Making the Case for a Response Framework
Being ready for both crisis and opportunity resulting from externally-driven elements
The Brief Case 📚→💼→📈→📊
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
- Variously attributed to Victor Frankl and Stephen Covey
Topics important for faculty are not always important for staff, and vice versa. Additionally, topics important for faculty and/or staff do not necessarily rise to the level of board awareness. Thinking about what needs to be learned, when, and by whom is a natural, if often unarticulated, process for most school leaders. When schools face a market or global influence or disruption, however, this process of leading the learning of others becomes existential — the importance and urgency of the work is inseparable.
In the spirit of building the bridge before we need or want to cross the river, we are going to spend the next 7 editions (including this one) of Making the Case to first present, and then more fully flesh out, a predictable, multi-faceted approach to how your school might engage with significant disruption from external forces. First understanding, then being willing and able to to deploy such a framework, will help leaders maintain focus on the essential learning, doing, learning cycle that should animate any school leader’s work during a time of upheaval.
If you rewind to COVID-19 and distance learning (to cite just one example of recent influence or disruption to school as we know it), the following six categories of internal control and inquiry, typically in sequence, were important for moving forward:
What operations in the school need to be adjusted
What policies need to be considered
What instructional or office tasks need to be be added or changed
What employees need to know
What students need to know
What families need to know
There may not necessarily be a perfect word to indicate the opposite of a crisis, but the same categories hold true for something external to the school that may present a dynamic opportunity for the school’s future (e.g., a once in a lifetime natural phenomenon occurring locally; the passage of landmark human or civil rights legislation; etc.)
Relative to disruptions — either of the crisis or opportunity variety — schools often fall into two primary categories:
Schools that are paying attention to the external event and either don't know exactly how to approach it or are seeking expertise and support within their own community or from an outside expert.
Schools that are just not paying close attention at all (they don't even know there is something to do or are passively ignoring it).
The 3rd category of school, one we hope to encourage, understands how to deploy an effective response plan when necessary. The 3rd category school is one that builds the skills and resilience necessary to go through multiple such cycles without compromising more than they need to of the school’s main function as a learning organization. As these schools have existing processes and habits around approaching and responding to external forces, they often confidently share how they are approaching a situation. Indicative too of such confidence, they are ready and able to adjust and update their responses as more information and understanding is developed.
After making the case for our response framework in this edition, we will apply the framework to a timely topic: Generative Artificial Intelligence. Over the next 7 editions of Making the Case, we invite schools to follow along in their learning and doing next year, so please share with colleagues and subscribe to be sure to receive each full case.
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