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This article looks into how to lead with emotional understanding of staff and students.

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Online June 2018 | Volume 75
Fighting Educator Burnout Pages 46-51

Janet Patti, Allison Holzer, Robin S. Stern, James Floman and Marc A. Brackett

For school leaders, stress is inevitable. The day-to-day grind of leading is emotionally demanding, and new challenges and higher accountability create a fever pitch of emotion that can churn inside even the strongest of leaders.

However, although stress is expected for education leaders, burnout can be optional. Moderate amounts of healthy stress triggered by efforts to achieve meaningful goals (called eustress in the research literature) can increase personal accomplishment and workplace engagement and even improve job performance (McGonigal, 2016).

The problem arises when stress becomes so frequent and so overwhelming that it leaves educators physically and emotionally depleted and they no longer feel a sense of passion and personal accomplishment (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001; Le Fevre, Matheny, & Kolt, 2003). When this happens, stress becomes distress, and one runs the risk of burning out.

The impact of constant stressors-such as the social-emotional demands of work or a steady stream of crises that challenge one's sense of perspective-can lead to the chronic depletion of mental and physical resources or "emotional exhaustion" (Grissom & Andersen, 2012; Maslach et al., 2001). But this level of distress can be effectively navigated, or even avoided. Research suggests that principals with higher levels of self-efficacy tend to display higher levels of work engagement and job satisfaction, along with lower levels of burnout (Federici & Skaalvik, 2012). Self-efficacy is a key psychological capacity for inoculation against the high pressures of educational leadership.

Getting Emotional

To understand how a leader's sense of personal accomplishment and self-efficacy can fade or grow, we have to understand the power of emotions. A recent study found that school leaders who reported greater levels of emotional exhaustion were more likely to experience a range of negative emotions, such as anxiety or anger, and were less likely to experience various positive emotions, such as hope or joy (Brackett, Floman, & Bradley, 2018). Also, emotionally exhausted leaders were less satisfied with their jobs and were more likely to want to quit the profession or retire.

Not only does burnout take a toll on a leader's work, but it also has a negative impact on his or her mental and physical health. The same study found that leaders who scored higher on emotional exhaustion reported exercising less frequently, missing more work days due to stress and mental health problems, and experiencing greater sleep troubles.
Researchers and educators from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and Star Factor Coaching have been helping superintendents in the New York City school district strengthen their emotional intelligence by showing that emotions matter. Photos courtesy of Janet Patti Madeline Chaffee and Kathryn Lee teach emotional intelligence training in Brooklyn, New York.
Flexing Our Emotional Intelligence Muscles

Emotional exhaustion-a by-product of chronic unhealthy stress-is not inevitable for school leaders. A major cause of distress is when leaders mismanage emotionally charged situations. This suggests that, by developing the skills of emotional intelligence (EI) (Salovey & Mayer, 1990), school leaders can prevent much workplace stress.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize emotions in one's self and in others, to understand the causes and effects of emotions, and to manage emotions effectively to suit a goal or situation (Mayer, Caruso, & Salovey, 2016). Leaders with developed EI possess greater self-awareness: Among other actions, they pause multiple times throughout the school day to reflect on their emotions and their meaning. Critically, emotionally intelligent leaders learn to recognize the behaviors, triggers, and events that lead to unhealthy stress.

Since 2015, the New York City school district has spearheaded an unprecedented initiative to infuse EI training throughout the school system. Partnering with our organizations- Star Factor Coaching and the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence -NYC has developed a program that includes intensive professional development training and coaching in emotional intelligence for district and school leaders.

Dolores Esposito served 11 years as a superintendent before taking on her current role as an executive superintendent of leadership at the New York City Department of Education. She says the emotional intelligence training she has received helps her thrive rather than burn out in psychologically demanding positions. The skills she has learned not only help her to manage her own emotions, but they also empower her to recognize and understand others' feelings, especially those who have competing needs and require personalized support to move toward positive action. Further, Esposito now recognizes authentic listening as an essential skill that facilitates her leadership efforts and supports the needs of all school stakeholders.

"Without emotional intelligence strategies and skills, it would have been much more difficult to effectively lead, inspire, and manage the complexity of the 21st century superintendent's role," Esposito says.

A New Professional Development

As part of the EI development program, all New York City school leaders attend training sessions that are based on RULER, a tool developed by researchers at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence that provides an evidence-based approach to social-emotional learning. It teaches five key skills: recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotions (see " Focus Areas for Developing Emotional Intelligence"). From the outset, the educators learn that emotions matter in schools, especially for learning, decision making, relationships, health, and everyday performance. Using role plays, reflection, and feedback, they practice applying these skills in positive communication, conflict management, empathy, and systems thinking.

To reinforce and individualize leaders' learning, the district partners with leadership coaches from our two organizations. The coaches work with individual leaders for five months to explore emotional challenges and successes. Coaches ask questions, listen, and provide resources on how leaders can develop specific skills, such as emotional regulation. These skills directly help to build resilience and support healthy interpersonal problem solving and conflict resolution.

The coaching process begins with leaders reflecting on their personal and professional vision and values and setting personal and professional goals for their own development. Then, throughout the process, the leaders get intensive and thorough feedback on their leadership behaviors. The feedback helps them identify the gap between the leader they are and the leader they hope to become. Blind spots and challenge areas are identified and become the focus of leadership development goals. Examples of development goals include: listening more (and solving problems without others' input less), showing empathy to others in need, being more present and focused, empowering rather than micromanaging others, managing frustration or disappointment more effectively, and being more in tune with the emotions of those around them (rather than making assumptions). As leaders make progress toward their goals, they generally become more hopeful and confident about their leadership and what is possible for their school community.

As school leaders build their leadership self-efficacy, they model their emotional intelligence skills. These leaders actively and regularly articulate their vision to the larger school community. For example, one superintendent who has undergone coaching now begins every professional development meeting with stories about her progress developing greater self-awareness and self-management. She speaks about how she now uses breathing exercises and pauses before reacting when she feels angry. This is in comparison to how she used to blurt out whatever she was thinking or feeling, sometimes to the detriment of others. Her transparency about her leadership growth inspires others to grow themselves, generating a positive contagion of personal development throughout her district.

