Why “the Superhero Principal” Needs an Update | Lindsay Whorton

Transcript

Nate McClennen: Good morning, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Nate McClennen, your host today, and really excited for this conversation on leadership. We’ve been thinking a lot at Getting Smart about some really big things happening in the world and in education: demographic shifts, demographic enrollment shifts that will impact public schools, technology changes, obviously, with AI, and the world of work. We have emerging occupations displacing current occupations, and a lot of things we don’t even know might emerge, which challenges what we want to do in K-12. Staffing challenges are always an issue for school leaders. Market competition in the public sector, with federal tax credits, state voucher programs, private schools, and even online schools and homeschoolers, are all putting pressure on enrollment in the public sector.

And then there’s this learning tension between basic skills and the science of reading, which is really, really important, and these broader competencies and durable skills, and how do we teach these things together? How do we teach real-world learning at the same time as core content? All these tensions are affecting the brave leaders leading our public schools. Two elements stick out as relevant to our guest, Dr. Lindsay Whorton, today, which I’m super excited to talk about.

First, at Getting Smart, we’ve imagined that leaders actually have to hold a bunch of different personas. They have to be visionaries, learners, and architects, they have to cultivate culture, weave together the community, and catalyze change, and that’s really hard for one person to do. Lindsay has talked a lot about this and is going to illuminate it for us. The second piece is that leaders need to think about the conditions, capacity, and commitment within their teams. How do you foster the good work within teams to advance the vision of the school and improve learner outcomes for every single student? As schools navigate this significant complexity, they need to redesign leadership.

Nate McClennen: Dr. Lindsay Whorton, welcome to the show today. You are the president of the Holdsworth Center, a nonprofit in Texas strengthening public school leadership, really important work. You joined the organization in 2017 and have grown it significantly, from about 7 districts to now 89 districts, is that right?

Dr. Lindsay Whorton, welcome to the show today. You are the president of the Holdsworth Center, a nonprofit in Texas strengthening public school leadership, really important work. You joined the organization in 2017 and have grown it significantly, from about 7 districts to now 89 districts, is that right?

Lindsay Whorton: That’s right.

Nate McClennen: 89 districts. You have an impressive academic background, Rhodes Scholar, Fulbright, worked for Boston Consulting Group before coming into education, and you’ve written a brand new book. Congratulations!

Lindsay Whorton: Thank you.

Nate McClennen: Your new book is called “A New School Leadership Architecture,” which challenges our traditional models that are really unsustainable. You’re advocating for a redesign of school leadership roles that distributes responsibilities, elevates teachers as leaders, and creates sustainable structures so people are doing the right things in leadership and staying there for the long haul. So, Lindsay, that’s a long preamble, but welcome to the podcast, and so grateful for you to be here today.

Lindsay Whorton: Thanks so much for having me, I’m excited.

A Current Events Class and a Life on the Basketball Court

Nate McClennen: We’re all going to start with the question I ask everybody. Thinking about when you were in K-12, what was your most memorable learning experience? Highest engagement, you felt like you belonged, you felt like you were learning. What sticks out in your mind with that quick question?

Lindsay Whorton: Yeah, I had an incredible high school social studies teacher. Her name was, at the time, Ms. Satterfield, she’s married now. I took as many classes with her as I could, and there was one class I was in as a senior, a current events class.

She designed this game where everyone in the class was assigned a role. You could almost think of it like the board game Risk, which I’ve never played, but I think that’s a good metaphor. Everyone in the class was playing the role of some head of state, and we all had a simplified set of objectives that reflected the geopolitical orientation of that country. And then we had a bag with poker chips in it, different colors meant different things, economic resources, military resources, etc.

You were basically trying to work with other people who were each guided by their own objectives, using the resources you had, to achieve your goal. It was incredibly insightful about how the world worked. It was fun, it was memorable. There are still things I learned from that experience that I think of when I’m navigating world affairs today. And I think she was also one of those people, I decided I wanted to be a teacher really, really early on, but I was kind of collecting models about how awesome teaching could be, and she was one of those people.

I was also an athlete, and so in a parallel track, I think the experiences I had on the basketball court were also a central form of that learning, where I was challenged and growing and felt that sense of belonging. So I think about both of those things.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, it’s amazing, I too was an athlete in high school. I think so many of the things you learn on the field, being part of a team, are really applicable to the world of work and the things we need to do in our professional and personal lives. And the game you were playing in your senior year also had an aspect of working in concert with all these other people, right? It’s about developing skills that are transferable across multiple sectors.

