Other Behaviorals Flashcards
Lesson Planning as an Engineering Problem
• Start with clear articulation of an end goal (skills and knowledge learned to mastery)
• Carefully design an assessment that will indicate if the end goal has been met –> the assessment defines the end goal
• Backwards plan every second to most efficiently get all the students to pass the assessment (meet the end goal):
• What are students expected to do when they walk in the room? –> Silently enter and begin a task already on their desk to help them transition brain between subjects and to keep energy level calm and focused, to allow the teacher to meet individually with students while everyone else gets started productively
• What is the maximum amount of knowledge that students can teach themselves at home as pre-work so that the in-class minutes can be used only for activities that uniquely have to happen in school (real-time feedback on writing, debate, discussion about a text etc.)
o How will you incentivize through carrots and sticks to maximize the number of people completing all the pre-work?
• What are the fewest words the teacher can say to clearly describe a concept, to clearly communicate expectations and directions for an activity?
• How do you get all students to pay attention and intellectually engage?
o Cold-call with the question first, then pause, then call on a student
o Immediately loop back to a student who didn’t get the answer right to ensure they got it and to show the class that you can’t tune out or check out because you made a mistake or didn’t understand something at one moment
• Continually pilot and refine methods like these, making changes based upon daily assessment scores and other metrics like the number of students raising their hands to answer questions
Approach to coaching/developing others:
In previous managerial roles, I successfully developed dozens of employees across multiple functions, including coaching our business operations leader to improve his team’s scores on an internal quality assessment by 20% and training rookie teachers to achieve nation-leading standardized test scores. Each time, I had onboarding conversations with my new direct report to develop a relationship based upon respect, trust, transparency, and accountability. In these conversations we shared our backgrounds, passions, and goals, and then I explicitly stated my values and commitments as a manager, including:
- I frequently give candid performance feedback—both positive and constructive—so people can achieve their career goals and so our team can excel.
- I truly appreciate honest feedback about how I can improve as a manager; as evidence, I explicitly named how I implemented feedback I recently received.
- I respect my team members’ superior expertise, and I believe I can add great value as an objective thought partner and coach.
I then built a learning culture by executing on the above commitments, by facilitating learning reviews at project benchmarks, and by modeling self-development and honest reflection. Finally, I leveraged my exceptional emotional self-control to create a safe space for my team to make non-critical mistakes that improved their long-term performance. Because I gained a reputation as a skilled coach and a high performing manager, I was promoted each year to manage more people across more varied functions, ultimately managing 12 direct reports with 13 indirect reports as the second-in-command on a staff of 60.
Leadership of Staff Culture
I served as the second-ranking leader of a startup public charter school with a mandate to achieve best-in-nation results. To cultivate the staff culture necessary to meet this target, I intentionally modeled the following behaviors and mindsets:
1. I consistently praised hidden contributions, progress, and strong effort, while creating accountability for continuous growth.
2. To encourage an entrepreneurial culture as we designed and built a brand-new school model, I publicly reframed challenges as opportunities and joyfully exhibited flexibility. For instance, during a staffing shortage I volunteered to manage a fourth and fifth team despite the outsize workload involved.
3. I worked without ego such as openly sharing credit for success, staying late to support colleagues, and cleaning up after events.
4. When solving problems, I incorporated diverse viewpoints and encouraged my team to remain flexible and comfortable with ambiguity. With this approach, I led an underperforming team to become a top achiever in our network of 47 schools.
5. I created an inclusive culture, successfully managing people of various races, genders, and sexual orientations. Similarly, I built trust with diverse stakeholders, from custodial staff to police officers to senior executives.
6. I encouraged candid upward feedback by remaining calm in the face of criticism and thanking people for raising issues so I could quickly address them.
7. I greeted each of my colleagues with a smile and expressed interest in their personal lives.
Ultimately, our strong staff culture helped our low-income students outperform the wealthiest school districts in the state.
How did I define success in my last job, how I researched to figure it out?
