On How We Need to Talk About the How

I spent this past weekend at the annual KIPP School Leader retreat where school and regional leaders get together for two days of workshops, conversations, and catching up with each other. One of the key goals of the retreat is to share best practices across our network of 109 schools. This happens formally, i.e. schools that are really great at something get to present to other school leaders and also informally through conversations over lunch or at breaks. I’m walking away from the weekend with lots of concrete ideas that I want take back to my school, especially from a day-long session with Paul Bambrick-Santoyo of Uncommon Schools on strengthening teacher observation and feedback. But this weekend reminded me of an issue I’ve been wrestling with for a while – how hard it is to share ideas that will move the needle for kids, even across the KIPP network. I’m going to argue that school quality is poorly correlated with the “what” a school does and highly correlated with “how” they do it. And that it’s way, way, way easier to share information, both in formal presentations and informal conversations, about the “what” than the “how”.

Many schools look very similar on paper and have many of them same structures, initiatives, and areas of focus. Just to name a few popular ones, virtually every elementary school in the country does “inclusion” for special education, has teachers teach “guided reading” lessons, and uses a “data-driven” approach around instruction and assessments. These similarities are even stronger in the “no excuses” charter school community, where you could add longer hours and a college focus to the list of items that almost every school does. So the “what” is similar, yet the quality of schools is incredibly varied. Just like humans and monkeys share virtually the same DNA, most schools and almost all “no excuses” charter schools look almost identical on paper. But humans aren’t monkeys and not all charter schools (and not even all KIPP schools) are outstanding.

So if schools look pretty similar and focus on pretty much the same things, why are some more successful than others? I would argue it’s all about the “how”, or the execution of the “what”. To break it down even further, it’s about how well people do their jobs and carry out the big ideas. This reasoning gets frustratingly circular (schools are good because people are good at their jobs), but I think it’s true. Almost all elementary schools teach guided reading, but some school leaders create a schedule that allows lots of guided reading to happen better than others. Some instructional leaders provide higher quality professional development for teachers on how to choose the right book than others. And some teachers are more skilled at teaching 6 year olds how to apply new phonics skills in their reading than others.

You could go on and on with this guided reading example and throw in more and more variables, but the point should be clear – what’s important is not that one school teaches guided reading and one doesn’t, it’s the thought, care, and detailed thinking that goes into execution on the big idea. But talking about the “how” is much harder than the “what” since it takes more time. To really get to the root of why one school’s reading results are better, it’s not enough to say they do guided reading or even that they do it really well. You need to understand what a school is doing at a deep, granular level around reading instruction.

The best sharing and development tries to get at this. Bambrick uses tons of videos of school leaders conferencing with teachers. KIPP school founders get to travel the country observing in schools to see the work that takes place on the ground. KIPP invests in people, both as teachers and leaders so that we are as good at executing on our ideas as possible.  But all of this takes a ton of time, money, and effort. As hard as this is, forcing ourselves to always go to the “how” conversations is what needs to happen.


After the jump, a teacher onboarding activity created by the wonderful Ellen Davis of KIPP Ascend Primary that I’ve slightly adapted and have used for the past two years to get new staff to think about the dangers of focusing on the “what” and not the “how”.

NUMMI “Reading” Response

Please listen to the This American Life program called NUMMI. The excellent radio program explains the creation and eventual failure of a revolutionary General Motors car plant, called NUMMI in Fremont, CA. Created as a partnership with Toyota, NUMMI was intended to bring the Japanese focus on quality and teamwork to an American car company and transform how GM built cars. As you’ll hear, it doesn’t quite work that way. Like the article, “Chef on the Edge”, this isn’t about education policy, guided reading, or sticker charts. But it is about teamwork, creating staff culture, replicating innovation, and finding what works. Like the chef article, I have some guiding questions for you to answer or think about in preparation for our calls. Please note that the radio program is about 55 minutes long. The link to the website is below:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/nummi and select the “Play” button located to the right of the picture of the car.


Act 1: 

1. What are some of the differences between GM and Toyota workers and between their working environments? 
2. Why do you think the GM workers who visit the Toyota plant in Japan have such a powerful experience?
3. Why is giving workers the power to pull the cord that stops the line such a big deal? 
4. What parallels do you see between traditional school systems and GM as an organization? 
5. Why was the NUMMI plant successful? How do those lessons translate to a school environment?

Act 2:

1. Why didn’t the NUMMI model work other places?
2. One GM executive talks about the mistake of focusing on how Toyota ran their factory floor and not on everything that goes into supporting that system, most especially the culture in the plant. What would a parallel be in a school setting? What would be “easy” to focus on, but would miss the bigger issue? 
3. One of the GM executives sends a worker to photograph every inch of the NUMMI factory so they could replicate it. What was this executive missing? What are the similarities in working in a growing KIPP school?
4. There are great KIPP elementary schools in other cities. What do we need to think about as we learn from them as we grow into 1st grade and improve our kindergarten program? What do we have to do to avoid the failure that GM had trying to replicate NUMMI?