School model design is an ongoing, iterative process. Too often, educators engage in a strong, student-centered design process but once the school launches, they stop designing. At Springpoint, we believe that school design is never done. Schools must be learning organizations, committed to continued adaptation, iteration, and change.
To hear about how schools can use summer break to iterate on their school models, we spoke with two Springpoint directors who are former school leaders. Sam Sherwood, Springpoint’s Director of Design and Implementation, previously ran Bronx Arena High School , a transfer school serving over-age and under-credited students. Suzette Dyer is the former leader of Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice, and currently serves as Director of Leadership at Springpoint. We also chatted with the principal of one of our partner schools, Lisa Simms from Denver School of Innovation and Sustainable Design, to hear about how she’s gearing up for a summer of collaborative planning and design.
Summer design work is part of a larger iteration cycle.
Summer is a natural and valuable pause point that allows leaders to sift through and apply overarching goals to their iteration work. Lisa Simms’ strategic planning work builds off inflection points during the year. Her school’s goals and new needs, for example, arose during a planning cycle that spanned January and March. When Suzette led Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice, she was very intentional about leveraging summer planning as one part of a larger picture of design and iteration. She would survey and talk to students in late winter about the electives they hoped to have the following year. The timing was strategic as students tend to be more engaged earlier in the year, compared right before summer break. The information she collected allowed her to build her staffing plan and course schedule in the summer. She also leveraged the summer in her quest to revise the school’s grading policy. Her first summer, the team read extensively about assessment and grading, engaging in lengthy conversations about formative assessment and learning. During the school year, Suzette highlighted proof points and worked to get everyone on board. This set her up to rework the entire grading policy the following summer for fall roll out. The summer after that, she provided even deeper professional development to illustrate models of summative assessments and show rich examples to refine the policy.
Prepare for summer iteration.
Leaders shouldn’t wait until the summer to think about iteration. Reviewing data sets in the spring—including graduation rates, credit accumulation, attendance, student and staff surveys, recruitment efforts, retention—can help identify patterns and let leaders select a focus point. For example, a school leadership team might look closely at credit accumulation to see which subjects students struggle with most in order to address that during iteration. Sketching out the data before summer also lets school leaders have informal conversations or focus groups with students to get a better understanding of the realities that underpin the data. Without being able to ask students directly, leaders may rely on assumptions, leading to a host of issues. For example, one summer Sam set out to address student tardiness. Since first period was advisory, she assumed that students didn’t show up because they didn’t think advisory was important. Sam reworked the schedule to put required courses during first period. Unfortunately, she found out that students did not change their behavior in response to what class they had first period. This meant that when students were late, now instead of missing advisory, they were missing key content classes they needed for graduation.
Carefully plan for community collaboration, communications, and roll out.
As leaders iterate, they need to involve their community. Suzette found summer a great time to engage key stakeholders, often inviting them to share food and ideas. One summer, parents, students, and teachers joined her for a working dinner where they revised and rewrote the discipline code. She also maximized summer as a time to run institutes of learning and offer professional development to teachers.
Ideally, teachers and staff are deeply involved in summer iteration work, but they might turn off in the summer—which will help them come back refreshed in the fall. Therefore, leaders may make decisions without stakeholder involvement. Leaders can find points of involvement, such as pre-summer conversations with key staff or calling several students to gut check iteration ideas. But the reality is that, since some changes will likely be made without all stakeholders, leaders need a rollout strategy that conveys key messages early and clearly. Roll out can take many forms, such as home visits, deploying key stakeholders, sending home letters or emails. Leaders can plot out the best approach based on their population and the changes to be made. Sam, for example, staggered roll out by first informing advocate counselors about key changes so they could talk to students during home visits that summer. Since advocate counselors were able to own the idea, which helped build enthusiasm about telling students.
Within Lisa’s process of determining what to focus in service of refining systems and essential elements, her leadership team has narrowed the school’s 15 drivers of success to three pillars. In messaging this to staff, she plans to emphasize that the same priorities remain, but are more focused. She likened it to “moving around your furniture to make more living space. Everything we valued is still there it’s just better organized.” This work will also shape her leadership team’s focus on “wildly important goals,” an approach based on work by Sean Covey.
Anticipate unintended effects.
School leaders, when making big and small changes alike, should look at all the systems and structures needed for success. Part of that is making sure new programming or a change of focus does not create major gaps. For example, if a school leader asks counselors to spend more time on college and career planning, that may leave less time and capacity for them to focus on restorative justice, which could lead to discord among students, and thus more fights. School designers need to balance and anticipate the ripples of all shifts.
Find an inspiring place to do iteration work.
Getting outside of the normal work space can help leaders jumpstart new ideas. Staying inside a school can stall big picture thinking because school is a place where leaders might be reactive, and not as proactive as they might like to be. A separation from the normal routine also sets people outside of their comfort zone and accelerates innovation. Sam recommends finding an outdoor space—she’d often post up on her co-principal’s deck. Lisa is currently having her backyard landscaped and looks forward to hanging up some hammocks in her iteration oasis. For leaders seeking a new and inspiring space check out common work spaces like WeWork, set up shop in a park or garden, see if local universities have space, or find a coffee shop, library, or low-key roof deck.
Find a thought partner or two.
Suzette found deep value in having thought partners and an engaged support team. In her first year as principal, she did not anticipate this, resulting in more isolated work time. She recommends that leaders figure out early who can provide iteration support where needed. Her next summer as principal, she was thoughtful about who led summer school, picking some of her best instructors and giving them smaller teaching loads so they could spend time iterating with her. Lisa has convened a strong senior leadership team of five, buffeted by a wider design team of nine people that includes experts from all key content areas.
Build relationships with key stakeholders.
Not only is summer a great time to cultivate community partnerships, but it can be a great time for leaders to build trust and deepen relationships with stakeholder groups like parents and support staff. Suzette used the summer to talk to parents because they don’t have other school-based commitments and they weren’t worried that she was calling about negative student behavior. She also spent a lot of time with custodians and security staff, including bi-weekly meetings where they talked about support and school culture, using scenarios and crafting protocols.
Focus on more than just problem-solving.
At Bronx Arena, Sam would address key issues in her model, but also saw the importance of “mak[ing] changes to the school, even if things are going well.” She believes leaders should think about both what isn’t working as well as what might be working too well. A flexible model can create “happy accidents” and leave room for teachers to explore their areas of expertise and flex their creative muscles. Innovative schools are living breathing organisms meant to serve students, who are always changing and evolving. If something is too stale or predictable, it could turn into a problem down the line—maybe it will bore staff or students, or create more traditional system conditions.
Take a step back.
All leaders recognize the importance of resting and recharging so that leading a school is sustainable. Sam took the same week off each summer, and Suzette unplugged for the first week after the end of school. Inspired by Simon Sinek’s strategy work, Lisa and her team are doing deep reflection work to find their “why” to refocus on goals and priorities, and to inspire all stakeholders in the “how” and “what” they do. She gets to dig into her “later list,” which helps her organize the things that are important but not time sensitive, including personal goals.
Summer is a great time for any school leader to engage in thoughtful, student-centered school design and iteration. As Lisa said, the summer is a perfect time to “stop and pause so we can ask ourselves how we’re doing…it’s easy to default to crisis mode during the year. We can think about systems and processes that may have started strong but died or shifted away from their purpose.”
We encourage all leadership teams to be intentional around iteration this summer. Please reach out if you have any questions about school design or iteration info@springpointschools.org