Mark White and Dwight Carter on Leading Schools in Disruptive Times

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 sitting down with Mark White, an award-winning teacher, principal and superintendent, as well as Dwight Carter, a nationally recognized school leader and director of student support services at Eastland Fairfield Career Center in Groveport,

Ohio. They recently published their second edition of their book, Leading Schools and Disruptive Times, How to Survive Hyperchange, and they’re sitting down with Tom to discuss how educators can prepare students for a globalized world when many institutions are not ready for the constantly changing 21st century.

Let’s listen in as Tom talks with them about their second edition and what they’ve learned through their careers. Mark White, Dwight Carter, welcome to Getting Smart podcast. Thank you Tom. Thank you for having us.

Great to have you guys on. Did you meet in Ohio? Did you both grow up there? I did not grow up there. I grew up in Texas and moved to Ohio, ended up in Gehanna where Dwight was a teacher.

I became the principal Gehanna Lincoln and then Dwight was a teacher and I was lucky enough to hire him as an assistant principal. He became a principal in the district. When I left the high school, he became the high school principal. I became the superintendent.

We worked together for a number of years. We’ve known each other for about 20 years now. About 20 years, yep. Dwight, did you grow up in Metro Columbus here? Yeah, I’m born and raised in Columbus, Ohio through Columbus City Schools.

Went to Wittenberg University, which is in Springfield, Ohio. I was blessed to get hired in Gehanna right out of college five days after graduation. How did you avoid going to the Ohio State University? I was a lack of a scholarship. No, I dreamed of going to Ohio State.

Maybe I wanted to play sports and I wasn’t a D1 athlete. So I played football and ran track at Wittenberg, had a great career in both events or both sports, I should say. Like I said, I got hired in Gehanna in 1994. Mark became the principal, I think, in 2001.

Then he hired me as an assistant principal in 2002. Dwight, I probably shouldn’t tell you, but I grew up in Ann Arbor. So Ann Arbor in Columbus. OH. Off it didn’t think much of each other.

So Mark, you became a superintendent at a tough time. Right into a crisis. Some people forget that we had a giant recession that started in 2009 and really hit in 2010. Those were a couple of tough years to become a school superintendent, weren’t they? Yeah, they worked very hard years.

Luckily, I’d been in the district for nine years as a principal and assistant superintendent. Yeah, I walked in just as we were all feeling the impact of the recession. It took a while to roll its way through our tax bases. And so I walked in looking at having to make some massive budget cuts in my first year. And at the same time, we kept trying to focus on what we were trying to do.

And I learned so much about leadership then, about just, man, in tough times, you don’t stop. You try to get people to focus on what they do. And we had people like Dwight and others running the schools and great teachers. And as we were going through this really tough time, we made it through to the other side. And that’s kind of where we are today.

And all that kind of helped shape the leading schools and disruptive times that we were looking at the disruptions hitting us and just saying, what did we learn from all this? And that’s where we are today. Dwight, you have been a school leader now for what, more than a decade, 10, 12 years?

18 years, 19 years. 19 years. And you’ve had a lot of success in a couple of different locations. What’s the, how would you headline the sort of keys to your success and how do you think about that role of a, particularly a high school leader today?

I’ll say keys to success were just being open to learning new ideas, listening to other people, getting other people involved, and primarily just staying connected to the kids. I think the one thing I can say about my career as a high school administrator or an administrator period is I was always really connected to the kids,

listening to them, trying to figure out what they need to connect, understanding how they operate, and then empowering the teachers to just do what they do. We, I’ve always had the opportunity to really work with some phenomenal educators. I mean, extremely talented and gifted in their craft and they loved what they did, but more importantly, they loved the kids that they were working with.

And so, and, but also, and I learned this from Mark. It’s the, the person you work for is a key ingredient to the success of, to your success, because if you work with a jerk or for a jerk, they can make your job extremely challenging. But if you make with somebody who or work with somebody who pushes you, who challenges you, supports you, coaches you, I mean, the sky is the limit.