A Systemwide, Cascading Impact

The focus on emotionally intelligent leadership in NYC public schools has fostered a systemwide effort to build a culture anchored in emotional intelligence. The leaders' training has helped to transform multiple school communities into collaborative learning environments with a shared vision, common values, and clear norms of how to develop together. With enhanced EI skills, healthy relationships thrive and supportive social networks accelerate student success. Through the ripple effects of implementing EI training in leaders, positive communication and healthy social-emotional development can spread to teachers and to students (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009).

In these school communities, self-awareness and self-management skills have become the pillars of pedagogy and school culture. Educators become proactive with their emotions, which helps them to avert the array of workplace stressors that trigger burnout and turnover. This can also lead to more conscious interactions, generative relationships, and a willingness to support one another through challenging moments. In schools with this developmental focus, conflict gets put on the table instead of under it, and adults work through the hard issues instead of avoiding them. Assumptions are challenged, and differences are explored to find common ground. In schools where EI is integrated throughout, adults are equipped to work through all of the hard spots.

Where to Start

Not every district may be ready to implement a systemwide approach to promoting emotional intelligence. However, all education leaders can take steps today to focus on the five key ingredients of EI skill building. In the absence of a more formalized investment in EI leadership or professional development, every school district or school leader can:

Create an expectation that emotions matter. Emotions are a part of everyone, and all leaders can get better at how we handle stressors.

Foster a culture that not only includes traditional instructional learning coaching, but also supports leaders and teachers socially andemotionally.

Incorporate self-reflection practices into every professional development opportunity. Reflection exercises should explore ways to examine our thinking about our emotions and our emotional skill levels.

Prioritize time in meetings to discuss school challenges and ideas with community members and receive feedback about how teachers and leaders handled difficult situations.

Revisit community norms regularly to check in on how everyone is feeling about the school's climate.

Emphasize self-care practices, such as meditation, yoga classes, exercise, and retreats. Allow teachers to include a self-care commitment when they set their performance goals.

Encourage individuals to take short physical or mental breaks every 45-60 minutes, to focus on work that makes them feel capable and productive, and to use their time off for enjoyable activities.

When given time and space for EI development, education leaders are more likely to see moderate levels of stress as a pathway toward self-efficacy and personal accomplishment. With self-awareness to detect the onset of unhealthy stress and helpful strategies to manage stress, leaders are more likely to reach out for emotional and community support, avoid burnout, reconnect with their purpose, and more passionately and skillfully cultivate flourishing schools.

References

Brackett, M. A., Floman, J. L., & Bradley, C. (2018). Emotion revolution for education leaders (survey). Unpublished data. Yale University.

Federici, R., & Skaalvik, E. (2012). Principal self-efficacy: Relations with burnout, job satisfaction, and motivation to quit. Social Psychology Education, 15(3), 295-320.

Grissom, J. A., & Andersen, S. (2012). Why superintendents turn over. American Educational Research Journal, 49(6), 1146-1180.

Jennings, P. A., & Greenberg, M. T. (2009). The prosocial classroom: Teacher social and emotional competence in relation to student and classroom outcomes. Review of Educational Research, 79(1), 491-525.

Le Fevre, M., Matheny, J., & Kolt, G. S. (2003). Eustress, distress, and interpretation in occupational stress. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 18(7), 726-744.

Maslach, C., Schaufeli, W. B., & Leiter, M. P. (2001). Job burnout. American Review of Psychology, 52, 397-422.

Mayer, J. D., Caruso, D. R., & Salovey, P. (2016). The ability model of emotional intelligence: Principles and updates. Emotion Review, 8(4), 290-300.

McGonigal, K. (2016). The upside of stress. New York: Avery.

Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9(3), 185-211.

Janet Patti is a professor in educational leadership at Hunter College and cofounder of Star Factor Coaching, a consulting firm that partners with districts and schools to build social and emotional capacities in educators. Allison Holzer is the co-founder of the talent-strategy firm InspireCorps and the principal design, research, and strategy officer for Star Factor Coaching. Robin S. Stern is the associate director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale University and co-founder of Star Factor Coaching. James Floman is a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale University. Marc A. Brackett is a professor in the Child Study Center at Yale University and director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.

KEYWORDS

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Online June 2018 | Volume 75 Fighting Educator Burnout Pages 46-51 Janet Patti, Allison Holzer, Robin S. Stern, James Floman and Marc A. Brackett For school leaders, stress is inevitable. The day-to-day grind of leading is emotionally demanding, and new challenges and higher accountability create a fever pitch of emotion that can churn inside even the strongest of leaders.

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This article looks at communication on the various levels of educational leadership.

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This article explores why leadership in schools is important. The author looks at past trends in educational leadership, and discusses new approaches based on current issues within schools.

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When 93 teachers and staffers were fired from Rhode Island's Central Falls High School in 2010, it fueled a nationwide debate over how failing schools might be resurrected.

But of all the school's dismal statistics, and there were plenty to choose from - fewer than half of its students graduated within four years, and only seven percent of its juniors were proficient in math - issues of chronic instability loomed largest: In six years, it been led by nearly as many principals.

Of everything we've learned about the art and science of reforming a failing school in the past decade, school leadership is second only to teacher quality in terms of importance - and the more dire a school's predicament, the greater the need for strong leadership. Because of this, the emphasis is now less on the lone dynamic teacher and more on the whole school environment.

"Indeed, there are virtually no documented instances of troubled schools being turned around without intervention by a powerful leader," said Kenneth Leithwood, a professor at the University of Toronto who studies leadership.

While the topic of school reform is hardly a new one, we haven't always looked to school leaders as harbingers of change.

