Podcast: Patricia Deklotz on High School Transformation

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host Jessica and today we’re talking with Dr. Patricia Declotz. Dr. Declotz has been superintendent in the Kettlemarine School District since 2006 and for the last 10 years has been recognized as a national leader in personalized and competency-based learning for students and teachers. In 2016, Dr. Declotz was named Wisconsin Superintendent of

the Year. It’s also interesting to note that Dr. Declotz, like Tom, had a private sector career before becoming a school administrator. In this episode, Dr. Declotz describes her innovative approach to high school transformation which includes launching three themed academies inside a traditional comprehensive school. Let’s listen in to find out why and how she took that approach and why it’s worked. Patricia Declotz, welcome back to the Getting Smart podcast.

Thank you very much. I’m happy to be here. It’s great to have you on. You joined us two years ago and we talked about teacher professional learning. Today we’d really love to dive into the subject of high school transformation. Before we do that, Pat, I think it’s worth noting that you had a 20-year private sector career before becoming a teacher and a school administrator. What did you do and then what provoked the shift to education?

Sure. Well, I was in banking and financial software development for a good amount of time prior to becoming an educator. I didn’t get my teaching license until I was 42. It was really a number of things that coalesced. My husband was transferred from Charlottesville, Virginia to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I stopped consulting as I had been doing. With that, as he began traveling more, I wanted to do less of the school board work that I had been doing.

I’d been on the board for five years. I resigned from the board and enrolled in university and finished my teaching degree and stepped into the classroom in 1996. Wow. It’s interesting that you were in fintech before we knew it was fintech. Yes. You must smile at all the new banking apps that are being launched now. Well, it continually changes. We were the ones that first introduced a credit card or a debit card

and did that kind of processing. I’ve seen a few things. So, you became superintendent in Kettle Moraine in 2006. For our listeners that don’t know, maybe you could describe the communities that you serve there just west of Milwaukee. Sure. We are what I would refer to as an ex-urban area. We serve parts of 10 little municipalities and we are midway between Milwaukee and Madison. Very nice geography in the area that we live.

I would say that the parents have very high expectations for education and for their students. We have the benefits of having fairly large metropolitan areas right around us. So, talk about your early strategic planning work in 2006 and particularly as it pertains to the high school. What condition was the high school in and then what kind of a community conversation did you try to create? Sure. Our high school at the time that I stepped

into the superintendency was a very successful comprehensive high school. Actually, every school in this district had earned the U.S. Department of Education’s Blue Ribbon School designation, Blue Ribbon School of Excellence designation. And at the time that I stepped into the superintendency, it was probably noted that the largest achievement gap that we could identify was with our most gifted learners. They were the ones who were making the least amount

of growth over a year’s time. The foundation for the strategic planning that we did came out of a board motion that passed in May of 2005, I believe, where the board charged the administration to transform our educational delivery system to better and more efficiently meet the needs of all students. It came somewhat out of the blue after about five months of budget discussions as they were wrestling with how to make budget reductions. And with very little discussion,

it was passed unanimously and I was given part of the responsibility along with Bob Davidovich. The two of us headed up the work of how does a district transform? This was well beyond or well before anyone was talking about personalized learning, at least in our conversations. And we weren’t exactly sure how to begin the work. So we actually used MacKrell to do a deep dive into scenario planning, which is a very, very rich visioning process that looks into the future and

identifies some very themes that emerge regardless of which future might be coming your way. It was a 17 month process that involved 25 members of a community and really provided a very strong foundation for us as we move forward. What came out of that specific to the high school and how would you say the high school transformation? What’s the origin story there? So as we received these recommendations, which in and of themselves didn’t appear to be very earth shaking, what we

learned was if we wanted to transform, we had to change from where we were or what we were. At the time, Wisconsin had the provision that local school boards could charter a school and wave certain expectations that were inherent in the traditional school setting. And we looked to using what’s called an instrumentality charter school approach to begin working with how do we transform learning. With an instrumentality charter school, the

employees of the district with all the benefits of the district and the school still has its own independent governance council that determines the policies and expectations for those students as they enter and then leave the school. My board’s expectation was that these schools would meet or exceed both the expectations and the performance of our comprehensive high school. So we started small. We had two, we went through a process that was kind of a feasibility study that I brought over

from my work in private sector. So we developed feasibility study framework and investigated how much community support we might have for an idea. One idea was for a performing arts school. Another idea was a school of global leadership. There were other ideas that had surfaced, but they didn’t pass the muster of the feasibility study. So we began with those two little charter schools and learned a great deal along the way.

