will have when they communicate out into the world to have the best opportunities at higher ed and employment, and then finally, how do you expand that learner ecosystem?

We believe that this unifying framework can organize systems change initiatives and build partnerships, whether through partners like CIE or partnerships within districts or a lot of other intermediaries that are doing this work and accelerate this learning through these regional networks so that all education models can meet this new horizon of learning and have every student meet the outcomes and the expectations and the vision they like to head towards.

So today, super excited to focus specifically on one part of the framework called the Community Vision. CIE has done a lot of work in this space at the state level, the district level, and the system level, and they’re going to share a lot of information on how this can be done by really, really deeply embedding within a community. So happy to pass it off to Doannie Tran. Doannie, take it away and walk us through what you’ve learned and what you’ve done.

Doannie Tran: Thank you to Getting Smart and the whole team for being such incredible partners and hosts for this webinar series. One of the first things we want to try to do here is establish why exactly we need to undertake innovation, especially when it comes to establishing the community vision that Nate was talking about.

This graph shows data from the Gallup survey around trust and confidence in U.S. public schools from 1975 to the present. What you can see here is a precipitous decline in the way that people feel, whether or not they trust and have confidence in our public schools. We wanted to highlight this not as a moment of doom and gloom, but to really acknowledge that a major factor for the declining trust in people’s felt sense of the education system is that they believe that systems are no longer responsive to them.

They don’t really understand them. They don’t really respond to who they are and what they need, and this feeling of lack of trust and a sense of declining responsiveness is making it harder for our very best leaders to stay in the job.

This is from an EdWeek report from last year that cited that 100 of the nation’s 500 largest districts experienced superintendent turnover between July 1, 2023, and July 1, 2024. Three of those districts actually had two or more leadership changes within that same time. So this lack of trust and declining responsiveness is having a detrimental effect on the way that leaders can lead and their duration and longevity in the job.

To dig in further into this, these waves of turnover, politics is actually topping the list of the stressors that are complicating the lives of educators. At the top, politics is actually beating out issues like staffing shortages, budget issues, attrition, and mental health. Politics is topping the list of things that are making it hard for people to do their job well.

Also, in that context, in the current moment, we know that the size of the Federal Department of Education is shrinking with the stated aim of returning more education to the states. Now, for a long time now, we’ve observed that state and local leaders have often based the rationale for their positions on the need to comply with federal requirements.

In the current moment, we think it’s really unclear what those federal requirements will be. So we just really want to prompt all the leaders in all these communities across the country to examine really closely the basis for the legitimacy of the positions that they have and the strategies that they’re undertaking because we think the federal context is shifting a lot right now.

So if the legitimacy that once came from being able to say the federal government is requiring us to do this, we have to ask ourselves, where does a new sense of legitimacy for our positions, where does it come from?

We wanted to highlight here this idea of public leadership as rooted in this triangle of factors, and this is from Mark Moore at the Kennedy School of Government, who examined what does it mean for public leaders to do public leadership work well, and he notes that we, it often begins by articulating a public value—what is the promise we’re making to our community?—and then does that promise have legitimacy and support from our community? And does it unlock operational capacity, literally boots on the ground, resources, time, energy, and money in order to accomplish and deliver on that public value?

Now good leaders are always rounding this triangle. They’re creating public value, generating additional legitimacy and support, which unlocks more operational capacity. In this moment, we have to ask ourselves, where does legitimacy come from?

We think that it comes ultimately from the sort of shift from basing all of our legitimacy on positional authority towards a legitimacy that comes from relationships, consensus, and trust. How do you get that kind of relationship? How do you build that sort of consensus, and how do you garner that sort of trust?

We think it comes from the process of co-creation. Co-creating visions with people unlocks operational capacity, builds legitimacy and support because people are supporting the things that they were a part of building.

Now we have examples of leadership like this all around us, and I want to highlight a particular story of a friend of mine, Dr. Elizabeth Holman. Liz, when she was in particular the assistant superintendent in Waltham Public Schools, she’s now the proud superintendent in Arlington Public Schools in Massachusetts.

But when she was in the role in Waltham, she was in charge of developing their COVID reopening plan, and it would have been very easy for her to go into a room somewhere with a few senior staff and spend a week hammering out their reopening plan in a closed way, not co-creating with her community. Instead, she brought together over 80 people from across the community, administrators, parents, teachers, counselors, community members, and students who met over months and built so much shared knowledge together as they co-created this place.

As a result, they unlocked greater legitimacy and support, more operational capacity, and were more able to deliver on the public value that they were charged to generate.

As we examine the stories of leaders like Liz, we think that there are four habits that undergird their leadership in this kind of leadership that goes from positional authority as the source of legitimacy towards relationships, consensus, and trust as the source of that legitimacy.

We think that this cycle of habits really, we say that it begins with this idea of inclusion. Are you bringing more people to the table than are generally there, generally present? Do you then think about empathy and how do you empathize with their positions, their ideas, their lived experience? Are you really learning about what they have gone through and what they need? And then do you involve them with co-creation?

We too often bring people into a space and then we send them away. We continue to do the work ourselves rather than working shoulder to shoulder with them in the process of creating the next plan. Ultimately, the last habit, reciprocity, is the idea of trading power and giving authority to people who generally don’t have it.

One of the ways I like to talk about reciprocity is it’s the ability to say no. When you co-create something and you bring it back to the community, are you really giving them the power to tell you that it’s sufficient or not sufficient for what they said that they needed? Putting yourself in a reciprocal relationship is about relinquishing some of your power in order to really hear what your community believes and thinks.

These are words, and they’re useful words, but we want to make sure that we are clear with what this looks like in practice and how it’s different from business as usual.

In the process of inclusion, you’re really going from a situation where you’ve got a few staff members working for a limited amount of time on a project behind closed doors, towards bringing together large, meaningful numbers of community members, students, staff, and parents who are working together over a course of time where they’re building relationships, building knowledge, learning together, and actually going beyond the kind of token representation that usually characterizes these processes.

