Up Close with Nevada Succeeds: Origins of the InspirED Fellowship

You’re listening to a special Getting Smart podcast mini series about the Nevada Succeeds Inspire Ed Fellowship. I’m your host, Shani Carruthers. Let me tell you a bit about Nevada Succeeds. Nevada Succeeds is a Las Vegas-based education nonprofit focused on empowering systems transformation

through educator impact policy and design thinking. Dedicated to building a statewide ecosystem, Nevada Succeeds launched an Inspire Ed Fellowship in July 2020 in partnership with Las Vegas Sands. The goal of the fellowship was to empower educational practitioners to investigate Nevada education challenges and use design thinking to develop actionable plans to determine solutions.

Using the Singapore education system and best practice sites across the country as a guide, individuals engaged in deep conversation around collaboration, student achievement, and professional growth for educators. Keeping equity at the forefront of all their work, those were given the opportunity to lead the support to discover innovative solutions to educational obstacles in space to shift

their practice and learning from insight to impact. We’ve been honored to partner with Nevada Succeeds on some of this work and are excited for you to hear these conversations with some of the many key players in the initiative. On this episode of the podcast, the first of a three-part series, we’re joined by Janine Collins, Mary Jean Gallagher, and Chip Kimball.

Mary Jean Gallagher is the former Chief Student Achievement Officer and Assistant Deputy Minister of the Ontario Ministry of Education. She also co-authored The Devil is in the Details, System Solutions for Equity, Excellence, and Student Well-Being with Michael Fulin. Chip Kimball was the previous Superintendent for Singapore American Schools.

He is now making his way over to the International School of Prague. Janine Collins is the founder and Executive Director of Nevada Succeeds. Let’s jump in. Janine Collins, welcome to the Getting Far podcast. Thanks, Tom.

Great to be here. It’s great to have you on to talk about Nevada Succeeds. We’re joined by a couple of your fans and colleagues, Mary Jean Gallagher. Hi, Mary Jean. Hello, Tom.

Great to have you. Are you calling in from Ontario? Yes, I am. I’m calling from Windsor, Ontario. We’re delighted to have you on the podcast.

Chip Kimball, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks, Tom. It’s great to be here. It looks like you’re calling from Singapore, but you’re actually here in Western Washington, right?

I am in Western Washington, and I’m between three worlds. I’m living in Washington, currently, and heading to Prague, Czech Republic, starting in July. That’s great. We’re thrilled that you’re back on the podcast with us.

Janine, we’re talking about Nevada Succeeds today. What’s the back story on that great organization? Yeah. Well, Nevada Succeeds began here in Las Vegas in about 2013, and the purpose was really to bring the business community to the table to help advocate for education, support education

improvement here in the state of Nevada. And through the duration of their research, they really focused on state policy, really working on ways in which they could support, bring the community together to support policies that would really create systemic change. And so that research that Mary Jean actually helped push their thinking, I think, as the organization evolved ahead, that research really led them to the recognition that, you

know, how my policy that really supports the development and the ongoing growth of educators really be at the centerpiece of systemic change. And so this latest iteration of the work that we’re doing at Nevada Succeeds began about a year ago when I stepped into the role to launch the Inspired Global Fellowship. And we were set to take educators to Singapore as part of a high performing systems deep dive to look at the systems and structures

that really ground their amazing as we were able to find out their amazing and really coherent. And I think you even use the word elegant approach to educator development. And to think about what policies we might be able to learn from and apply back here in Nevada. And while that was set up to be a really incredible experience, you know, as with all of our plans in the past year, that shifted and changed. And we were not able to travel in person. But

actually, because of you all, we were able to figure out how to do something really meaningful virtually. And so excited to talk about that work today a little bit. And also, the elements that really pushed on our thinking to help us evolve something that we think is pretty is has the makings of something pretty important and significant right now. Janine, you’ve assembled such an extraordinary, interesting and diverse group of leaders in Nevada. I would you headline the

lead learners that you’ve assembled there? They are lead learners. And I love that you said that because they are curious, they are reflective, and they are passionate about systemic transformation, not just change. And I think that that’s really, it’s exciting, it’s compelling. We always like to say we’re in the zoom room where it happens together when we get together. And that Hamilton reference and it’s it’s magical when humans are able to assemble and come together and really

