Introduction and Background of Douglas Reeves (00:58)
Cindy:
Thank you so much for being here.
Douglas Reeves
Well, it's my great pleasure. We both have a lot of international interest in common, so I'm looking forward to burning with you today.
Cindy
Absolutely. So I'd love for you to set the stage for our audience. What is the work that you do that you are most passionate about?
Passion and Research in High Poverty Schools
Douglas Reeves
Well, for quite some decades, my work has been in high poverty schools. I'm the author of the original 1990-90 studies, 90% poverty, 90% minority students, and 90% meeting or exceeding academic standards. But over the course of years, I've updated that and been joined by other researchers. I particularly want to acknowledge people like Karen Chenoweth, Heather Zdowski, Stephen Graham. You know, 30 years ago, I was kind of a voice in the wilderness, but it really is great to see research that is replicable and that is supported by other researchers, and I wouldn't be doing my job.
as a writer if I don't acknowledge their work as well.
Cindy
a very great emerging body of evidence here.
I'd love for you to share with us because as you said, most of your work is in high poverty, high achieving schools. So what are some of the more interesting findings that you've had in your research?
Findings on High Achieving Schools in High Poverty Areas (02:14)
Douglas Reeves
Well, there's a couple of things when I updated this research in the book, Achieving Equity and Excellence, that I think are really important. Number one, some of the original findings are very robust and persistent. For example, one of the things that distinguished schools that had identical demographics, that is, 90% poverty, high numbers of minority students, same union contract, same per-people funding. But the successful schools did more non-fiction writing, writing to describe.
writing to compare, writing to analyze and so on, literally starting in kindergarten. And the unsuccessful schools with the same resources and the same students did a lot of haikus and acrostics, which were really reflective, frankly, of low expectations. No offense to haiku fans, but I'm just saying that the multi-paragraph nonfiction writing claim evidence reasoning is really what challenged students to improve. That has been supported over the years with evidence that shows, as I attempted to do,
that sort of nonfiction writing doesn't just help writing. It helps reading comprehension, helps mathematics, science, social studies. Moreover, it is an emotionally safe way for our second language students, of which there are a growing number in the US, for them to express themselves in an emotionally safe way. So nonfiction writing is the bomb. Not a lot of magic bullets out there, but as I always tell people, it's practices, not programs. Don't go out and buy something labeled nonfiction writing. It's what we do, not what we buy that matters. So that's one thing.
Another consistent finding was collaborative scoring, where teachers will look at anonymous student work. Can we agree on what student work is proficient and non-proficient? That may seem obvious, but in an astonishing number of schools, you can have wildly varying definitions of what quality student work is, literally from one door to the next. In these highly successful schools, the faculty agrees. What's good third grade writing? What's good seventh grade math problem solving? What's a good ninth grade lab report? And they agree on proficiency.
Another common characteristic is what I would call a laser-like focus on achievement. That's what they talk about. They don't spend their time talking about things that they can't control. They're talking about things of the curriculum, the assessment, the student performance, and most importantly, feedback on how they get better. And then the final thing that I would say is they agree on these fundamental principles of accuracy and fairness. It's crazy in schools that I go where the very same work
that everybody thinks has the same quality. We all have the same standards, for example, but it could be an A, could be a B, could be a C, could be a D or an F, or if they're using numbers, the same thing. In these highly successful schools, there's a consistent definition. And I guess just one more thing, since you and I both share an international student at school background, there are, although most of my work is in high poverty schools, I've spent some time in some very elite, very expensive international schools and private schools in the US. And the astonishing thing is,
is that these characteristics of successful high-poverty schools is precisely what you see in great independent schools, great international schools, great charter schools. So it's not a matter of label, it's just great teaching and leadership.
Cindy
I'm really hung up on the informational text piece because that isn't something that I've heard in the past and you think that it would be more widely publicized. Why do you think that is the piece that informational text has such a profound impact?
The Importance of Non-Fiction Writing in Education (05:39)
Douglas Reeves
Well, I think King says that writing is thinking through the end of a pen. It's responding to literature. It's responding to, it's interviewing people and drawing your own conclusions. I ran an elementary school newspaper club for several years. And all the parents and many of the teachers would say, these kids don't like non-fiction writing. They'll only do fantasy and fiction, baloney. They loved writing for publication. They loved interviewing teachers and administrators, loved writing movie reviews and book reviews and game reviews.
writing opinion pieces, writing sports reviews. So I think it is really about engaging their brains in a way that helps them to understand literature. Moreover, I have nothing against fiction, but I think too often we expect too little of our students when all we think that they can do is fantasy and acrostics, when they can write profoundly intellectual pieces. And I'm talking, by the way, starting in kindergarten, where they can write to describe, they can write to say,
how this dog is different from that dog, you know, how this plant is different from that plant, and from a very early age, can engage in that sort of intellectual reasoning that really serves them well later on. And as I say, it is particularly helpful for second language kids. Unfortunately, a lot of people think writing is kind of the caboose and the literacy train. First you speak, then you read, then maybe if we get around to it, you write. That's one of the problems, frankly, today.
in a lot of these commercial literacy programs. They're so focused on reading that they forget that writing is a key to reading comprehension. It's not one or the other, you gotta do both.
Cindy
that production element. What I'm hearing there too, in the products you described from your students, was authentic writing environment. So having a newspaper club, being able to, a video game review, that it's opportunities for students to see literacy as something they do for themselves in making sense of the world. And informational text gives a good chance to do that. Do you think that's a piece of it, the authentic writing context?
The Role of Collaborative Scoring and Focus on Achievement (07:41)
Douglas Reeves
Absolutely, it's things like family histories and neighborhood newspapers. Even during COVID, when kids were pretty isolated, there were tons of opportunities for them to make important family connections and social connections through the vehicle of writing. And also, as they proceed and they come out of kind of the emotional cocoon of that has happened when the schools were closed down, it's so important that they have opportunities to connect with one another. Writing is a great way to do that.
Cindy
Beautiful. The second piece that you really touched on there was this idea of equitable assessment and of having multiple voices to make sure that there's clarity and alignment behind how we're assessing. And I'm curious, how do you think we should be measuring student achievement?
Measuring Student Achievement Accurately and Fairly (08:29)
Douglas Reeves
Well, in a word accurately, who would have ever guessed a few years ago that the word equity would have been a bad word, but it is a very loaded term in a lot of educational circles. So I just talk about accuracy and fairness. For example, if we were playing a game and then, and let's just take basketball as an example as it's fairly international, and at every away game there was a different height of the basket, a different shape of the ball, a different dimension of the court, different set of rules. Kids would say...
that's not fair and they'd stop playing the game. We expect in things that are really important, like basketball, for there to be a consistent level of expectation. And if that's true in basketball, it ought to be true in mathematics, in science, in writing and so on. And yet the research that I did with more than 10,000 teachers showed that the identical set of work, I mean same homework, same quizzes, same finals, same behavior, same everything, could have resulted in an A, a B, a C, a D or an F.
depending entirely not on the student's performance, but on the idiosyncratic judgment of teachers. That's not fair. And the other word that I like to use is just accuracy. If we believe that we're evaluating students accurately, then it's not, you know, gee, I know it when I see it, it's up here somewhere. It's I've established a clear set of expectations and you meet them or you don't. It's not about outside of school functions. It's not about family structure. It's not about homework.