Let’s do a quick deep dive on the why charter. I’m curious if you were, did you get any, was there a planning grant set with it or any extra funding or was it the policy flexibility? Was it the governance model that was interesting? What led you to explore that option? I think the primary reason that we looked at it, and there certainly were other advantages once we started to dig into it, but the primary motivating factor in looking at charters was how do we

become something different if we’re living within the constraints of what is. So we knew we wanted to play with ideas like seat time and place of learning that we wanted to make the learning more relevant than what we were seeing in the classrooms and wanted student engagement to be at a much higher level. We recognized that student voice was a really important part of engaging students in their learning that we needed to listen to them, get their feedback, engage them in

some of this design work. And so in order to have those permissions, we needed to waive those expectations or standards that the state had put forward. Where did the proposals that you looked at in these feasibility studies, where did those come from? Were the Academy ideas your idea or were they teacher leaders or did they come from the community? It was a little bit of a combination of both. So I think that as we started the work,

people wanted to test if I was really saying, how would you like to create a school? Like, that’s a big responsibility. So it was very much a collaborative process as we first started this work. People that had a vision for what education might be or things that they saw that they would like to change. So there was kind of a key, we call them a director, for each of the schools that engaged in some of the research. We were able to get a planning grant for one of the schools.

We were denied the planning grant for the other one. So we had two different models going forward at the same time. And it became very apparent to me that whereas in private sector, it’s often recognized with innovation, you have to invest in research and development. And in education, that simply hasn’t been the case that without an investment in the research and development, it was very, very challenging to really do the work that we needed to do, to invest in the people,

to do the designing. So I would say that finding the support for the school that didn’t get the planning grant was one of my biggest challenges at that time, to give them the release time and the opportunity to think outside of their full-time responsibilities, really. So the feasibility studies were going on in 2009-10. There was this planning year, 2010-11. And then you opened two academies in 2011-12. Is that right?

I believe that’s correct. Yeah. And tell me about launching those schools. How big were they, who enrolled in the school? And we piloted the School for Performance and the Arts the year before they were launched as a school. So we piloted some of the work that we were doing with a handful of students, a couple handfuls of students. When that school opened, it had about 65 students and we did not have seniors. So it opened with 9, 10, 11, 11th grade students.

The KM Global actually started much smaller and it really opened with only about 20, 25 students. And it remains our smallest of the schools. But one of the things that became really apparent in the first years that we did this was that kids wanted to belong. They wanted an identity and they wanted to belong. And with these micro schools, as you’ve called them in the past, they had a sense of belonging. They didn’t really care if you were a freshman or an 11th grader. They were part of

this new school. And there was a great deal of collaboration and support for each other. There was just a very, very finely developed commitment to success. So you had these tiny teacher teams in these new academies. Was it a challenge to support them? Their work must have been both complicated and a little bit political since they were in both of these academies are located inside the traditional high school. They are under one campus roof. That is correct. I think it was

challenging for them. I do think that people wondered what they were doing and why they were doing it. I know early on there were questions of why aren’t we good enough? Like why do you need to do something different? So one of the big takeaways I think is make sure that you have a very solid grounding in the why. Like why do we need to do education differently than we did in the past? And there’s a great deal of research that people can draw on to help build that urgency

as to why we need to prepare students for a future that’s very different than a future that I might have been prepared for or prepared to be successful in. And as we looked at these small communities that we were creating, the students’ sense of ownership and agency, their ability to advocate for themselves, their understanding of why they were learning and what they were learning, how it was important to the work that they wanted to do was very compelling. They became the best

advocates for the work that we were doing over anyone else. The challenge of the teachers, so again one of the things that I would recommend is start small and start with the willing. We all know that there are various types of employees who look at change through different lenses. Some are more able to embrace the opportunity of risk-taking, others are a little less little less eager, they may be a little more reluctant, but they also are very focused on

what’s best for students and with some support and guidance they will embrace that opportunity. We know that we have a good curve in the middle that are maybe less eager to make change but are very hard-working good people and they really need to be given the opportunity to understand why this is a better way of meeting student needs and how it can affect students’ agency in the choices that they’re making as they go forward.