And that’s been my, I mean, thankfully that’s been, I’ve been very, very happy and lucky to be, to work with some phenomenal leaders like that. Dwight, what, give us one or two tips on things that you did to, or and still do to set the tone in your building? First, we always look at the first day of school as a celebration, as opposed to like,

we’re not going over rules and regulations in the handbook, we’re going over, like, we’re treated as a new school year. So we celebrated like, like we celebrate the new year. So we would have, you know, balloons and music and, you know, matching shirts, like we just made it more festive to really let the kids know that we really are happy to see you. And this is the place we want you to experience, not just the place you want you to attend. Because sometimes you look

at school, especially high school is like, I’m going to do my time and I’m going to get out like a jail sentence. And it’s like, nah, it’s not a jail sentence. This is an experience to like, really launch you for your next, your next path and whatever that’s going to be. Here’s a way we can help you get there. So we talked about, we did it that way. And the second thing is that we constantly had, again, I learned this from Mark as well, get as many student committees

together as you possibly can to understand and listen to what students are experiencing. Yeah. And then try to implement those things with also getting teachers involved too. That’s really great. I’m smiling ear to ear Dwight because I just got off the phone with a school leader who’s opening a new innovative school in the fall. And I said, you and I are going to get together again next week and we’re going to talk about how to make that first day,

that first week, something really extraordinary. So I love that you were so intentional about starting, starting things off, right? Yeah, I have a quick story real quick. I forgot what year it was, but one year, I think it was 2000, either 2009 or 2010, we hired a live DJ. So in the first, in the first day of school, we had a live DJ in the lobby. And the kids were getting off the bus. Yeah, we had the staff outside. We had those big like airmen kind of

floating around, nose noise makers, everything like that. And the kids walked in the building, it’s like, what in the world is going on there? Some of them was just like, I’m not going in there. They tried to go around to another exit or another entrance. We had staff members there with a radio playing music loud. So we shocked them, but that’s something they talked about for the rest of the year. Mark, what do you think made Dwight so successful as a school leader?

Dwight leads with his heart. And I always say, you know, you have to balance your brain and your heart when you’re leading. And when those two things line up and the tough decisions you make, you’re in better shape, you’re happier. But you have to lead with your heart in schools, because your heart tells you how to treat people, how to resolve really tough situations. And that, I think it’s your heart that allows you to find the different ways of solving problems,

creative ways of solving problems, because you’re doing it for the right reasons. Well, to both of you, Mark and Dwight, congrats on the new second edition of Leading Schools in Disruptive Times. It’s a great book from Corwin. Back to the first edition, I think it came out in 2018. Whose idea was it to write a book? Well, we first started with Dwight, and he made some contacts. And we did a first book about

learning space redesign. And when we were both working together in Gahanah, we designed this high school building that was completely out of the box and won all kinds of awards and was really still at the front edge today of where it is and designed. Designed for Gen Z, technology, five, the critical five C’s, everything like that. So anyway, we just said, we were talking. And I started my administrative career back in the 90s. And I was saying,

keep things keep coming at us. We haven’t seen before. If you look at what’s happened since 2008, 9, 10, with the admin of social media, and Facebook, and YouTube, and the globalization, and the growth of knowledge. And we said that everything keeps getting piled on our plates as administrators, but nothing’s being taken away. I was talking before this session began, I’m in a school, and I was talking with an administrator telling me that he goes, you know,

they keep calling me about doing this and doing this and doing this and doing this. And what are we doing? It’s all so new. And it’s all new built around today COVID and built around the testing, the accountability that keeps changing on us all the time. And so I just said, you know, what we do many times is we just cope initially with something new that comes at us. And we might adjust if we take the time to think about it. But we don’t always transform our mindsets.

