¡Soy Capitan! Navigating the Creation of an Instructional Model

     Have you ever driven a boat?  If so, you know it does not handle like a car.  Acceleration, steering and stopping are less exact.  The bigger the vessel, the greater the need to anticipate your actions to ensure successful navigation.  I love this analogy for the principalship.   As the captain of the large vessel that is my school, it is critical that I ensure clear direction, and steer with a steady hand.  Quick steering, without a clear direction, does little to change the direction of the ship!  One might end up like the USS Minnow!  I think of the verse in Ritchie Valen’s song La Bamba, “Soy Capitan.” I am the Captain and it is my responsibility to mark and steer the course. What follows is the voyage that we embarked upon to bring clear direction to our instruction at Morton Ranch Jr. High.

     On a fine summer day in June of 2011, I sat in my office reflecting on another good year.  I let my mind wander toward what my focus would be for the upcoming school year.  My excitement started to build in anticipation of staff development week.  I love staff development!  I am in my passion when serving in the role of “teacher.”  My possibilities seemed endless.  As I continued to ponder, a critical understanding began to unveil itself.  How would I bring focus to our work?  We had a strong vision statement that captured what our campus climate looked like.  What about how we teach? This question led to my quest for an instructional model to guide our work. 

     As I quested, my mind settled on the work of Jim Collins in the book, “Good to Great.”  One of the power quotes in this book is, “Good is the enemy of great.”  I felt like this was just where our campus was… good, but not yet great.  This book and its accompanying monograph, “Good to Great and the Social Sectors,” are classic research-based leadership texts.

     In this book, Collins discusses Isaiah Berlin’s classic essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox." The fox is clever in his attempts to eat the hedgehog, but is unsuccessful due to his scattered approach.  The hedgehog is masterful at meeting the fox’s challenges with his simplified approach of rolling into a protective ball!  Collins celebrates the simple, focused approach of the hedgehog over the diffused approach of the fox.  He argues that this is what many successful organizations do.  This simple, focused approach is described as the Hedgehog Concept.  It can further be described as simplicity within three circles.  My desire was to become more like the hedgehog. I was seeking a clear way to avoid the pendulum of educational change.

     This concept can be easily represented as a Venn diagram with three intersecting circles.  Collins provides guiding questions to lead a discussion related to completing the diagram. With this structure, my instructional leadership team embarked on an abbreviated book study of “Good to Great.”  This team is composed of assistant principals, counselors, department chairs, instructional coaches, the librarian, ESOL Team Leader and the campus secretary.  When we met together at our summer retreat, we collaborated to build the model pictured below.

     The first question I asked of the group was, “What is our main thing?”  The answer we came to was student success.  This idea we represented with the picture you see in the central “sweet spot” of the graphic above. I facilitated the completion of the three circles in the model by using the guiding questions that Collins provides.  When it made sense to do so, I modified the question to fit our purpose.

1.         What are you deeply passionate about?  We identified passion for the content and a passion for student success.
2.          What can you be the best in the world at? We made the decision that quality first time instruction was the thing we could be best at.  In a Title I eligible campus, it is critical to get it right the first time!
3.         What drives your economic engine?  I adapted this question to read, “What drives your instruction?” We landed on content as our focus in this circle. 

     The final decision we made was the title of our instructional model.  We ultimately landed on the title, “Accomplished Teaching Model.”  We felt that this moved our expectation beyond what the teacher did toward the ultimate goal of students learning.  Accomplished teaching equals learning.

     In my next blog, I will begin describing how we fleshed out each circle with specifics and our journey to become deeply aligned with the model.  ¡Soy Capitan!