It's not about any of those things, and it sure as heck is not the average. It's about did I meet the standard or not? That is the way that in our society, we evaluate drivers and pilots and brain surgeons. It's never on the curve. It's never against the average. It's always about a standard of proficiency. They meet it or they don't. And it is also, I would add, not about getting it right the first time. We want our drivers, pilots, and brain surgeons to make a lot of mistakes, get feedback on those.
And then when they get it right, then you get to be a certified brain surgeon pilot or driver. The same ought to apply in seventh grade math.
Cindy
My fear when listeners hear this is that they're going to hear standardization as standardized tests. So might you elaborate on some other systems of accountability for standardizing assessment without standardized assessment?
Douglas Reeves
Right. Well, the late Grant Wiggins had a wonderful article called standards, not standardization. And I think he expressed it beautifully in that phrase. So I do believe in standards. I think standards are fair and accurate. It is the only way to get past some of the racial gaps that happen when we get involved in standardized testing. Moreover, when we do assessments in the classroom, it's never one shot and you're done. It's always instead of a three-hour standardized test, it's maybe three items.
and then get feedback, improve it, get feedback, improve it. Very much like a great musical practice, very much like a great athletic practice. It's never about feedback weeks or months later. It's immediate feedback. So the assessment that I think is most important involves that. In fact, I would even go so far as to argue the purpose of assessment is not merely to evaluate a student. The purpose of assessment is to give feedback that improves both teaching and learning.
both what my students do and what I as a teacher do. And so we gotta be really clear about that. And so I fear sometimes that so much emphasis is, and let's take a balanced approach here. There is a national need to say, hey, once a year, can we ask how kids are reading? Does society have an interest in that? I'm okay with that. Once a year, can we ask how they're doing in math? I'm okay with that. But that does not give me as a teacher the day-to-day feedback that I need to use. In fact,
Cindy
Yes.
Douglas Reeves
That's the difference between formative assessment, which informs teaching and learning, and summative assessment, which does not. That's just a national accountability model. And just a consumer alert for your viewers, there's a lot of things out there masquerading as formative assessment that are not. I wrote an article called Uninformative Assessment. That would be the best way to describe them. If it's not helping you as a teacher, improve teaching and learning tomorrow, it's not formative. So we gotta be really clear.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I hear teachers say, well, we have too much testing, so they do none. What we've got to do is get the right kind of testing, which is two or three items with immediate feedback, followed by respect for teacher feedback and application of that. But just to illustrate one point on this, I'm seeing a growing number of high school teachers in math and science, which typically have got the highest failure rate, especially in urban schools, dramatically change how they do assessment from do the odd number of problems
one through 30, in which two things can happen, either they don't do it and they flunk, or it's done by Khan Academy or ChatGPT, thanks very much, that doesn't work either. What they're doing is to get the assessments done during class so that the students get immediate feedback, it's really authentic student work, not done by artificial intelligence. That's what I'm seeing around the country, is a much more appropriate way to help students practice and gain proficiency.
Cindy
So just to summarize, I'm hearing more formative assessment more often and less, I don't know, large chunks of assessment, just kind of little pieces here and there that make space for iteration. Beautiful.
Douglas Reeves
Exactly. And iteration is key. So anybody who does a one-shot assessment, one shot and you're done, is basically saying teacher feedback doesn't matter. Now I don't know any teacher who would say teacher feedback doesn't matter, but I know a lot of teachers who do one-shot assessments. Those two ideas are intellectually incompatible.
Cindy
Very cool. Another idea you touched on was this idea of averaging and how that undermines the process of success. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
The Problem with Averaging in Assessment (14:23)
Douglas Reeves
Sure. A lot of our computerized grading systems default to the average. So, I'm going to, whatever, however proficient you were at the end of the semester, I will punish you for mistakes that you made three months ago. That's what the average does. And we teach every seventh grader in the country that the average, that is the arithmetic mean, is not always the best measure of central tendency. Sometimes it's the mode, sometimes it's the median, and oftentimes it's not the average. Here's the illustration that I think jars people.
Imagine that you have one of your students who has just won the state track championship. And she is up there on the podium about ready to have a gold medal placed around her neck. And somebody taps her on the shoulder and says, sorry kid, you fell down in practice in February, so we're going to take that gold medal away. Now in that context, that is crazy talk. But colleagues, I'll tell you what, every semester there's a kid who is proficient, who can do everything you ask and more at the end of the semester.
and yet they get Ds and Fs because of mistakes they made three months ago. And that is why the average is fundamentally wrong. This is not a philosophical statement. I'm a math teacher. It's a mathematical statement. The average is inaccurate. And yet a lot of us are governed by these dumb electronic grading systems. The visual image that I want you to have, I bet a lot of our viewers remember the old series The Office, in which this, you know, very obnoxious guy...
who would prowl around the office and his hair kind of looked eerily like mine. And I want you to imagine that the guy from the office is the programmer of your electronic grading system. Now who do you think is more qualified to evaluate your students? Is it that guy or is it our professional educators? So let's stop letting the computers run our evaluation of systems. The average is dumb. The average is fundamentally inaccurate.
And worst of all, it's demoralizing. A lot of kids stop showing up in the last two months of a semester because they say, what the heck? I'm gonna flunk anyway. I might as well not even show up. So when we've had schools get rid of the average, it doesn't just improve the student success rate. It improves behavior, improves attendance, improves student and faculty morale. There's a whole cascade of virtuous things that happen once we get rid of the average. If you could just pick.
Cindy
Yes.
Douglas Reeves
one thing to do. You don't need a 450 page book on grading reform. You just need to get rid of the average.
Cindy
May I ask, do you ever get family pushback from that? Because I'm thinking about in my own classroom, right? That that was a, well, show me the grade book that justifies the score. So how do you educate families around this idea of how we assess?
Douglas Reeves
Oh sure.