push on each other’s thinking, challenge each other’s assumptions, and show up in the spirit of learning without an attachment to the outcome. And so often we’re so outcomes focused. And I think we definitely knew we were going to create outcomes, but we’re really open to what outcomes we might generate. And I think that that curiosity, that reflection and that desire to transform the system in some way, even just through small steps, I think allowed us and allowed all of them to

suspend their need to know and just to show up in wonder. And I think that’s been a really exciting element for all of us to engage in. I love that. Dr. Kimball, I think you connected with Nevada succeeds through a board connection when you were head of school, the CEO at Singapore American School, where you led a seven year school transformation. I guess you could talk about the connection with Nevada succeeds, but would love to have you sort of dive in on how you think

about the challenges of school leadership today. Yeah, thanks, Tom. I did get connected to Jeanine and Nevada succeeds through a board connection initially. But I will tell you that the reason why I stuck it with Nevada succeeds, if you will, is because of what I saw in Jeanine and her leadership, but also what the team was hoping to accomplish. And if you think about what she has modeled, it really applies to all school leadership, which is the ability to be curious and to be agile and

to be courageous. And curiosity, agility and courage actually in my mind are some of the core elements, whether it is at a big institutional level at a policy level or down to the school level. And when I think about the challenges that schools are faced with, you know, courage today is probably in my mind one of the biggest challenges. So if we think about inside of COVID, the courage to think about the right kinds of things to do in the right order at the right time, when you’re

keeping in mind your student constituencies, your staff constituencies, your parent constituencies, the economic implications, the educational implications, etc. And then you remove yourself from COVID, we just pretend we’re not in a COVID world anymore. It’s the same, it’s the same charge. It’s about being courageous, curious, courageous and agile to do those things that we know are not just right for kids for today, but are right for kids for tomorrow. All of that in my mind stems

from an organizational culture that is created that is 100%, whether it’s a principal, a superintendent or a state level person, the culture is 100% the responsibility of the leader. And all work, whether it’s curricular work, whether it’s HR work, whether it’s budget work, all work stems from the culture that is created from the leader. And my mind, that’s the biggest challenge of educators today. Thank you, Chip. One of the favorite stories of mine from your

leadership at Singapore American was that you had some instincts on what would take SAS from good to great, but you took the time to invite 100 of your faculty members to visit about 100 of the best schools in the world. And that great example of curiosity that built agility, that really built this broad layer of capacity at Singapore American. So love that learning agenda. It was really, is it fair to say, secret to the success that you had later on?

Yeah, absolutely. I don’t think that we could have done it without. Often in a lot of the academic papers you’ll see, is it top down leadership? Is it bottom up leadership? And I think most educators will agree that it’s both. And by engaging faculty in that inquiry, that actually gave them both the excitement and the tools and the ideas of what we may be able to do going forward. And there were a couple of important components. One was of course getting their feet on the ground

and actually seeing these places. Secondly, was doing it as a team. We don’t want to create as one individual in a school that has a host of great ideas because they’ll get smothered by the existing culture of the school. So doing it as a team was important. Also having leadership endorsement. So one of the things that we said is it needs to show up in the budget and it needs to show up in the very public activity that we are doing, that we are saying we’re asking the hard

questions. And one of the questions that the team asked me was, okay, so what are the sacred cows we’re not allowed to touch? And in my response to that, there’s only one sacred cow that you’re not allowed to touch. Is that whatever we do can’t limit the ability for kids to have access to post-secondary opportunities, like college or university or those kinds of things. That was the only non-negotiable. And they asked me that questions three or four times because they actually

didn’t believe me the first time. And we really did question absolutely, and that was critical to the work that we did as a school. I’m really glad that we have Mary Jean Gallagher with us because there are a few people on the planet that know more about capacity building across the system than Mary Jean. Mary Jean, you had the good fortune to be a leader of the important reform work that was done in Ontario a decade ago and then recently with Michael Fulin to write about it in a great

book called The Devil and the Details, System Solutions for Equity Excellence and Student Well-Being. So, Jeanine and I really appreciate your leadership. I wonder how you reflect on the challenges of system leadership today, Mary Jean. Well, I found it interesting as I was listening to Chip’s comments about how you lead a school through a change, the degree to which it was parallel with the work that Michael and I talked about in the book The Devil is in the Details,