Empathy is moving beyond the idea of a survey of the community where you might get some response rate and you might get some meaningful data. We’re not saying surveys are bad, but moving beyond that to really thinking about those coalition members going out and doing deeper, more meaningful relationship-building interviews with members of their networks.

In some communities, we have coalition members that collectively do over 200 interviews with people across the entire district. Co-creation is going from a small team of consultants doing the work primarily towards these coalition members that you brought together and have kept together, really writing the plan themselves, hashing it out, really doing the real work of putting together the concepts so that they can be meaningfully involved in talking about those concepts later when they’re talking with their friends and their neighbors.

With reciprocity, we think about going beyond a one-way communication where you’re just sharing outwards the product of the work to really thinking about bringing communities together to meaningfully give feedback and to really prepare them to champion the plan within their community.

When we do things in this way, we often hear things like this, and I want to highlight one quote that came from a board member in Burlington School District in Vermont, where she said that “this is more than just a strategic plan. This is more like a constitution for our district.” We really think that when we enact these habits in this meaningful way, we really do see a real shift in the ways that districts operate and the ways in which they build relationships with their communities.

This is an example of what we mean when we say we can make politics really work for you and your district and your goals. Politics is not a dirty word. It just means that we need to rethink the way in which we enact our politics and think about politics as marshaling the insights and collective will of a group of people of our community towards doing something that we can’t do alone.

To close out this particular section, I wanted to show this video of a board member in Bellevue, Washington, just outside of Seattle, as she’s talking about her reaction and her understanding of the plan.

“Because this is such a different approach. ‘Cause you know, I think I mentioned before I was on a different strategic planning group. Actually. I’ve witnessed a couple of them. So I like this approach a lot.

And also I am very hopeful that we are gonna retain some of this inclusive design methodology of empathy interviews and co-creation for other things that we’re gonna do around the district. So that was the. So first, I, I love that you found these consultants too. I, I really like the process and I, and I want us to hold onto it.

And then the problem statement, for me, that was huge because so often the problem statement or whatever comes is not real. It gets translated out of real into sort of professional euphemisms. And so then, and then you go through another couple of more layers and, and I love the fact that this is real, even though.

When it, when I first saw it, I thought, yeah, a lot of people have worked for decades to try to have this not be the case, and yet it’s still the case, so let’s be real.”

Doannie Tran: Well, thank you all for engaging in this webinar. We aim to do real work and provide real value to communities by really eliciting what they need, what they want, and how they perceive the problems and opportunities within their communities.

Nate McClennen: Thank you, Doannie Tran from CIE. What a great and inspirational talk about co-creation. In our framework, we talk about the why and building community vision, and CIE is really leading the way in understanding how to co-create and make sure that everybody in all communities owns what’s happening as a vision for their schools and districts.

We are going to offer two more district or two more webinars in partnership with CIE. The next one will be “Strategic Planning for Legitimacy, Impact, and Survival.” The third one is around, okay, you finished your strategic plan. Now what do you do? Follow through the bills legitimacy and support.

We hope that you’ll tune in and join us for those next two. Finally, feel free to connect with us at any time. CIE is at contact@leadingwithlearning.org and Getting Smart is at jessica@gettingsmart.com. We appreciate you all listening today, and we look forward to seeing you next time on our next two webinars. Thank you very much, and thank you, Doannie.

Strategic Planning for Legitimacy, Impact, and Survival (Part 2)

Transcript

Nate McClennen: Welcome everybody to our second of a three-part series on how we build community vision, strategic planning, and put those strategies into place. We’re very excited to partner with the Center for Innovation Education (CIE) on these webinars as they dive deeply into how they help and support communities to co-design the vision for the future.

So, my name is Nate McClennen. I am a senior partner at Getting Smart, which is an advisory and advocacy firm for the future of education. I’m pleased to be joined by a couple of other folks who will introduce themselves. I’ll pass it on to Doannie Tran, who will talk about CIE, and then he’ll pass it on to others.

Doannie Tran: Well, first thank you, Nate, and thank you to Getting Smart for partnering with us on this. We’re so excited. My name is Doannie Tran. I am a partner at the Center for Innovation Education (CIE), where we try to make systems more responsive to the communities they serve. I’ll pass it over to my friend Victor.

Victor Prussack: Hi, everyone. I’m Victor Prussack. I’m the Director of Engagement for the Burlington School District in Burlington, Vermont. We have around 3,400 students spread through Pre-K through 12th grade in 12 schools and have had the pleasure of working with CIE and Doannie. Over the course of the last four years or so, we are entering the fourth year of a strategic plan that they gave us critical help in developing.

I’ll pass it on to Melanie.

Melanie McGee: Hi everyone. I’m Melanie McGee. I’m the Director of the Program Management Office for Bellevue School District in Bellevue, Washington. We have around 19,000 students, and we are in the second year of a strategic planning process. We actually met Doannie and CIE through Victor a couple of years ago when we were looking for a partner to really help us think differently about how we design a strategic plan.

This has been year two for us, where we’ve been diving deeper into defining what our goals and measures will be. Pleased to be here. Great. Well, welcome everybody. Grateful that you all could join us today and excited for you all to share some wisdom with our listeners and viewers. Just to give a little context, we want to start by talking about where we are headed. At Getting Smart, and I think many other folks that we partner with around the country, we think about some bigger issues and challenges that we’re trying to help address to help all learners thrive and reach the goals they have set for themselves. This falls into four big categories. One is broader outcomes.

Certainly, we have standards, which we call core skills, whether it’s in ELA or math, etc. But then on top of that, we need to expand and think about durable skills or transferable skills. How do we create broader outcomes for young people to strive for?

Second, to achieve those outcomes, we need better learner experiences, which have higher engagement and a better chance of stronger outcomes for young people. The third is how do we signal to employers or higher education the achievements, experiences, and competencies that learners have gained over their K-12 experience?