Douglas Reeves
Well, and let's be directly honest, if I can speak frankly, the families who push back are the ones for whom the present system works fine. They love the bell curve. Their kids have always gotten high grades. They go home to a two-parent family with a quiet place to get homework done. They have parents or tutors who check homework. Their kids are headed toward the valedictorianship, and they don't want to change anything because it's worked just fine for them and it worked just fine for their parents. And I respect that, but here's the argument that I would make. I don't want to be...
yet crosswise with the parents of high achieving students. They oftentimes support public education and we need them. But I would make this case, if we can collaboratively focus on all students, not just your kids, but all students, then here's what happens. Everybody benefits. When we remove a section of repeaters, for example, that means we can add another advanced class. We remove a section of repeaters, we can add an elective that your kid has always wanted to take. Not only that, but when we reduce the failure rate,
We improve discipline and safety. That's in everybody's best interest. And we make the school a place that our best teachers want to come to. So the kind of thing that I advocate, like getting rid of the average, doesn't just help low performing kids. It helps everybody. And here's the other thing. I think for those parents of high performing kids who are thinking about college and thinking about career, it is fundamentally the difference. They've been trained throughout their academic career to be point grubbers.
And let me tell you what, you're not gonna get in the dean's list with points. Once you're in college, once you're an associate in the law firm or junior partner in a medical practice, it's performance, not points. Nobody gets ahead in college or the world of work with extra credit or with points. And I grieve that some of those very high achieving kids have bought the lie, that it's points that matter when the truth is it's performance.
Cindy
Yes.
Cindy
Beautiful. What a well-rounded argument of not only how it benefits the entire ecosystem, but that problem that we've been solving for that high achievers do get so fixated on the grade. And what a way to kind of shift that culture in your school.
Douglas Reeves
Can I just add a footnote to the teachers who are watching? This is also an issue of respect. This is being recorded in the summer of 2023 at a time when we are losing teachers left and right out of our profession. And when I interview these teachers, it's not money. I mean, money's important. Don't anybody leave this session thinking Doug said money is unimportant, money's important, but it's not enough. It's respect, it's professional treatment. And you wanna know the most...
Cindy
Please?
Douglas Reeves
disrespectful conversation that happens with teachers every single year. It's when the kid comes in at the end of the semester, how many extra points do I need to get to go from a B plus to an A minus? That's disrespectful. It's disrespectful. The respectful conversation is, ma'am, what do I need to learn, show, and do to move from a B to an A? That's a learning conversation, not a points conversation. So we gotta get off this points train and get more respect for teachers by focusing on-
performance, not points.
The Concept of Power Standards in Curriculum (20:26)
Cindy
could have said it better myself. Another piece of your research that I would really, really love to talk about is this idea of power standards. So just to set the context, a lot of people are talking about how do we refine our curriculum? How do we reduce what's on the plate of teachers of what we need to cover or teach? So can you talk about this idea of power standards?
Douglas Reeves
I mean, nobody comes to that. Let's just first of all acknowledge that all of our viewers know that there's too many standards and too little time. That's just the facts. And to be completely fair, you know, it's easy to beat up our state departments about this, but to be totally fair to them, nobody goes to Tallahassee or Topeka or Sacramento and says, here's what you don't have to teach. Every year they go to the state capitol and say, hey, you left out this part of history. You left out this sort of mathematics. You left out this. You left out that. But none of them.
Cindy
Right, more.
Douglas Reeves
gave teachers more time to do that. And you see that on everything from fundamental literacy to advanced placement European history. They add, add without giving teachers more time. So acknowledging that state departments will never take things off the table. I've seen some that claim to prioritize, but all they're really doing is grouping under different labels. They're really not saying, Doug, you don't have to do the rhombus and the trapezoid in seventh grade. You do have to do exponents. I mean,
That's the level of clarity that teachers, and I count myself among them, we want absolute clarity. We're literal people, but very few of these standard setting process do that. So it's up to us. At the district level, what I think we need to do is have Doug, the eighth grade math teacher, sit down with Jill, the ninth grade math teacher, and have a conversation about, hey, what do I need to do? Have my students do to be ready to succeed with you next year.
Cindy
Me.
The Importance of Intergrade Dialogue in Setting Standards (22:13)
Douglas Reeves
And Jill is never going to say, well, Doug, there's 45 eighth grade math standards. You better cover every single one of them. She's going to say there's about six that are most important to succeed in my class. And that includes things like fractions and decimals, which I know they should have learned in fourth grade, but they didn't. There's a ton of eighth grade and for that matter, tenth grade students who don't know. It's writing and understanding story problems. It's plotting points in a graph and drawing inferences. It's a handful. And my ELA colleagues would say the same thing. They've got 45 things.
There's about a half a dozen. So power standards have three criteria. Number one, what's most essential for the next level of earning. And that requires an intergrade dialogue. And when I really listen to Jill, my counterpart in the grade higher than me, she will not stop at saying, "'Doug, here's what you don't have to do and do have to do." She'll talk about things that are not in the state standards like, "'Doug, how about helping them keep an assignment notebook? How about having them organize a project into component parts?'
How about having them be a good self advocate, asking for help before it's a crisis? You'll never see those things in a state standard, but Jill's right. And we got to listen to her to tell me, what do I have to do in my grade to send it to her professionally? So that's number one, it's what's essential. Number two, what's that high leverage? A few minutes ago, we were talking about writing. The schools that I see that are really performing well require nonfiction writing in every class.
every grade. It starts in kindergarten. It includes art and music and social studies and math. And I know all the reticence that you're going to get there because Doug the math teacher isn't going to say, oh, gee, principal, thanks for the tip on educational research. We're going to say, are you kidding me? I'm a busy guy. I've got a math curriculum. I don't have time for writing. And I'm not a math teacher. Please don't wait for buy-in because it'll never happen. Just say, Doug, I'm not asking for buy-in. There's just a lot of evidence that says writing helps.
I'm just asking for 20 minutes once a month for you to have students write about a graph, write about a story problem, write about why a wrong answer is wrong. And I'm not asking for buy-in, I'm asking you to do it. And at the end of the year, let's see if our students are thinking more deeply about graphs, story problems, and all the other things that you do as a mathematician. And once I see that it helps my students, then I'll have buy-in. But I'm not going to have buy-in up front. And you'll have people yelling and moaning and belly aching.
all the way to the honor roll, just like our kids don't embrace, you know, challenging things either. So, the first part was what's essential. Second part is what has leverage. Nonfiction writing is an example.
The Role of Non-Fiction Writing Across All Classes (24:46)
Cindy
Can I clarify, when you say leverage, would a synonym for that be that it has transferability or do you see those as being different?
Douglas Reeves
Yeah, that's it. No, on the contrary, that's a really thoughtful point. And thank you for making that more clear. I mean, if I push, when I use leverage, I push in the lever of nonfiction writing, then the other part of improvement in mathematics, science, social studies go up. But transferability is great as well. You could have said the same thing about critical thinking. Do I understand the relationship between a claim and evidence? What evidence supports a claim? What evidence doesn't? And we can literally start that at kindergarten at a more sophisticated level of secondary school.