• There was no clear rubric or performance measure for me at my last job. Instead, I was given a series of special projects to tackle and some responsibilities on the leadership team within the school in which I spent my days. For the special projects, I proposed criteria for success for each project when the assignments were delegated to me and I continuously sought clarity and alignment in expectations with my manager during our 1x1s to make sure we were on the same page about their expectations.
-School expansion strategy:
• Data accuracy, comprehensiveness, replicability of analysis
• Clearly explained logic
• Error free presentation, clear communication, written in a way that a non-expert audience would understand.
-School Startup Playbook -
• Accuracy in reporting success and failures of previous school launches
• Easy to find the supporting documentation
• Clearly explained logic
• Error free presentation, clear communication, written in a way that a non-expert audience would understand.
Stories about Empathy
Whenever I deal with someone who’s difficult or whenever I’m in a personal conflict I:
Decide on the most generous interpretation of the other person’s actions - remember, nobody wakes up wanting to be difficult, everyone is affected by their environment and by needs that are not fulfilled.
Decide what you want out of the relationship –> helps overcome stubbornness, helps make a decision for the long term rather than the short term win.
I then do a lot of listening to make sure the person feels heard and to figure out what the root cause is so I can directly address it - it’s usually that they have some unmet need, a blind spot or bad habit, or they have a different perspective on how to reach our shared goal.
Figure out how to treat the other person how they would want to be treated while being candid.
Example: Joel and checking homework:
• At first I was really angry with his reaction, but I had to check my emotions and my judgments. I understood that he was trying to both contribute to the school and manage his life at home, and that it was really hard to speak out to defend his home life in a school like ours where you are idolized for giving everything you could for our kids.
–> we discovered that students were improving most quickly when they had rapid feedback about their efforts - they were doing homework in classes in which teachers were checking their assignments for completion each day and praising or giving corrective feedback. They were not doing as much homework in classes in which teachers didn’t check frequently. When teachers didn’t check every day, we also couldn’t track homework completion rates as effectively. As a result, Sherry and I believed it was critical that each teacher commit to checking each homework assignment each day. When I brought this idea up at a team meeting, Joel freaked out and said that would take way too long, he wasn’t willing to work past 4:30 because he had a kid, this was way too much work.
- His response was triggering for me. I wanted to assertively respond: “Don’t talk to me so aggressively, who do you think you are? And part of choosing to work in this school is accepting your obligation to do whatever is necessary to help our students succeed, even if it means working until midnight like I do every night.” Of course that would have been ineffective. So…
- I took three deep breaths, then I asked myself what’s the most generous interpretation of why he’s acting like this and what does he need, I asked myself what do I want to get out of this interaction, and then I decided on my next move.
- I started talking a bit more slowly to calm myself down and to de-escalate the situation. I said, “Joel, you seem upset about this. I understand that you think this requirement is going to add an hour of work for you each day and you are concerned it will interfere with your home life. If I am able to prove to you that it doesn’t have to, will you give it a shot for a week and we can re-evaluate? Let’s meet this afternoon in your classroom and I’ll show you how you can efficiently check homework to support this team without it being a major burden for you.”
- That gave me room to think quickly about ways for Joel to meet my requirements as efficiently as possible. I realized he could circulate in the classroom during the first five minutes and check each assignment for completion as kids did a review problem silently, and how we could then give this data to a student leader to enter into a tracker online. The whole process could be done in 5 minutes.
- That afternoon, I explained this to him, but he was still skeptical. Therefore, I literally walked around an empty classroom, pretending to talk to students, modeling for him how he could use a checklist on a clipboard with some pre-determined criteria to quickly assess the quality of student’s homework within the first five minutes of class as students did independent work. He was still skeptical, so I went to his classroom that afternoon and physically checked his kids homework with a stopwatch in my hand, and I gave the data to a student to upload for me - in under 5 minutes. Then I observed him, coached, him, and gave him feedback on this process in his next three lessons.
- He was sold and so bought in that he agreed to demonstrate this process at the next team meeting so we could get everybody on board. He also became my biggest advocate, later often referencing that day when discussing my strengths as a leader.
- Many moments like these helped us transform a team and drive major results for students, leading to a doubling in the # off students who completed 100% of their homework each week.