Finally, how do we broaden our learner ecosystem? It’s not just the school building and within the school walls, but it incorporates all of the learning that can happen in the ecosystem around a learner. When we think about broader outcomes, better learning experiences, stronger signals, and expanded learning ecosystems, this is the target that we are headed for to help all learners thrive.

At Getting Smart, we have a larger framework that we think helps unite the field to organize systems change initiatives, and CIE and the work that you all do with partners really fit nicely into this. When we think about this frame, we always start with observation and reflection. Then we think about why, what’s the community vision, which we talked about in the first webinar with CIE, what are the big outcomes that we expect, whether those are standards or competencies or competency progressions that are associated with the competencies, the how, what does a learning model look like?

The signaling, so who is receiving the proxy for completion of competency and completion of standards and learning and understanding. Finally, the where—the learning ecosystem. Then, of course, we wrap it with how on earth do you share this and scale this so that others can benefit from successful work around the country?

This is the frame that we think about, and today’s webinar is going to focus specifically on two parts of this. We’re going to review community vision and what we’ve done before in the first webinar and talk more broadly with a couple of great exemplars around the country. Then we’re going to dive into a bit of strategy work. Once you have a community vision, what happens? How do you put a strategy into place to make it become a reality? With that, I’m going to turn it back over to Doannie to get us started on what this looks like in practice.

Doannie Tran: Thank you so much, Nate. I really appreciate that introduction and the grounding in the idea that we need to think differently about learning and the Learning Innovation Framework is such a powerful way of doing that.

For us, we also want to ground this in the question of where does legitimacy and accountability really come from? For a long time, we’ve focused our energy on being compliant with federal requirements, and leadership in the current time really has been focused on answering that question. In a world of shifting federal roles, leaning on compliance is not a sure path to legitimacy in the eyes of our school leaders, teachers, community leaders, and families.

The fact is that “because we have to” may not be the end of the conversation anymore. In order to have real legitimacy and accountability, we have to lead with relationships with the people in our community, really understanding what they need, what they care about, and structuring our systems so that we are responsive to that.

We think strategic planning is a key structure and a key lever that can help us do that, can help us forge new relationships that really help us build legitimacy and true accountability with the communities we’re meant to serve. We know that we can really have an impact on trust. At our last webinar, we talked about the declining trust that people have in their institutions and in education systems specifically. What we have found is that our approach to strategic planning can dramatically improve the way that community members feel about the trust they have with their education systems.

This is a bellwether question, and it’s framed as a negative. I’ll try to put it in context here, but this key question is: People like me don’t have any say about what happens in our schools. The more people that agree with this, the worse it is. What we found is that in a strategic planning process with our partners in Bellevue, participants in the strategic planning process we facilitated with them were actually four times less likely to agree with this statement compared with the control group. We have this signal here, speaking of signals that Nate mentioned, that what we are doing when we go through strategic planning in the way that we’re going to talk about during this session has a positive impact on relationships, responsiveness, and ultimately trust.

What are the anchors of this approach? In our last webinar, we talked about the habits of transformative public leadership, which are really rooted in the idea of inclusion, empathy, co-creation, and reciprocity. This helps us shift from using positional authority as the source of legitimacy towards legitimacy based on relationships, consensus, and trust. If you want to dig into this more, I’d encourage you to go back to the previous webinar, where we talk about what each of these things means in greater detail. They are the anchor of the way we think about strategic planning.

When we do strategic planning with inclusive design and those four habits, we really go through this process that’s detailed on this slide. We build a coalition, listen to the community, make meaning, design a strategy that is responsive to what we’ve learned, and then empower people to go and do the work. We think that this is the relationship-building, trust-building, inclusive work that should be at the heart of all strategic planning. We have some evidence and a belief that it helps leaders stay in the job long enough to have a meaningful impact on their community and to weather the sort of political storms that are just at the heart of public leadership at this time.

In this first phase of doing the work, we really focus on how to build a container that models the kind of democracy we want to have. What we often end up doing when we compose task forces is trying to put everybody through a single application process. We say, “All right, we’re going to put this application out into the world, and we want everybody from our community, no matter who they are, where they come from, and what perspectives they bring, to apply to be on the strategic planning coalition through this application.” What ends up happening is we actually undermine trust because community members look at this application process and assume, due to a lot of previous history and bad experiences, that the district is going to choose folks the superintendent wants, who are just going to say yes to everything and push through the strategic plan. We actually want to acknowledge that there are three different types of stakeholders that could be a part of the strategic planning process, and they should each have their own on-ramp to the coalition.

The first group I want to talk about is the group we call the essential stakeholders. These are folks who are politically important and have critical expertise. Think about these as the folks who would sit on a blue-ribbon commission. These are the heads of the Chamber of Commerce, board chairs, and the president of your local union. For these folks, we say don’t make them apply. Just use an invitation from the superintendent to invite them directly. They are simply appointed into a third of the seats of your strategic planning coalition.

For the interested stakeholders, these are the people who always raise their hands to be a part of committees. These are the people who come to your board meetings, get all the emails, and are very engaged. They have a lot of social capital and connections and networks. For these folks, this is a great place to use an application. We just say, “Please apply. We’d love for you to be part of it.” We hold a third of the seats for this group of interested stakeholders.

Then there’s this third group: potential stakeholders. These are folks who are in the community. They live the system, experience the ins and outs of all our structures, and yet they may not be plugged in to hear about the application. They are not the kind of folks who usually show up on the radar of the superintendent to be appointed into one of those seats. But they live the system, and their insights are critical. We use a process of random selection, also called sortition, akin to jury duty. We just do a random slice using the data systems of the district and invite a random cross-section to join the strategic planning coalition. We don’t ask them to apply; we just offer them the seat.

If we think about 30 people as being a part of a coalition, about 10 are directly appointed by the superintendent, 10 come from the application process, and 10 come from the random selection or sortation process. We think this group, and we’re transparent about this, we publish it as a part of the strategic plan. We say these are the three different groups that made up the coalition. We think that being clear about that and being honest and transparent is an incredibly big trust-building move.