because we think of any education system as having three levels. There’s the government level and change in a number of places always sort of starts and people at the top think they’re the ones who are going to be able to define the change and make it all happen and any kind of system change fails on that criteria alone. Then there are people who want to make change at the front end of the whole organization in the schools and they can change the school they’re in but it’s very

difficult for them to make that any kind of system change. You need the middle layer which might be a school district or sort of that middle layer between the top of the organization and the people in the front lines and Michael and I refer to that middle group as the fuel and the glute because they’re the people who can in fact support the schools in their examination of where they might be able to go and open doors for them, make connections to other schools who might also be

trying to explore some of the same issues. At the same time that that that glue in the middle is putting information up to the top. We’ve coined a phrase called connected or collaborative autonomy, that each layer and every part of the system is actually autonomous. But if you’re going to have a system change you have to find a way to bring them all together in a culture that’s very parallel to what Chip referred to in the Singapore School. It’s a culture that we referred to in Ontario

as building a culture in which every part of our system was open to learning. We wanted our children to be open to learning but we wanted our teachers and our principals to be open to learning and to be focused on learning. Too many pieces of system change get sidelined by not paying attention to what it is that we’re trying to do for students in the system and with students in the system and how we want them to develop their voices and provide leadership as well. So it’s a very very

complex social movement I think when you’re talking about either a change in a school or on a broader basis. And it’s about convincing every layer of a system that they can actually lead and make change from the seat they’re in. That was one of the big pieces that we got into some good discussions with Nevada succeeds around that you don’t have to wait for the school super, for the state superintendent or the chair of the board or even your principal. You can actually

find a lot of space in the place that you are in education to move forward with something good for students that’s going to bring a better outcome to them. The secret is to bring enough colleagues along with you above, below you, beside you in whatever organization you’re in that you can actually create that culture where you’re learning rapidly from each other and from the outside. Because we can’t make change just because I think the change would be good to do

it this way. We have to do it based on what we can learn from other people who’ve watched some of those paths. I love that Mary Jean and that leading from the seat that you’re in has become sort of a watchword for Nevada succeeds. Janine with coaches like this you had extraordinary insights. I wonder if you could summarize how you think now about leadership development, what that should look like and how you’ve tried to incorporate some of those ideas into your cohort at Nevada succeeds.

When we talk about leadership development I think that one of the things that came out of this, that is continuing to come out of this experience is the recognition that who is the leader therefore. And this recognition that who are we there to serve and who is every layer of the system there to serve and how are those voices and those perspectives and those voices and perspectives which are sometimes not as readily listened to or heard,

a part of a leader’s practice in terms of unearthing them, giving them voice and informing the broader understanding of what the work can look like. And I think that the connected and collaborative autonomy process was really powerful because we also recognize that leadership development isn’t only for people in a role that is typically thought of as a leader. And I think that there’s a lot of talk around teacher leadership but I think we’ve and I think

we’ve really tried to recognize that everybody has a capacity to be a leader where they are. And so if there is a challenge, if there is a problem, then it is up to us that we see, then it is up to us to solve it and to do the work that it takes to do it in a way that brings multiple people to the table, not just to solve it by ourselves. So I think a lot of times too, I just want to lean into that idea of the barriers too that maybe exist and then the barriers that

maybe are just perceptions that are there and kind of I think we’ve poked a lot at what are actual barriers to change and that interplay between the transformation of self and the transformation of system having to go hand in hand and go back and forth in conversation has been really pivotal. So I think in any sort of leadership development at any stage, just recognizing the need to work on ourselves so that we can work on the work and transform

ourselves so we can transform the work has really been pivotal. Thanks, Janine. Chip, in addition to school visits, I know you worked hard at distributing leadership at Singapore American. When you left, you had about 150 teachers involved in different leadership roles out of the 400 faculty members. What else can you tell us about strategies for developing young leaders?