Example: SpEd with Andy:
• At first I was really angry that he was requiring us to spend a disproportionate amount of time on a less important initiative, one that I was not as philosophically aligned with and that I thought was less mission-critical.
• But then I put myself in his shoes to figure out why he was holding the line.
• Bureaucracy-busting was one of his manager’s top priorities for the network. He would have to use a lot of political capital to push back against her. He already had many items he was pushing back on, and he was in the hot seat for underperforming the year before. He needed a win in his boss’s eyes, so I decided to give it to him to provide him and I with more power to make the decisions we needed to for our school’s mission.
Teach me Something
Topic: “Should we modify human genes to cure diseases?”
–> well-intentioned scientists with ethics will create a tool that they can’t control, will inevitably be used by someone with less noble purposes, such as creating a super-human military, tinkering with genes to get kid to be ivy-league ready…and once that happens, it starts an arms race and everyone else is going to be forced to do it too to keep up).
Skill: Three keys to better handle stressful interactions:
- Decide on the most generous interpretation of the other person’s actions - remember, nobody wakes up wanting to be difficult, everyone is affected by their environment and by needs that are not fulfilled.
- Decide what you want out of the relationship –> helps overcome stubbornness, helps make a decision for the long term rather than the short term win.
- Listen with genuine curiosity, try to understand the root cause of the issue. Look inward to figure out your role.
Figure out how to treat the other person how they would want to be treated.
Tell me a Joke
- You know why you never see elephants hiding up in trees? –> Because they’re really good at it.
- What did the fish say when he ran into the concrete wall? Dam.
Tell me something you’re learning that’s not compulsory that someone wouldn’t think you would be learning.
Weapons of Math Destruction - opaque, large scale, negative impact, little or no feedback loop
o Teacher evaluations, college rankings, recidivism formulas, personality tests in minimum wage employment decisions, etc.
Resume Story - live music
Celebrate Brooklyn, SummerStage o Jazz - Robert Glasper o Soul - Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings o Funk - Dumpstaphunk o Rock - My Morning Jacket
Resume Story - policy, books
Ethics and the Real World - Peter Singer
- “Which is more important, public health or private freedom?”
- “Should we modify human genes to cure diseases?” (well-intentioned scientists with ethics will create a tool that they can’t control, will inevitably be used by someone with less noble purposes, such as creating a super-human military, tinkering with genes to get kid to be ivy-league ready…and once that happens, it starts an arms race and everyone else is going to be forced to do it too to keep up).
Most Humbling Experience
Watching “Raising Bertie”
5 or 10 Year Career Plan
• I want to spend the rest of my career working in operational roles that drive impact, especially in terms of reducing our environmental footprint. I would love to grow a career at Via, helping to improve operations on the ground and then, once I know the business more, working on expansion to help launch new service offerings. I could see myself doing this work for the foreseeable future. If I didn’t have that opportunity at Via, I would work for a similar company that was using technology to improve efficiency and reduce environmental impact.
Weaknesses
Weakness #1: If I’m not careful, I can come across as standoffish, which means that there is a mismatch between what I feel as an extrovert and how others perceive me.
When I enter a room with a lot of people my natural tendency is to stand to the side and analyze what’s going on around me, and while I’m deep in thought people think I’m disengaged.
When I’m doing independent work I really try to focus to avoid making errors and to do my best work, but my natural face communicates a super seriousness and unapproachability that I don’t feel since I’m usually lighthearted and I am energized by being social.
• What I'm doing about it: Now, I try to dive right into conversation so I can't get caught deep in thought at the side of the room. I remind myself that I genuinely love learning about people, the work they do, the places they are from, and their passions, and I find someone to go learn about. I've practiced this every day at Business School, building more productive habits, using networking events or the time before class starts to introduce myself to people I don't know or strengthening a relationship that I've started to develop. Physically, my resting face is closed, which reads to others as cold. I've learned that all I need to do is slightly open my face/mouth, and I read as much more approachable and friendly. I intentionally try to correct for this when I'm in social situations. • It hurts me and the people I'm around when people think I'm hard to read or get to know, so I'm working to improve in these areas. I've made drastic improvements - I got wonderful feedback from my learning team on this issue through surveys they filled out about me and I've successfully networked with each company I've interacted with.
