5. Inclusive School Leadership Where Teachers and Students Thrive with Susan Moore Johnson

Episode 5 Transcript: https://tinyurl.com/3njwkf2x

In Episode 5, Dr. Jabari Mahiri talks with Dr. Susan Moore Johnson, a former high school English teacher turned prominent Harvard professor specializing in teacher policy, organizational change, and leadership. Johnson has conducted extensive research on effective school environments and the critical role of school leadership in shaping positive and sustainable conditions for both teachers and students. 

Her book, Where Teachers Thrive: Organizing Schools for Success, draws from multiple studies conducted between 2008 and 2015 in challenging urban school environments. These studies involved nearly 400 educators across 26 schools, focusing on organizational structures that support teacher development and student learning. Professor Johnson critiques traditional, compartmentalized school structures that hinder teacher support and resource allocation, advocating instead for collaborative frameworks that prioritize professional growth and collective problem-solving.

Professor Johnson identifies two distinct leadership approaches that differentiate successful schools from unsuccessful ones. In successful schools, principals adopt an inclusive leadership style, involving teachers in problem-solving and decision-making processes. This approach contrasts with instrumental leadership found in less successful schools, where principals impose top-down directives without engaging teachers in meaningful collaboration. Johnson's findings underscore the importance of shared decision-making and teacher empowerment in fostering productive school climates.

Professor Johnson emphasizes the importance of collaborative environments, where principals facilitate teacher collaboration and professional development. Successful schools also prioritize relationships with parents and community stakeholders, creating welcoming environments that support student success. She critiques policies that overlook the role of school organization and culture in supporting effective teaching. Her findings highlight the need for holistic approaches that address both teacher support and organizational effectiveness.

Equity Leadership Now! hosts conversations with equity-conscious leaders from pre-K through university settings who transform structures and strategies for educating students, particularly for those from historically marginalized communities.

Transcript

Inclusive School Leadership Where Teachers and Students Thrive

with Susan Moore Johnson

21CSLA Berkeley School of Education Leadership Programs

Jabari Mahiri Host, Editor, and Producer

Brianna Luna Audio Editor and Production Specialist

Mayra Reyes External Relations and Production Specialist

Becca Minkoff Production Manager

Diana Garcia Communications Manager and External Relations

Audra Puchalski Communications Manager and Web Design

Jennifer Elemen Digitally Mediated Learning Coordinator

Jen Burke Graphic Designer

Robyn Ilten-Gee Editor and Media Consultant

Rian Whittle Sound Technician

Transcript

Brianna Luna  0:17 

Equity Leadership Now! hosts conversations with equity-conscious leaders from Pre-K through university settings who transform structures and strategies for educating, particularly for those who are marginalized. We complement the mission and goals of the 21st Century California School Leadership Academy, 21CSLA.

Brianna Luna 0:36

Housed in the Leadership Programs of Berkeley School of Education, we acknowledge our presence on unceded Ohlone Land. We explore innovative ideas and compelling work of educational leaders at the intersection of research, policy, and practice, to realize individual, social, and environmental justice, because our democracy depends on it.

Jabari Mahiri  1:08  

Harvard Professor Susan Moore Johnson studies, teaches, and consults about teacher policy, organizational change, and leadership practice. Formerly a high school English teacher and administrator, she has been an Academic Dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Education from 1993 to 1999. She has taught current and aspiring teachers, principals, superintendents, and policymakers. She has published many articles in scholarly and professional journals, and five books, including Leading to Change: The Challenge of the New Superintendency and Achieving Coherence in District Improvement in 2015. In 2019 she published Where Teachers Thrive: Organizing Schools for Success. 

Jabari Mahiri  1:50  

We are honored to have you as a guest on our podcast, Equity Leadership Now.

Jabari Mahiri  1:58  

Now you and I have something in common, we were both high school English teachers. So tell us a little bit more about what your research has found regarding key factors that differentiate positive, sustaining work environments that serve teachers, as well as students, and those that are unproductive and often demoralizing, and end up shortchanging both? 

Susan Moore Johnson  2:21  

Right. That's a big question. I wrote a book about that, Jabari. I'll try to keep it short. 