From Rhodes Scholar to Boston Consulting Group

Nate McClennen: So, you always wanted to be a teacher, but you ended up at Boston Consulting Group. What’s a quick story of your journey? Because now you’re at this center, thinking about education leadership and working with all these district leaders in Texas. Quick journey story.

Lindsay Whorton: Yeah, the long story very short: I realized teaching was the best job and most important job you could have back in fifth grade. I love it, love it, and was passionate about teaching. So I went to school in Iowa to play basketball and train to be a teacher. Finished my student teaching, and that’s when I won the Rhodes.

At the time I had mixed feelings about it, because I was so excited about getting into the classroom, I wanted to be a high school English teacher and coach. But I thought, well, I’ll go do this thing, and I’ll get back to it as fast as I can. I ended up being abroad for about 4 years. I lived in England, and then in Finland my fourth year, studying international education. My degree was in social policy, and my research was on unions.

One of the really beautiful things about getting outside your environment, at that point in my life, is I was really able to interrogate the beliefs I had about how you make great schools, and put those in concert, because we have some really unique beliefs about how to create great schools in the U.S. that don’t match up very well with what a lot of other people have done in other contexts. I had a lot of time to work through that, observe, and think about it. And one of the realizations I had, which is so obvious: one of the things that all of the really high-performing nations that people focus on have done, and for me, high-performing means student achievement is really high, the variation between your highest and lowest performing students is relatively low, and the predictability of who’s high-performing is low. Where you live, what degree your parents got, what color your skin is, what language you speak at home, are not predictive of your performance.

Those systems have all done one really simple but really hard thing, which is figuring out how to make generational investments, ensuring you’re attracting really talented, committed people to the education profession, and really helping them hone their skills. Obviously that’s easier to do in a smaller country than the U.S., but of all the things we’ve tried to do to improve schools, we’ve never really, in my opinion, taken seriously the question of building an excellent education profession at scale.

So when I came back, I tried to get a job as a teacher, and nobody would hire me, because my resume was weird, and it wasn’t 2026.

Nate McClennen: Right, right.

Lindsay Whorton: So I landed at BCG, because I just needed a job, and my other option was to keep being in school, and I thought I shouldn’t do that. I took the job at BCG, did a few other things, but pretty quickly said, I’ve got to be doing the work that’s connected with my passion, I’ve got to get back to the work of schools. I met Charles Butt, who’s the founder of Holdsworth, and kind of the rest from there is history, because I realized his vision was to create a place that was trying to figure out how to spend all of its time, focus, and resources to help elevate the people. I didn’t know I wanted to live in Texas, but I wanted to help him with that, so I helped him for a while, and then moved down here.

Nate McClennen: Awesome.

The Superhero Principal Problem

Nate McClennen: So you ended up focusing on leadership at the Holdsworth Center. What’s the challenge? You talk about superhero principals, and I think anyone in education, and I was a principal for a long time, I was reading your book and thought, oh my gosh, this feels familiar, we tend to fall into this as the default. Talk about the challenge, even some of the data you’ve seen around school leadership, before we jump into the solution.

Lindsay Whorton: Yeah. I think there are two big stories. The one I’d introduce briefly is that the nature of the education profession is changing. The folks entering the profession, who are leading our schools in 2026, just look different than what the education profession looked like in 2000.

I think that’s one pattern, with teaching in particular. And Texas is often on the leading edge of what is coming to the rest of the country, so there are some things we see in Texas that are true for the nation but more developed here. When you look at the teaching profession over the last 5 years in Texas, you’ve got this exodus happening, which has meant the state of Texas is hiring a lot more teachers each year than it was 10 years ago. And if you look at who those new teachers are, we know folks in their first 5 years of teaching haven’t peaked. But two, you’re now hiring new teachers who have a lot less training, development, and experience than what we would have had 10 years ago. That’s just a fact. We’re not talking about the debate we used to have between Teach For America and traditionally certified teachers, we’re talking about minimal, if any, preparation before they enter the classroom. And we know those teachers concentrate in the schools that need great teachers the most.

So that’s a pattern we see playing out. And the other thing anyone who’s worked in schools over the last 25 years can attest to is the jobs just keep getting bigger, harder, and more complicated. We tend to just add things to the plate, but there’s never really an intentional effort to remove as we add. So the job of the principal has expanded and gotten more complex.