But that claim, evidence, and reasoning, what fits, what doesn't fit, is really good, you know, good citizenship training for all of our students. So those are just a couple of things that I think work. But I wanna be candid about this. It's not gonna have, people wanna say, well, I have to wait until the state will tell me what to do. And by the way, if I don't cover the rhombus and the trapezoid, and it's on the state test, then I'll be in trouble. Colleagues, nobody's ever been fired.
A, for test performance, that's a big urban myth out there, but they sure as heck haven't been fired for failure to cover the rhombus. A lot of kids are in trouble because they really don't know the basics of literacy and math that we need to be able to give them. That only happens if I sweep some other things off the deck.
Cindy
I think I disrupted your train of thought. You said that there were three points to clarify when we're asking about, when we're trying to identify power standards. You'd said that they're essential, that they have leverage or they're transferable. What would be the third indicator? I might've missed it.
Douglas Reeves
Well, I've been rethinking this. No, you're quite right. And I wrote about this over the course of many years. And I think we need to maybe broaden our scope there. But part of what I think is most important is are they ready for the next level? And so leverage is really important, as is essentiality. But sometimes I think what we're forgetting is, so I want us to look forward. That's what essentiality is about. But I also want us to look backwards.
What are our kids? And this was true before COVID, but especially now. What I expect my students to have, but they don't. So if I'm teaching eighth grade math, I expected them to have abstract multiply and divide with and without a calculator. Every math teacher listening to me knows that a lot of kids don't have that. If I'm teaching eighth grade English, I expected my students to know what our topic sentence is, to know what our transition is. But every teacher listening to me knows that there's a lot of students who don't know that.
Cindy
It was ha ha. Yeah.
Douglas Reeves
So looking backwards asks the question, what are the foundations that we need to approach learning this year? And to the administrators who are watching this, I just wanna make a plea, please don't give me any pablum about, Doug, you just gotta work smarter. No, actually I need more time. You send me kids, you can't add, subtract, multiply, and divide, I'll teach them algebra, but I need more time. And I'm seeing more and more high schools that are giving everybody double periods in English. Everybody more time in math.
Cindy
Gotta go back.
Douglas Reeves
If we've learned anything, and props to Johns Hopkins University who's done the best research on this, summer school isn't working. Saturday school isn't working. After school isn't working. The kids who most need it don't show up. The academic interventions that work are during the day. It's a part of the arguments that I've made in the book Achieving Excellence in Equity and many other publications is that you've got to be able to work during the day, and the practical influence of that is fewer periods.
These high schools that have nine period days are failing. Fewer periods, five, maybe six. And I know what you're, oh, but Doug, they're gonna lose all these electives. You wanna know who doesn't get any electives? The kids who drop out of high school because they flunked freshman algebra for the third time. You wanna have more electives? Have more kids in 11th and 12th grades. And this is what I've seen when I mentioned international schools and high achieving independent schools. They have fewer periods.
because they know that their teachers need more time. Our regular public school, and especially high-poverty schools, need the same thing.
Cindy
I want to come back to this idea of specialist classes, but I do want to linger on power standards a little bit more because I really think they're a big key for curriculum design and for how we fix schools moving forward. So we've said they should be essential, they should have leverage, and that we should have some space for gap analysis, right, for looking backwards. Do you think that these should be done on a school level? Should they be done for each?
Each year should we analyze them or what might be some systems and processes I can put in place to really make space and time for power standards.
Douglas Reeves
Given the high level of student mobility that our country faces, it's not a school level. It needs to be at the district level. And it doesn't have to be micromanaging. I think what we can do is on a single page is say, at the end of this year, whether it's third grade ELA or fifth grade math, here are the six core things that you need to know and be able to do. That gives teachers plenty of flexibility to teach and reteach, to add some things that have compelling relevance to their students, plenty of endorsement of teacher creativity.
Cindy
Okay.
Douglas Reeves
But what you don't have the discretion to do is not get 100% of kids proficient at those five or six things. And that's what we have to really get serious about.
Cindy
So district level, you're saying that's where it should be identified and then, and then even potentially redesigning assessments so that rhombuses aren't even on that thing, that, that only these kind of core, that we're, we're identifying the floor. That doesn't mean that we're identifying the ceiling, but at least we all know where the floor is. Okay. That makes it.
Douglas Reeves
Precisely. And teachers are brilliant about creating opportunities for extension and enrichment and that sort of thing. But we've got to be super clear about what the basics are. This is a, the way that I think makes it more compelling is to describe it as a health and safety issue. My cafeteria manager has plenty of creativity to create nutritious and beautiful and well-designed meals that have a wide variety of cultural influences. My cafeteria manager does not have the discretion to...
throw out hygiene regulations, and to serve unsafe food. So to me, literacy and student success is a health and safety issue. We've got to look at it like that.
Cindy
Well, and to continue that analogy a little bit, that I still have to have the right amount of protein and nutrients in the meals that I'm making. That's not dictating what I have to cook and serve my students, right? I can serve a million different dishes that meet those nutritional requirements, but that's where the kind of art and flexibility comes in.
Douglas Reeves
Exactly. I think Bob Marzano has always made that argument beautifully, that it's a combination of both. But when I hear people say it's only art, then they're disregarding the science and the health and safety issues. If there's any covert blessing of COVID, it's when health and safety is at risk, we know what to do. In a matter of days or weeks to protect the health and safety of students and staff, we need to start looking at literacy and student success as a health and safety issue.
And without being melodramatic about it, I was just speaking to a group this morning about this, given there's 1.3 million kids that left during COVID who have still not come back to the United States. 1.3 million, think about how many schools are gonna be closed. How many tenure teachers are gonna be laid off if those kids don't come back. And what I really want you to think about is the next 50 years of those 1.3 million kids of poverty, of unemployment.
Cindy
Yeah.
Douglas Reeves
of excessive use of the criminal justice system and the medical care system. That's what's at stake. And so we've got to move heaven and earth to get kids back and those that still are here to stop these toxic practices like the average that says sink or swim kid, you know, I'm going to prepare you for the real world. I guess that's the real world of poverty, unemployment, jail and hospitals.
Cindy
Well, and I'm going to keep piling things on top of you. Yeah, I see you didn't understand and here's the next level and here's the next level. And because there's just too much to get done. I'd like to go back to something you said a moment ago, because it's kind of, it's sticking with me a little bit because you talked about the need for more time. And I kind of imagine power standards as a solution to the time problem. But I think I heard you mention reducing the number of specialist classes or.
not specials classes, like specials, extracurriculars. Do you advocate for that?
Douglas Reeves
Well, if I have to choose between having a ninth grader who will learn to read and stay in school and having them take art in ninth grade, I'm not saying get rid of it. I'm saying we may have to move some of those to higher grade levels because if they cannot read in ninth grade and there's way more students than we think that are in that boat, you just saw the 13-year-old NAEP test results which are the lowest in 20 years, we are going to have a nation full of ninth grade students
Cindy
Yeah.
