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Janet Pilcher: Hello, everyone. Welcome to today’s Accelerate Your Performance podcast, where we gather each week to share strategies for hardwiring excellence in education. I’m your host, Janet Pilcher. It’s great to kick off my Monday with you.

This summer, I’ve intentionally interviewed educational organizations that have a strong commitment to excellence and an improvement mindset. I started with the Child Development Center, or CDC, interviewing a key leader and teacher. In a past episode, I interviewed their CEO, Rina Irwin, who also was awarded one of our most prestigious Difference Maker Awards. They go to organizational executives who have been partners with us for five or more years and are model organizations applying the Nine Principles Framework.

You can see from the interview with a key leader and teacher from the CDC, the impact they’ve made in the lives of students and their families. If you missed that episode, check out our podcast site to gain access to it. I also highlighted Oxford School District in Mississippi, and check out the link to Superintendent Roberson and the latest episode I did with a principal and teacher at one of the Oxford Elementary Schools. This team will be with us at our annual K-12 conference, What’s Right in Education. We hope to see you there, so please connect to our website and learn more about it. And if you have questions, just shoot me an email or shoot someone on our team an email so that we can connect with you. I’d love to see you there.

When we look at the conference, the superintendent of another great school district that was on the last two episodes of our podcast, Hemet School District in California, will also be there.

They will be part of the presentations that focus on improvement work and just can’t wait to be with everyone in person at the conference. And during the last two episodes, I interviewed Superintendent Barrett at Hemet and a key improvement coach leader and teacher and leader of teachers. Such tremendous episodes and just totally enjoyed the time that I had with this school district, as well as all of the others as we made our way through the summer.

And I can tell you when I had my interview with the individuals, with Superintendent Barrett and Superintendent Roberson and really looking at the work that they’ve done, it’s just true commitment and discipline and focus and care of their team. They’re just level 10 out of 10 and I can’t wait to see everyone in the Denver area when we’re together. So thank you all so much for the contributions that you make.

As I completed the interviews and reflect on them, I can’t help but connect back to how all of the interviews that I had this summer are just examples and models of all the principles. But today I focus on how they are positive examples of Principle One: Commit to Excellence.

It’s difficult to do the tools and tactics and other principles well if you fail to make this important one a commitment, that commitment to excellence as a driver of what we think about and how we show up each and every day. Now by making that commitment, they all have an improvement mindset. I think you could see that as you listen to the episodes, improvement focused on their district, each school and each classroom.

An improvement mindset means they are always looking for ways to get better. They celebrate actions working well, and they know why things don’t work so well, and they look for ways to get better. They turn challenges into opportunities and identify ways to solve problems. You can truly see that occurring when we talk with the superintendents and executive leaders who are really looking at the system as a whole and being highly involved in what’s happening at the district level and how that aligns to the school level and then into the classroom. Such great evidence.

Here’s what we talked about. You know, we drive with improvement rather than accountabilityYou heard that with Dr. Barrett. We had very specific conversations about really focusing on improvement and not really driving with accountability because when we do, we’re likely to achieve our desired results when we’re driving with improvement. And we talked about accountability then as the outcome of our improvements rather than a threatening way to lead people. And you can just see the deep drive and the conversation I had with Dr. Barrett, the great drive that’s there, but really looking at how we focus on ways that we can get better.

And when we’re not achieving in ways that we want to achieve, how do we have deeper conversations about that? Such great evidence that you could see not just with one school, one classroom, but really beginning to spread that improvement work across the school district. And that’s the work that’s in place now with the model school districts that we’ve talked about this summer.

And as you can see from the teachers in the classrooms, improvement motivates people. We saw examples of how improvement in the classroom motivated students to take ownership of their learning. We saw it in all of the samples, just the value of what happened with those interactions and students taking ownership and accountability through the care and concern and discipline of what was occurring with the teachers in the classroom. And the students analyzed what worked and didn’t work and engaged in conversations with teachers on what they needed to be able to improve.

Adults and students get better when they know the goal. Talk about what’s working, what’s not working and how they can work together to improve. I felt, it’s so interesting with the conversations, last week I remember talking with the teachers and then when I was talking with Dr. Barrett most recently, we were just simply talking about when we think about what’s happening with adults and what we’re trying to do as leaders with adults, well, it’s teachers as leaders doing that same type of improvement work in classrooms with students. You could see that throughout the summer in Oxford, at CDC and Hemet.

Conceptually, this seems simple. However, it takes tremendous focus and discipline to apply processes and strategies that build this improvement focus. And from the conversations with leaders and teachers, we see improved results that instill pride in them, pride in each other, and pride in their students.

That, my friends, is what building a great culture is all about. Every person I interviewed said they realized that they have much more to do. That’s what great organizations do, and that’s what they say. An improvement journey never ends. We’re always focused on getting better. That’s what makes us a great educational organization.

Thank you to the executives, leaders, and teachers who spent some time with me this summer. When I completed our episodes, I knew I was in the right place doing the right work because of people like you. Thank you for the difference that you make in the work that we all do together and in partnership every day. Our goal is to be the best that we can be so that we’re providing the best to the students and families we have the privilege of serving.

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Thank you for tuning into this episode of Accelerate Your Performance. I look forward to connecting with you next time as we continue to focus on the Nine Principles Framework so that we can be our best at work. Have a great week, everyone.