I would make the argument that what we call middle-level leadership, true deep systemic change inside of a school or a school system is not possible if you don’t both empower, strengthen, and support middle-level leadership and that looks in a variety of ways. So everything from PLC leaderships, in our case we were a PLC school and we empowered those PLC leaderships to we offered a doctorate program, an onsite doctorate program through the University

of Southern California at SAS. We offered what we call the leadership cohort, which was people that a group that would meet with myself and the deputy superintendent once a month just to talk about leadership, to stipend leadership positions across the system. All of those were different mechanisms and in my mind if we don’t again empower that leadership, it is impossible to get the systemic deep kind of thoughtful change that you’re looking for if you don’t do that. Often

the the the challenge there’s a great book, the knowing doing gap, and in that it describes the difference between knowing in your head what you should do and actually doing it. The high-level leaders, the superintendents and the principals have the knowing side, but they can’t do the doing. The doing actually happens on the ground with the teachers and with the teacher leaders and that is actually the greatest challenge for schools is not knowing

it’s doing and middle-level leadership is is predominantly responsible for the doing dilemma. Mary Jean, what would you add about important experiences for developing leaders? First of all, I think leaders develop by having the opportunity to lead. So it’s been my experience throughout education that you can you can identify the good leaders in your system by looking at how many of the members of their staff are stepping forward to lead not only in the school but right

across the system. You know, it’s an interesting piece when you’re talking about developing leadership opportunities that can be really meaningful for people. When we were doing the education reform in Ontario, we were trying to move 5,000 schools along K to 12 along a change continuum and and engage them in defining that continuum as well, always trying to focus on the learning and the work on the students desk. We started out by going out to the system and

hiring groups of people to work with us at the ministry level etc and coordinate this from all of the school districts etc. And we started out in the first few years with saying well here you were a really great teacher who led literacy improvement or a principal who had that in your school so now you’re working for us go out and multiply but within a few years it became really clear that each one of them was doing the best that they individually knew how but you weren’t

going to get a system of change with a whole group of individuals working even if they all worked for the same place. And so we had to institute changes where monthly we brought all of these people my student achievement officers from across the province about 125 of them all total but to bring them in every month for two days of co-learning so that they could share with each other their experiences and share the challenges of working with schools and school districts and that became

such a powerful learning piece but the other thing we did about two or three years in because this was over a decade ago and we weren’t we were breaking new ground of a lot of what we were trying to do we actually asked our school districts to put together change leadership teams in their districts and at first they just wanted to send you know the superintendent the assistant superintendent and a few people like that we said no no we want those people we want your curriculum your program

your staff superintendent your staff assistant superintendent etc but we also want three or four opinion setting principles from your district on that team and oh by the way we also want you to have in each grouping that you come to our professional learning sessions with your team must include at least two or three teachers practicing teachers in classrooms because it became really obvious in our first set of meetings with all of those folks that they really didn’t know how to talk about

doing change in a classroom so you cannot you cannot do system change without enabling and empowering voices at every level of the system to influence to really deeply influence your system to be curious about what they’re going to bring to the table from a leadership point of view I think good leaders are as Chip said curious people I would love to have all three of you comment on any tension you see between innovation and equity how can leaders both innovate

but also be champions for equity in their system I’m going to start with Chip on this one how do you hold these ideas in tension Chip or do you see that tension I do see the tension and one of the things that we talked about often in Singapore was the need for systemic change as opposed to flashes in the pan because often these flashes of a pan of a special program even a school within a school in some instances end up creating an unintended consequences of

of deepening inequities in the system right and and and so in my mind the you may very well want to pilot something or test something but only with the intentions of creating an opportunity for every single child through that programmatic implementation and and and so we were very intentional about that which again is why we were very nervous about specific programs that only reached a certain segment of the population knowing that you know the the greatest the greatest tool

for dealing with equities is the utopian view which is a personalized educational experience for every child right that actually deals with equity quite nicely the difficulty is we don’t know how to do it completely well yet but that but but I would agree it is a huge tension and one that we’re grappling with all the time Mary Jean what what can you add about uh leading for innovation but being a champion of equity um first of all when you are talking about leading for innovation

and leading for excellence I don’t think you can have excellence I mean to me there’s a three-legged stool that supports a successful school and that is excellence equity and well-being like those have to be the three issues I don’t think you can truly accomplish one without the other so I think you do need to look at all three of those and you need to look at what your goals for change need to be and could be in order to engage that my other observation would be that if you change your

education system to focus less on asking students to simply repeat back stuff that you’ve already told them and expecting students to actually think and to work through and you ask those open-ended questions for which the answer may not be known and have them work through that as part of their learning experience often the students who are accustomed to not having the answers will start to shine I would love to see someone do some research on this I’ve not seen it yet but it is