Douglas Reeves
who cannot read their textbook, which is not just an ELA failure, they can't read the science textbook, they can't read the social studies textbook. So saying, oh, no, they still have to have that German elective. Actually, what they need to do is to speak English. And if you want to keep those other electives, the only way you can keep them is to have kids who are still in school when there's juniors and seniors. But right now, if we have a bunch of 17-year-old freshmen, they're not going to stay in school. I realize that is a very unpopular argument to make. But there's...
very scant evidence that some of this elective work, and that includes world languages, sorry, but it's just true, that are not advancing the fundamental survival skill of students. And if we don't think about that in survival context, we are gonna lose these kids.
Balancing Reading Competence and Experiential Learning (34:55)
Cindy
Might I said it as a case study? So like I'm imagining a young girl with dyslexia who hates reading, hates reading. And all of her specialty classes are filled and jammed with remedial reading classes that tell her you're stupid, you can't read, practice reading more. As opposed to that same student having an opportunity to be in theater and feel smart and special and see her gifts actualized and see the purpose of reading.
And that to me is maybe why I would hesitate to make that argument. But what would be your perspective on that?
Douglas Reeves
I don't think it's an either/or proposition. My eldest son is one of Boston's leading actors, and theater saved him, both emotionally and intellectually. So I'm a big advocate of the theater. But I would argue also that given the situation that you just described, this young woman who is dyslexic, she can't read the script. She's not gonna succeed in theater either. And I think the situation that you described is when we have students, whether it's dyslexia, which...
Cindy
Yeah.
Douglas Reeves
A lot of these things that are so-called disabilities are way overdiagnosed. What may be is we just didn't teach her how to read. And we've pathologized that for my failure as a fourth grade teacher, as a third grade teacher that she should have learned to read by now. I turned my failure into her fault. So I give her a label or pathologize her. So I think the burden that we bear is let's learn how to read. For example, and let's stay with your example. We don't know.
if it's dyslexia or not, unless we really have certified reading teachers in our high schools. But we never do, or I should say, very, very rarely do. All of those reading specialists are crammed into the elementary grades, and yet everywhere I go in middle school and high school, they are pleading to have the reading expertise so we can get an accurate diagnosis at that high school level. And I worry that there's way over identification of special needs kids that may be a skill gap.
rather than a neurological gap. And once they're convinced it's a neurological gap, it's a label that sticks with them and their parents cling to it because they don't want to admit that, hey, it's a skill problem. No blame, no shame, we just need to learn the skill. And yet we hardly ever provide students with that opportunity. And so just to be clear, I'm a big advocate of extracurriculars. I've written extensively about this. Kids who are involved in extracurriculars tend to do better. But one of the
The tragic things that boards of education do around the country is to say, if you don't maintain a C average, we'll kick you out of all the extracurricular activities. For the student that you're describing, who might be flunking several classes because she doesn't read well, then we rob her of the the theatre group that almost kept her coming to school. What we ought to be saying in what Rich Kids do is exactly, and this is a real equity issue for me.
Cindy
could have saved her life.
Douglas Reeves
100% of students are involved in extracurriculars. I don't know why we don't make that a public mandate, that everybody gets something.
Cindy
I think if we can reduce the amount of curriculum, we can focus, give the time we need to those foundational skills without needing so much of this deficit thinking in schools. We make more room for strengths when there aren't as many spaces to say you're below here and here and here and here. But I don't know.
Douglas Reeves
precisely. And strengths can be developed. I mean, that's one of the things that, pardon me, and let me just, since you mentioned our girls and young women and as a parent of daughters, this resonates with me a lot. I have to give you a great book recommendation that every teacher and every parent of girls should read, and that is Brave Not Perfect. Brave Not Perfect, the author is the founder of Girls Who Code. And here is this brilliant woman, Yale Law School.
done all these amazing things in her life, talks about how the pattern from early childhood all the way through Yale Law School is, if it can't be perfect, I better not try. And the girls receive that impression again and again and again. So let's talk about the dyslexic girl that you described. If I can't be perfect, why even try out for the theater? If I can't be perfect, why even apply to college? And that standard of perfectionism is killing our young women and girls.
particularly in STEM classes, in STEM occupations as well. So I'm gonna tear about that. The author, I regret not being able to pronounce her last name, but the title is Brave Not Perfect, required reading for parents of kids.
Cindy
We will link that in the show notes. And it's such an important message. Just, it's so pervasive in our culture, especially for women. So yeah, thanks for shining some light on that. Okay, I'd like to pivot a little bit now to talk about leadership with you. So in your book, you talk about how we can't lead alone and that we need to get everybody working together towards a common goal. So how do you think that we create these environments
Where there is the psychological safety, where there is the sense of unity, what do you think are the keys to this?
Douglas Reeves
Well, I think the one key is to demythologize the perfect leader, the man, and I'm using my pronouns carefully here, on the white horse who rides in to save the day. And we just, we have to get rid of that because, and I wrote an article about breaking the glass ceiling. I think this is related to our previous conversation. Why is it that 24% of superintendents were women 20 years ago? And today in the enlightened age of 2023, 24% of women.
our superintendents. It'll be the same thing 20 years from now if we don't define what leaders are. 72% of our workforce is women, and yet we systematically denied them. Well, there's a couple of reasons for that. Number one, we have made, you know, the late Dick Elmore sadly lost in COVID, but the wonderful Harvard professor, Dick Elmore, talked brilliantly about distributed leadership. And we have to stop saying, well, you didn't show up for the girls' volleyball
Cindy
Ugh.
Douglas Reeves
team on Friday night, and you weren't there for the musical on Saturday night, and you weren't there for the band practice on Sunday. We have made leadership a 24-7 occupation in which we require leaders to choose between their families and their personal health and their job. So the first thing we have to do is to restructure what the expectations are. And it gets back to what you said about team leadership. Why can't we sit down and say, yes, we do want leadership representation at these events, but I'm not the only leader?
Yes, we want leadership representation at community events, the Rotary Club and the Chamber of Commerce and the Red Cross, but I'm not gonna be the only one who does it. If we wanna make leadership less of a killer job, we've gotta have what Nick called distributed leadership and mean it. And that means actual structural roles that people have. That includes not just appearances at games, that means real structural roles that I'm not gonna be the expert at everything. I wrote a...
book called Assessing Education Leaders and it has, and by the way, I'm not trying to sell books, it's free and open source, the Leadership Performance Matrix with 10 dimensions. Stop trying to be perfect at all 10. Say, I'm really pretty good at communication, but I'm not so good at data analysis. But thank goodness, I've got a colleague who is, and she's gonna lead data analysis. And I'm really pretty good at faculty development, but I need some help on leadership development. Here's a colleague who's gonna be really good at that. And we come to our boards.
with a team of leaders rather than, you know, I'm the great person who's going to solve it all. We've got to stop this nonsense of individual perfectionism of the leader.