Susan Moore Johnson  2:24  

I think there were there were two major things that clearly differentiated the successful schools from, what I will call, the unsuccessful schools. One was that, in the successful schools, the principals had adopted an approach to school leadership that was inclusive, whereas in the unsuccessful schools where teachers were actually very unhappy with their workplace and the students are not doing well, their approach was more instrumental. 

Susan Moore Johnson  3:00

So let me just describe those two types because I think they may sound familiar. In the instrumental schools, leaders or, the instrumental leaders, were discouraging or preventing teachers from having meaningful roles in defining their school's problems and devising solutions. Instead, they would present their teachers with a plan, believing that, if only the teachers would comply, the school would do well, it would be just fine. But, the instrumental approach fell short of what was needed. Although the principal thought often that the teachers had bought in, so to speak to that plan, they in fact, weren't invested in making the principal's plan work. 

Susan Moore Johnson  3:55 

In schools with inclusive leaders, the principals would engage teachers in working with them to identify the most pressing challenges within their school. And some of those problems can be addressed with established kinds of solutions, like how to run a fire drill, but many are not well understood. And so, in order to make progress, teachers had to combine their professional and Insider knowledge about the school and their students, and work together to explore the problem, pilot promising solutions, and then decide what to do, and implement a plan together.

Jabari Mahiri  4:43

I wanna just focus on the fact that we're highlighting your book Where Teachers Thrive, and you draw on many studies, but directly focus on three studies conducted by you and your research teams between 2008 and 2015. For those studies, you interviewed nearly 400 educators and 26 challenging low-income urban school environments. Your book focuses on 14 of these schools, nine of which achieved notable success with their students. Overall, goals of your research were to understand effective organizational structures for supporting and developing teachers throughout the school in their work with students. Your book notes that school organizations often reflect outdated inefficient, compartmentalized structures that rarely provide teachers with the resources and support to improve teaching and learning. Can you talk a little bit about what your book says is problematic about this intensive focus on teacher quality? 

Susan Moore Johnson  5:41  

Sure. So when The Economist reported that based on students' standardized test scores, the teacher is the most important school-level factor in students' learning as we all have repeated time and time again, I was first delighted. I thought, finally, teachers are getting the credit they deserve for the work they do. But as policymakers called for teacher quality to be the standard for hiring, supervising, retaining, sometimes compensating, and dismissing teachers, I knew we were in trouble. And I thought, you know, it would only reinforce this notion that it's individuals rather than the organization, not individuals and the organization, that matter. And, as you know, it turned out that I was right. 

Susan Moore Johnson  6:34 

The Gates Foundation had invested $575 million dollars in an experiment, and I credit them for doing an experiment before the entire country implemented this idea. It involves three large school districts and three charter management organizations. The school officials all agreed to make all of these decisions about individual teachers on the basis of so-called teacher quality, which was largely dependent on student's standardized test scores. When it was over RAND Corporation studied the experiment, and they found it failed to achieve its goals. It didn't improve the achievement or graduation rates for students, the academic performance on tests, nor did low-income minority students have more access to more effective teachers. 

Susan Moore Johnson  7:35  

So my response was, of course, that this ambitious strategy was narrowly conceived about individuals while ignoring the schools in which they work, and the organizations. And so, the strategy really did nothing to improve how the teachers and principals also did their work together in the context of the school.

Jabari Mahiri  7:59  

We understand that your unit of analysis in each of the three major studies was individual schools and teachers' work within them. We want to talk a little bit about the specific roles that principals and other educational leaders including teacher-leaders, of course, were in transforming the structural organization and cultural climate of schools to improve student learning. How do principals and other school leaders understand the complexity of urban schools in terms of engaging many stakeholders, particularly parents and families on the one hand, and district office leaders on the other?

Susan Moore Johnson  8:33  

So this is a very important question because the relationship of parents and families to schools has great consequences for students, and the principals of the successful schools in the study, quite deliberately, reached out to parents, to be sure that they both understood what the school was doing and could advise the school about their children or about their programs. And so, some of the successful schools had very creative ways of engaging parents and making them feel welcome. 