Since 1983, when A Nation At Risk warned Americans that its public schools were failing at an alarming rate, reform has taken on many different forms, with some experiments yielding more success than others. At both the local and federal levels, however, our slow progress hasn't been for a lack of ideas. Among them: stringent graduation requirements, national standards, new approaches to how reading and math are taught, smaller classes, smaller schools, greater accountability through increased testing, and a focus on recruiting and retaining highly qualified teachers.
New thinking on leadership
More recently, research has emphasized the importance of school leadership in improving outcomes for a school and its students. But make no mistake: this is not the school leader as drill sergeant, or the charismatic leader whose skill-set is impossible to replicate. Instead, it is a school leader who is capable of transforming a school environment so that its students and teachers can flourish.

It is important to keep in mind that while school leadership is essential, consistent, strong leadership at the district level must not be overlooked. While principals create conditions that encourage great teaching, superintendents can create conditions that allow principals to become even better leaders.

In this way, superintendents can lay the groundwork for successful school leaders by setting a clear direction and tone, investing in professional development, setting up mentors for new principals, giving principals the authority to make key decisions and elevating the importance of academic achievement - sometimes even going so far as to making it a part of a principal's evaluation. And while many states have adopted standards for principals, Delaware is leading the charge by working on statewide evaluation systems for its principals.

One significant shift from the previous way of doing things is that principals, particularly at the elementary school level, are expected to be instructional leaders - meaning they must be skilled at making all of their teachers better educators. And while the concept has been around for quite some time, it's now a key element of the job description.

But how can one person have such a huge impact?

A 2009 study by New Leaders for New Schools found that more than half of a school's impact on student gains can be attributed to both principal and teacher effectiveness - with principals accounting for 25 percent and teachers 33 percent of the effect.

The report noted that schools making significant progress are often led by a principal whose role has been radically re-imagined. Not only is the principal attuned to classroom learning, but he or she is also able to create a climate of hard work and success while managing the vital human-capital pipeline.

Getting from here to there isn't about magic or one-size-fits-all solutions. According to Michael Fullan, author of Leading in a Culture of Change, leadership can take on many different forms in school turnarounds. While some leaders opt for transformational leadership or turning good organizations into great ones, other personalities are better suited for distributive leadership, or the sharing of responsibility among a few people such as an assistant principal or outstanding teacher.
Leaders who cope vs. leaders who transform
Leithwood has written that good leadership tends to follow three basic steps: first, setting a direction; second, developing people so that they can head in that direction; and, third, redesigning the institution around instruction. He says it's less about leaders possessing a compelling shared vision and more about helping "people figure out the shorter-term goals on the way to achieving that vision and then set[ting] high expectations for people in accomplishing those."

When it comes to school leadership, being willing to change is the name of the game - whether it's restructuring the school day so teachers are able to observe teaching of the highest order, or allocating enough money in the budget so that instructional coaches can be hired. Persistence, open-mindedness and optimism are helpful qualities, especially when facing tough decisions that result from statewide spending constraints or contract negotiations.

Public Agenda, a public opinion research organization based in New York City, conducted focus groups with principals in high-need school districts, focusing specifically on how leaders respond to the challenges that inevitably arise. Whether it's ensuring that buses run according to schedule or that loose-leaf paper is delivered on time, school leaders classified as "copers" versus "transformers" tackle problems in fundamentally different ways. Public Agenda found that transformers had an explicit vision for their school and did not get bogged down in the obstacles. The copers, on the other hand, became overwhelmed. Both types of leaders talked about the importance of instructional leadership. But the transformers actually did it, while copers merely talked about it. "The transformers knew teachers, knew kids, knew what they needed, and were on top of it," Jean Johnson of Public Agenda said. "Copers," she said, "never got to it. You'd hear the phrase, 'I was headed to the classroom, and then something happened.' "

But the school leader as superhero isn't a sustainable model - and copers can be taught to become transformative leaders. The focus is now on how to create conditions so that otherwise ordinary leaders might be trained to become extraordinary.
Preparing principals

Meanwhile, greater attention is being paid to the training of principals. A 2005 report by Arthur Levine, who at the time was president of Columbia University's Teachers College, noted that leadership programs at many education schools lacked rigor and were of low quality.

New models have been introduced to educate and train the next generation of school leaders. The most successful programs, according to Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond and her colleagues, tend to have the following key characteristics:

A focus on instruction, organizational development and change management.

Curricular coherence that links goals, learning activities and assessments around a set of shared values, beliefs and knowledge about effective organizational practice.

Field-based internships that enable principals-in-training to apply leadership knowledge and skills under the guidance of an expert practitioner.

Mentoring or coaching that supports modeling, questioning, observations of practice and feedback.

Problem-based learning strategies-such as case methods and projects-that support reflection and link theory to practice.

A structure that enables collaboration, teamwork and mutual support among principals-in-training.

Collaboration between universities and school districts to create coherence between training and practice, as well as pipelines for recruitment, preparation, hiring and induction.

Vigorous recruitment of high-quality candidates with experience as expert, dynamic teachers and a commitment to instructional improvement.

Financial support that enables principals-in-training to complete an intensive program with a full-time internship.

Both the Wallace Foundation and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation have invested in principal-training programs, in addition to New Leaders for New Schools, a national organization that trains principals in different districts. Cities like New York (with its Aspiring Principals Program) are also joining the effort, while states such as Iowa and Louisiana have shuttered weak programs.

Finally, Race to the Top, last year's federal competition for $3.4 billion in grants to support education reform, emphasized improving the training and evaluation of principals as much as it did the training and evaluation of teachers. Going forward, it's tough to imagine a 21st-century school being resurrected by a lackluster school leader. Instead, we are learning about ways to equip more school leaders with better tools, a set of skills that can transform not only a whole school building but also our perception of what it means to be a principal in the first place.

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Why school leadership matters - The Hechinger Report

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When 93 teachers and staffers were fired from Rhode Island's Central Falls High School in 2010, it fueled a nationwide debate over how failing schools might be resurrected. But of all the school's dismal statistics, and there were plenty to choose from - fewer than half of its students graduated within four years, and only ...