Cindy
Makes me think of the Pareto's Principle, the 80-20 principle, and how do we make more space for the things that are our 20%. What are the things that you are doing that only you can do that you are amazing at? And stop wasting your time on that other 80% stuff that is just bogging you down and draining your energy. But how do we...
Douglas Reeves
Yes.
Douglas Reeves
That's the fundamental argument of the, that's the argument of the Gallup research. You know, what we tend to do because we all wanna be perfect. We're all, we all got A's throughout our student career and we can't stop that addiction to, you know, universal success, but the Gallup research is very compelling. Identify what your strengths are and don't build a team of clones. Build a team with complimentary strengths so that I spend more, faster and easier to.
Cindy
Go for it.
Cindy
diversity.
Douglas Reeves
concentrate on my strengths and make them better and help other people do the same. And it really requires and this is hard sometimes. Cuz when I see my clone, I say, isn't that great? They're just like me. I wanna have somebody who is my clone. That's a really terrible leadership strategy. You gotta value divergent thinking. You gotta value divergent strengths. And that takes a certain degree of discipline from the team to say we need to bring diversity to the table.
And by the way, I'm not just talking about the illusion of diversity because they have different skin color and different genders. I'm talking about real diversity. That means diversity of background and perception, diversity of analytical approaches that really help the entire organization make better decisions.
Cindy
to argue there, then our classrooms need to be doing the exact same thing. We need to be calling out divergent ways of thinking and ways of doing and ways of being and giving students space to identify what their superpowers are rather than consistently. But you're, oh yeah, you might be really good at that, but you're not good at this. So come, come to this remedial class.
Douglas Reeves
Well, I really appreciate, as a math teacher, what you said about different ways of thinking. And here's one real concrete way of thinking about this. Whether you're using language of ABCD or exemplary, proficient, approaching, and so on, whatever the language is, I think we need to do a much better job of distinguishing between being proficient, I meant the state standards, and what's the next level. And if the next level is an A or the next level is exemplary, what you just said is the insight I wish every teacher had. And that is, hey.
You got the right answer, bully for you. You know, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the two sides. You know the difference between an adverb and a verb, bully for you. But to get to the next level, we ought to say, what's a different way of expressing that descriptive sentence? And what's a different way of using the Pythagorean theorem? Or more to the point, think about where the Pythagorean theorem is not true, where all these mathematical certainties and scientific certainties are not true.
That's deep thinking at a different level that I think we need to challenge our children to do.
Cindy
Well, and to harken back to those power standards that like, I might not be, you know, math was never really my forte. And maybe I'm not the kid who was gonna figure out the alternate use for the hypotenuse and the Pythagorean theorem, right? But potentially in literacy, I have more space now to uncover my divergent thinking. Oh yeah, I've ticked those boxes. Now how much further can I get? So I think like by limiting our curriculum, we make so much more space.
for students to explore those areas of passion and interest in depth.
Douglas Reeves
Well, and that'll only happen if they're willing to take a risk of making a mistake and doing something wrong. I wrote along with my son a book about creativity called The Myth of the Muse. And one of the things that the research on creativity makes abundantly clear is that it is a process of trial and error. And, you know, nobody's first draft hangs on a museum wall.
Douglas Reeves
It was notebook after notebook, revision after revision. And yet, what happens in classrooms? One shot and you're done. And a lot of creativity comes out of collaborative efforts, not individual efforts. And yet, what do we see in the classroom? Works independently, works alone. So we say we value creativity, but I think there's a lot of things that we do that undermine it.
Redefining Leadership and Unleashing Creativity (47:16)
Cindy
Can I pivot back in our leadership discussion, we were just talking about distributed leadership, and I wonder what advice do you have for budgeting, for systems that make this a reality in schools versus just a burden that you're putting on the shoulders of teachers?
Douglas Reeves
No, I appreciate that. And I'll tell you, we are going to hit a funding cliff. And I don't care if you get a billion dollar grant, you don't have a 25 hour day. So we have to use the time and the money that we've got. But let me be really specific about some great principles that I've seen, for example, that have fundamentally changed without adding minutes to the day or dollars to the budget. One of the greatest ways of time, I think most viewers would agree, is a staff meeting. So I'm seeing more and more.
principals say good morning ladies and gentlemen here are the announcements read them at your leisure bam saved 44 minutes and 50 seconds of every meeting and let's use that time to get real work done. Maybe it'll be developing a common assessment that we used to wait in the central office to do maybe it'll be for collaborative scoring one of those key 90 practices and maybe it'll be to find some interim assessments that we can do not waiting for the district assessment what's it what are three or four assessment items that we could do tomorrow
that we could do as a check for understanding. And when instead of saying, you gotta do that with extra time and extra money after the school day, do it in time that we work together. And go home, be with your families.
Cindy
Go home. Cool. So almost a, sorry. So almost like a flipped learning model for staff meetings that we're doing the active engagement together. And the stuff that could be read in a note should be read in a note or in an email, but let's spend more time doing the work. Cool.
Douglas Reeves
I...
Douglas Reeves
Yes.
Douglas Reeves
Exactly. Same, I will tell you that my group, Creative Leadership Solutions, has essentially abandoned the traditional workshop model, which is just, didn't work before, but it's especially not working now, and spending more and more time with teams of teachers getting real work done. I think we have to not only rethink staff meetings, but rethink workshops, where I've got a brand new teacher who is shell shocked coming into this profession right now, sitting next to a 30-year veteran, assuming that they both have the same learning needs. We really have to.
Cindy
Awesome.
Douglas Reeves
rethink the money and time that is spent in some of these traditional, you know, sit in the auditorium and listen to the inspirational speeches. Just a waste.
Cindy
So when you're saying distributed leadership, it's more just a matter of our practice. It's how are we spending time and how are we empowering people who are impassioned in these areas to take a leadership role in that active learning together.
Douglas Reeves
Exactly. And let me illustrate with a real specific example, because I know our teacher and administrator viewers are literal people, and they want to say, that's great in theory, Doug. How does it work? Let me tell you exactly how it works. And, you know, if I could take the wonderful work of Dick Elmore and extend it to the next level, what we have found enormously successful is what we colloquially call the science fair for grownups. And by science fair, I mean, it looks like a kid's science fair.
Cindy
Yeah!