Susan Moore Johnson  9:15  

One of the schools had a weekly lunch for parents that was very well attended and where every week, a new grade level or a new program would do a presentation, in addition to the general lunch there. Two schools had worked with a local community agency to hold a food pantry in the school once a week. And the teachers would know when that was and they often ended up being able to meet with parents informally there in that school setting. And so, just making the school a welcoming and familiar place was very important to the teachers, to the parents, certainly to the principal who was always, you know, keeping an eye on that and ultimately, to their students. 

Susan Moore Johnson  10:12 

The principals were very savvy about the district office in the successful schools. I think, for the most part, they were running interference on behalf of their teachers. Whatever autonomy the district gave them to make decisions about budgeting or about selection of teachers or using staff time or resources, they used more autonomy than they were given. They were always sort of reaching the edge of what was possible.

Susan Moore Johnson  10:41   

And so, the district office was something that the principal had to understand and deal with, but it was not something that teachers even realized what was happening on their behalf. Other stakeholders, including the teachers union, were very important to the teachers. But in the successful schools, there was not much dissatisfaction. Teachers felt well cared for by the principals, and well-represented. They felt that these principals managed the school well, and helped them figure out systems for doing their work together. 

Susan Moore Johnson  11:31 

So consequently, the principals nurtured, I think, I would say that's right, a good relationship with the building rep from the union. It was interesting because in the schools that were not successful, the principals and the building reps were often at odds. I would hear people blaming the union for one thing or another. But it struck me as, especially when it was the same union that I was hearing about, you know, in the successful schools, different building reps, but the same union, I realized that the principals were doing a great deal to maintain the relationship so that the union would actually support the kinds of things they were doing.

12:19

[Music Break: “Hoist Up the Banner” by Eric Bibb] 

Jabari Mahiri  12:59  

I'm really excited about the way you're describing the complexity of schooling from the standpoint of, in this case, the principal's role, and it seems like the principal runs interference. In other words, one of the reasons that we have successful versus unsuccessful schools is that the principals take care of a lot of the things that don't end up being in teachers' laps as problems that they have to deal with.

Jabari Mahiri  13:22  

So before we go further, though, I want to take a little bit of a sidebar to have you talk just a little bit about the demographics of the schools that you were working with, because it's clear from a reading of the book that you selected, high poverty schools, schools that were struggling in terms of resources. Some of those were successful, and some of those were not, and your arguments in the book give us a realization of what made the difference between the two. So, just a minute or two on the demographics of the schools that you studied.

Susan Moore Johnson  13:55 

They were schools that, all of the ones we studied at one time or another, had been under state watch. So, this was not a random assignment kind of study. I really wanted to be sure in the first two of the three studies, that we had schools that performed well and poorly on the state test. So that measure of success was important. And I will say this was the MCAS state test in Massachusetts, which teachers and principals regard quite highly actually. It's challenging, it's not a sort of basics kind of exam. And so people take it seriously. We could take those scores across the schools seriously as well. 

Susan Moore Johnson  14:56

The schools, most of them were between 90 and 98% students of color. And so it was this combined effect of being marginalized by where you're allowed to buy a house, or where you would live, communities, as well as just by general racial discrimination in some of these large organizations. And so the issues of equity ran through this study. In the third study that we did, I was kind of tired of studying schools where things were horrible. 

Susan Moore Johnson  15:43  

So in the third study, we included six schools, all in the same city limits, and they were elementary and middle schools, no high schools in that study. They were all successful by the state standards, and several of them had actually been in turnaround, and successfully worked their way back and stabilized their teacher turnover, and their kids did well. The state standard of a level one school, which is what all of those schools were, includes reducing achievement gaps among subgroups of students. So, they were really making remarkable project progress. 

Susan Moore Johnson  16:33  

And so really, that was what I wanted to understand. I've studied turnover quite a lot, for this study, but also for an earlier one. And I think the general perspective is that teachers don't like to work in low-income urban schools. And if you look broadly at the data, teachers do leave low-income urban schools at higher rates than other schools. But it turns out that when you compare demographically similar schools, as we did in that study, who the students are does not determine whether the teachers leave, these schools had achieved a lot of stability in staffing when they improved as workplaces. So as I like to say, when teachers are leaving low-income schools, in large numbers, they're not fleeing the students, they're fleeing that work environment that doesn't allow them to succeed in doing what they've committed their professional lives to do. 

