Introduction
At school and district levels, managing scarce resources to sustain or improve results has never been more 
challenging. Striving for consistency and efficiency builds tensions between those who care most about equipping children for an uncertain future.
Increasingly critical eyes on the education system advocate blunt instruments like “stronger management”, more top-down management, tighter controls, and simple incentives. This is surprising since such methods are failing the private sector by dispiriting and limiting people’s contribution. So, why should we expect anything different in education?
This is aggravated by the economy. We simply don’t know what jobs will be there in twenty years. Today, apart from a few core skills we cannot know what knowledge or skills will be needed in the future.
The consequences are that teachers complain that their jobs, while rewarding, are getting harder because of too few resources, too much paperwork, crowded classrooms, students with emotional problems, low pay and high-stakes standardized tests.
Isn’t time to realign administrators, unions, teachers, parents and students? The realignment is from teaching a curriculum more efficiently, to one of inspiring lifelong learning to thrive in a rapidly shifting economy.
Here’s the case for realignment
An Implementable Agenda
Unlike many other ideas now being pursued in education, this shift doesn’t require research, consultants or vast funding. It doesn’t involve reinventing the wheel. Thousands of Montessori schools have been on this track for many years, with extraordinary results.
Realignment covers such issues as:
1. Realigning Teachers and Parents Inspiring the Students to Learn: Shifting from imparting static knowledge to enabling students to create knowledge and deploy skills to new situations.
2. Realigning Administrators as Enablers: Managing teachers by traditional controls doesn’t work any better than it does in industry. Only inspired teachers inspire students. Realignment is moving administrators from controlling to enabling, to release teachers’ energies and talents while removing things that get in the way of their work.
3. Shifting Measurement Accountability from Teacher to Student: Instead of measuring progress through top-down tests, the education system must be linked dynamically to self-driven learning of the students themselves. For example teachers:
- Working in short cycles;
- Setting the goals of learning for the cycle.
- Shifting how the learning is to take place to students
- Measuring progress in terms of the questions students ask, not just the answers that they give
- Encouraging students to measure their own progress not just dependent on the teacher’s tests.
4. Shifting Communications from Command to Conversation. shifting from top-down communications and directives to conversations that help the student discover new resources, solve problems and generate new insights.
5. Moving from Outputs to Outcomes: This shift in-goal also means an implicit shift from delivering outputs (numbers of students who pass a standardized test) to outcomes in terms of what students are able to do as a result of their education. At its heart, it’s a shift from a focus on things to a focus on people, and the true goal of education.
So, how are such realignments achieved? Certainly, it requires concerted and sustained effort founded on all stakeholders being “on the same page”
This means that if people are to be clear on their expectations of others they need to understand the change from their perspective. The problem is that too many leaders use rational models which they think just makes a common sense and is why things go wrong from the get go Why? Because simply implementing prescriptions often means they disregard or are not aware of certain, sometimes irrational but predictable elements of human nature. This is why an approach to aligning and tacking people’s expectations was developed
The Alignment Process
What’s needed is a process that helps people clarify and develop agreed expectations to which there is genuine mutual commitment. Agreeing and measuring such specific expectations forms the basis of managing the tensions in school districts in a different way. It’s different because the focus is on people comparing their expectations of others with those others has of them. This focus helps people be more aligned and strategically focused.
Then analytical tools can help drive performance discussions between groups and people on their expectations and assumptions that result in:
- Specifying what people can stop, start and doing
- More objective performance criteria against which people/groups will be measured
- Removing expectations that are non-value added and not strategically aligned
- Identifying significant issues to address
This method then becomes a key change driver by accelerating alignment and tracking the health of working relationships. Such tracking includes:
- Distractions that impact work loads
- Misaligned expectations which reduce flexibility and strategic focus
- Factors that reduce effectiveness
- Misalignment with organizational principles and strategies
- Productivity issues between administrators and staff
The final outcomes help people understand:
- What is expected of them
- What they can expect from others
- How well they are strategically aligned
- How their performance is measured and compensated
- What they can stop doing
- What they need to focus on
- What information and resources can be used to achieve their goals
- How they are going to be supported and coached
How has it been used?
This alignment process has been used as a key driver of successful systemic change. It supports these efforts by clarifying and improving performance contracts between critical relationships, such as:
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Groups have successfully used alignment processes to:
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How it Works
The process starts with leaders and stakeholder representatives defining areas of alignment judged to be crucial to the success of a project, strategy or implementation. It is imperative that these definitions are a consensus of those leading alignment and provides focus for those generating expectations. It’s worth stressing that this process is not trying to align people on every aspect of their work – just those areas where improved or initiated alignment is needed.
Using this framework people are coached to identify their expectations of others and what they think is expected of them. This data is then used to analyze content, quantity, and quality of the expectations generated.
This analysis then provides targeted data pictures of groups and one-on-one relationships based on Figure 1.
For example, the relationship between Tom and Cliff looks aligned if you only look at Tom’s expectations of Cliff (13) and what Cliff thinks Tom expects him (12). But, Cliff’s expectations (22) & What Tom thinks Cliff expects of him (4)
tells a different story.
Then users meet and decide which of their expectations are to be discarded, agreed or are unresolved.Users are then shown how to use their relationship analysis to prioritize which alignment meetings are really needed.
Alignment Outputs
1. Distraction Index
Identifies which individuals or groups are aligned or distracted from achieving strategic goals:
Aligned, and Doing Things that are Expected — expectations and assumptions of these expectations are in balance.
Distracted, and Doing Things that are Not Expected— individuals are making
incorrect assumptions about what others expect of them.
Distracted and Expecting Things that are Not Done — expectations exceed assumptions of those expectations.
2. Tension Ratings
Expectation originators rate each of their expectations on a scale from High to Low Tension if an expectation is not met. Tension rating filtering enables users to see how well they are aligned in terms of stress and the importance others place on different areas of the change process.
Communication Channel Analysis
Un-Channeled
In a change process, groups are often expected to change who they communicate with and about what. If for example, the Sales VP is expected to work closely with the Chief Data Analyst and her team to create customized solutions for clients and they do not have any expectations of each other…..! Conversely, if the customer service team now reports to the newly appointed Head of Customer Service and not the General Manager then you would not want to see people still having expectations of the GM.
Cross-Channeled
Medium levels of expectations are often needed when sales people are selling within the same customer base and need to migrate customers from one to another, e.g. a customer relationship needs to change from transactional to consultative, as their needs grow and become increasingly dynamic. An account in this condition will need to be moved to the sales team with more ability and resources.
Highly-Channeled
High levels of expectations are needed where people work in the same function or process, e.g. Architects and General Contractors
What is a practical way to start?
Clearly, this alignment process has a powerful set of tools and needs to be used in a progressive way. This progression is driven by the value it delivers at each stage. So, we have found a good first step is running short half-day or full-day workshops with stakeholder groups like teachers and administrators to uncover or confirm misalignments and plan how to move forward.
We have found both with student focused alignment, as with Brigham Young University (Idaho) or faculty alignment, as with Gogebic Community College this is a good first step. These sessions consistently prove the value of alignment and offer insights into how much is either assumed or vague when setting a new direction or improving effectiveness
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This post is based in part on material provided by PDS Group LTD to which the author helped developed and has permission to use. (http://www.pdsgrp.net)