Douglas Reeves
and teachers or teams of teachers choose, okay, what's my, they all have the same framework. What's my challenge? What's my practice? What's my result? Well, my challenge might be, hey, not enough proficiency in third grade reading or too many kids flunking ninth grade biology. Let them choose. Maybe it's engagement. Maybe it's parental involvement. Let them choose. What's my challenge? Middle panel. What's my practice? What did I do? Well, I changed the way that students practiced chemistry. I changed the way that third grade readers
approached their subject and I stopped assuming that they had things that were supposed to have done in K2 because a lot of them didn't get it. What are my results? Well, I tripled the number of students who were proficient at third grade reading. I dropped eighth grade failures in mathematics by 82%. So challenge, practice, result. And what you do to finally answer your question about distributed leadership, you fill a high school gymnasium at the end of the year with all these hundreds of three-panel displays and
At the end of that, people will not say, thank goodness Doug Reeves wrote a book or gave a speech. They don't. They say, I learned it from the teacher in room 103. I don't believe these outsiders. I don't believe these people who write books. I believe the teacher in room 103. And that's the way you really get distributed leadership. Just this morning, I was having a conversation with a classroom teacher who said, well, you know, I'm not an administrator. I don't have a title. And I told him very frankly, he's an elementary school teacher. You know, the authenticity that you bring
to say, I tried this and it worked with my classroom, with my culture, with my union bargaining agreement, that young man is gonna have more authenticity than any set of outsiders or top-down implementers.
Cindy
What I'm hearing there is just school-wide making shifts to the ownership of data, right? That like data is something that we are collecting for ourselves to empower our practice. For learners, data is something that you collect for yourself to empower your practice and learn and grow. So it's just this top-down remodeling of how we're looking at learning and growth and action research.
Douglas Reeves
I think we have to be really careful about the use of the word data. Because I think you and I are saying by data we mean, hey, what happened yesterday that will inform my instruction today? The way too many people, particularly those who have bought into these data warehouses, they're still looking at last year's data. And unless they're retaining a whole lot of students, those kids have already left your classroom by now. So this data or these vendors who will come in a million dollars later and say, I can give you 50 charts and graphs. I don't want 50 charts and graphs.
Cindy
Hmm
Douglas Reeves
I want to know who's meeting standards, who needs help, and more specifically, what help do I need to offer them? That's all I want. And I think a lot of districts have become overwhelmingly victim to this false complexity that makes somebody look real smart but doesn't help teaching and learning. Moreover, I've heard legitimate concerns from teachers that say, well, my administration is weaponizing the use of data. Data are there to humiliate and embarrass teachers.
And I think we've got to be super clear when we use the term data. It's the data is like the weather. It's not your fault that there's a foot of snow and it's 10 degrees outside. That's just the data. It is your fault if you send kids out to the playground without mittens and boots and hats. It's our response to data that we're responsible for. Not your fault that you've got two thirds of a third grade classroom not reading on grade level. It is your fault.
if the principal is not willing to provide the time and the support necessary to get them on grade level. So I just, I don't mean to pick nits here, but I think it's really important for our listeners that we distinguish between data and response to data. The latter is what's on us.
Cindy
Very cool. Oh, I really love that. You shared a term I'd not seen before. You talk about four types of teachers, the leading teacher, the losing teacher, the lucky teacher, and the learning teacher. And I wonder why as leaders is this an important framework for us to know and be aware of?
Douglas Reeves
And just to be clear, that's not just about teachers. That's administrators, schools, entire systems. So just so you can visualize, I'll use my finger puppets here, so you can visualize this. On the vertical axis, we have the achievement of standards. So that's, you know, high and low. And then on the horizontal axis, we have, do I understand how I got there? I think the label of the graph was actually understanding the antecedents of excellence. So let's look at the upper right-hand quadrant.
Cindy
Okay.
Douglas Reeves
My students are performing well and I know how I got there. That's the leading quadrant. Great, happy to stay there, better work hard to stay there. But move over one slot to the left. That's the high performing school and we have no idea how we got there. That is, you know, that's the kid who was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. That's the kid who whenever he has trouble in class, parents buy a tutor for him. And miraculously the school looks good because they're always up there. And...
Cindy
No idea. Lucky.
Douglas Reeves
That's great as long as your kids stay rich and the parents stay committed to hiring tutors. Presumably they'll move into the college dorm with them as well. That's the lucky quadrant. But you know where I'm going with this. A lot of schools that used to be lucky didn't stay that way. So in the lower left-hand quadrant, you see the losers. That is low academic achievement, have no idea why they're there. And I don't mean to use such pejorative language, but colleagues, I'll tell you, I've been there.
where I'll say, gee, we've had three years of low literacy performance. How's this year time allocation for literacy? How's this year instructional strategy for literacy gonna be different from last year? And in more than 90% of the cases, the answer, hey, the master schedule set, it won't be time allocations done. And then they seem ever so surprised that they do the same thing and get the same old results. That's losing for sure. And then in the lower right-hand quadrant, this, precisely.
Cindy
I don't know.
Cindy
Or you could call it insanity, right? Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
Douglas Reeves
Yep, you see it all the time. Now here's the hardest part in this quadrant that you can imagine, the lower right-hand quadrant. So remember, if the vertical axis represents student achievement, that lower right-hand quadrant also has low performance, but on the horizontal axis, they have deep understanding of what they need to do about it. They are changing their instructional practices, their feedback practices, they're changing their time allocation, they're changing the way that leaders get involved in teacher collaboration.
Now here's the question, on paper, if all you looked at was the scores, they both look the same. They both have low scores. But let me ask you, is there a difference between that lower right-hand quadrant, the learning quadrant, where they're doing something about it, and the lower left-hand quadrant, the losing quadrant, same low test scores, and they're just clueless? And I think what we undervalue in this country is that lower right-hand quadrant, the learning quadrant, where the teachers have been honest.
They know that they've got a job to do. They're taking decisive action, not just the teachers, the leaders as well, in time and strategy and practices to ultimately get back up to that leading quadrant. And what we do is routinely humiliate those teachers because they had low test scores and we never looked at the causal variables. What are they doing about those? If they're doing nothing, then you're right. We gotta take action. But when they're saying,
Gosh, I've read the research. I'm going to do more nonfiction writing. I'm going to change my time allocation. I'm going to do writing across the curriculum. I'm going to do all these things that the research tells me to do. And I'm not going to wait for next year's test scores. I'm going to get feedback from two or three items every single week to see if I'm getting better and better and better. That's what we undervalue when we only look at scores.
Cindy
just like you were saying how the data is the weather, right? We can be oblivious to that weather or we can adapt and respond. And so whether you're leading or you're in the learning quadrant, that's the differentiator is, is you're taking the time in the morning to put on the raincoat or to even look at the forecast and make an informed decision. And that's all we can ask for as school leaders is that we're making informed, educated, research-driven decisions.
Douglas Reeves
precisely.
Cindy
Beautiful. Well, I think that is a lovely, lovely place to pause. I have a set of three questions that I ask every guest who comes in the show. It's like my lightning round at the end. So are you ready for my lightning round of questions? Awesome. So the first is what is a book that has had the most profound impact on your practice?
Douglas Reeves
course.