Jabari Mahiri  17:44 

I think that is such an important finding from the analysis and your work, the equity issues permeate everything that your work is addressing. So let's just probe a little bit more about when we have effective principals in these settings as you were describing, settings that have some of the same demographic characteristics as other settings where schools are failing, and yet the schools are succeeding, and all of the metrics and other ways with teachers level of a sense of thriving on the one hand and students, you know, academic, and social development success. I want to ask three characteristics that you can address and the first one is of what principles effective work might look like. What does it look like in relationship to facilitating teacher collaboration, learning, and professional development?

Susan Moore Johnson  18:33 

Okay, let me focus on the collaboration piece because I think I can describe that best. We saw it amazing amount of similarity across the six schools in how teacher collaboration worked.

Susan Moore Johnson 18:51

But across eight of the nine effective schools, successful schools, however, we'll call them, teachers had a robust set of teams that they participated in. The principal made this possible, with a schedule that provided for common planning time, at least once a week, and often every day, particularly in an elementary school. The teams would meet at least once a week, but again, sometimes daily. They were very clear about why they were meeting, sometimes, as you probably know, teachers say they collaborate, but it means that they sit in the same room and do lesson planning or grade papers. And, these were genuine decision-making meetings about things like what shall we teach? Or what should we do? This child is not doing well, in anyone's class, what kind of services can we bring in? 

Susan Moore Johnson  19:56  

So there were an array of discussions and decisions. Also a review of their own teaching, how are we doing as teachers? How do we know? Are they learning what we want them to know? Are they learning something we didn't expect them to learn? Isn't that wonderful? And so, these teams would meet, and they became as one principal said, our teacher's first line of defense. And, teachers appreciated them enormously. The teams, their purpose was anchored in the mission of the school, and every one of these schools had a mission, and it was not just something in a file cabinet. It was about equity, it was about social justice. People would express it in different ways, giving these kids the education they deserve. And so, team meetings were seen as a kind of precious thing that would enable them to learn together about their work, and about their students. The principals made that possible. But what was interesting, that teacher leaders typically facilitated those meetings. In three of the schools, the teacher leaders were supervised by an assistant principal, regularly, someone who was very, very skilled, and they also received a respectable stipend. 

Jabari Mahiri  21:26 

So in your book, you make a distinction between new teachers and those teachers in the middle part of their career, and then teachers who are veteran teachers, can you just give us a quick sense of what distinguishes those kinds of teachers on your study?

Susan Moore Johnson  21:37

Well, the new teachers, I think, are the most interesting in that, they have a very clear notion in their head that if they're not happy, they can leave. This was certainly in that first study around 2000 that we did looking at new teachers, we tracked 50 of them over four years. One said, If I don't get a sense of success, I don't need to stay. If I get it, I'll stay. And that meant being able to get the feedback from kids that in fact, they were learning and he was contributing to it. 

Susan Moore Johnson  22:20

So, new teachers are maybe full of energy, but there's also something tentative about it. If they do not have ongoing relationships with their colleagues, to help them understand the school and understand the process of teaching, and to encourage them when they have bad days, it's very, very hard. The notion of the plateau, where you get better and better and better until about year five or six, and then you flatten off, actually has not been proven to be true. And, two of my students, Matt Craft and John Papay, who are now economists at Brown, did a very interesting study where they used a teacher survey that we had also used in Massachusetts, and administered it over time, looked at the teacher responses over time in Charlotte Mecklenburg, a very large district. 

Susan Moore Johnson  23:27

It found that when teachers were working in schools that the entire teacher group, the entire staff rated positively as work environments, they continued to improve over time, at least the full 10 years that they had data for. So, I think I would say I don't know what principals in that district are doing, but my guess would be, that they were in classes, they were promoting teams, they were creating opportunities for teachers to move beyond their classroom, to work with others to learn new things. I would imagine that they were promoting professional development that was really grounded in the work that teachers were doing and would help them get better. 