I think the argument I’m trying to make is that we tend to have groups who talk about principals, and they do that work over here, and other groups, we don’t have very many people who talk about assistant principals, they’re kind of the neglected role in education, and then we have folks really focused on teachers. But these human capital issues are really interconnected, when we think about a teaching profession that’s skewing towards needing a lot more support, that’s really connected to the job of the principal, which has gotten more demanding.

There’s research that’s about 10 years old, but I’m sure we’d find similar things if we re-ran this survey, that asks principals who’s responsible for the development, coaching, and support of teachers in your building, and about 80% of principals say, I’m the primary person responsible for that. And if you expect one principal to be primarily responsible for 25 or 30 teachers, which we know is a wild span of control, and then you say, now 50% of those 25 teachers are in their first 5 years and had no development before they got here, we are on a collision course of expectations that are just not realistic.

As I was thinking about your framing, what I appreciate is that, as I watch folks in these roles, I don’t want them to be experiencing as much pressure and stress as they’re under. The only bright spot for me is that these pressures coming together, I think, is creating a real invitation, it’s forcing people to say, we’ve got to do something different. So that’s where I think there’s both a real challenge and a real opportunity when we think about our folks in schools.

Nate McClennen: Do you think the same applies, you’re using the word “principal” here, but does it apply for superintendents, assistant superintendents too? As you think about our leadership structures in schools, and I’ve done a ton of work in rural schools where sometimes the superintendent is the principal, so it gets complicated, but in many systems where you have a superintendent, then a district-level set of staff, then your principals at the schools, and it distributes down, does your work apply across the board at the superintendent level as well?

Lindsay Whorton: Yeah, it’s funny you ask that, because when I first sat down to write this book, I thought I was writing a book about all of the jobs, from superintendent to teacher. I realized that was 2 or 3 books, so the book itself really focuses on principal to teacher, but there was a piece I’d worked on as part of that bigger project that we released a few years ago about the job of the superintendent, that makes this similar argument.

I think particularly as public education has become increasingly hot, navigating these competing perspectives in your community is just a bigger and bigger part of the role of a superintendent. I think you’ve got a similar question of how do we revisit, if the superintendent’s got to spend more time in their community bringing people together around a positive vision for kids, if we’re still also expecting them to be the chief academic officer, how do we expect that to work, and how do we really level up how we frame the role of a superintendent, and then set realistic expectations about how that team needs to be structured to get the work done. So I haven’t filled in those gaps in principle, but I think it applies from top to bottom.

Nate McClennen: Well, it feels like the superintendent is often sort of the political player who’s digesting and evaluating what the community need is, what the community vision is, translating it into something that’s a broad strategy for the district to improve learner outcomes, and then it gets pushed onto the principals at the site level. So when you think about the principal role, what do you think, in an ideal world, is their function? What should they be doing, knowing they’re doing a lot of things?

Lindsay Whorton: Yup. Well, I’ll start with what I think we need to allow principals to release, because that may be an easier way to back into this. My overarching argument is that the shift we made to say a principal shouldn’t be a building manager, they should be an instructional leader, that’s a good shift. But I think the way that got communicated, or the way principals internalized it, is you must personally do all of the following functions of instructional leadership. And I think if we add those up, it just adds up to a number of minutes and hours that are not available to a single human being.

Nate McClennen: To instruct, to coach all those teachers, right?

Lindsay Whorton: That’s right.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, yeah.

Releasing the Superhero: Coaching, Vision, and Community

Lindsay Whorton: So to start with, if you think the principal is going to be the primary coach and developer of teachers and ability, I think that’s an unrealistic expectation. I think we have to create a leadership structure where principals can delegate the coaching and support of teachers to other leaders in the building. We also have pretty good research that when you think about the vastness of content areas in a school, the expectation that the principal is going to be the leading expert in all of those areas is pretty unrealistic in a lot of our school buildings. And when we think about how much change we’re continually navigating around pedagogy and curriculum, there are other people in the building who are stronger experts and more credible in the coaching and support. We’ve got good research that principals actually are not that effective at coaching and evaluating all of the teachers anyway. So we hold on to this in a way that’s kind of disconnected from the evidence we have. So I think that’s the first piece, we’ve got to think more creatively about how coaching and support for teachers happens.

Our model for that is, I’m making the argument that we need more of what I call team leaders, or what I’d describe as player-coaches. I don’t think these need to be full-time administrators, but it also can’t be teachers who are given honorific leadership assignments with no pay and no time to execute. So how do we elevate and harness all of that expertise and leadership we have in our classrooms? And as we do that, and really have these experts who are closest to kids with time to lead, it’s also going to change what we do at central office.