Weakness #2:
I have a hard time making a snap decision and pushing forward with a project if I have not had enough time to seek input from people with various perspectives and pressure test my ideas thoroughly. This slows me down in my personal work and holds my teams back.
o Example: I had to re-org our special team, redistributing roles and responsibilities knowing that one person on the team was departing in the coming weeks. I really wanted to make sure that our even-more-lean team prioritized the most essential drivers and that I assigned work in a way that carefully took into account individual’s skills, interests, aspirations, etc. My team could have gotten a lot more done early on if I had taken an hour to create R+R with an 80/20 approach because I could have given them direction to focus their work much earlier, but I really wanted to take the time to interview each person on my team, to get feedback on drafts, and to do deeper dives into the data to make sure we were prioritizing and cutting the right work. It took me a week rather than an evening, meaning my team worked for an extra week on projects that were either cut, significantly modified, or given to another person on the team.
o Been practicing a lot with my learning team at CBS:
If I’m collaborating with someone on a task, I’ll tell them that I want to set a time limit for how long we spend on a particular aspect of the project to avoid stagnation of my own-creation.
I set timers for myself when I’m 50% of the way done with my time allotted for a task and I ask myself whether I’ll be better off with a more refined product or a finished product, and I adjust course.
Strengths
Strength #1: I can manage many projects and tasks at once, in a fast moving and ambiguous work environment, reliably getting results.
• As a Dean of Administration, I managed five different teams with a wide variety of focus areas. I also individually contributed to the school by managing the integration of two schools, overhauling our communications and data systems and managing the implementation, serving as a key advisor for our principal on a wide variety of strategic decisions, designing and operating our first onboarding and performance management systems, and many other areas of responsibility. I had to use every minute of my day uber-intentionally and became known as the most reliable member of our team despite having more areas of responsibility than anyone but the principal himself.
o Able to do this because of exceptional personal org systems, highly intentional use of my time and reflection on my choices and habits, a drive for personal efficiency, and a relentless focus on results.
Strength #2: I’m able to quickly analyze a situation and ask incisive questions to efficiently get to the heart of the issue so we can make better decisions. I’m willing to ask hard questions that my peers often aren’t because I am willing to deal with discomfort to get results and to move closer to our mission.
• During our second year, I essentially served as my principal’s chief of staff, among several other roles. One day, he called me into his office to get my opinion on a new org chart that he and an org design consultant had crafted. He was really excited about it and wanted to show it off. In essence, he had redesigned the entire reporting structure so that teachers’ managers were grade level chairs, rather than assistant principals who had each managed a particular content area, such as science or math so a 9th grade math teacher would report to the 9th grade leader and not to a math assistant principal.
• I thought about it quickly, realized there would be many first, second, and third order consequences that I was concerned about. I tried to keep an open mind and asked him to share his rationale and what he considered to be the tradeoffs. It quickly became clear to me that what he was trying to do was avoid having his Assistant Principals, each of which was underperforming and were unreliable (except for me), manage teachers next year. Because he was conflict averse and hated people management, he was stripping underperforming Assistant Principals of their managerial authority rather than replacing them or coaching them, and in the process he was about to set off several ripple effects that would really hurt our school.
• So I asked him directly, “If you could go back two years ago and hire better assistant principals, would you keep our current structure or would you adopt this whole new org chart, and why?” he thought about it and admitted that he’d keep the same org structure, and asked me what I thought? I told him the ripple effects I thought this new structure would create, my analysis of the tradeoffs, and told him that I thought the issue was ineffective people management, not the org structure. So we agreed that I’d own supporting the APs the following year, I’d help create systems to improve their people management, and that we’d keep the structure to avoid the issues I laid out.