Jabari Mahiri  24:18 

And talk a little bit about that from the standpoint of veteran teachers, then, what are your considerations from your research of how they continuously improve?

Susan Moore Johnson  24:28

Well, I think that becomes very much an individual matter. Some teachers just get deeper and deeper in their work, and people in the school point to them, as you know, individuals who just have incredible depth and knowledge and skill with students. I think the problem is that we don't yet know how to draw upon veteran teachers' skills in an organizational way, in an orderly kind of purposeful way, to support other veteran teachers who may really feel like they're just going through the motions. 

Jabari Mahiri  25:14

Resources are always a problem in terms of schooling throughout the country throughout the world. I want to give you a scenario, if you could only choose one, and you had this pot of money, and you could put it into increasing teacher salaries, or you could put it into it continual development of principal leaders, where would you put the pot of money? 

Susan Moore Johnson  25:39  

That's unfair, Jabari. Of course, I'm not going to answer that directly. But, I would say one, teacher salaries are incredibly important to ensure that teachers can afford their careers. We know that when it becomes impossible to raise children, to buy a house, to send your kids to college on a salary, you either need another salary in your household, or you need another job on the side, or you may have to leave. And so, I have no patience with incentive-based pay for performance. But I do think that, especially now, after the pandemic, and in the midst of all this political haranguing about what schools can teach and shouldn't teach, I think that that we have to be sure that teacher salaries are respectful and adequate. 

Jabari Mahiri  26:49 

Your study began in 2008, the series of studies, and concluded with another major study in 2015, and there was one situated in the middle. Now, things have changed dramatically, and the country in education and whether we're in contact with people or not, whether we're virtual, whether we're synchronous or asynchronous, and, you know, the COVID era and all kinds of other situations, we've had, you know, George Floyd and protests in the streets, we've had, you know, January 6. Can you just project a little bit about how any findings from your book help us engage these considerations for the work of school leaders and teachers with respect to impacts from the pandemic, and other kinds of things that have happened to since 2015? A small question. 

Susan Moore Johnson  27:43 

Yeah, sure. Well, I do think that the issues of race, violence, and equity have gathered the attention of a lot of people and a lot of educators. I think that I worry about schools not, especially teachers, but schools as organizations, not being allowed to actually take on those issues with students or probably with each other. So, the possibility that history teachers wouldn't be allowed to teach about slavery, it would keep me out of teaching I think if I were going to be a social studies teacher. That would be a deal breaker. Absolutely.

Jabari Mahiri  28:32  

Or if you couldn't teach Beloved as an English teacher, Toni Morrison. 

Susan Moore Johnson  28:40

Oh my word, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. So. Yes, exactly. I have a really hard time with the notion that I wouldn't be able to make good judgments with my colleagues about what to teach and how to teach. I don't think we have to reimagine schooling. I think, reimagining relationships between teachers and students and groups of students, and their social development, I think there was a lot going very well in a lot of schools. The challenge is actually to reinforce those practices and expand them, while actually holding the line on some other values and practices that we will not return to.

Jabari Mahiri  29:28 

Harvard Professor Susan Moore Johnson, thank you so much for engaging in this conversation with us today on Equity Leadership Now. Her book is Where Teachers Thrive: Organizing Schools for Success. We are going to be using this book in our teacher education program and our Principal Leadership Program, because it's right on the cusp of both leadership and teaching, as well as all of the other complex stakeholders that are involved in schooling to make it successful. Thank you so much.

Susan Moore Johnson  29:59

Thank you Jabari. I have really enjoyed it.

Brianna Luna  30:08  

Our podcast team includes  Jabari Mahiri, Brianna Luna, Mayra Reyes, Becca Minkoff, Diana Garcia, Audra Puchalski, Jennifer Elemen, Jen Burke, Robyn Ilten-Gee, and Ryan Whittle.

We recognize and appreciate our founding team members whose vision and groundwork have been instrumental in driving our project forward: Andrea Lampros, Lissa Soep, Dara Tom, and Julia Zhu