How Well Does Your School Learn?
Schools that are learning organizations are primed to outperform their peers
Greetings from NYC where we’re back to school in the wake of a blizzard and mid-week flurries falling amidst the morning commute. The city has seen two significant storms in the new year, and as the New York Times reported, the first served as a learning opportunity for our new mayor when confronting the second.
As shared in the Times, “Mr. Mamdani urged staff members to apply the lessons they learned from the past storm.” As such, city staffers increased proactive communication about the coming snow, sent ambulettes to provide additional supplies to New Yorkers in need, expanded access to shelter beds, and partnered with state officials to implement emergency measures to keep drivers off the roads. In the context of a “once in a decade” snowstorm, the consequences of success or failure are literally life or death. And though New Yorkers are still navigating this seemingly neverending winter, it appears the proactive measures put in place by Mamdani and team reduced the impact of the storm, particularly on the city’s most vulnerable populations.
All this got me thinking: we now have a mayor who learns, and who is cultivating a culture within city hall so that it can become what Peter Senge calls “a learning organization.” Per Senge, a learning organization is one in which:
“people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.”
Schools would seem to be ideal places to be learning organizations, but there is nothing inherent in the walls of a school building that fosters a culture of learning. Rather, becoming a learning organization requires leadership, systems, routines, and participation. Here are three thoughts on how leaders can facilitate a culture of learning within their schools, and in doing so, accelerate growth and development for adults and students alike:
(1) Take radical ownership over outcomes – and invest your team in the same. To generate the type of “results they truly desire,” team members need to believe in their own ability to impact and improve outcomes. But this is easier said than done. The problem of low expectations within schools is well documented, but perhaps less often discussed is the relationship between educators’ low expectations and their own feelings of diminished self-efficacy. Per Bandura, when individuals lack self-efficacy, they do not expend effort because of their perception that their effort is futile. Leaders operating within schools must both confront their team’s level of self-efficacy as well as their own. And they can begin by modeling what it looks like to lead with the belief that one’s actions can and will lead to improvements in outcomes. Doing so can generate quick wins and positive momentum toward goals – launching a virtuous cycle that demonstrates to team members that it’s possible to actively shape the future they want to bring into fruition.
(2) Institutionalize routines for reflecting upon (and learning from) successes and failures. The pace of a school day is often so fast and furious that there’s little time to pause and reflect. But effective leaders make reflection – and learning from successes and failures – a habit. One way to do this is by systematizing engagement in after-action reviews. In an after-action review, team members gather immediately following implementation of an initiative to answer four key questions:
What did we aim to accomplish? (consider both goals and strategy)
What did we actually do? (consider how execution compared to strategy)
Why did it happen that way? (consider causes of gaps between execution and strategy)
If our aims were met: What lessons did we learn and how can we repeat our success?
OR
If our aims were not met: What changes will we make to our strategy and/or execution in order to achieve better outcomes?
Treating such a protocol as a compliance exercise will likely do very little to change or improve outcomes. But when leaders build commitment to a culture of learning from mistakes, the systematic use of such routines can facilitate a culture where growth and improvement is non-negotiable.
(3) Empower everyone to notice and address problems. In learning organizations, participation in continuous improvement efforts is not limited to those at the top of the organizational hierarchy. Rather, frontline team members (i.e. teachers) have a critical role to play given their unique vantage point and, in the case of schools, their proximity to the core work of the institution (i.e. educating students). Teachers see problems that others are likely to miss. But they are unlikely to speak up and name problems, let alone solutions, if disempowered and discouraged from doing so.
Leaders can address this by teaching everyone on their team to “pull the cord.” The metaphorical cord comes from a reference to a physical cord located on the production line of Toyota manufacturing plants. Toyota had created an organizational culture where anyone on the line could pull the cord at any time if they noticed a problem with production. Once pulled, the production line would stop and supervisors and/or support team members would be alerted of a need for a fix. Activating this process had a cost. It temporarily slowed productivity and required time and resources. But the expense was worth it because the organization understood that the consequences of NOT addressing the issue in real time would be far more costly.
In organizations that learn, team members — especially those most proximal to the frontlines — must be empowered to pull the cord. But just telling them to do so is not enough. The true leadership test comes from how leaders respond when team members raise up their concerns. When leaders demonstrate how the entire organization learns and improves when one team member is brave enough to elevate a problem in need of a solution, cord-pulling becomes a part of the culture. And over time, elevating issues so that everyone can learn an improve no longer requires bravery or risk-taking — because it simply becomes the way we do things here.
Back to our mayor who learns: the response to the city’s blizzard was certainly imperfect. There were power outages and inconsistencies in snow removal. There were communication breakdowns between various city agencies. But even critics of the response noted that the city’s plans this time were “10 times better” than last time. Fostering a learning organization doesn’t mean we execute perfectly or that our problems go away. But it does enable rapid improvement that has the potential to accelerate growth and make possible outcomes that previously may have seen unattainable. For school leaders looking to unleash the potential of their school communities, fostering a school that learns is a powerful place to start.