What we end up getting are groups and coalitions that are incredibly well-primed to do this work in an inclusive way because they are inclusive in terms of both race and role and perspective. This slide shows the composition of the Bellevue Strategic Planning Coalition, which you can see was tremendously diverse in many measures.

Melanie McGee: I think for us here in Bellevue, one thing that was really important is that we gave voice to people who don’t always feel access to some of our traditional ways of including them. That third group you talked about, the potential group, those who we tapped on the shoulder, it was really important for us to actually get this composition of our coalition by race and by role. We worked hard to elevate voices who don’t always participate. That was super powerful for us.

Victor Prussack: I would add to that, I would echo that. For us, we were using the phrase “radical inclusion.” We were really thinking about what does our district look like, number one, as far as composition by race and income, students receiving services through special education or multilingual services. But we were also thinking about in a radical inclusion model, often those folks were left out of that process. Just including them is not enough. If they’re not included in decent numbers, they’re not feeling like they can necessarily participate. We tried to almost overrepresent certain folks as a way to create a coalition where people would, in fact, freely participate and engage.

Doannie Tran: I appreciate that so much, both of you. Trying to avoid the tokenism trap where we have a sort of token representation, but to have large enough numbers of people that Melanie noted represent voices that usually aren’t at the table and who really should be if we’re going to design a system that meets all needs.

Once you have this group, what do you do? One of the things we think is really important is that we all need to get on the same page about what the strategic plan is supposed to do. This process is what we call building a shared reality. We all have to ultimately agree that this is the current state of things, and the strategic plan is meant to address that.

One of the most important tools we use are empathy interviews, which those of you who are fans of the design thinking process are probably very familiar with. We use questions and empower the members of the coalition to use questions like, “Can you describe a time when you were really struggling with something with the school, but it worked out in the end? How did you get through it?” So it’s inviting people to tell a story about the ways in which they experienced the system in the past so we can draw out themes about where the system is working for people and where it’s not. We empower each member of the coalition to go out and do a whole host of these types of interviews and then bring that data back into the coalition at a follow-up meeting.

What do we do at that meeting? As the next part of establishing a shared reality or building a shared reality, we use these empathy interview data to help develop what we call problem statements. These are tools, a statement that capture the most important themes from the interviews. You can see here that each of these statements has a user and a need, but a problem that gets in the way of that need being met. For example, students and teachers want a supportive environment that understands and empowers them. However, there’s a gap between what our BSD community culture is and what it needs to be.

We start with multiple problem statements as people work in small groups to process their empathy interview data. We support coalitions to forge a single problem statement. You can see here that the single problem statement identified in the Bellevue strategic plan is: Each member of the diverse BSD community wants to feel heard, valued, and affirmed so they can feel empowered to do their best work. But there’s not yet an organizational culture that helps each individual experience a sense of belonging and support. That becomes the center of the strategic plan. The strategic plan, in some sense, is trying to answer or respond to this problem statement, but we need to focus our attention on that problem statement. We do need to understand the many causes for why the problem statement exists. We lead districts and the coalition in a process of engaging in root cause analysis so that we can name the issues in a way that may be counterintuitive. Naming the issues doesn’t make us look weak; it actually makes us look honest, which enhances trust. Sometimes we’ve had the experience of people saying, “Wow, I’m just really glad people are saying this finally,” which actually lends legitimacy to the project, not taking away from it.

Melanie McGee: I’ll just say for us, this was really hard. One, to see and to hear, we know it’s true, but it takes a lot of courage to put these words up on a screen and share them back out with folks. We had leaders who were hesitant to do it. Doannie probably remembers. We said, “Do we really have to? We don’t call it a problem statement, maybe we call it an opportunity.” And you said, “No, it’s actually really important to name it, name it as the challenge that it is.” You’re absolutely right that in doing so, people in the room were so appreciative that we called it out. Naming it gave us a focus and it gave us something to then think about where we go next and how we want to begin to tackle it.

Victor Prussack: These were so powerful that recently, in the last actually a couple of weeks, a group of us went back to them because we have all these archived to go back, that more raw data to look at. What in the words of the people who are participating in this work of the original guiding coalition, what were they saying those problems were? Because we’re now entering year four, and we’re sort of building the activities that we’re going to be focusing on in our different priority areas next year. We wondered if we were drifting too far from the original intent because a refined strategic plan can only say so much. This is sort of all the behind-the-scenes data. So we actually have gone back to that data. That’s how powerful that is.

Doannie Tran: Once you’ve gotten to this place where you’ve named the problems, we don’t want to admire issues and problems; we want to ground in them so we can have a shared reality for moving forward. We go from building a shared reality into the next step of our strategic planning process, where we generate what we call community commitments, what it will look, feel, and sound like to our community when we’ve solved the problem statement. This is where we turn from understanding the problem to aspiring to something different.

These commitments lay the groundwork for how the community will gauge ongoing progress and success. You can see here the community commitments from Bellevue’s strategic plan were rooted in three big overarching umbrella ideas: We belong, we learn, we lead. On the right side, we describe what we and members of the community would really experience if we achieve these aspirations—belonging, learning, and leadership.

After establishing a shared understanding of the present and a shared vision of the future, really then shifting into the idea of identifying priority areas and strategies that will address the problem statement and move towards the community commitments is as much as anything in a strategic planning process that’s really community-rooted is kind of straightforward. You’re identifying a few things that are going to help you make progress towards belonging, learning, and leadership in the context of Bellevue. That can be really galvanizing. It’s very focusing.

Once you have priority areas like the ones shown here from Burlington, we think that everybody in every district and every leader has a responsibility to communicate with the community about the progress being made over time. You can see here the five priority areas identified through the strategic planning process in Burlington. This one slide captures one way in which the leadership of Burlington communicates about how the strategic plan is being implemented and the progress and ongoing needs are playing out.