Strength #3: In my first year as a teacher in a chaotic and dysfunctional school, I learned how to control my emotions, think rationally, and act strategically under intense stress. I had to learn to control my breathing, to challenge my assumptions and biases, decide what outcome I wanted, and then make a strategic move to get to my desired end result. • As a teacher, this was critical when students or parents were in my face yelling at me or when I was trying to teach a complicated subject and the 30 teenagers in front of me were talking amongst themselves and ignoring me. • I was able to apply this skill many times as a school leader, such as when I had to convince one of our teachers, Joel, to add a time consuming responsibility to his plate. To make a long story short, I had just taken over management of the 9th grade team, and my job was to turn around the students’ performance. We had done a lot of analysis and a lot of piloting of interventions and realized that it was critical that all students had their gradebooks updated every day to reflect whether or not they had done the previous night’s homework. In our 9th grade team meeting when I announced that this would be a new requirement, Joel freaked out - very resistant to a proposal the rest of the team got behind. He thought it would take too long, he wasn't willing to work past 4:30 because he had a kid. • His response was triggering for me. I wanted to assertively respond: "Part of choosing to work in this school is accepting your obligation to do whatever is necessary to help our students succeed, even if it means working until midnight like I do every night." Of course that would have been ineffective. So… • I took three deep breaths, then I asked myself what's the most generous interpretation of why he's acting like this and what does he need, I asked myself what do I want to get out of this interaction, and then I decided on my next move. • I started talking a bit more slowly to calm myself down and to de-escalate the situation. I said, "Joel, you seem upset about this. I understand that you think this requirement is going to add an hour of work for you each day and you are concerned it will interfere with your home life. If I am able to prove to you that it doesn't have to, will you give it a shot for a week and we can re-evaluate? Let's meet this afternoon in your classroom and I'll show you how you can efficiently check homework to support this team without it being a major burden for you. • That gave me room to think quickly about ways for Joel to meet my requirements as efficiently as possible. I realized he could circulate in the classroom during the first five minutes and check each assignment for completion as kids did a review problem silently, and how we could then give this data to a student leader to enter into a tracker online. The whole process could be done in 5 minutes. • That afternoon, I explained this to him, but he was still skeptical. Therefore, I literally walked around an empty classroom, pretending to talk to students, modeling for him how he could use a checklist on a clipboard with some pre-determined criteria to quickly assess the quality of student's homework within the first five minutes of class as students did independent work. He was still skeptical, so I went to his classroom that afternoon and physically checked his kids homework with a stopwatch in my hand, and I gave the data to a student to upload for me - in under 5 minutes. Then I observed him, coached, him, and gave him feedback on this process in his next three lessons. He was sold and so bought in that he agreed to demonstrate this process at the next team meeting so we could get everybody on board. He also became my biggest advocate, later often referencing that day when discussing my strengths as a leader.
Strength #4: Analyzing data to find critical areas of improvement and leading teams to make this improvement.
• Google: Impact of market response program, creating improved processes to increase market intelligence gathering, projected to increase hiring by 30% with little to no extra cost
• School expansion strategy
• Special Education
• 9th grade turnaround - noticed in my data analysis a need to provide students with a more consistent experience from class to class to improve homework completion rates and to reduce the number of escalated behavioral issues we faced.
Failures
Failure #1: Lesson plan structures with history department first year
I learned to be a highly effective teacher while working at North Star Academy High School. This school had a very unique culture that directed all teachers to implement the same best practices. They required that each lesson follow one of a few different templates or structures and in part to enforce this requirement that they had managers give a ton of detailed feedback on teachers’ lesson plans before each lesson. These methods had worked in training me, and our school was held up as a model for educators around the world—we literally had people visiting from all corners to learn from our success.
Therefore, when I was hired to help start another charter network’s first high school, I thought it would be a great idea to replicate these same systems with my team—standardized lesson plan templates and lesson plan feedback.
This blew up in my face. Two of the five teachers almost never met the deadline or they disregarded the lesson plan structure I was trying to impose, and they would go complain to the principal—my manager—that I was micromanaging them. The other teachers were frustrated and overwhelmed and felt set up for failure because they had so many other responsibilities on their plate and I was the only manager in the school requiring their teachers to do this additional work. I had mediocre relationships with some of these teachers and really bad ones with the two that refused to do this work. My principal didn’t have my back because he and I were philosophically misaligned—I thought lesson plan quality was a key driver, he didn’t and he prized teacher autonomy.