And yet we’re surprised the next time when this next iteration of this change comes at us, we’re saying, where did this come from? Well, if we’d thought this through in the first place, we might have seen this coming at us. So we were just talking and said, you know, we’re going to try to do something with this. It’s a different time now. Disrupt, we are in disruptive times. And you guys thought 2017 when you wrote the book was disruptive. And then 2020 happened. When did

you guys start the update to the second edition? I think that was November or December of 2020. Yeah, it was the early November into December of 2020 is when we started focusing on the second edition. Primarily, you know, obviously looking at the pandemic and how that was like no other disruption we’ve ever seen. It was like all the disruptions we described in the first edition sort of wrapped up and combined in the pandemic. And then on top of that was the social unrest and

social injustice that was compounded because of the pandemic. And, you know, schools are grappling with how do I even respond to the emotion that’s that I’m feeling, let alone the emotions that are of our staff and our students and our our parent community, like how do we even deal with those things. So we were, we had a lot of information to go from. And we were all trying to figure this thing out from superintendent’s assistant superintendents building principles, assistant

principles, teachers, coaches, consultants, everybody’s trying to help each other out figure what’s our next step. So we’re just coping and adjusting. And I think we’re in the transformation stages right now, because things are starting to settle and slow down. And but the coping, like in our first book, we talked about coping is usually like a 24 to 48 hour period. But right now, it’s more like a three, four, five, six week, maybe six month period, depending on

where your mindset is. And so it’s just a longer period of the coping, adjusting and transformation piece. Well, there’s there’s just so much about your book that we appreciate. Mark, as you said a minute ago, America is really great at adding new things to schools. I think of it as sort of sedimentary, right, that we we keep adding layers of demands, and we never, never take anything away. Your book does this really beautiful job of looking at five waves of American school history.

And I think you guys do a nice job of showing how the age of accountability, how we sort of locked in the testing regimes just at the time when the internet was exploding. And this new age of technology was happening. And in some respects, we in well intentioned ways made schools less agile and more narrowly focused while the world was beginning to accelerate and innovate. Is that fair to say? Yes, I would say even more so today, the testing model is the one thing that might do

the most to hold us back. Yeah, you know, everywhere I talk with all these educators, as you guys do also, and people want to change, but they’re they have to worry about the test scores and the accountability as an example of things being added. You know, here we have a lot of states that were schools have opened like I’m working in Texas. And so the principles that teachers had to deal with COVID. And how do you teach in this? How do you teach online? How do you keep kids safe

when they come back to school? And oh, yeah, we’re still going to give the test at the end of the year to okay, like we might not give you the same ratings, but you will get the results. So the pressure is still there. And so people want to come back and reset their schools and say, what kind of new models can we go into? What kind of online learning? What kind of in person learning? What kind of hybrid models? But how is this going to affect our 20th century testing model? And so that I think that

that really concerns me. Can we adjust in time? I really think the system could break down within the next 10 years because of all the things that are coming at us. So I think it’s going to be a matter of how quickly we can adjust, how quickly we have the leaders who can step up and get this through the communities or school boards. I think the parents and kids are going to want new models. They’re telling us that already. Seems clear through the pandemic that that many learners and

parents have expressed interest in new models. I’ve been doing research today on big drops in enrollment that we’ve seen around the country. Maybe a third of it is just not sending kindergartners to school, but it’s also parents that have chosen other options and it’s high school students that have disconnected. So America has really expressed interest in new learning models. And it’s a time for us to be more responsive than ever. Yeah, we’ve through a force change, we’ve had to

learn how to become agile and provide different modes of instruction. And now that schools have, because not all learners experienced a bad school year through COVID. Some enjoyed the flexibility, they enjoyed the independence, and they were thriving. And so some educators as well. So it’s not necessarily can we do it, it’s how can we continue to do it when things are back to quote unquote normal. And so I know there’s conversations with superintendents going on

asking, do we provide an online model for those who want it? Or do we completely say, nope, if you want to intend this district, here’s how we’re going to do it. Because that may be the easiest way through bargaining agreements and other parameters that are in place. So it’s really going to press as Mark talked about, it’s going to put a lot of stress on the system. Because now teachers and parents and students have experienced success a different way.