Victor Prussack: One of the big pieces of this was this commitment to accountability. It’s interesting you, there was a slide earlier about the change in accountability, especially in this day and age from if you think about the Department of Education, but also for our own agency of education at the state level.

We want there to be accountability, but the accountability we want to be to our community, so our teachers, our students, our families—that’s what we want, and to each other at the district level, that level of accountability. This is one way to do that. It was definitely a difficult process to land on metrics that were measurable and also could make sense to most of those constituents who I mentioned, but also could be reported in a way that if you don’t want to dig deep into data, you could sort of see. We’ve landed on this visual representation. I have a colleague, Karen Vogel, who loves to come up with different ways that one can illustrate changes in progress when we’re thinking about educational data. That’s visual, so visual representations. This is one that she came up with. The lovely piece of this is we are truly seeing progress over time. There are some of the occasional dips. We launched our plan during COVID, so you can imagine what year one was and is—was year one even reliable? But we are really seeing progress right now. It’s also, it’s warts and all, right? There are some places where we maybe are declining or we’re just staying flat. But we’re being honest about that, and that helps us think about how we want to use our resources, time, and money moving forward each year.

Doannie Tran: Yeah. Thank you, Victor. Every time I look at this report, I always think of how elegant it is, honest it is, and how understandable it is. Thank you for showing us a little bit about how Burlington is approaching that.

Now, just considering what we’ve talked about so far, the idea of assembling a diverse coalition, establishing a shared reality through empathy interviews, problem statements, and root causes, and building a vision for the future through community commitments, and then reporting out about progress through tools, just like Victor just shared. All of these parts of the process have been working towards the goal of building legitimacy that is based in relationships, not compliance. We wanted to offer up this video of a student as we close here who is sharing her priority area with the board on the night of the presentation of the strategic plan and its ultimate approval.

Priti Mangar: Good evening everyone. My name’s Priti Mangar, and I’m in 11th grade attending Burlington High School. My family immigrated from Nepal to the United States when I was in second grade. Going to a new school, speaking a different language, and taking in a new environment is a lot for a child. Many children in the district have experienced or are experiencing those overwhelming emotions.

Wanting to be included in the community is a longing of not only immigrant students but every individual. The coalition group has recognized priority area number one to be focused on belonging and well-being. For the metrics, we will know we succeeded in the area when we see that 90% of students and staff say that they belong and their well-being is supported at their school. When there is a decrease in disparity between students on IEPs and not, when there is an increase in the percentage of families that feel they belong in our district, the metrics should demonstrate reduced chronic absenteeism for students who qualify for free and reduced lunch.

Doannie Tran: We wanted to show that to illustrate that much of leadership right now can feel disconnected from the student experience and from the experience of families and educators. By structuring a strategic planning process in a way that intentionally includes those voices, empathizes with them, co-creates with them, and is ultimately in a reciprocal relationship with them, we think this is a key element of building lasting legacy impact and legitimacy in our work.

Nate McClennen: Doannie, Melanie, and Victor, thank you so much. That was really informative. It really helps, I think, our listeners and viewers think about these big picture ideas. The first webinar addressed community vision—how do you build coalitions and co-design? How do you then in this webinar put it together in a strategy and how do you record progress on that strategy and have all stakeholders involved?

Looking forward to our third webinar, which is going to be about implementation. I really appreciate the time and energy put into this work. It makes a difference for the students in both school districts we talked to today. The process itself is going to be really helpful for the folks that watch this video. If you need more information, please connect with us at GettingSmart.com at jessica@gettingsmart.com and CIE at contact@leadingwithlearning.org. We look forward to seeing everybody in the next webinar.

Shifting from Document to Dynamic Action (Part 3)

Transcript

Nate McClennen: Welcome, everybody, to our third webinar in our series on building community vision and implementing strategic plans for districts and schools. Super excited to partner with CIE on this project and this webinar series. They do an amazing job working with schools and districts on building strategies that really involve co-design. So, this third webinar is focused on what happens once you finish your strategic plan. Now, what do you do? So, shifting from document to dynamic action, and today we are joined by three great people. I’m going to pass it off to Doannie after I introduce myself. So, I’m Nate McClennan. I am a senior partner at Getting Smart. Getting Smart does advisory and advocacy for the future of education.

Doannie Tran: Yes, please. Thank you, Nate, once again. So pleased to be here and so grateful for your partnership and that of Getting Smart. My name is Doannie Tran. I’m a partner at the Center for Innovation and Education, where we try to create the next generation of policy in partnership with communities, students, and educators. Ultimately, to make our education systems more responsive to the communities in which they’re embedded. I’m pleased to be joined today by Victor and Melanie, and I’ll let Victor introduce himself first.

Victor Prussack: Thanks for having space. It’s great to be here. My name is Victor Prussack. I’m the Director of Engagement for the Burlington School District in Burlington, Vermont. We’re a relatively small district nationally, but one of the largest in the state. We have around 3,400 students spread across 12 schools, pre-K through 12. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Doannie and others from his team at CIE for over the last four years, helping us create and keep our strategic plan going and alive. I’ll pass it on to Melanie.

Melanie McGee: Hi everyone. Thank you. My name’s Melanie McGee. I’m happy to be here. I’m the director of the Program Management Office for Bellevue School District in Bellevue, Washington. We’ve got about 18,000 to 19,000 students. We are a K-12 plus transition organization, and we have been working with CIE for the past couple of years to develop our strategic plan. Thanks for having me.

Nate McClennen: Welcome, everybody, and again, thank you for taking the time to be with us today and share your wisdom and thoughts with our viewers. I wanted to start by just framing the big picture: we are trying to figure out systems in education where all learners thrive. We think we’re going to leave it at those three words: all learners thrive. There are four different areas we think about at Getting Smart. We talk a lot about the areas that we need to focus on.