But then, I think if we look at all of our experiments with what we’d call teacher leadership over the last 30 years, they fail and lose momentum for a variety of reasons, but I think one of them is we take promising people, throw them into a new job, and then have no plan or strategy for how we’re going to coach and support them to do the new leadership work they’ve been assigned. Because we know that the work of leading and coaching and growing adults requires new and different skills, in addition to the skills that make you a great teacher working with students. And we very rarely build the capacity into our leadership structures to do the coaching and leadership development of other adults.

So the argument is, in small schools, that may be the principal, but in really big schools, and in Texas we’ve got really, really big schools, dozen-hundred-student schools, and 600-student elementary schools, you may very well need another role with a different leadership mission. I call this the bridge leader in the book, who’s really focused on coaching and developing all those team leaders and supporting coherence across either grade levels or departments.

So if you had all of that capacity, then the principal is really a person who is, one, setting vision, thinking long-term about the needs, the priorities, and the change that needs to happen in the school, because what we see in a lot of our schools is you always have to be drawn toward the most urgent work in front of you, and it makes a lot of our schools really reactive. So how do we create space for principals to be setting the vision and priorities for what needs to happen now to improve achievement for students, and then coaching those other leaders to execute it, but have more time to think about where we need to go next, and how to bring coherence between what they’re hearing from central office and what they see on the needs of their campus?

But I think the other dimension, and I think this is becoming more true as we see more forms of competition and choice in our communities, principals need to be spending a lot more time also in their communities, talking to parents, families, community members, understanding their needs, dreams, and vision for students, because that’s the only way the vision for change in the school is going to meet the needs of the families and the community. So that’s a high-level sketch of what I believe the principal needs to be able to release, in order to spend their time in new ways.

Nate McClennen: Okay, let me rephrase that, see if I have this right. I think I heard three things. One is coaching and support, building capacity, but not in the way we traditionally do it, which is, I’ll take care of all the teachers and figure out how to make them better. We’ll talk about that in a second. So that’s number one. Setting vision and translating the vision at the district level down into the site level to make sure you’re meeting the needs of the community. And then I really like this third part, just getting out in the community, building those relationships. We call it weaving, right? So how are they out there being present and understanding what those needs are, rather than predicting or pretending or guessing what those needs are.

So we have these three areas, and before we get into your actual specific framework, which you just alluded to, still the tyranny of the urgent reigns supreme, right? So you could say, build capacity, set vision, community connect, but then something happens. There’s a discipline issue, there’s a parent issue, there’s something you’ve got to do at the district level. Do you have specific structures to protect that time, or does the framework itself inherently buy time for principals to do these three big things?

Lindsay Whorton: Yeah, I think all of this is a both-and. One, ideally, it’s kind of like Tier 1 instruction versus intervention, applied to school leadership. If you’ve got these structures in place, and you’re coaching and building the capacity of others, over time you’re decreasing the number of some of these urgent issues that require your attention. So I think that’s part of it. I think the other thing we know about high-performing schools is that over time, you’re building and maintaining systems that also move you away from those kinds of urgent work, and that’s kind of a key job assigned to the bridge leader, to build, maintain, and continuously improve those systems.

But then, of course, in any organization there are going to be things that happen that need the principal to get involved, so this isn’t at all saying the principal says, no, sorry, I can’t help you with that. I think it’s about a relative reallocation of our time and energy. And then, of course, there are things that happen that require us to be responsive, crises, and all that.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Four-Level School Leadership Architecture

Nate McClennen: Alright, so that makes sense, and I like the idea of building systems. You’ve alluded a few times to this bridge leader and team leader and team member. Let’s walk through it, describe the framework, the four-level school leadership architecture, in a way our listeners will understand as they’re thinking about their own leadership scenarios in their schools.

Lindsay Whorton: Yeah. So you’ve kind of got the basics of it, but before we dial in, I’d say the framework is designed to say these are the jobs that have to be assigned to someone in your school, and the jobs are classified into these four levels. Before getting into the levels, the part I get most nervous about is anytime we hear “levels,” I think what we hear is hierarchy, like this is a vision for a really hierarchical school.

My starting point would be, I think you could enact this model in a way that’s really hierarchical if you choose to, if you make it about how the principal is still holding power and has a new chain of command for how things get done. This could be very hierarchical. But to me, the idea that you need to get clear about who’s doing what, how that work’s going to get done, and how people’s jobs fit together, that’s just good organizational design. There are different ways you can enact that structure that will point you toward different kinds of cultures.