Do we just let that go? Or do we transform the mindset of everybody involved to say, let’s make this happen, even if it’s a pilot, you put a pilot in and you can do almost anything. So let’s pilot some changes for a year, even though we’ve experienced the pilot already through force, but can we put a pilot in and a couple districts to see if it works? Use some quantifiable measures because that’s what we need to see if we’re successful. And then just keep

iterating from there. I think this now is the opportunity to do it. I don’t know if we’ll get it again. Well, if you look at the factors that are going to be reshaping us, we have more millennial and Gen Z parents who do not accept the status quo as easily. We have Gen Z and Gen Alpha in our schools. They don’t accept the status quo. We have accelerating artificial intelligence. We have a testing system that is still built too frequently on the 20th century methods. And even

the standards don’t go up as high in, I think, the taxonomy, Bloom’s taxonomy is when you need to go. You put all that together and the way the world keeps accelerating, are you really going to say by 2030, 2035, risk they’re going to be doing this? There’s no way. And I tell people all the time, I tell teachers, okay, so if you’re a 23, 24, 25 year old Gen Z teacher, if you’re going to be teaching for 30 years, you’ll be teaching in 2051, are you still going to be doing it like this in

2051? When does that change? 2041? I don’t think so. It’s going to be changing now. It’s changing now. And that’s up to why to say, man, it has to change. We have to change. And I just hope we can. Yeah, a good friend of mine always says, don’t let a good crisis go to waste. We’ve experienced a crisis and educators across the country have adapted and transformed how they do things they had to. So like I said, many, many, some didn’t experience success, but many have.

Let’s hold on to that and let’s evolve through this crisis so that we can really be an innovative, fluid, flexible system because we have competition now. We’ve always had competition, but now there’s more, much more viable options that people have experienced. So how do we keep going? In chapter one, you said something similar. You said if leaders are going to thrive, they have to use disruption to their advantage.

How could they do that? Can you give us an example of that? Yeah. Let’s talk about just what we just talked about with the online learning that had to happen. So if we go through the timeline of last year, so in March of 2020, March 16th, I think March 18th, pretty much in Ohio, I’ll speak for Ohio, we were told to go home for an extended spring break. Now that was the wrong verbage because you tell kids an extended spring break, that means we’re

done for the rest of the year. And so we immediately became online instructors with not a lot of training on how to be an online instructor. So at that point, we’re just giving packages, just trying to keep kids actively involved. But over the summer, that’s where the innovation occurred. So some teachers said, okay, we got to do something different. So they started doing research, practicing, trying different apps, connecting other people across the classroom,

the state lines just across the country say, what are you doing? And so the professional learning networks became much larger. And people were sharing, I mean, we were sharing resources that worked, it didn’t work, trying things out, practice things, we were having meetings with each other, trying to figure out what’s working, what’s not. By the time the fall rolled around, some people had robust online learning structures that kept the kids engaged, established, we had

a reemphasis on the social emotional learning through relationships, so that then you can go a little bit deeper as Mark talked about, go higher and bloom taxonomy. And it wasn’t just general, wrote memory, there was actually critical thinking, creativity that was happening. But there were pockets of it, and I think every school district, it wasn’t systemic, but there’s pockets of it. And then those leaders then highlighted the teachers like in our district,

we highlighted teachers that were doing some of these innovative things to say, you have an expert per se in the building, let’s tap into the expertise. And so it became more of an evolving learning community that was born out of a need because leaders saw some innovation that was happening with instructors right in their rooms or in their district and using them as models to say, here’s what we can do. And you can’t say you can’t do it because they’re doing with the same

students that you have in your classrooms or your labs. So let’s see what we can do, how we can make that happen, how we can make it stick. Mark, chapter two in the book does a great job of outlining seven disruptors. Some are ones that I would expect you’ve talked about being globally ready and what that means in a post COVID world, you’ve talked about the generational challenge. One that might not show up on other people’s list was this idea of transparency, that parents want more access to

information and are more closely scrutinizing school operations. Talk about that challenge of transparency. Yeah, you know, Dwight and I both began our careers before the internet. And so basically, if you try to get ahold of a teacher, you call the school and they would write it down on a little pink piece of paper, the message put in the teacher’s mailbox, and the teacher would check the mailbox maybe twice a day and call home. Now parents, community members,

they want to see what’s going on right away. They want to see that learning management system being used. If a kid takes a test during the day, many times we have parents wanting to see their scores of the test score that night. And they’re bugging the teacher the next day when you’re going to have this test rated. We have information officers in our schools because of the internet and because of social media to keep monitoring these things. And you have to be very careful