One is how do you create broader outcomes? By that, we mean standards, which address core skills, but also these transferable and durable skills that are really important, like collaboration, communication, creativity, etc. We need to make outcomes more broad. We need to create better learning experiences. We know that especially as students get older, engagement levels decrease, and we start losing students; their interest in school drops, etc. We need to create learning experiences that better engage and lead to better outcomes. The third is we need to create stronger signals. How do we take the learning experiences that students experience and put them into a format and document them in a way that either higher ed or employers can see this is what a student can do, knows, and is like as an individual human? Finally, how do we expand learning ecosystems? It’s not just the opportunities within a school district but opportunities that are outside of the school district because we know young people learn everywhere, but often we only count the things that are happening inside the district.

This is our aspirational vision of a new horizon for learning that will help all students thrive. Create broader outcomes. Create better learning experiences. Create stronger signals and expand the learning ecosystem. To do that, we put it in a frame, what we call the Learning Innovation Framework. Our hope is that with this framework, we’re bringing a lot of players together, both in districts and intermediaries that work with districts who are doing great work in this area across the country and across the world. They generally fall into the categories within this framework.

The goal is to accelerate systems change initiatives, build partnerships, and accelerate the learning through regional networks so that these models can meet this new horizon. We start with observation and thinking about what do you notice? Building community vision, which was our first webinar with CIE, building the what, the outcomes, what do we expect all graduates to know and be able to do? What does the learning model look like to achieve those outcomes? For whom the signals that the learners are giving off so that they can reach the job they want or reach the higher education institution they want. Then, where the learning ecosystem has been expanded.

From that, there’s obviously observation and reflection going on along the way, and then always we actually encourage how do we scale and share the things that we’re learning in schools? Part of this webinar series is about thinking about scaling and sharing. We know that CIE does a great job at strategic planning and building community vision, and we want to make sure that gets shared out with districts so more districts are able to create great strategic plans. Today’s webinar, the third in the series, is really focused on this strategy piece. The first one focused on building community vision. The second one focused on writing the strategy. The third one is, what does it look like to actually implement this strategy and purpose so it doesn’t just end up in a Google Doc or a Word doc somewhere or gathering dust on a wall, or whatever the case may be. Excited to hear about how these two districts and how they worked with CIE and Doannie Tran and his team to create an actionable element to a strategy. Doannie, I’m going to turn it back over to you and your team.

Doannie Tran: Thanks, Nate. We’re excited to be here and excited to tackle this really important question: Is strategic planning the end of a process or is it really just the beginning? Often, unfortunately, the signals, love this idea of signals and what do we communicate to important actors all around us. Signals that we send about strategic planning sometimes actually communicate that it’s the end of a process and there’s really no more input or available space for the community to engage. Strategic plans, especially the way that we’ve described them in our previous couple of webinars, really represent an enormous investment in effort and a really deep and meaningful aspiration for the community. But the problem is that even with all of that intention, all of that effort, and all of the dreaming that went into painting the picture of what the strategic plan could and should do, so many plans, at least from the standpoint of many people who are close to children, close to families, become shelfware. It is a binder that’s on the shelf. I haven’t really figured out an analogy to a Google Doc that is never opened, but I’ll think about that a little bit more. They end up just gathering dust.

What we hope for this session is that we want to plan or we want to think about a process by which your plan truly comes alive, continues to live, and actually builds momentum and trust with your community. We think that a key element of being able to live in that idea of a plan that actually lives, is enacted, and is visible and builds momentum with the community is shifting from a compliance mode to a collective ownership mode. In the old model of the way that we’ve traditionally led these sorts of processes, we have really seen it through a compliance lens. Somebody in a room somewhere, a district office created a plan. It gets filtered into a series of top-down directives that really are about making sure that certain boxes can be checked so that we can report to the board that we’re making progress and that the stakeholders are just the recipients of these directives and these progress updates.

What that ends up often creating is a cycle of low-key resistance, minimal buy-in, and the plan really becoming irrelevant to the lived experience of the educators who are actually supposed to be enacting it, the students who are supposed to be impacted by it, and the families and communities that are supposed to see progress. In this new model, we think about the key phrases here being collective and reciprocal. What we think about is we want to do this in a way that actually unlocks capacity in our communities. All of those people that I just mentioned, families, students, educators, community members, these are all people who have knowledge, skill, and ability that can help further the strategic plan’s implementation. We want to unlock that capacity. We want to build legitimacy and trust with all of those people, and we want to sustain this work over time and with the kinds of turnover that tend to happen in every sort of public system. At the heart of this new model are these four habits: inclusion, empathy, co-creation, and reciprocity.

Inclusion is where we intentionally are bringing diverse voices into roles of implementation. Empathy is understanding and responding to the needs and perspectives of those who have to carry out the plan every day and are impacted by it so that we can actually respond to the new information that’s coming in. Co-creation is designing and adapting that implementation process alongside the community, not just having them be passive recipients of all of our new plans. Reciprocity is continuing to ensure that whatever it is that we’re doing is actually being enacted in a way that generates mutual benefit and shares power as we follow through with implementation. We’re thrilled here to be joined by two districts who are doing this work on the ground every day in partnership with their communities. What I appreciate about both Victor and Melanie is that they are doing this work and they’re incredibly honest and real about all of the challenges and all of the things that are going well versus not going well and where there are still areas for growth.

If you want to hear a little bit more about that, Victor spoke really beautifully about the ongoing reporting to the community about progress in the last webinar. We just want to feature these two voices because they are real districts undergoing real transformation and doing this work. Bellevue has taken on the idea of empowering design teams and a steering committee to really engage in co-production during the implementation process, and I’m going to let Melanie speak a little bit more to that now. Thanks, Melanie.

Melanie McGee: Thanks, Doannie. We are in year two of our strategic plan, and last year we followed the process that Doannie and team outlined previously, brought together a coalition to co-design, came up with the problem statement of root causes that you’ve seen. This year, we pulled the coalition back together, added some new voices and members. Their charge was to take that strategic plan that the group developed last year and come up with what our five-year goals and measures would be. So, what can we actually hold ourselves accountable to? What are those measures? What are those metrics? As Victor mentioned, those are really hard to come up with.

