10 Principles for Designing the 2020-2021 School Year
I wrote my last article, “It’s Time To Design For Resilience,” from a place of personal experience, as our team moves our school into remote learning and plans for the road ahead. I needed a framework to understand what was happening.
Since it was published, I’ve received a number of questions. Most of them boil down to the same thing we’re asking at my school: how do teams do this? How do we design for institutional resilience at our schools?
The challenge of 2020-2021 in schools, in part, is to build resilient systems, programs, and cultures. By resilience, I’m not referring to the personal trait that we often seek to build in individuals through SEL, though that will also likely be imperative. I’m speaking about programmatic or institutional resilience: the ability of your school’s teams, systems, and programs to flex, to function, and not to break -- even in the midst of uncertain, unschedulable, and abrupt changes in the conditions that we work under.
There are many others offering resources to help leaders get their head around the deep, lasting disruption underway for schools. Like you, I have been swimming in articles, webinars, and Zoom calls to share ideas. I hope that Leadership+Design (L+D) has added something to that conversation, but we’re certainly not the only ones to do so.
READ EARLIER ARTICLE: "IT'S TIME TO DESIGN FOR RESILIENCE"
The question remains: how do teams do this? How do we design for resilience at our schools? As school teams navigate our present crisis - which is the textbook model of a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) situation - a well-facilitated design methodology is the solution. When schools put it in motion, the outcomes are new insights, more effective teams, and stronger, more creative plans.
All of us are beginning to plan for next year, which means you need to plan your process. Let the following principles guide your work:
Design from mission and values. Your mission is there to clarify your school’s unique reason to exist, but under normal circumstances schools often avoid hard conversations about what the mission might force us to change. This is the moment we’ve been talking about - you’ll need to focus on what’s core, and deliver it really well.
What does your mission mean specifically now, in the midst of COVID-19? What kind of response does it call for? What legacy programs have value under the old model, but are not mission-critical under new circumstances? On the other hand, what new tasks does your mission challenge you to take on?
Clarify the dominant scenarios. Consider a Scenario A (return to campus with an emphasis on social distancing), a Scenario B (unscheduled, intermittent patches of extended remote learning), and a Scenario C (extended delivery of your mission through remote learning). Each of these has many possible permutations. Update 5/8/2020: NAIS has released this stellar guide to scenario planning, which should now be the first read for independent schools in this phase.
Avoid assuming that you’ll know by July 1 which scenario your school will operate under; in fact, the scenarios may change throughout the year on. Designing resilient systems and programs in 2020-2021 means designing solutions that can withstand changing scenarios and help your team pivot when needed. Look for rituals and systems that can provide throughlines to your community (e.g. Town Meeting is still on Fridays at 8am) during these changes, or can adjust quickly. As you develop solutions, look for how they apply under each scenario, and how you might transition as a school from one to the other.
Think in terms of systems. Schools are a web of interlocking considerations. Schedule impacts grouping; grouping impacts staffing. Map the key components of your school model: what broke, and what became more central, in Spring 2020? What’s at risk of breaking, and what has the possibility of becoming more central, given the scenarios you’re mapping next year? Then, look for the connections between them. Not only can that help you understand the dynamics better, it may help you find opportunities to feed two birds with one hand.
Design from human needs. During triage, the focus is often on translating each component of our on-campus experience to a digital analogue. But a digital version of an on-campus experience may feel incomplete. Instead of replicating on-campus experiences in the digital space, we need to design experiences that meet human needs in different ways. These needs extend beyond the classroom: with our newfound isolation, we’re newly reminded of the ways that on-campus school serves a variety of needs apart from learning objectives. This requires a systematic process of clarifying the needs of students and families at this time.
Designing from needs serves another goal, as well: it helps us step back from assumptions about what school looks like, and opens up a broader set of options for our future.
Defer finding solutions. All of the above requires us to wait before answering the question, “what are we going to do?” Jumping into solution-finding early feels productive, but teams typically lose a lot of time with a lack of clarity about what outcomes, exactly, they’re trying to achieve. After you’ve explored possible scenarios, identified the needs you’re designing for, and clarified what your mission calls you to do, your team will have a shared understanding that will lead to developing better ideas. You’ll also have a set of criteria that helps you properly evaluate possible what’s worth doing.