It was really tense for a bit as I saw these teachers really struggle and saw that they were fairly uninspired as a result of my management. For the remainder of the year and for the entire next year, I totally changed my approach. I focused on setting very clear vision for what excellence looked like in student work samples, or the outputs, and didn't put much emphasis on evaluating the inputs such as teacher actions or lesson plan design. I used data from student writing samples and exams to get teachers to deeply reflect upon what they were doing effectively and ineffectively and then coached them to improve upon their ineffective behaviors, based upon a shared understanding of the result that we wanted to change. Teachers had much more flexibility to design lessons creatively and to solve problems creatively. I learned a ton from this failure. 1. It's so much more effective to influence rather than tell, unless safety is involved. 2. It's critical to be aligned with your manager and with the organizational culture or everything you try to do with your team will be much harder. 3. My job as a manager is to set vision, coach, motivate, and support, not to tell how to do the job.
This is a story about my failure to gain alignment with my boss and my boss’s boss and my failure to change course when I knew I didn’t have alignment.
- One of the five teams I was managing was our operations team, which in part is responsible for maintaining excellence in facilities. This team was overwhelmed with major projects that directly affected our ability to achieve of mission of preparing students for success in college - for instance, 1. they were fighting a major real estate developer who was doing construction during school hours that was so loud that students couldn’t hear their teachers, and 2. they were improving safety systems to make sure we were prepared for emergencies in our building.
- They were already above capacity when our CEO, my manager’s manager, decided that it was important that we fight the city to have them replace an escalator in our building that kept breaking down. She wanted this done because she didn’t like having to take the stairs or a freight elevator when she visited our school each month.
- Getting the city to agree to replace the escalator would have been a super time-consuming task for my overstretched team because of city bureaucracy, it had low odds of succeeding because the facilities team told me they didn’t have enough money to make critical safety repairs at the hundreds of other schools they managed, and I knew that even if we were successful it wouldn’t make a meaningful difference towards our school goals.
My managers and I agreed with my assessment and we agreed to continue pushing the city, but that we wouldn’t spend so much time on it that it would hurt our other priorities that were actually mission-critical. My bosses thought that if we communicated incremental progress to my CEO, that she’d be fine with us and would give us room to do the work we really needed to do for our kids.
I should have realized that my bosses and the CEO were not aligned and that he wasn’t willing to spend the political capital to tell her so directly. Instead, it appeared to her that we were just incompetent and too slow to move, since she didn’t see rapid progress. As a result, she had less faith in us, resulting in us having less space to make the necessary bold decisions we had to make to be successful as a school, with everyone terrified of her wrath each day.
I should have known that we were destined for failure if my bosses were not aligned with their manager, and I should have insisted that we fight for more resources or find a way to deprioritize other projects to free up resources if nobody was willing to tell her directly that her priorities on the issue were off.
In the end, I learned how important it is to gain alignment and buy-in up the hierarchy. It was wrong to try to appease the CEO by making slow progress when we weren’t invested in the initiative – we should have spoken up directly to resolve the disagreement and then bought into whatever was the result.
Failures/Mistakes that I learned from:
• Asking openly for constructive feedback, getting general responses or no responses started to provide structure, such as “biggest blindspots,” “magic wand,” “force rank me on these common mistakes that managers make – I know I make many of them and I won’t believe you if you tell me I don’t.”
• Giving constructive feedback over email, realizing it must be given in person to be most effective.
• Daily mistakes and reflections in learning how to teach effectively:
o Body positioning when giving directions
o How to respond to students’ comments and questions to maintain rigor and engagement
o How to give clear directions for complicated activity 3 bullet points max, also on board, not speaking until all eyes on me
• Challenge of focusing too much on inputs and then too much out outputs when coaching and evaluating performance. When focused too much on outputs, made it scary to fail or to achieve really ambitious, game-changing goals because only thing that mattered was black-white outcome, not process that actually strengthens the individual or org along the way.