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Four Key Factors of Effective School Leadership

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Four Key Factors of Effective School Leadership

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This article discusses four key components of how to organize leadership in education.

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Elizabeth Brooke, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, Chief Education Officer, Lexia Learning and Rosetta Stone

In a time when schools are being held accountable to the highest level of standards, strong leadership is critical for the schools' success. These standards are reminiscent of the Reading First days, when schools were being asked to progress monitor their students and set high goals for every individual. There were several key factors noted in Reading First schools who demonstrated success, despite having challenging student populations (Crawford & Torgesen, 2006). These factors can be applied to these similar times in order to create a school environment that is open and supportive, and where strong leadership is demonstrated not solely by the principal, but rather it is established based on a shared vision with coaches and teachers.

Numerous studies on the topic of effective school leadership focus our attention on four key factors: Organizational Knowledge; Use of Data; Scheduling; and Positive Beliefs and High Expectations.

1. Organizational Knowledge

Effective leadership begins with extensive knowledge of the instructional environment: individual student needs, strengths and weaknesses of staff members, aspects of the instructional programs, student data, and schedules. It is the manner in which school leaders weave these data sources together that they lay the foundation for effective school leadership.

Researchers exploring the qualities of effective school leadership often begin with the leader's knowledge of the students in his or her school. By developing a data-driven understanding and knowledge of the students, the principal and other school leaders can inform their decisions pertaining to:

Resource allocation - Do I have enough teachers and enough time to meet the needs of my at-risk students?

Scheduling - Have I scheduled the reading blocks in such a way that my teachers and paraprofessionals have sufficient time to provide instruction, and provide intervention for students in need?

Professional development - Have patterns in student skill gaps revealed a gap in teachers' instructional abilities requiring additional professional development?

Funding and procurement - How do the characteristics of my student population affect the available sources of funding or the ways in which I can allocate my budget?

Effective leaders have a strong knowledge of the range of instructional tools available to address their students' needs. This entails-in many cases-a team-based approach to researching and vetting research-proven programs that address specific needs. Because of the sheer volume of programs available, many school leaders rely partly on their leadership teams to continuously research and share information about new tools and methodologies. Information sources such as the What Works Clearinghouse and the National Center on Response to Intervention provide a shortlist of instructional programs, some of which have extensive efficacy research.

Once an instructional program has been selected, it is imperative that school leaders develop an in-depth understanding of the program in order to ensure fidelity of implementation, drive behavior around proper use levels and ensure that teachers avail themselves of the training and professional development resources provided to them.

Effective school leaders develop their organizational knowledge based, in large part, on their understanding of student data. This includes the use of summative data-analyzing outcome data in the spring to allocate resources and plan for the upcoming school year-as well as a wealth of real-time formative data. There are a number of assessment products-and even some online instructional programs that gather student data without administering a test-that can provide real-time performance data to inform instructional decisions.

Effective school leaders take an active role in data meetings, ensuring that teachers understand how the data indicate the instructional priorities for each teacher's classroom. Far too many schools focus their data-driven culture on the process of data collection. While frequent measures are important for meaningful formative assessment, the most important aspect of data-driven culture is an ongoing focus on data analysis. Frequent (e.g., weekly, bi-weekly, etc.) data meetings help schools to effectively inform instruction, accurately identify and monitor students needing intervention, and provide school leaders the opportunity to modify children's instructional programs in real-time. The frequency of the meetings can meet the needs of the individual school. The critical piece is that the meetings are scheduled ahead of time, so they do not get pushed out and missed on a regular basis. It is important to establish these meetings as something that is important to the school leadership, because when student data is closely examined on a frequent basis, teachers understand the importance of driving improvements on these performance indicators.

An important factor of effective data meetings is having the right people in the meeting in order to act on the decisions made about the data. Time spent tracking down the appropriate team member to inform or act upon a particular data point results in missed opportunities to improve student outcomes. Data meetings must include all of the key players, or at the very least, incorporate specific next-steps to ensure that instructional decisions are made and implemented based on the findings at the data meeting.

3. Scheduling

High-performing schools consistently identify scheduling as one of the key factors of their success. For purposes of this discussion, we will focus on schools' efforts to support an uninterrupted period of at least 90 minutes for reading instruction. Schools place a priority on supporting differentiated, small group instruction for struggling students. Therefore, in resource-constrained scenarios facing many schools, effective scheduling helps maximize available support staff. This can be accomplished in several ways:

Some schools schedule a 90-minute reading block across all grades first thing in the morning, regrouping students into homogeneous skill groups in each classroom. Sometimes called the "walk and read" model, this approach helps schools better utilize all of their trained intervention staff by placing them in classrooms with the students most at-risk of reading failure.

Other high-performing schools stagger their reading blocks, which allows reading specialists to serve multiple grades and classes throughout the day, and enables them to observe and model lessons in more than one classroom or grade level during the reading block.

In addition to scheduling dedicated instructional and intervention blocks, high-performing schools place a high priority on scheduling data meetings. This requires the allocation of sufficient time and resources, such as substitute teachers, when necessary. Data meetings must be considered as equally important to other aspects of the school day-particularly since the effective use of data will inform nearly every other aspect of instruction.

4. Positive Beliefs and High Expectations

A factor that is often overlooked in effective schools is a culture of positive beliefs and high expectations. High-performing schools often have a stated, school-wide belief in their students' abilities to achieve, despite significant obstacles such as limited resources, high ELL population or low parental involvement. Leaders in these schools focus on raising expectations for students, not lowering them. In order to address high absenteeism or high numbers of behavior referrals, many of these schools have started expressing their belief in the students to the students themselves, to the parents, and to the community. By establishing a school culture in which all members of the school community believe that the students will be high achievers, the belief in reaching these high expectations becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Positive beliefs and high expectations may be the most important factor in high-achieving schools. Not only does it establish a culture of success, but it is also an approach that draws upon a limitless resource. During these difficult economic times, when school budgets continue to tighten, your school's belief system is the one critical resource that cannot be affected by funding sources or staffing levels.

