Empowering Teachers and the Community through Expectations of Success
Educational reform will be a random walk of failed bromides until we embrace what is at the heart of Finlands success: the adult expectations for childrens' success have more impact than any environmental limitation the students might have. In our communities, our mission must start where Finland IS: all...
Economic Empowerment Drives Poverty Reduction and Business Acceleration!
The key for all businesses and economic development policy makers to remember: Re-think of how you view third graders: in just over ten years they will be your employees, customers and core to your region’s business attractiveness. Don’t value them lightly.
So much of our work changes if, like, our expectation of a pilot to safely land the plane, our expectations of our communities are that they will deliver ALL children to the safety of literacy and through that to a life beyond poverty
Why, despite all the experimentation in education, have statistics on third-grade reading proficiency shown so little improvement across North America?
How collective impact efforts can get derailed
It is the Zen of Working Differently: don't focus on the money and the money will come!
How efforts to Achieve Community Outcomes Get Derailed
But these are our problems as an entire community. We all own them together, and we can only solve them together.
How efforts to Achieve Community Outcomes Get Derailed
At every community meeting, at every step in the process, we have seen some version of these traps arise and threaten progress.
Changing Behaviors Across Your Community
Changing Behavior in your community requires that you think through a no blame - no shame approach to mobilizing community action.
Moving from Counting to Accomplishing
A tsunami of measuring things has hit our community efforts over the past decade. For the most part, this "run it like a business" mantra has done little harm, but it also has not gotten us to the promised land of transformative change.
Four Steps to Community Sanity
Where communities fail to to even get out of the gate to meaningful change is their failure to agree on a shared definition of what is the target of our collective efforts and how will we know if we are making progress to that result.
A community's expectations are a critical element to the success of our innovations
I've come to see that at the very heart of success there are just two interrelated and mutually dependent, elements: the need to change expectations or the "inner attitudes" in James' phrasing and the need to work differently, to innovate.
SWOT v. SOART
Whether it is a city, town, school, or district, what has surprised me most is that I have never had to talk a community down from too high an aspiration. I have never felt the need to pull back the reigns because a community was getting their expectations too far ahead of their potential grasp.
Lesson from the ASU/GSV Education Innovation Summit
I am constantly struck by how destructive blame is to the ability to achieve impact and how terribly hard it is to banish blame from our most basic human interactions.
The Need to Work Differently
It is only in a "safe" place where folks, who have been doing the community's heavy lifting, are respected and see that clarity regarding the shared outcome is a full answer to their prayers for resources and tools aimed at moving the needle on the outcome they have dedicated their lives to.
Role Clarity for Community Governance
Each Action Team decides how to implement structures, processes, and measures to achieve the outcomes, while Community Governance looks at how to organize resources, decision making, accountability, and community engagement to support the work of the Action Teams in a coherent fashion in order to optimize...
