Category Archive

Erika Krohn is the principal of Yorbita Elementary School.

When I really think about the work I’ve done with the Ball Foundation, I feel like I’m a different person in many ways. For the past year and a half, I’ve been bringing a different kind of leadership to my school. Our staff meetings look very different. We don’t have any “administrivia” anymore. All that goes out in e-mail now. Our staff meetings are instead really about learning. Just this past fall, we spent two sessions developing and articulating our values and beliefs here at the school. We now repeat those beliefs at the beginning of every staff meeting. And we’re not just going through the motions. When we have a difficult situation with a parent or a student, we always bring those beliefs to the forefront.

But even more so, we’ve been using those beliefs to have courageous conversations from colleague to colleague. There’s a change going on. People are really changing their practice, and while they’re not necessarily getting kudos or recognition, they are getting results. So people are talking about it. There’s a buzz in the air, which can be scary for people. Change is scary. People are wondering, “Does that mean what I’m doing is not valued?” So it’s been very helpful to articulate our beliefs and values, and have those courageous conversations with each other.

Another key learning for me came from the workshop called “Leading Meetings that Matter” that Ball sponsored in Fall 2008. It was such a powerful training. It illustrated where I was trying to go as a leader and gave me some more tools to use.

We have this beautiful staff learning room at my school with tables and chairs and where we can keep our charts and things. But now we’ve cleared out the tables and we’re using Open Space Technology to pull the chairs out into the spaces in the room. In fact, we did that just this past Tuesday. We did a debrief from a learning walk that the teachers had just taken part in. A learning walk is when teachers get to see other teachers in their classrooms. Usually there are specific things that they’re looking for in each classroom, and this time we were looking at different areas of practice. The exciting thing about this learning walk was that almost every single person on campus wanted to go visit a colleague. I also had eight teachers who were willing to open up their rooms for an extended period of time. I think the way the whole thing was handled built trust with the staff.

But to get back to the debrief – we debriefed as a whole group in a big circle. Then we did “Open Space” so that the teachers could go deeper into their own areas of interest. That whole concept of choice has been a big learning for me. I used to think that we had to do everything school-wide in order to be really effective. And now, we still do some things school-wide, but I’ve also invited teachers to go into areas of study that they want to look at more deeply. As a result, there seems to be so much more buy-in. I think Ball has really helped me in handling complexity because it is more challenging when you have several different areas of research going on at your school. But it can work beautifully. You can identify the common themes between the different practices.

Because of all this change, there’s more excitement with a large segment of the teachers around practice. And I’m connected to that excitement because I’m elbow-to-elbow with them learning, which has been fantastic. There have been bumps in the road. As you know, change is hard for people. Being asked to open their classrooms and share their practices can be really scary. There have been people who have just loved it, and some who’ve been a little more hesitant about it. But like I said before, the way we handled the learning walk and the debriefing has built trust with the staff. We used strategies from “Meetings that Matter,” coming up with agreements before we could debrief. This type of learning is built so much on trust, and we’re not there 100% yet, but we’re getting there. We’re bonding more every day.

People don’t realize it, but I’ve seen a difference in people as a result of all the activities we’ve been doing throughout this year. A young and very talented teacher came up to me after a Literacy Network and said, “I’m learning new ways to think. And I just changed how I approach things in my lessons and my class.” Because of what’s been happening, she told me, “I’ve changed.” So I told her, “You do understand how if we’re all changing together, how much power we could release for our students?” And she said, “Oh, I’m starting to get it.”

Another instance where I’ve seen people changing came during the strategic planning process. I sat on the Core Planning Committee for the strategic plan. Eight committees were picked to come up with the action plans for the eight strategies, which were then presented to the Core Planning Committee. The work that people did was amazing. But there were two strategies that were not accepted by the Core group. So, other teams were formed to really take a look at those strategies, and they presented again about two weeks ago to the Core group. I was really struck by the quality of their work. What they did with their action steps was so powerful and rich with things that I would never have conceived of. It really made me think, “Wow! People in our organization have been changing and have really been thinking about things differently.” There was such a difference between these two strategies that weren’t accepted and the new versions. It really spoke to the power of how people are transforming.

One of the new strategies was, “Create a district-like culture that fosters risk-taking, ethical thinking, and creativity as a means of building staff and students that feeds their understanding of their responsibilities as world citizens.” I remember thinking, “What an impact that could have on our district if we all went out and did that.” Again, it really struck me that people are changing and becoming thinkers and learners. I thought, “We are well on our way to being a true learning organization throughout.”