my professional experience that what happens is those kids have a much better set of strategies for what to do if you don’t know the answer and you think the teacher is going to ask then the kids who are always bringing the answers with them right so there’s there’s that piece of it as well the other piece I would say in all of that is that I think one of the biggest barriers to actually an equity an equitable outcome for students from all backgrounds is in the area of teacher expectation

when I was a superintendent of the school district here in Windsor we had a number of schools that were in core areas of the city and and very needy communities lots of new immigrants etc and we did everything there we reduced class size we put social work psych time language translation all sorts of supports in place and in the end I’m standing on the playground talking to the teachers wondering why this hasn’t been working for the x amount of years we’ve been doing it

and one of them said oh look I love my kids but but they don’t have books at home and they don’t have this and they don’t have that the poor deer is what can we expect I call that the poor deer syndrome because kids live up or down to teacher expectations so how do you design a school or a system in which teachers expectations are continually raised they can only do that by working together on that project and sharing with each other the frustrations and the successes and one last comment

about how you implement that across the system we got to the point in the work we were doing in Ontario and also in the work I’m now doing with Victoria Australia that when you don’t think about implementing something as a pilot project because pilot projects are good where they are but they’re rarely scalable instead you think about a project from the point of view of wanting to implement it across the system and so you design what you think is a good idea and you get volunteers from

across the system and you work with them for a year and you research and study what’s working what’s working what’s not working how you contribute to that while you’re doing that you let the rest of the schools in the system know this is coming soon to a school near you so you should be interested in this and you should be finding out from your colleagues second year you expand to about 50 45% of this with an intention that by year three you’ve made the refinements to the project to the work

you’re doing you’ve got lots of experts in your system now because of those early adopters and you’re purposeful about using the early adopters to help move forward on a scale basis it’s the only way i’ve ever seen broad change work across a district or across a state I love that Mary Jean because it’s a little bit like personalized learning for a school you’re meeting them where they are and you’re giving them the time and support they need to

succeed just like we’re trying to do for students. Tom if you don’t mind I’d just like to make a comment against Mary Jean’s as well you know one of the things when we did these visits of these hundred schools we were trying very hard to balance the tension between excellence what we call the extraordinary care and the third pillar for us was possibilities or innovation those those three and what we found was we found many schools that were phenomenal at extraordinary care as an example

but were compromising excellence and some that were phenomenal excellence but compromising extraordinary care and it’s the it’s the balance of those two and then you throw in innovation and possibilities at the same time in my mind that is actually the sweet spot of where schools can be and extraordinary care can be tricky because in some cases extraordinary care comes finds itself in the form of enabling and not necessarily enabling the right kind of behavior in other cases

it’s empowering so when you are providing extraordinary care for that child is the extraordinary care actually to provide additional supports around them or is the extraordinary care actually to push them a little bit harder because that’s the best way to care for that child and this is the work of of schools in the modern era is how do we provide the right kind of care at the right time for a child while holding dear our our our standards of excellence and

creating an environment of the freedom to innovate within the with for a child within the classroom within the school within the district I love that Jean Jeanine anything you’d add on innovation and equity and you had so many great rich conversations about that this year with the fellows we definitely did and I think that that question that tension is actually something that we put right at the center of our work in terms of saying how might we do equity focus innovation

and how might our fellows be engaged in thinking about systems change through that through that very important uh lacy really as opposed to even a lens right like a lacy which dr smith which we’ll talk with him at some point soon brings up this this this equity lacy and so in terms of like what that actually looked like in our fellowship I think that when we we took our design thinking process at the center of the work after in doing our empathy interviews in really getting to understand

different experiences from uh young people to educators so policymakers to business community like really getting everybody’s perspectives on what they want their hopes and dreams what they struggle with what they love about learning and assist the education system when we got to coming up with prototypes our educators had to identify students that they were encountering that were furthest from achievement or opportunity to build to imbue the empathy interviews and then to do

continued uh thinking in terms of what they would build and so really um I think it oftentimes we see innovation work happening only after we’ve seen people check the boxes of what the compliance work looks like and I think to speak to chip’s point that’s and I add to mary jeans from quite frankly like that’s the innovation is really potentially the secret sauce that helps actually make those things happen and people are capable young people any any people are capable of great

