Author: Alan Jones

      The third shift school leaders must undertake is HOW THEY SHOW UP. Presently, main and central offices are occupied by school leaders performing their particular professional roles. To best prepare our students for the digital world of work, school leaders must move beyond their identity as professionals and show up as humans, with the courage reveal their authentic selves. The intent is to move beyond task-driven and transactional relationships by taking time to enter teacher workplaces not only to model professional expectations, but, more importantly to share values, beliefs, hopes, and fears. Too often school leaders fall back on their professional selves to restore a sense of certainty and authority. When these professional walls go up, faculty members become reluctant to share their deepest passion, wisdom, creativity, and expertise.

      The second shift school leaders must undertake is HOW TO CREATE VALUE. Presently, main and central offices preoccupy themselves with the implementation function. The goal being adding programs or activities or structures or amenities that will set their school apart from other schools in their area.

      To accommodate the digital working world, school leaders must move beyond competing on the hard facts of schooling to creating educational environments that live up to the soft educational goals and values written into school mission statements: “passion for lifelong learning;” “empower students to think critically;” “fostering a love of learning;” “cultivating leadership skills;” “equipping students with the skills and values they need to thrive in the 21st century.”

      How should school leaders begin this shift? For those school leaders serious about making this sift, they should start with sitting in classrooms all day and asking themselves this question in each class: “In this class do I see any evidence of a mission stated goal or value being purposefully developed amongst the students in this class? If the school leader is honest with themselves, what they will observe in their classrooms is best summarized in a quote from John Goodlad’s A Place Called School (1984): “Boredom is a disease of epidemic proportions.” Now, a generation later, if you were ask students for a list of adjectives that describe their classroom experience, I doubt any of the goals and values written into school mission statements would make the list.

      In past and future blogs, I will continue describing those managerial and leadership strategies and dispositions that embed mission driven goals and values in classroom instruction. The journey towards mission driven leadership must begin with school leaders being brutally honest about the classrooms they supervise and the courage to change, in Goodlad’s words, “the extraordinary sameness in our schools.”

  

      I devoted the last four Blogs to a McKinsey study describing for trends in the private sector that will dramatically change the world of work. For each trend, I explained how institutional schooling fails to prepare young people for successfully working in occupations that are radically different than the ones their fathers and mothers worked in. A follow-up to the McKinsey study on the four trends in the private sector working world, was a second study describing the five shifts industry leaders must undergo to reimagine their role in the digital world they now work in. I will devote the next five Blogs to applying these private sector leadership shifts to how school leaders should think about and enact school environments that will best prepare young people for successful working in a digital world.

      The FIRST SHIFT school leaders must undertake is what they FOCUS ON. Presently, main and central offices are controlled by a managerial mindset that values certainty over uncertainty; standardization over novelty; and routinization over innovation. To best prepare out students for the digital world of work, schools’ leaders must move beyond a focus on implementation to a focus on impact. Instead of reliance on the certainties of managerial routines, school leaders become comfortable with a visionary mindset that focuses possibility. From a leadership perspective, this transformation requires the following elements:

• Aligning people with a clear and shared purpose and aspiration;
• Defining the value to be created for community members;
• Contributing positively to a wider society and the natural environment;
• Encouraging and empowering people in small self-regulating entrepreneurial teams;
• Fostering horizontal transparency and collaboration throughout the network and beyond.

“New rules of attraction, retention, and attrition”

   “Organizations are tailoring employee value propositions to individualized preferences in ways that can help close the gap between what today’s workers want and what companies need.”

      The media had devoted a lot of time and space to the impact of COVID on student learning. Not only are achievement scores at an all-time low, but, absenteeism is at an all-time high. School officialdom appears satisfied with all the blame for deterioration of learning in our schools on COVID. However, in previous blogs on trends in the workforce, I have described a school system, that for the last two decades at least, has continue to support school organizations and pedagogies—one size fits all— that not only is in opposition to the values expressed in their mission statements, but, runs counter to a younger generation of employees who value training, development, flexibility, autonomy and opportunities to make a difference: they just don’t want to make money just to make money—they want to make an impact. These values became the norm during COVID when corporations were forced into working conditions that valued autonomy and flexibility. This new generation of students in subtle ways is sending a message to institutional schooling, that like their private sector counterparts, what organization environments they are attracted to and will perform well in.

Trend #3:    “True hybrid”: The new balance of in-person and remote work

   “Since the COVID-19 pandemic, about 90 percent of organizations have embraced a range of hybrid work models that allow employees to work from off-site locations for some or much of the time. It’s important that organizations provide structure and support around the activities best done in person or remotely.”

School Response:   “Our schoolhouse, is our sanctuary”

     The large-scale failure of at home learning during the COVID-19 pandemic taught the school community all the wrong lessons. Instead of seeing the potential for developing alternative instructional delivery systems, school officialdom doubled-down on the sanctity of schoolhouse building. Granted, most of the at home learning platforms schools rolled out during the pandemic were poorly designed and poorly delivered. That does mean, however, that well-crafted at home models, ones for example the private sector uses for training, are a model of learning that, aligns well with a technologically fluent population, provides unlimited options for course offerings and specializations, personalizes the learning experience, and, most importantly, has the ability to embed students into real world scenarios with real world feedback. If there is one glaring outcome to emerge out of the COVID-19 pandemic—one which the private sector now embraces—it is location matters little in conducting business. Training, negotiations, research, business transactions, meetings—all, can be done well in an office, as well as sitting on a subway train. Our children and grandchildren get this concept. Back in main and central offices, not so much.