Successful schools highlighted in research consistently demonstrate strong aspects in each of the four key factors of effective school leadership. In these schools, their successes began with the principal establishing a collaborative approach to leadership. As a principal, you don't need to have all of the answers. You need to know the right questions to ask, and you need to foster the environment to empower a shared sense of ownership in the problem, and a shared sense of ownership in the solution.

Lexia Learning ©2017
www.lexialearning.com

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Four Key Factors of Effective School Leadership

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Elizabeth Brooke, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, Chief Education Officer, Lexia Learning and Rosetta Stone In a time when schools are being held accountable to the highest level of standards, strong leadership is critical for the schools' success. These standards are reminiscent of the Reading First days, when schools were being asked to progress monitor their students and set high goals for every individual.

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How to Approach Data- Driven Decisions in Education 

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How to Approach Data- Driven Decisions in Education 

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This article provides an overview of Data-Driven Decision making, and how it can be effectively implemented.

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"Data-driven" has become a popular term in recent years. It proudly declares that the issues with which we wrestle have been informed by simply involving data in the process. But being driven by data requires more than just the existence of good data or superior systems to warehouse the data. It requires a meaningful process for developing questions, conducting exploration and analysis, and ultimately, using the data to help us arrive at solutions.

In education, the issues vary across classrooms, schools, districts, and states, but the process for using data to inform decisions can follow a common set of activities. The figure below offers a picture of the key elements of a data-driven process in education.

At the heart of the process of effectively using data in educational decision making are three sequential steps:

1. Assemble high-quality raw data. The sheer amount of potentially available education data is vast. Data can include formative or summative test results, interviews, observations, surveys, financial records, and transcripts. The decision at hand should suggest which data should be assembled.

2. Conduct analysis that ensures results are relevant and diagnostic. Educators often find themselves drowning in data rather than being driven by it-burdened by irrelevant data that will not be used and non-diagnostic data that might be used inappropriately.

Relevance depends on who receives the data, the timeliness, and the level of detail. Giving high school counselors data on how former students perform in postsecondary settings is largely irrelevant because the students are already gone and because the counselor likely has no way to identify the reasons for their success or failure. Teachers and school-level staff typically need student data that are fine-grained-at the level of individual students and specific skills-and rapidly delivered to give them useful evidence to adjust instruction. Higher-level decision makers are likely to need data on programs and staff, as well as broader data on students.

The same data can be diagnostic for some decisions and not for others. A teacher's value-added score, for example, might be diagnostic for informing a principal's hiring decision, but is not, in itself, diagnostic for how to improve a teacher's practice. (That is, this data point does not pinpoint specific strengths or areas for improvement that should be addressed in order to change the score in the future.) To be diagnostic, data must be reliable and valid for informing the decision at hand. Reliability means that the data are stable-when measured repeatedly, the same results are generated. Validity means the data are appropriate; data that are improperly analyzed or interpreted can lead to invalid inferences. In other words, invalid data can cause decision makers to draw exactly the wrong conclusions. For example, raw student test scores might be valid for understanding a student's skills but invalid for understanding a teacher's contribution to that student's learning, because they don't account for the student's underlying ability.

3. Use relevant and diagnostic data to inform instructional and operational decisions. Even the right data and clear analysis aren't helpful if the results are filed away and forgotten!
Key Organizational Supports
The best decisions require infrastructure, policies, and practices to support them. Three key organizational traits must be in place, as the figure shows:

1. Data infrastructure. The creation and improvement of data systems are essential for effectively collecting, transferring, and manipulating information. Establishing links between distinct databases facilitates analyses that require connections across data types. Creating low-burden data collection mechanisms and certifying and monitoring data collectors (such as principals conducting observations) also support data quality. Adjusting data access and management practices to ensure timely delivery enhances the likelihood that data will be used, and employing verification systems ensures data integrity.

2. Analytic capacity. The ability of staff to create analysis plans and make sense of findings may require support and training. Relevant training topics might include implementing data practices, accessing and analyzing data, or data management and security. Technical assistance providers, either in-house or external, can conduct such training and offer additional insights. Likewise, improving accessibility of data, such as offering web access to data or ensuring data are presented in user-friendly formats, supports capacity for data use.

3. Culture of evidence use. Strong leadership and systems of accountability facilitate successful data use. For example, organizations may have formal policies requiring and monitoring data use, provide incentives for data use, or follow a strategic plan for using data. Promoting data sharing allows staff to reflect on data together, and allocating time and resources for examining and using data encourages staff to do so.

In data-rich environments, education decision makers have access to a wealth of information about students, staff, operational activities, and the communities that they serve. These data, however, have limited use-and could possibly be detrimental-if decision makers do not understand the benefits and limitations of data, the types of data relevant for the decisions they are confronted with, and how data can be appropriately used for decision making.

Learn more in our detailed report describing this conceptual framework for data-driven decision making.
Read more about our education work. View the comments policy

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How to Approach Data-Driven Decisions in Education

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"Data-driven" has become a popular term in recent years. It proudly declares that the issues with which we wrestle have been informed by simply involving data in the process. But being driven by data requires more than just the existence of good data or superior systems to warehouse the data.

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This article addresses changes that educational leaders can implement through teachers on campus. Specifically in regards to learning from teachers who push the boundaries of mainstream teaching.

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February 2013 | Volume 70 | Number 5
Creativity Now!

Danah Henriksen and Punya Mishra

Creativity in learning is often highlighted as a skill essential for success in the 21st century. Daniel Pink (2005) notes that creative thinking is increasingly necessary to accomplish goals in our complex, interconnected world, and education researchers and psychologists tout the social, emotional, cognitive, and professional benefits of possessing creative abilities (Sternberg, 2006).

