What Do “Small Wins” Have To Do With Leading For Deeper Learning?
April 8, 2024
By Kippy Smith and Erica Crane
Experiencing, reflecting on, and sharing small wins in meaningful work can change your day (and your life!). The meaningful element of the work is key here. Many educators (and students!) believe pursuing Deeper Learning outcomes for students is more meaningful than working toward traditional achievement measures alone. As the Deeper Learning (n.d.) team defines:
Deeper Learning describes the higher-order thinking skills, learning dispositions, and collaboration skills needed for students to succeed in twenty-first century work and civic life. Deeper Learning competencies promote the ability to transfer learning and apply learning to new and complex situations in an ever-changing global environment. (para 2)
While meaningful, many of the Deeper Learning outcomes lack the concrete, well-defined metrics that help teams clearly see the goals they’re pursuing. Rather, Deeper Learning outcomes are a bold vision for what’s possible in education. Leaders are instrumental in cultivating a shared team vision for Deeper Learning across a school or system – and doing so is a significant, ongoing process. However, education leaders are tasked with profoundly intense operational demands that do not let them focus solely on instructional leadership (Darling-Hammond et al., 2007). This means leadership expectations can feel infinite, so having clarity on what is most important for your team to realize a bold instructional vision is essential (as you’re responding in the moment to the clogged drain, late bus, or lack of subs). Ok, so you’re bought in, you’re committed, now what?
If you’re living transformational leadership or considering how to best do this with and for your teams, there are some tenets that will make Deeper Learning more possible. (And our team would vouch for these tenets as supportive of other transformational visions too!) According to Deeper Learning researcher Jal Mehta, leading for Deeper Learning means leaders must:
Begin with a stance
Focus on human values
Practice symmetry in these values across adult and student learners
Cultivate communities that value learning and balance support with challenge
Be a pioneer
Think in systems
Become organizers
Engage in effective storytelling or weaving around the work moving forward
See equity holistically and ambitiously
Practice courage (Mehta, 2024)
Notice these tenets are about the ways of being and working that support Deeper Learning outcomes. In other words, to get clearer - and closer - to the “what” of your instructional vision, focus on the “how” and the “why”. Having tenets like these to ground your decision-making, approach, and commitments can help leadership proactively build an ecosystem that fosters these mindsets and practices - even when the day-to-day school operations are consuming.
Routine team reflection on successes and also lessons learned helps make learning a core stance of your team. Communicating what the team is collectively learning while pursuing holistic and ambitious equity places value on learning itself. It also redefines progress toward your vision as learning. Sharing stories of successes and lessons learned (small wins) in professional development, newsletters, staff shout outs, reflection prompts, etc. means you are taking steps to lead more clearly for Deeper Learning. Taking steps to recognize where your staff is thriving can help them see what’s possible. It can also help democratize who gets to determine what thriving looks like, sounds like, and feels like.
Highlighting small wins in a systems approach is not the only way forward, but it can strengthen your approach. Supportive leadership that creates opportunities to emphasize the small, contextual Deeper Learning wins along the way can make strides in realizing this ambitious vision. School systems that operate with a “big tent with local flexibility” approach offer the overall Deeper Learning aim, but allow practitioners to make the implementation their own, in context (Mehta & Fine, 2024, p. 18). It’s a forever task that needs foundational structures to be built to help it perpetuate. The change is constant in these learning systems, so dynamic mechanisms for monitoring progress are needed to reflect continual change. Remember, “breakthroughs in deeper learning happen through top-down forces, shaped by school leaders and bottom-up actors such as learners, teachers, and the community who come to own, love, and shape the new school vision” (Richardson et al., 2024, p. 158). Together, school teams can define what’s possible and keep moving onward toward this possibility.
References:
Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (2011). The power of small wins. Harvard Business Review, 89(5), 70-80. https://hbr.org/2011/05/the-power-of-small-wins
Darling-Hammond, L., LaPointe, M., Meyerson, D., Orr, M. T., & Cohen, C. (2007). Preparing school leaders for a changing world: Lessons from exemplary leadership development programs. The Wallace Foundation. https://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/Documents/Preparing-School-Leaders.pdf
Deeper Learning. (n.d.). What is deeper learning? Retrieved March 13, 2024, from https://deeper-learning.org/
Mehta, J. (2024). Commentary: Leading for deeper learning: why a human vision of schooling demands a human vision of leadership. Journal of Educational Administration, 62(1), 173-177. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-01-2024-276
Mehta, J., & Fine, S. (2024). A “big tent” strategy for system-wide transformation: Seeking Deep Learning in Ottawa. New Pedagogies for Deeper Learning. https://deep-learning.global/
Richardson, J.W., Bathon, J., & McLeod, S. (2024). From vision to reality: How school leaders nurture deeper learning, Journal of Educational Administration, 62(1), 157-172. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-02-2023-0044