things uh if given the right you know and give given the right invitation to the party right they can come to the party they just need an invite so I think that we invited our fellows to say hey how might we bring these two pieces together and I think that that um you know and what we saw in Singapore in 2010 was a reimagination of their definition of success through their global competency framework and through that graduate profile and so by them choosing you know they Singapore known

for its high pieces scores and being a high performing system their willingness to lean in to say this might not be everything we could be doing we could even be doing better as a system and being more conscious of creating learners who can engage in a you know a global economy by them taking on that task to define it we saw that they were able to innovate and change the ways that they prepare educators and student outcomes so I just I think that again it’s bringing those two together

that is really powerful I’d love to close with a quick round on innovation opportunities we just published a report on 20 invention opportunities and so something that we’ve been thinking about for the last two months I wonder if each of you could headline one or two things that you’re excited about in terms of the invention or innovation opportunity Mary Jean I’ll start with you what’s on your short list well on my short list would be finding ways when you want to make

when you want to make innovations you have to be able to know that the outcome you’re creating in this preferred future is actually giving you something better for kids like like for decades change in education has been about well the adults are really enthusiastic about it so it must be good um the lessons I think from all of this testing stuff we’ve gone through in the last while is that if you have if you can measure some sort of an impact for students and the change that

you’re making that you can use that to assess and fine tune what it is you’re doing in the process along the way the problem of course is that at this point in time not everything that’s worthwhile is being measured and so on and we’ve in fact I think clearly overemphasized all of that stuff so to me the big area of sort of key innovations is how do you I how do you how can we more more successfully measure impact for students of the things that matter and what we do with them and

how can we then use that to feed our curiosity about how to get better I love that thank you Chip what’s on your short list of innovations yeah so it’s a great question you know we we often think about what how do we create intrinsic motivation in people whether it’s kids or adults and I think one of the the the factors for that is autonomy and so it’s about creating as much learner autonomy as we possibly can so that learners are responsible for both designing

and executing the learning that is most relevant to them so and that’s complicated and challenging for sure but I believe that that’s where the future is headed and and if you think about related to that the implications of AI and machine learning as it relates to a learner having more autonomy around their learning so imagine a learner being able to create their own customized playlist from a variety of resources that are available so that it can apply it to the

project that they’re working on inside of school that is being guided by their teacher right that that to me is the package the system so that’s the that’s the learner implication the system implication in my mind is is then micro experiences that are part of micro schools that contribute to the macro economy of learning I mean that’s the that that’s kind of that the innovation from my perspective and then the last innovation is accountability which which Mary Jean

touched on a little bit and accountability is best accomplished through reciprocal accountability systems and that is off more often done with your peers than by your superiors so so if it’s plcs for teachers if it’s study groups with kids if it’s you know leadership groups for leaders that is actually where the greatest level of accountability takes place so those are my three I love that Jeanine anything you’d add to that list well it’s funny because I was going to jump in

with accountability and measuring the harder skills and not just the things that we currently have ways of measuring in place for so maybe just to expand on that I think you know to kind of round it back to what Chip said about having agility and courage I think really thinking about when we think about the future of learning or even what we’re doing right now really being willing to call out this idea that building community and that doing the work for each other

and for the world that we live in and to have Mary Jean talks about it in her book you talk about indifference making like the putting that at the center of an innovation process I think is a really is profoundly moving to young people it’s exciting and I think it’s really I think it really matters to adults too and so I think being able to center that probably involves some innovations in the accountability processes we have in place too I love that thanks for all of your lists I think we

we covered many of those items in our recent in our recent report I would add Jeanine that maybe an innovation would be that every aspiring leader in America would have access to a program like yours like Nevada succeeds we really appreciate the leadership that you’ve brought to that organization and the amazing learning experiences that you’ve created in part because of Mary Jean and Chip this has been like a leadership trifecta having Jeanine Collins Mary Jean Gallagher and Chip

Kimball on the podcast thanks to all of you for joining us great thanks Tom our pleasure thank you thank you thanks so much to our guests for joining us today we appreciate their leadership in the space and can’t wait to see the ripple effect of having such incredible fellows doing important work in education stay tuned for part two of this series coming next week thanks for listening this is Shani signing off