There’s a district we’ve worked with really closely that has enacted a version of this model and really anchors it in shared leadership. One of the things they’ve done is say, yeah, we’ve got these four levels, and our vision is how do we push decisions as close to students as possible? They’ve actually used it in a quite anti-hierarchical way, and said, now that we have these teacher experts, why do we have these experts at central office sitting in their offices making all these decisions about curriculum, when we have these leaders who are close to students who could be empowered to make those decisions?

So that would just be a starting point before we get into it, because I think it’s the biggest misunderstanding. The idea is you’ve got four basic kinds of jobs. The first level of the model is team members. In any organization, that’s where the majority of your employees are, and they’re the most important people in your organization, because they’re doing all the work, delivering the service and the outcomes. So your teachers are the heart of team members. I define the four levels around their role in building capacity and delivering results, distilling all of the complicated frameworks we have around leadership into a few things.

So teachers, team members, are building the capacity of students. They have a responsibility to be driving their own kind of learning and development, and then they’re responsible for the day-to-day instruction delivered to students, and their time horizon tends to be proximate to kids. They may be planning over a quarter or a semester, but a lot of their time is spent around what’s happening this week.

Nate McClennen: So just pause for a second. So the team members are building capacity in, in some ways, their students, right? That’s their job, the teachers, educators, frontline folks, and they’re building, it’s very immediate, they’re planning, and they’re building capacity in their students.

Lindsay Whorton: Students themselves.

Nate McClennen: And themselves.

Lindsay Whorton: And their peers.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, and their peers, right, right, right.

Lindsay Whorton: So then the team leader, their job in building capacity is the growth, development, and success of those team members. Ideally, we would have spans of support in our schools, and I don’t like the word “control,” expansive support in our schools, that would be closer to what we’d expect for similar jobs for other knowledge workers, which is not 1 to 30, it’s more like 1 to 6. So ideally, you’d have a team leader responsible for coaching and supporting like 6 to 10 teachers, and really actively thinking about how do I make sure they succeed, how do I help them get better.

And then their responsibility in delivering results is to be looking at that data on a longer time horizon and supporting individual teachers and the teams to be thinking about how they’re achieving their goals with kids. We can think of this as the thing we’d want to be happening in an excellent PLC, and the question is, who has time and responsibility to plan for and do that work? So that’s really the work of the team leader.

And then, in large schools where you have many, many team leaders, the principal may not have the capacity they would ideally have to really sit with those team leaders, coaching and supporting them, looking at the data with them, monitoring to ensure they have what they need to succeed. So for larger schools, we assign that capacity building to the bridge leader. The bridge leader is basically responsible for the success and growth of those team leaders, and they’re also monitoring down into the next level, into team members, and saying, do we like what we’re seeing with how teachers are growing and developing on these teams?

And then their delivering-results responsibilities are monitoring and supporting those team leaders, but then thinking even longer term, and they’re often working on what systems we need to have in place to solve the problems and challenges and areas of friction we’re seeing come up on these teams. How do I drive continuous improvement? And they’re also looking across all of these teams for what are our organization-wide professional learning needs, and how might we put together some school-wide interventions and supports to help these teams succeed. So they’re bridging and connecting across those teams and departments.

And then, the work of the school leader, it’s important to say, of course, the school leader’s releasing a lot of responsibility for the work to others, but they’re not abdicating the responsibility to monitor and support success and help people course-correct if they’re off track. So it doesn’t mean they’re not in classrooms, not looking at data, it just means they’re doing that work through a different lens, which is to look and see, who do I need to be supporting in order to build their capacity to address this challenge. So those are the four levels.

And the goal for me, one of the things I’ve learned working in Texas, we’ve got 1,200 school districts, they range in size from like 100 students to 200,000 students in Houston, there is no one just-right organizational design that’s going to work across all those schools. So for me, the goal is that the smart people in education who know their communities best can use this framework to say, what does this make me think about how we’re currently staffed, and what might it look like to organize our people differently to ensure all these jobs get done? There’ll be schools that say, we don’t need that bridge leader, we’re going to collapse the school and bridge leader work, and the principal can do that in our community. People will tailor this. But I’ve just found we sometimes make things so complicated that people can’t see the path, so that’s kind of the simple lens through which people can diagnose where they may be missing some capacity in their school.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, yeah, I agree with you 100%, that educators in the education sector, and I’m part of it, you’re part of it, tend to make things really complicated. Wherever we can make things simpler, I love the idea that you’re talking about jobs, you haven’t, well, you’ve alluded to principal or curriculum coordinator or something like that, but the reality is you haven’t listed a job title here. You said, here are the roles, and fill them with job titles that you think, or people that have job titles that are filling them.