in what you put out to make sure what you’re putting out is very honest. It’s clear. It’s transparent. We’re in a world that wants information done in bullets. That’s very easily understood. We don’t want to use education ease. And like one of our contributors said, you know, the trust begins with the information we put out in this day and age. It used to be people automatically trusted us. But now they’re going to look at the internet, they’re going to look at

the social media, they’re going to look at our webpage and see if it all jibes and what they’re hearing from each other through the phone and through texting and everything like that. So it’s a new world in that way. And so the transparency is essential today. So, Dwight, any tips for school leaders on how to stay in closer touch with their school community? Yes, school leaders have to be engaged in social media in some capacity or have someone in the

school or the district engage in the social media. Be it, you know, there’s a lot of Facebook groups now. Obviously, there’s, you know, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat is huge with our students. Now, TikTok is even bigger with our students. And so just being aware of those spaces and then being able to respond accordingly. Well, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to stay ahead of it because the information gets out so quickly. For example, you know, an event can happen on

school property within the next 20 minutes. Everybody knows about it because everyone’s taking a picture or sending their version, their narrative of what actually happened. And so then we have to quickly get involved, get the messaging out as Mark talked about, because parents want to know they want to hear from us immediately. And so that’s where the clear, concise communication comes into play. And it doesn’t stop there. That’s just the beginning.

And so you have, as you investigate or as you talk about how to resolve the issue, as you’re adjusting practices, you have to continuously communicate with parents through email. The more information you can put out to better, the better. And I say email is for information, not for communication. So you’re sharing information, you’re not necessarily communicating because that’s two-way. You want to just get information out. And that’s the first thing.

The second thing is promote your school and everything that’s going on. So you have to be principals, have to be the chief storyteller and get as many positive messages out as possible. And I stole this one from Mark. 99% of the people that drive by your school don’t know what’s going on in your school because they haven’t been in your school. So they believe what they hear and what they see. So we have to get out in front and start pushing out all the positive things that are

happening in the classrooms, be it an innovative project, sporting events, art, performing arts activities and ceremonies, student awards, presentations, anything that’s promoting what school’s like now, as opposed to what school was like when the adults were in school. It’s a completely different ball game, a completely different experience. So the more positive we can get out, when that one negative thing happens, it’ll be a blip on the radar because there’s so much positive

information, factual positive information is out there. You’re listening to the Gingsvard podcast we’re talking to Dwight Carter and Mark White, co-authors of leading schools in disruptive times. We are certainly living through disruption. Chapter five in your book talks about technology. I guess I’d love to have both of you reflect on the challenge of updating your learning model and then trying to build a tech stack that supports that learning model. Mark, would you take the

first stab at tech tips on how to update your technology so it supports your learning agenda? Well, the first thing I want to say is I want to give huge congratulations to our teachers around America, around the world for what they’re doing with technology. I’ve said I was a little bit concerned about our systems transforming. I saw what the teachers did and people who can’t say, well, American schools can’t change quickly. Yes, they can. Our teachers and our principals

changed very quickly. Yeah, most of them over a weekend, right? Yeah. And like Dwight was saying, they coped adjusted transformed all the way through. I’m seeing some amazing things now when I coach teachers compared to what I was saying back in the beginning of the year. I think the thing about technology is it’s essential for these generations today, Gen Alpha, Gen Z. They have to plug in with technology. It doesn’t have to be for everything.

It doesn’t have to be for every assignment for all day long. We don’t want that. But at the right time, using the right tool to plug it in, it makes all the difference. And before I turn it over to Dwight, who also knows a lot about this, I tell great teachers and great leaders this, you can be very good, very good at what you do and never use technology effectively. But until you use technology effectively, you’ll never be as good as you can be. So you decide, do you want to be

really good or you want to be great? The technology today is often the difference between good and great. Dwight, what do you think? You said it best. Also with technology, I think it’s a great way to connect with students to make learning much more relevant by empowering them to decide how they want to present information. What topic do they want to research? What resources they want to use? Make sure as they instruct that it’s aligned to the standards. The give students the constraints