Douglas Reeves
Oh my goodness, I'm a voracious reader of, with no exaggeration, thousands of books. So I mentioned earlier Brave Not Perfect, which I think is really an important one. I'm trying to, that's an interesting challenge, but one that I would say is really important for all of us to think about, or outside the field of education, I think it's important for us to think about.
other historical books that may have a profound. So for example, you mentioned teams Doris Kearns Goodwin's a team of rivals about the administration of Abraham Lincoln and how he deliberately included people who disagreed with him on a regular basis to make his administration stronger. You want to look at a model for somebody who thrived during crisis. It would be hard to find a better model than not just Lincoln, but the other people who, uh, who he included. And it's not an accident that
One reason President Obama said that he included Hillary Clinton in his cabinet was he was influenced by Doris Kearns Goodwin's scholarship of Team of Rivals. I've tried to do the same thing. I run an organization of really smart people who, thank goodness, do not always agree with me and have the intellectual and personal courage to tell me when I'm wrong. So if you're looking for a book outside of education, I would certainly commend Team of Rivals. Let me just.
check my notes here for a second to see if I can offer another book. I didn't mean to give you such an extended response, but I really have an obligation to honor other authors. And so let me just check if there's any that pop up to me in my list right away. Please be patient with me. And here we go. I would say, particularly in this time of stress and anxiety that a lot of our students face, here are a couple that are
relevant not just to education, but to our lives as adults in the post pandemic era. The upside of stress, the author is Kelly McGonigal, a Stanford psychologist. And what McGonigal says wisely is that too often both parents and teachers say, we need to protect our kids from stress. Wrong, she says. We need to differentiate between bad stress, which is paralyzing and debilitating, and good stress, which is what they need as a survival skill in life.
And we've all seen these snow plow parents. I'm going to protect my kid from everything when what we need to do is differentiate good and bad stress. And the final one, which is similar, is from NYU professor Wendy Suzuki. And the title of that book is A Good Anxiety. In the same thing, she says, kids come in, NYU is a great school. And yet kids and their parents come in to Professor Suzuki and says, well, you know, you got to understand my kid has test anxiety. So please don't give her.
you know, a test or she has problem with deadlines, so please don't give her deadlines or, and life is gonna be full of awful consequences for these kids who cannot deal with any stress or any anxiety. So please understand, I'm not saying, bucket up kid, life is hard. I'm saying, let's be thoughtful about this, recognizing some anxiety is bad, some stress is bad, but some anxiety is necessary for survival, some stress is necessary for a survival. We've got to thoughtfully as educators and parents,
Cindy
Mm.
Douglas Reeves
differentiate the two.
Cindy
Well, as schools, we're supposed to prepare students for life. So if we're not helping them to embrace challenges and recognize even their own areas of strength and weakness, then they're not ready for the real world.
Awesome. Okay, question number two. This is kind of my personal research question. So I find in leadership, there tends to be kind of two different cultures I see in schools. Some that are really focused on achievement and getting the test scores, achieving, and then others that are a little bit more centered on sustainability, wellness, joyous classrooms. And my question is, how do you find this balance? How do you create highly joyous
and highly productive schools and workplaces.
Douglas Reeves
You know, I'm smiling so broadly because you have hit on one of these central issues of our time right now. And we've all read about the reading wars, you know, as if they're new. This has been going on for decades. And do kids need phonics or do they need the joy of reading? That is a false dichotomy. Of course they need phonics. Everybody believes that kids need to sound out words. But my fear with the present science of reading craze is that they're reading books with the, you know, stunning plot line of cat.
Matt Sat. And I don't know what that means, but I know it, you know, it's great that they know their, that their vowels and letter sounds. I'm all for that. But that does not include the joy of reading. And part of what my friends in the literacy field are insisting on is that you can't have one without the other. If all they know is decoding, but they don't have that flashlight under the bed joy of reading, we're making a mistake. And I think that's one reason why I'm such an advocate of student writing as well, because I think
Cindy
Yes.
Douglas Reeves
That's the sort of thing that engages them and empowers them. So I'm all for competence, but I'm also all for joy. That has nothing to do with the grade, and has everything to do with just being a literate citizen.
Cindy
So is relevance the key there, you think? Just being engaged in material that...
Douglas Reeves
Not necessarily.
I mean, so the reason I said not necessarily is that I'm kind of a non-fiction guy, as is probably evident to our viewers, or if you've read any of my work. I value creativity, I'm just not very good at it. And so I like, you know, so relevance resonates with me. But I also think that there's a lot to be said for kids who can sketch fantastical characters, both visually and verbally, and things that are not necessarily part of their social structure or news cycle.
Cindy
Hmm.
Douglas Reeves
I want literate citizens, but I also want to absolutely embrace this creativity. I would maybe a way to, Howard Gardner and I did this public library deal that was very fun in Boston. He's just a prince among men. But he has a great quote where he said, you can't think outside the box if you don't understand the box. So I want to be really clear channeling my inner Howard Gardner that creativity and knowing the facts.
are not opposites. You can't think outside the box if you don't understand the box. So we gotta be able to help our students do both and value the relevance that you cited, but also value their expansive view of a fantastic world that I might not even understand.
Best Leadership Advice (01:06:04)
Cindy
Beautiful. Final question for you. You've worked with leaders around the world, you've worked in schools, and I wonder if you could stand up on a stage and give one piece of advice and every single school leader in the world would hear it. What would be the piece of advice that you think would be the most profound thing that you wish you heard or learned or could share?
Douglas Reeves
You ask a straight question, you get a straight answer. Our responsibility as leaders is to create a fearless environment, hence the fearless schools. To create an environment in which it is safe to make a mistake, in which mistakes are never the source of humiliation and shame, whether those mistakes are by a struggling reader in first grade, or whether it's by an assistant superintendent who's 55 years old and just made a blooper of a mistake in front of a board. A fearless environment means we learn from mistakes. By the way, props to Amy Edmondson, who's the leading scholar on psychological safety. And what she would say is whether it's the superintendent in the boardroom, the child in a classroom, or for that matter, the captain of an airliner, you've got to have an environment where it's safe for people to push back, safe to make a mistake, safe to say, hey, captain, you're making a mistake. In her work in medical care, hey, surgeon, I may just be the tech here.
but I just saw that you're operating on the wrong leg. How about let's fix that. And a fearless environment that leads, that is literally in Professor Edmondson's research, a matter of life and death, is where we can challenge the boss, and the boss, instead of being angry or defensive, allows everybody to learn from it. That's what I aspire to be as a leader. And I think we would be better, in your hypothetical that I were addressing leaders, I would want them to leave with that notion.
I got to create a fearless environment which is safe and appropriate to make mistakes and to learn from them.
Cindy
couldn't have asked for any better advice than that. Well, my friend, it was such a lovely time catching up with you and just hearing your perspective. I love how straightforward you are with things that we can do as leaders that have a profound impact. And I just thank you so much for your work and for your time.
Douglas Reeves
Well, thank you so much for the kind words. It's been a joy.