On one hand, we had a coalition working this past year to come up with those goals and measures. On the other hand, we had a series of design teams. The way that our strategic planning process works in the district, we have a five-year strategic plan, we have annual plans that we do each year, and we have school improvement plans. They’re all sort of nested one underneath the other. We had our strategic plan last year, and we needed an annual plan, so we did the thing that you’re not supposed to do, where a few of us went into a room to create that annual plan and came up with our best thinking and 20 initiatives that we wanted to tackle this year, all connected very nicely to one of those three commitments that we came up with. There was not a ton of shared ownership. We got questions like, who came up with this? Where did this come from? Why are we doing these specific things? We had to answer and say, it was us. We did it. We thought it was the best next step. We know we still have to define our measures.

For those 20 initiatives, about six of them had design teams that we pulled together this year, and their charge was to go deeper in a particular area. I’ll give you a couple of examples. You saw on a previous slide where our priority areas were really centered around the Belong, Learn, and Lead. We had some initiatives around developing a welcome center that would be connected to this idea of creating a sense of belonging, really helping new students, new families who are coming into the district be able to navigate our system better. When we talk about a welcome center, yes, it’s a physical space, but it’s so much more than that, and it really embodies the experience that we want folks to have as they are coming into our district. We had a design team that we pulled together this year to go deeper into defining what could that look like, what should it include, what different departments would need to be situated over there? What are the different needs that people in the community are going to have that would cause them to come into a welcome center? That team worked very specifically in that area. The connection that team has to our big strategic plan coalition this year is then thinking about what are those five-year measures and metrics that we’re looking at. We know belonging is important. We know what people want to feel and experience in the system when they’re belonging, what should be our measures for that? We use some of the work that the Welcome Center team was doing to help us further define that. That example carried through the additional design teams that we had as well.

As I mentioned, there were several more, some that were connected to our Belong priority, some that were connected to Learn, some that were connected to Lead. They’ve been in the field on the ground doing work this year. We have liaisons from each one of the design teams who also sit on our coalition so that we have that reciprocal feedback loop going on between the coalition and the design teams. As we’re nearing the end of this first year and coming to a place where we will have some strategic goals and measures to accompany our plan, I will say that the work that the design teams have done to really help us think through what those measures should be has been invaluable. Those are the people who are going to experience what it is we’re doing. Those are the ones who we’re going to ask, to what extent are we making good on these commitments? Having their voice and having their input along the way has been instrumental in helping us further our plan.

I will say it’s not been a perfect process. I was sharing with Doannie, you know, our district this year is going through some financial challenges, some pretty deep financial challenges. We bit off a lot with our strategic plan in terms of what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go. It’s very real for people to say, but given our current context and climate, is it realistic to think that all of these things can still be priorities, and how are you going to cull it to the most important, highest impact? Again, just having those different voices has been really helpful. I remember one of the things that Doannie and CIE would tell us last year, and it was how the work is the work. I always think about that, the relationships that we’re building and the conversations that we’re having and the empathy that we’re building from one another. Being able to see different roles and different people who may at first blush appear to have competing interests, when they share their experiences and you get down to their needs and their feelings, and you can connect with each other on a human level, it really does so much to bring us together as a community.

Doannie Tran: Love it. Thank you so much, Melanie, for the honest reflection about the opportunities and challenges from this year and how you’ve navigated them as the work has continued to emerge. I love the connection that you just made there around how we work is the work. It’s a perfect lead-in to this other aspect of this that we want to highlight. When you implement your strategic plan, it’s an opportunity to model and live into your values. Nate did such a great job at the beginning of this, talking about the systems that we want to make, a place where all learners can thrive. If your district or your community has a vision for that, then your implementation of the strategic plan is an opportunity to model it. If you value student agency, where are the opportunities to co-create with students as you’re implementing the plan? If you have a value around diverse perspectives, how might you include more perspectives at every stage of the follow-through? If you value community and connection, how do you lead with empathy and model the building of reciprocal relationships with people in your community as you’re implementing?

Do you value collaborative problem solving and want to model that for young people? How can you co-create in order to navigate the challenges that inevitably come up when you’re implementing complex strategies and plans? When you follow through in a way that mirrors your district’s learner-centered values, it reinforces them system-wide. It shows that you’re walking the walk. It shows your school leaders that this plan is not just a checklist; it’s a way of working. It models to your students and your families that the way in which you want them to learn is the way in which you are going to operate. We think that this alignment creates a culture where everyone can experience the kind of inclusive, dynamic learning that we’re trying to spur everywhere. It helps us to create a system that ultimately is able to learn and adapt. What we think comes out of that is increased legitimacy because the plan is seen as something that isn’t talking out of both sides of your mouth, where you’re saying one thing and doing something else. It’s authentic because the implementation mirrors the way in which you want to work, which when you take advantage of that legitimacy and build on that legitimacy, it deepens the trust that you have with your community because you’re practicing ongoing responsiveness and empathy through the way in which you are following through with your plan. Because you’re activating more of your community, more of your school district leadership, more of your students, you’re actually building a culture of agency, which you think would maybe increase some level of people going off and doing their own thing. It actually means that people are taking initiative in ways that if you can funnel that learning back into the system the way that Melanie talked about, and with their steering committee and coalition and the design teams can actually really build people’s sense that I am an actor and a meaningful part of implementing the strategic plan. It makes the change more sustainable because the people who are enacting it aren’t doing it because they’re being told to. They’re doing it because they’re following a need and following a process that helps them take ownership over it.