to use the technology to make it meaningful to them. But also, and also, and Mark touched on this, Gen Z and Gen Alpha, they’ve known nothing but choice their entire lives. They choose when they, what type of music they listen to. They choose what type of shows they watch and when they watch them. They can design their own shoes, design their own clothes. They have nothing but choice. So in schools, we can use technology to give students choice on how they want to present

their information. And as Mark said, there has to be a balance. It’s a both and not either or. And again, a great teacher using technology is going to, they’re going to be exceptional. A bad teacher using technology, they’re still going to be a bad teacher. So you still have to have the pedagogy, the sound pedagogy and figure out what technology do I, what do you want to accomplish and what technology will help support that goal as opposed to how do I use this app or

this software and then deciding how it fits into the learning. So I think it’s got a, the driver, driver has to be what do I want to accomplish and then how this technology is will support that. Dwight, the irony is you just wrote a second edition of a book on leading schools in disruptive times and today your day was disrupted by a student discipline issue. Yeah. Yeah. How do you, I don’t even know how to frame this question. How do you put good plans in place and then be ready

as a school administrator for what your day brings you and how do you turn a bad situation like that into a positive one for your school? Communication and teamwork. One of our teachers to one of our assistant principals then to me as another assistant principal then to our director. So we then got all this information. We talked about a game plan like, okay, here’s, here’s what we have. Let’s figure out what’s accurate and then here are the students we need to talk to. While all that was happening,

we informed our, our secretaries to say, you know, we’re dealing with the student situation and also had a student leadership meeting going on from nine to one. So I had to go into the students and say, hey, I’m going to step out for a while, you know, you take over, make sure everything’s, you know, everything’s in place and they, they ran the meeting. They didn’t, I didn’t even need to be in there. So it was, it was phenomenal. So then we just went about trying to figure out what was

accurate, what’s not doing the investigation. Immediately started to contact parents, got as much information we needed to get down, then started quickly adjusting to what needed to happen and really focused on the students and what they needed and to help in the coach them through what was going to happen and why. And by the end, it was more about explaining, you know, what happened, why we were doing what we needed to do and what was the goal and what was there,

our goal and the outcome, which obviously was to change behavior. And so by the end, and so by the end of the day, after some, you know, parent meetings, it took what five or six hours to do. But by the end of the day, everybody was on the same page and understood, you know, this is what had to happen. Everybody was safe, everybody was taken care of and the bigger goal in mind was to make sure safety was paramount and protect the kid at the same time.

Mark. Mark, I really appreciate your approach and you’ve said a couple of times today how important it is to listen to students. Mark, I would love to have you take us out with some advice for school and system heads leading in disruptive times. Yeah, I would say that, you know, I’m still coming across some people who say, wow, I can’t

wait for next year when things get back to normal. It’s not going to be a normal again. And I’ve come across some people who say, you know, well, we’re not going to have any online options for our kids next year. They’re going to be back in our school. That’s not going to work. We live in a world of differentiation. So I would say moving forward through the 2020s, it’s going to be splintering of the models. I think we’re going to have kids who want to be back

five days a week every day. We have some kids who want online learning, but there will be a significant amount in the middle there that wants some sort of a hybrid. And we haven’t found that yet. We have the teachers. Do we know we have the teachers? We have the principals, I would say, for our systems leaders, open up the doors, get the data from your kids, from your parents. What do they want to do? I think our teachers and principals have a lot of good answers.

Can we break out of the system to get to where we need to be? Dwight Carter and Mark Wake, congrats on the second edition of Leading Schools in Disruptive Time. It’s been great to have you guys on the Getting Smart podcast. Thank you for having us. Yeah, thank you, Tom. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much to Mark and Dwight for joining us on this week’s episode. We appreciate their awareness of disruption and their

solutionary approach to preparing to face it. We’d also like to thank Corwin, the publishers of Leading Schools in Disruptive Times, for sponsoring this episode. We’ll have a few more episodes with Corwin authors in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. All right, listeners, that’s it for today for the Getting Smart podcast. This is Jessica signing off.