Despite this increased attention to creativity, we still have little understanding of how to nurture and support creativity in current classroom contexts, particularly creative teaching. The U.S. climate of high-stakes testing and scripted curriculums makes it difficult for education stakeholders to infuse creativity into teaching practices (Giroux & Schmidt, 2004). Teachers and administrators face the question of how to successfully integrate creativity into teaching practice when teachers have many pressures and little leeway.

As a part of our research at Michigan State University, we've been developing ways to integrate creativity into classrooms and explore the role of teachers in enhancing students' creative skills (Mishra, Koehler, & Henriksen, 2011; Mishra, Henricksen, & The Deep-Play Research Group, 2012). Our work goes beyond teaching generic techniques and seeks to genuinely embed creative approaches within disciplinary contexts (Mishra, Henriksen, & The Deep-Play Research Group, 2012). We hope to resolve a fundamental dilemma about creativity-that even as it's grounded in deep knowledge of the particulars of a field, it requires stepping outside these particulars. In other words, creative people have the ability to maintain a sophisticated knowledge of their field of expertise yet look outside the frames of that field to come up with new ideas. How do good teachers do this?

Learning from the Best

In trying to enhance the teaching practices of new and veteran teachers, it's useful to consider the successful classroom efforts and impressive records of skilled teachers. A key component of our research has been studying interviews we conducted with eight highly successful teachers-each of whom was a finalist or winner of the National Teacher of the Year award from 2000 to 2010 (Henriksen, 2011)-with an eye to their creative practices.

We chose these teachers for several reasons. For a teacher to receive this award, he or she must have been found to be "exceptional" or "outstanding." Winners would have received recommendations from principals, fellow teachers, parents, students, and other community leaders, and they would have a verifiable track record of excellent classroom practices and student achievement.

In addition, looking across applications for the National Teacher of the Year award for the same stretch of years, we found that more than 90 percent of finalists and winners highlighted creativity as a key teaching theme and gave examples of creative teaching in their practices. In addition, research suggests that "effective" teaching is essentially the same as "creative" teaching (Davidovitch & Milgram, 2006).

Analyzing these interviews helped us identify five key approaches or guideposts for creative teaching. Here, we provide concrete examples of creativity-rich lessons and practices that our interviewees used as they observed these guideposts-and we discuss how teachers and administrators might begin to do the same.

1. Connect Your Interests with Your Teaching

Research shows that the most accomplished, innovative people in any field are also highly creative in areas outside their professional lives (Root-Bernstein & Bernstein, 1999; Root-Bernstein, 2003). They actively draw on outside interests and creative ways of thinking to improve their professional practice.

The winners and finalists we studied had a variety of creative hobbies and interests, which they actively incorporated into classroom lessons and practices. Besides noting outside pursuits-anything from rap music to cooking to hiking-award winners reflected on how these pursuits affected their creativity, both overall and as teachers. For instance, teachers with musical and artistic interests found many ways to weave music or art into their teaching.

These professionals connected their hobbies and creative passions to ideas or subjects they teach by seeing and deliberately exploring connections between their interests and school subjects. Sandra, a high school English teacher and recent National Teacher of the Year award winner, said,

Outside pursuits always factor into your thinking about your classroom or your students. I think that we teach who we are, and I know that I teach who I am. Whatever it is that interests you ... that energy manifests itself creatively in the fabric of the classroom.

Teaching with the arts naturally becomes a key part of such connections. This could mean incorporating design activities into teaching science or having students write songs to learn a certain piece of information. One teacher with an interest in photography, design, and visual arts has students create artistically designed "advertisements" for science concepts, such as a poster to sell the concept of chloroplasts (for photosynthesis) to an animal cell (animals don't have chloroplasts, so students must convince them of the value of having chloroplasts or a cell wall). Another teacher, who has an interest in rap and a talent for rhyming, has created engaging mathematics lessons that involve rapping about math ideas. These lessons have been key to getting his students excited about math.

The crucial point is not that these teachers used art or music (which some might find daunting), but that they turned their personal interests and creativity into valuable teaching techniques.

Teachers wove in not only their hobbies, but also their subject-matter interests. For example, a middle school algebra teacher with an interest in sociology began to integrate sociology into his word problems and math scenarios. He came up with problems and applications of mathematics that were relevant and engaging for his students.

Trying This Approach

The best way for teachers to start may be to take one step. Wherever possible, teachers should tap into their own interests and hobbies and begin to think of themselves as creative teachers and individuals. The interest area doesn't have to be a direct match with the subject matter. Consider areas of crossover, where two different subjects might touch on each other. For example, one high school English teacher taught a lesson on narrative movements in a text by Kafka by discussing how these transitions related to movements in a piece of music.

During both pre- and inservice programs, teacher educators should encourage new teachers to tap into their passions. Teacher educators might assign their students to plan a lesson connected to a certain subject matter that makes use of any hobby or outside interest. This lesson could extend from something as simple as incorporating music into class to something as complex as organizing students into special interest groups to argue for or against policies directly involving renewable energy. As teachers begin to consider how they can teach science through an artistic lens or work sociology into math problems, the curriculum becomes unique and interwoven with personal interests.

2. Link Lessons to Real-World Learning

Taking knowledge out of a vacuum and infusing it into an authentic experience ensures that creativity is grounded in relevant learning. All the teachers cited lessons they had taught that had real-world applications. The fact that the teachers viewed "real-world" learning as creative tells us that such teaching moments often feel fresh and bring in novel thinking.

One elementary teacher described how she often started the school day with a "sky watch," during which kids collected weather data:

When the first bell would ring, they would spread out on the school courtyard. We'd talk about the clouds and the humidity and the weather and the wind direction, and we'd collect scientific data. [Later] the kids would go online and send the data to scientists at NASA. It was a project going on all over the world, where kids were sending sky watch information to scientists.

Sandra's research and writing lesson had a realistic context:

My students do a grant project in which they create [mock] nonprofit organizations that meet the needs of a demographic group that cannot meet its "American dream." The students interview people from nonprofit organizations in the community. They compete with the other groups in the classroom to fund grants for their nonprofit, [applying to a] grant panel composed of actual community members.