So we started with the willing rather than trying to build enough willpower amongst an entire campus staff. We started with a handful who were excited, who were willing, who were risk takers, who were able to be very reflective and evaluate their successes as well as where they needed to improve. One of the things that starting small allows you is the ability to be nimble. If you’re learning something that isn’t working as well as you want you can change it very quickly.

So we learned a great deal and we did make modifications and changes along the way in order to best meet those student needs and best support the staff in doing so. How would you say that in those first few years that the learning experience was different for students than in the traditional school? So we started and each school has a little different pedagogy. So we didn’t, first of all, we didn’t say it has to look the same. We said we want to learn

what’s best and create the vision, create your mission, define the pedagogy and we will continually evaluate to see if you’re making the mark. Interdisciplinary learning was a big piece of what we looked at seminars rather than semester or quarter-based learning. We went for maybe five to six-week inquiries or deep dives into a content area. Again, when you jump over to global, they had the expectation that every student would do an inquiry almost like a dissertation

defense, a deep dive into a research question that they would defend publicly in front of community that was very interdisciplinary and again they would meet the standards that we were holding them to by doing these defenses and presenting the evidence which show their mastery. It’s been a really exciting journey as we look at how things have evolved because we really see the importance of letting students struggle with their learning, not for the purpose of pleasing their teacher,

but for the purpose of them understanding and answering their own question, being able to publicly defend an idea and present it in a way that can stand up to questions and criticisms from complete strangers. It’s been a good experience in that we broke the model of you’re doing this out of compliance to engaging the student to set their own goals, to design some of the work that they were doing and how to demonstrate their mastery of learning targets

and certainly supporting them in that learning through various teacher-led or teacher-supported learning processes. One of the things that we discovered in doing this in the area of mathematics was the benefit of an online textbook, if you will, and the role that the teacher plays with an online textbook. So rather than simply giving students an online resource and expecting them to navigate to our level of expectation, we developed performance tasks that once the student felt that

they were ready to move to another area, they had a separate assessment, if you will, that allowed us to check for readiness and to make sure that it wasn’t simply surface knowledge, that there was some deep knowledge behind it. It’s allowed us to recognize the importance that pace has to do with deep learning and the individual nature of each student that comes into our classrooms. We don’t have to be prescriptive about what you learn on which day, but rather these are the

expectations. This is a recommended pathway and you’re going to take the time you need to show us the proficiency that we know is needed in order to continue to advance in that course of study. Hi, Emily Leapteg here, co-author of the new book, The Power of Place. In my first couple of years, as an elementary school teacher, I didn’t pay much attention to where my students were from or their connections to their communities, although I really should have. Once I realized the value

and strengths of these connections, I had an entirely new perspective on teaching and learning. I began to realize the incredible amount of untapped potential and creativity in the students that I was trying to so desperately contain in my traditional four-walled classroom. My almost powerful learning experiences have been deeply rooted in place and connected to my community, so why wouldn’t this also be true for my students? There is nothing more incredible than witnessing

one of nature’s finest phenomena, more invigorating than being uncomfortable and curious in a new culture or context, and more humbling than helping tackle an issue in your own community. You’re invited to explore or continue your own place-based journey with us in our new book, The Power of Place, available for pre-order now at the link in the show notes. Thanks for listening. Initially, these three academies seemed quite autonomous. When I visited first

five years ago, you could clearly identify these three academies. They had a different part of the building and they often had a different kind of furniture. It seemed like there was a high degree of autonomy. Is that fair to say? I believe it is fair to say. They still have a great deal of autonomy, but one of the principles that we put in place from the very beginning, the board set the expectation that we learn from each other. These charter directors sit on my leadership council,