Victor Prussack: Even going back into an earlier part of our discussion here, I think of the strategic plan. Traditionally for us, I know it sat on the shelf 100% the Google Doc that was never opened and wasn’t even admired honestly. What I have seen happen, it’s almost like a living organism now because what the Guiding Coalition came up with four years ago, there’s been evolution of that over time as things change. So that’s one thing I think about. The other piece is this slide that’s up here right now, I think about the term symmetry. I met Doannie actually through a group of educators from across North America who I’m connected to. Our district is connected to the deeper learning districts. You speak all deeper learning, dozen. It’s based out of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. The term symmetry is something that we’ve used in the beginning there. For us, at least, and I wonder about this for Bellevue, this type of approach that we’re talking about, a very inclusive approach, one that has deep levels of co-creation, is really what we want to see happening at the classroom level. We are really trying hard to model that throughout the system. People can see that part almost the habits of the strategic plan living throughout the day-to-day workings of the districts and the way decisions are made. That is what’s going to make it sustainable over time. I’m curious for us, we’re in our year four, so in about a year we’ll be thinking about the next iteration of our five-year plan. I’m curious if that piece of it will just be a given moving forward. Will we need to, will we need to really examine things like habits or will that just be the givens and we really need to think about just what are our main priorities going to be for the next five years?

Doannie Tran: Thank you so much, Victor, for bringing up this idea of symmetry. Modeling and symmetry are ways in which we both change the ways that we work, also show others how they could also be a part of this process in a way that’s aligned to it.

Melanie McGee: If I may, I just want to be really honest and transparent that this is hard work. It’s hard to change old practices, and it has been so valuable to have partners like you to work with along the way to help continue to push us forward. It’s easy to fall back to what we know, and we found ourselves even doing it this year where we thought we were doing the group a favor and taking some things that they had talked about and taking it into the back room to summarize it and bring it back to them to let them react. They called us on it. They said, no, this isn’t it. This isn’t what we talked about you. This isn’t reflecting it. They were right, and we needed to hear that. I just want to acknowledge that it is hard to change, it’s hard to change practice. We know that. We hear that from our educators all the time. They go to training, and they learn new ways of working and new practices, and yet to try to implement it, it can be a whole different story. I just want to appreciate and value having strong partners to walk alongside with us in this journey. We have truly valued that.

A couple of other things that just stand out as I’m thinking about this slide in particular around the legitimacy and the deepening trust, the culture of agency. We have seen our students become so active and so involved through these design teams that we’ve done. Through the coalition, they are leading so much of this work on their own, organizing meetings outside of their school day, outside of our meeting hours, so that they’re bringing things back together for other folks in the room to look at and respond to. It’s just really been incredible to watch. Yes, it’s exactly what we want them to do in the classroom too. I think that’s a really key point. We even talk about it as we’re trying to come up with our measures for We Lead and we’re saying, why are we sitting in a room really talking about this? The kids told us they want to be agents of change in their lives, and how would we know? Well, we would have more opportunities, and it wouldn’t just be opportunities; it would be people really helping us stretch maybe outside of our comfort zone as kids to take something on that we might not have thought about doing.

The final thing that I’ll say is thinking about doing a process in this way. We recognized early on that we wanted to do something different with how we designed the strategic plan, and we wanted to continue to do something different in how we came up with the measures. Yet there’s been a very real tension that we’ve been grappling with around, but what do we do with some of those traditional measures? We feel a moral imperative to ensure that our students graduate proficient in math and literacy, and yet we don’t want those to be the only things that we’re looking at. We’ve landed on this idea of continuing to use a measurement blend where yes, we have some quantitative data that we want to review and look at. We also want to look at qualitative. We also want to continue to go out and talk to people and better understand how they’re experiencing the system. What are their feelings? What are their needs? What is the experience of one person here? Different artifacts. Thinking through different ways of knowing how we’re doing on those commitments has been incredible. Really, truly, and I look forward to the next stage.

Doannie Tran: Thank you, Melanie and Victor, for illustrating an incredibly important point here: we are all in uncharted territory. Education is undergoing tectonic, seismic shifts. One of the traps that we think leaders can fall into is the trap of needing to be seen as having all the answers and to have the plan. We just gotta do the plan as opposed to acknowledging that situations are changing, new information is coming in, creating structures and systems for that, and displaying the kind of vulnerability that both Melanie and Victor have just spoken so eloquently about, that sometimes we just don’t know, or we made a mistake, and now we’ve gotta pivot and bringing more people into that as opposed to walling them off and keeping them on the outside. It’s what builds trust is for people to feel like they’re on your team. I think Melanie and Victor and Bellevue and Burlington respectively have really done an incredible job of really expanding the tent and building trust with their communities through the implementation of their strategic plans.

To close out, we just want to recap that implementation is where you are really trying to deliver on the promise of your plan and that you want to shift from compliance and top-down mandates to co-implementation, co-creation with a broad variety of users, and that you want to align your follow-through process with the values that your organization holds, especially as it relates to being learner-centered and community-centered. This approach, we believe, is an approach that builds trust, legitimacy, and the culture of agency that we really do want to see suffused through all of our learning experiences, as Victor mentioned. Now, as we are closing out this part, we just want to offer up a couple of points of reflection: who can be your co-implementers for the initiatives that you’re taking on now, and what’s one way to make your current follow-through more reciprocal and more inclusive with the community that you’re meant to serve?

Thank you for engaging in these questions. Thank you to Melanie and Victor for bringing their on-the-ground deep expertise and experience to this conversation as well.

Nate McClennen: Thank you, Doannie. Thank you, Melanie. Thank you, Victor. I really appreciate your time and insight. Super valuable for, I’m sure those who are watching this. My takeaways are this: we want all students to thrive. It is the goal for us. We need a strong community vision. We need a strong strategy, and we need to be able to implement that strategy well, and it needs to be co-created and highly agentic. With that, we hope that from these three webinars you’ll have the incentive, motivation, and interest to reach out to either us at CIE, at contact@leadingwithlearning.org, or Getting Smart at jessica@gettingsmart.com to ask questions, look for ideas, look for resources. We’re all here to help support you on your journey. Thank you so much, and we look forward to hearing from you.

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