Trying This Approach

Considering these two examples from teachers (out of many similar ones), we believe teachers of all subjects or grades should consider ways they might connect (even in small ways) ideas and topics they teach to events and contexts in the real world. The place to begin is often to just consider examples of how these topics already inhabit the world around students. For example, in what places might a teacher help students connect to science in the community? If the unit is on bacteria, can students collect and sample bacteria cultures from within their school environment or conduct a unit on food safety in the school cafeteria or a local restaurant?

3. Cultivate a Creative Mind-Set

In reflecting on their beliefs, most of the award-winning teachers noted that creativity was not a generic or detached skill, but a mind-set that affects how they see the world. They knew that insights they might have in one area can carry over into new areas of activity. So they maintained open-minded awareness of interesting things in the world around them, looking for innovative ideas for the classroom. Adam, a middle school mathematics teacher, noted,

I'll often just be doing something else or I'll see something happen, and [I'll think], "Well, how can I relate that to teaching?" I'm always on the lookout for ideas. I've trained my mind to look at something and think about how it applies to teaching.

Trying This Approach

Teachers might stimulate their creativity by deliberately-perhaps for 10 minutes a day-observing the world around them, keeping their eyes open for new ideas. Most teachers keenly observe their classes and students. Extending this observation to look for ideas from other disciplines or from something they see, read about, or interact with in daily life is a good first step.

Open-mindedness also means considering other people's perspectives. A creative teacher imagines him- or herself in the position of students, asking how a particular class or group of students would want to learn something and what methods could make a topic interesting for that group.

4. Value Collaboration

Successful design teams or business groups often note that they develop their creativity through collaborative effort. Teachers in our study touched on a similar point. Mia, an elementary school teacher, highlighted the importance of gathering ideas and bouncing them off other teachers:

Anytime you have multiple brains focusing on one idea or one goal, the potential is exponential. You can start brainstorming ideas and bouncing them off one another. The difficult part is making sure you have time for this.

Teachers questioned the myth of the solitary creative genius. Creative inspiration can certainly arise in the course of individualized work or play. Often, however, having the opportunity to talk through existing ideas and get new ones from others is an excellent creative catalyst.

Jack noted how he helped build a collaborative creative community:

We started a group at my school for teachers; we began to meet in my classroom once a month. Everyone's ticket in the door was to bring to the table something new, something of their own to offer, so that we could share ideas and try out things that had been successful in other classrooms.

Trying This Approach

Teachers should seek out colleagues to ask questions of and share lessons and ideas.

It's important that administrators who recognize the need for creativity in teaching ensure time for teacher collaboration and give teachers space-physically and figuratively-to share with colleagues. They should set up a regular meeting time for teachers to get together and talk or share ideas. How this is organized may depend on the setting and the teachers themselves, but sessions should have a relaxed feeling. It's important to highlight creativity as a focus, such as by asking everyone to contribute an original idea from their own classroom to begin the dialogue or brainstorming ways that the arts or cross-disciplinary lessons might be woven into the existing curriculum.

Teachers understandably tend to partner with others who teach similar content. To think outside the box, it's good to open up conversations among teachers from different subject matters to discuss areas of crossover. The English teacher who taught literary movements in Kafka from the perspective of movements in a piece of music developed this lesson by working with a music teacher and that teacher's students.

5. Take Intellectual Risks

Another key theme that emerged from our interviews was the notion of intellectual risk taking in building a creative teaching practice. These teachers didn't teach haphazardly but were willing to try out new ideas and approaches in their classrooms and were open to failure. Trying new things enables educators to find novel, interesting approaches to teaching-and to find out which novel approaches work.

Sandra suggested that "intellectual risk taking" is tied to making frequent mistakes:

I need to create the kind of environment where students feel able to make mistakes and know that making mistakes is part of our work and our process. [They need] also a willingness to ... be able to manage ambiguity. That's really important if you want to be creative because if you can't hold two thoughts at once without judgment, it's hard to get past either of them.

Mark, a middle school science teacher, explained,

Creativity needs to be about the ability to make mistakes, to learn from those. [When students] see that kind of risk taking and iterative process, I think it helps them understand how to do things well themselves. Ultimately, what students will gain from your class is not necessarily all content knowledge. Often, it's how you approach things.

Risk taking requires a school environment and leadership that allows experimentation, as Mark acknowledged:

My principal over the years has been very supportive in the fact that he's OK with me trying new things, and ultimately it leads to good results on objective measures of achievement. But he also sees the fire in the students' eyes, the passion for learning, and the excitement about being at school. [In many schools] it's that fear of "there's so much pressure right now to keep achievement high." When teachers are teaching in fear, they take few risks.

Trying This Approach

For teachers, becoming an intellectual risk taker comes down to trying new things in the classroom as often as possible. This doesn't mean teachers can't have some tried-and-true activities that always are a part of their practice. It simply means that teaching practice can only be creative when it's always evolving.

Admittedly, the current education climate can make risk taking difficult. School administrators play an important role in establishing a climate that accepts thoughtful experimentation. To empower teachers to be innovative and try new things in the classroom, school leaders must be open to listening. If a teacher has an idea or wants to try something new, a leader should be willing to listen, discuss, and collaborate on ways that idea might be implemented.

Another key point is to give teachers ownership of their successes. When a new idea is carried out skillfully, hold up the teacher who spearheaded it as a model of successful creativity. Having creativity modeled and publicly appreciated within the school culture is vital to cultivating it.

Calling All Stakeholders

Education stakeholders across the board should encourage these five practices for building a more creative teaching practice. These ideas provide practical guideposts for current teachers and administrators. And if teacher education programs adopted them, we might get a head start on nurturing creativity and risk taking among preservice teachers.

References

Davidovitch, N., & Milgram, R. M. (2006). Creative thinking as a predictor of teacher effectiveness in higher education. Creativity Research Journal, 18(3), 385-390.