and they are part of the work that we do to align to the district’s goals. They set their own goals, of course, as do all of our schools. We have been extremely intentional in trying to cross pollinate, if you will, to learn what works, to understand why it works, to see how we can then use that to move the work forward in other areas. I’d love to shift gears a little bit and talk about the impact on the traditional

conference of high school. When I visited a year ago, I was struck by a couple of things. One is that you’ve done a beautiful remodel of the entire facility. It’s all a very modern facility with lots of flexible spaces. It was quite difficult to determine where one academy stopped and where the traditional high school started. They seemed to be quite integrated. I got the sense that instructional strategies may have been picked up by the

comprehensive high school. To some extent, the traditional high school had been at least as beginning to be transformed as it’s learned from the smaller academies. Is that true? I would say that’s a very fair statement, because we intentionally are trying to learn from each other. In that community forum where we were going over our strategic vision and planning, the community told us loud and clear that they didn’t want personalized learning for some.

They wanted it for all. Their expectation was that we figure out how we scale this. Again, within the context of each. That has been a big part of the work that we’re doing is trying to scale opportunities that recognize the unique individual of each student and that we support them in their learning in a way that allows them to own their learning and to learn at the pace and through the places or processes that best meet their needs. Have you found that the facility’s

modernization has helped create a learning environment that supports what you’re trying to do not only in the academies but in the traditional high school? The facility improvements have definitely played a role. A great example of that is in our cafeteria commons where our high school is on a four block day. Two of the blocks, it’s used for instruction. We call it a math pathways approach. The other two blocks, it’s used maybe more independently, but in addition to being

where kids eat their lunch. In the math pathway, if you were to come to our high school first thing in the morning, you would see maybe 100, 140 students in this cafeteria commons and probably five to seven teachers that are working with small groups answering individual questions etc. And this is again using that online curriculum, allow students to progress at the pace that they want as rapidly or when they need support not to push them forward when they don’t have the mastery.

We’ve learned that if a student doesn’t successfully complete Algebra 1, they won’t successfully complete Algebra 2. And Algebra 2 is a graduation requirement. So it’s really, really critical that we kids don’t go on past Algebra 1 until they can demonstrate mastery at a B level if you want to use a letter grade. So and again, the team of education experts, our math educators have developed their own assessments, performance assessments that help to

check ins to that. They’ve got the diagnostic feedback from the tool that we use to pull small groups or to see if someone’s not making progress. Each student has a mentor that they meet and set goals and monitor their progress to accomplishing those goals. And again, one of the things that I think we’ve learned through this work that we’ve done with personalized learning is it’s not only about the academics, the ability for students to set goals to monitor progress to hold themselves

accountable, to understand when they need to redefine perhaps their pathway to accomplishing their goal, and maybe the commitment that they’re putting into accomplishing that goal. Those are life skills that help create that employee that our business partners tell us they’re looking for. So Pat, you’re really 10 years into high school transformation. How would you say it’s working? I would say that I’m very proud of the work we’re doing because of the impact that it’s having

on the students that we serve. And what I mean by that is it’s more than their academics. Their academics are absolutely critically important. But I believe that we are better preparing our students to be successful as they go off, whether it’s post-secondary or a career that we’ve developed the skills and dispositions that our employers and our post-secondary friends are looking for, that agency and ownership of learning and understanding of what kind of impact they want

to make on the world. And is that true of both the comprehensive high school as well as the three academies? I think it’s probably most pronounced in the three academies, but we are seeing the impact of that personalized learning approach as it’s making its way into more traditional learning environments and some of the redefined pathways. We now have eight pathways at our high school that look at pace, place, voice, choice, path, all of that.