Pay attention to community maintenance. Great on-campus programs balance task (activities that achieve an external goal) and maintenance (activities that strengthen individual well-being and community relationships). But so much of the maintenance that happens when we’re on campus is unprogrammed: hallway transitions between class periods, though often seen as “wasted time” on a school’s schedule, are one of the most important times of day for a middle school student. For adults, the few moments of transition before we formally start a meeting are where we check-in with each other, or pass along informal and build culture or share essential bits of information related to running the school.
When designing for resilience, we have to create rituals that build community and group maintenance into our on-campus as well as our remote learning experiences. If we don’t, it’s all work all the time, and people get frayed. Eventually, our task activities become less effective, even destructive. This also means intentionally redesigning your precious on-campus time to be more human and relational, so that you can leverage those relationships if and when you move into remote learning. (Once you do so, you may not ever be willing to go back.)
Build your leadership team’s capacity to collaborate and navigate ambiguity. This challenging environment heightens the need for leadership teams to build the skills to navigate a VUCA environment. This includes self-awareness, an improviser's mindset, and a shared language for talking about emotions and conflict.
This is also about letting go and distributing authority. To move quickly, you have to allow people to make decisions - or at least to developing prototypes to bring back to the full team. The work of planning needs to be distributed to more people, which ultimately it will build confidence and trust. It will also, very likely, disrupt established patterns of status on teams. That’s probably good.
Acknowledge the emotional component of this work. The fact that designing for 2020-2021 is a huge cognitive challenge doesn’t mean that it’s not also a huge emotional challenge. As Mr. Rogers says, “if it’s mentionable, it’s manageable.” By allowing emotions to be on the table when teams work together, they increase the likelihood that they’ll be successful in identifying a solution. The same is true for the communities you serve - they also need opportunities to process and reflect.
Design for ongoing learning. In a typical school year, we often designate days for professional learning 12 or more months in advance. Often this means an intensive stretch of professional development before school opens, or maybe a handful of days throughout the year. In a resilient professional community, learning, reflection, and time to share will be an ongoing feature of how you operate.
These habits will not only help you improve the quality of your program throughout the year, they offer a channel to reflect on what you should change in your new normal school practice. What did you stop doing that should have stopped a long time ago? What new practices should be maintained even when you’re all on campus? And what assumptions about teaching and learning have been exposed as needing re-examination? This leads to perhaps the most important point:
Lay the groundwork for reinvention - in 2021-2022 and beyond. The need for institutional resilience comes from the challenges of the year ahead, a year where the demands of social distancing, and the duration of on-campus learning, are uncertain and may result in flux. A resilient system is designed to manage those transitions well, and it will be necessary for as long as we live with the threat of COVID-19.
In a post-COVID world -- presumably one in which a vaccine is widely available, or perhaps one with widespread testing and effective treatments -- we will emerge unable and unwilling to return to the way our schools ran in the first part of 2019-2020. Some bad practice will have been clearly exposed as just that. Some of our new habits will have had enough time to become better than what we were doing before. New technologies will have evolved: we’ll be thrilled to ditch some of them, but others will feel impossible to live without. The economy will have shifted dramatically. Perhaps most importantly, our students and their families will have new needs and markedly different expectations of what school looks like.
At that point, we will need to actively engage in what the education nonprofit Transcend calls re-invention. They also point out that the reinvention needs to start now.
As schools design next year, they should consider professional learning, planning, and reflection to be essential, ongoing activities. What is working? What are we learning? What do we not know yet? What should continue? By actively engaging in this process of learning, reflection, and planning, schools will be better situated to emerge stronger in the years to come.
This work is challenging. It is complex work that deals with a VUCA situation, and planning will necessarily happen in a compressed time frame. Many schools have reached out to us for help. For some of them, this article may be enough. Great! At the same time, each of these principles has nuance, and could be the basis for their own blog post. Having a facilitator can ensure you’re using the right tools, keep your team on track, steer you around common pitfalls, and help your team get better in the process.