Giroux, H. A., & Schmidt, M. (2004). Closing the achievement gap: A metaphor for children left behind. Journal of Educational Change, 5, 213-228.

Henriksen, D. (2011). We teach who we are: Creativity and trans-disciplinary thinking in the practices of accomplished teachers. (Doctoral Dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. (3489807).

Mishra, P., Koehler, M. J., & Henriksen, D. (2011). The seven trans-disciplinary habits of mind: Extending the TPACK framework towards 21st century learning. Educational Technology, 11(2), 22-28.

Mishra, P., Henriksen, D., & The Deep-Play Research Group (2012). Rethinking technology and creativity in the 21st century: On being (in)disciplined. Tech Trends, 56(6), 18-21.

Pink, D. H. (2005). A whole new mind. New York: Riverhead Books.

Root-Bernstein, R. S., & Bernstein, M. (1999). Sparks of genius: The thirteen thinking tools of the world's most creative people. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Root-Bernstein, R. S. (2003). The art of innovation: Polymaths and the universality of the creative process. In L. Shavanina (Ed.), International handbook of innovation, (pp. 267-278), Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Sternberg, R. (2006). The nature of creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 18(1), 87-98.

Danah Henriksen is visiting assistant professor of educational psychology and educational technology and Punya Mishra is professor of educational psychology and educational technology at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan.

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February 2013 | Volume 70 | Number 5 Creativity Now! Danah Henriksen and Punya Mishra Creativity in learning is often highlighted as a skill essential for success in the 21st century. Daniel Pink (2005) notes that creative thinking is increasingly necessary to accomplish goals in our complex, interconnected world, and education researchers and psychologists tout the social, emotional, cognitive, and professional benefits of possessing creative abilities (Sternberg, 2006).

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School Leadership and Teacher Collaboration

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School Leadership and Teacher Collaboration

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This article explores how effective teacher collaboration increases performance in students.

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I recently had the privilege of traveling to Shanghai to visit schools and meet with educators there. Shanghai, of course, has outperformed all other nations on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in reading, mathematics, and science by large margins in both 2009 and 2012. One reason Shanghai educators give for their success is their extraordinary system for allowing teachers to collaborate, develop, and study lessons. I was eager to see that for myself.

What I saw did not disappoint. We saw four schools-not the best schools in the city-and in all of them, we had the chance to observe classes and sit in on teachers' meetings. We saw teachers crowd into classrooms and observe the classes with us, taking copious notes and watching the students' responses. We then saw them meet with the teacher and provide critiques, offering suggestions. In one school, a low-performing school attended mostly by migrant students, the teachers observing and commenting on the lesson were from a higher-performing school, part of a system known as "empowered management," designed to engage the existing teaching force to turn around low performance.

The teachers meet weekly in both grade-level and subject-area groups. They also meet in jiaoyanzu, or "teacher research groups." The work of these groups frequently results in journal publications. A survey found that 75 percent of teachers had at least one publication, and 7.9 percent said they had more than nine publications.

The result of these opportunities was evident in the classes we saw. A third-grade math teacher, for example, skillfully guided students through a lesson on plane coordinates, starting with the concrete-in what row and seat were the students sitting?-and moving to the more abstract-(x,y). She ended up asking the students for examples of how the coordinates might be used in the real world, and the students saw their relevance in theater seats and cities on a map. All in 35 minutes.

I thought of the Shanghai teachers' experiences recently when I read about a new study that looked at the effects of teacher teams. The study, by researchers at the University of Washington, Stanford University, and Vanderbilt University, found that when an effective teacher joins a teacher team, students of all of the teachers in the team improve their mathematics scores. In addition, the study found that when an ineffective teacher joins the team, the other teachers' students' performance does not go down. In other words, teacher collaboration benefits all teachers, and all of their students.

As Min Sun, a professor at the University of Washington College of Education and one of the authors of the study, put it, "Student learning is not a function of just one teacher but of the combined effort of many teachers."

The study's authors suggest that school leaders should create professional learning communities or other structured opportunities for teachers to collaborate to share instructional ideas and feedback--the kinds of opportunities that are routine in Shanghai.

How can this happen in the United States? A new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) finds that the quality of leadership matters. The report, using data from the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), a 2013 survey of teachers and principals conducted in 38 countries and other jurisdictions, identified four types of school leaders: administrative leaders, who spend a large portion of their time on school management; educational leaders, who are engaged in instructional leadership but do not do much to engage stakeholders in decisions; inclusive leaders, who do engage staff, parents, and students in decisions but spend less time on curriculum and instruction; and integrated leaders, who combine the qualities of educational leaders and inclusive leaders. These inclusive leaders, the survey found, are most likely to foster professional learning communities. Teachers engage in reflective dialogue and collaboration and have a shared sense of purpose and a focus on student learning.

At a forum to discuss the TALIS findings, Anthony Terrell, the principal of Mt. Vernon High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, cautioned that professional learning communities do not just happen; principals and teachers have to work hard to make them effective. "PLC work is much harder than it sounds," he said.

For one thing, principals have to construct master schedules to carve out time for teachers to meet regularly. And then they have to help ensure that the meetings are productive and focused on improving instruction and learning. "Teachers are good at meeting, but they are not always good at talking about instruction," he said. "They talk about kids-that's where it ends. They rarely talk about data, and never talk about interventions."

In his case, Terrell held the teachers accountable for producing plans in the PLCs by requiring them to present evidence of their work. And it proved effective: student performance at his school has improved.

The results from TALIS confirm Terrell's experience. The survey did not find a relationship between the conditions for professional learning communities and student performance. That's because the quality of the learning communities matters. But when it works, students benefit. It's worth trying to make it work.

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School Leadership and Teacher Collaboration

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I recently had the privilege of traveling to Shanghai to visit schools and meet with educators there. Shanghai, of course, has outperformed all other nations on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in reading, mathematics, and science by large margins in both 2009 and 2012.