Two, is this an approach that you would recommend to other people, this idea of starting with the willing, creating micro-schools or a school within a school academy and then allowing those to flourish? Is this a viable approach to comprehensive school reform? I think it’s a very viable approach to school reform. There’s a verse in Ecclesiastes that says, if you wait for perfect conditions, you will never get anything done. I think about large-scale

reform and you can spend all your energy trying to get people ready to go where you could be using that time to learn from the beginning. Knowing that people need models and that there are differences, if I can show teachers that maybe haven’t experienced personalized learning themselves, what it looks like and the impact it has, they’re much more willing to take it on because ultimately all teachers want to do what’s best for students. I just think that this is a really good

way to build understanding in the community, start with a small group of parents who see the impact it’s having on theirs and they have conversations with others. It’s really easy to be a, they used to say Monday night quarterback, I don’t know if that’s even what’s said anymore, but it’s easy when you’re on the sideline to be critical of what’s happening. But when you’re in the game and playing the game, you have a very vested interest. I think that one of the big lessons,

one of the big pieces of advice I would give is remember that your community is always evolving. It’s always changing. You always have new people coming in, so you have to constantly be communicating your why and how to your parents, to your business partners, so they understand the importance of the work that you are doing. Could you have gone faster and would that have been a good idea or a bad idea? In what ways might you do things differently?

Sure. I don’t know that going faster is always better. My grandmother used to say, make haste slowly. I think that’s in many ways what we’ve done here because we’ve learned from everything that we’ve done. When we’ve gotten pushback, it’s caused us to slow down and really look at how can we do this in a way that’s not going to cause a complete stop to the work that we’re trying to do. I don’t know that I could go faster than we’ve gone. We’ve done some incredible work.

We have more work to do and it’s about readiness. When you’re focused on meeting the needs of students, you’re always going to have more work to do. How would you describe the path forward for the high school, both the three academies and the comprehensive high school? What do you hope to be better at 18 months from now? I would say that we are looking really deeply at making some of those place-based learning opportunities available for more students in our high school. Schedules can

really create problems when you’re in a very tight start-stop schedule. It doesn’t meet the needs of our business partners as they try to bring students into their workplace and we have to be more flexible in the way that we define learning. It’s not simply when a teacher is standing in front of the classroom, but there’s lots of ways of measuring progress and setting plans to obtain a goal. Let me recap a couple of the things that I’ve observed at Kettle Marine that I think you guys do

really well and then I’ll let you underscore the ones that make the most difference. It feels to me like early on you distributed leadership. You identified teacher leaders that were ready to move. You supported them by allowing them to cultivate ideas for these academies. I think you did a masterful job at creating a collaborative environment. Other places doing academies or charters created on us versus them and maybe it’s because it’s inside the high school that in a single building

that it’s collaborative, but the community that you’ve created with four high schools in one building is really quite remarkable and then the way that you’ve supported teacher professional learning in the district including the three academies is really I think quite remarkable. Those all seem to be part of the success story. Does that ring true? I would say they all ring true and it really I think is reflective of how do we value the people

we work with. If I’m the only one that has an idea, it’s going to be a very, very impoverished district. When you distribute leadership, when you can see the person that’s working closest to the problem and learn from them, when you allow them to collaborate, these are the lessons that I brought with me from the business sector. It was an all hands on deck in meeting the needs of our clients and customers. That’s the way we need our teachers to be engaged in the work of education.

The idea that we all have value and we all have voice and we should have a common goal. If we don’t have a common goal, then somebody needs to get out of the boat. This idea of letting people be the best that they can be, bringing their excellence into the work that they do, to me that’s how we meet the needs of our students today. Patricia Declottes, it’s been a treat to have you back on the Getting Smart podcast. Thanks for

your lessons learned on high school transformation. Where can people learn more about the great work being done in Kettle Marine? I would point them first to our website kmsd.edu for Kettle Marine School District. We do professional development twice a year, once in the summer, once in the winter. We call it Transform Ed. You can google that on our website as well or search for that on our website and learn about opportunities if people want to come and do tours.

We appreciate the collaborative environment you’ve created inside the district and the way that you work with educators around the country. A lot of us are learning from your work, Pat. Thanks so much for being on the podcast. Thank you very much, Tom. A big thank you to Dr. Pat Declottes for joining us on today’s episode. We appreciate her student-centered leadership and her efforts to build community support for innovations and learning. Okay, that’s it for today, listeners. But before

you go, don’t forget to hit subscribe. That way, every Wednesday morning, you’ll have our newest episode delivered right to you. Oh, and while you’re at it, don’t forget to leave us a rating and a review. Until next time, for the Getting Smart podcast, this is Jessica signing off.