Lockhart ISD: A Case Study in Shared Leadership

Nate McClennen: So you’ve worked with about 80 or so districts, independent school districts down in Texas, you don’t have to mention a specific one, but talk through a specific one. What’s really worked here? What’s a success story where you say, here’s where they were, here’s where they are now on their journey? Describe that journey and the impact it’s had on the system.

Lindsay Whorton: Yeah, and one caveat I’d give, we’ve worked with 90 districts through a variety of different programs, and when we started, we were really focused just on the principal. And this work has really grown out of what we’ve learned and seen, that the principal alone is really important, but the principal alone is not the answer.

There was a district we worked with in that prior principal work, Lockhart ISD, just south of Austin. If you know about Lockhart, you probably know it as one of the greatest places to get Texas barbecue. But the superintendent of Lockhart’s a guy named Mark Estrada, and when we were working with him and his district on how to really strengthen their principal pipeline, he really had this vision for how he wanted to elevate teachers and teacher leadership. One of the things we always wanted districts to take on is to look at the way other roles were structured, but it’s just so big and overwhelming, and most people decline. But he had this real vision, and so we were able to work with him and his district over the last five or six years.

They really brought this model to life in a really beautiful way. They created, and this is the district I mentioned earlier around shared leadership, they started by adding a position called a lever leader. It’ll sound similar and familiar to some other models that exist around the country, it’s a 50-50 teacher leadership role, where teachers teach half-time, and the other half of their time is really protected for this team leader work.

They started on one campus, Plum Creek Elementary, created these lever leader positions, and over time, what they realized was, now that we’ve created this level of leadership, it changes how everything else in our district works. It was a multi-year process for the principal, her name is Jamie, she’s an incredible school leader. But it took Jamie a while, at first Jamie said, I’m going to manage all these team leaders, and I’m going to have this assistant principal over here, who’s now kind of sidelined instructionally, now that we’ve created all these new positions. But she wanted to keep it close.

It took a couple of years for her to say, you know what, what I need to do is empower this assistant principal to play a role in coaching and supporting these lever leaders, and that’s going to really free me up to operate differently. And now Jamie’s actually the principal of two campuses, she’s been able to stretch and do more things, both of which are extremely high-performing academically. In the Texas grading system, Plum Creek was an A last year, Jamie’s new school that just opened is also an A. And if you go and visit these schools, the instruction is engaging, solid, consistent across classrooms, and when you watch teachers and how they work together to learn and build that instruction, it is a system of developing people that is sustainable, because I think one thing that stands out to me is there are ways to get student achievement to bump, but if it’s not backed up with a really robust and sustainable way of elevating the capacity of people to keep making those good instructional decisions over time, it doesn’t last. When people go to Plum Creek, what they see is, it is beautiful to see people talking about instruction and student learning in such a thoughtful, consistent way.

The district has spread this throughout other campuses. But Jamie will tell this story early on, she went to central office, and this is a relatively small district for Texas, about 6,000 kids, she went to central office and said, hey, we’ve created these positions, you’re telling me to empower them to lead, but you all are making all these decisions that are, one, what I now view as my role.

Nate McClennen: Right, right, right.

Lindsay Whorton: And so the district, led by a woman named Stephanie Camarillo, who’s the Chief Academic Officer, Deputy Superintendent, brought people into a room and said, we need to look again at how we make decisions around curriculum and what our roles are, and the district was able to identify central office positions they could repurpose for these campus roles. So it’s just, they’re a really wonderful example of a district that was really clear on what they were trying to achieve for teachers and for students, took this iterative, continuous learning process, and didn’t feel like they had to wait to have it all figured out to get started. They’ve just made remarkable progress over the last 5 years.

Compliance Versus Agency: Why Vision Has to Be Clear

Nate McClennen: So thanks for sharing that, I’m hearing a few things here. One is that district had to have a very clear vision about where it wanted to go, around setting a vision and being clear how they wanted to improve results or maintain results, whatever they were looking for, that could then trickle up into the classrooms, trying to avoid the word “down” so it’s not hierarchical, right? Trickling to the most important people, the students, who are learning and trying to have an extraordinary experience in the district.

The second thing I’m thinking about is that student results can go up, at least temporarily, from a very compliant system. A top decision gets made, it gets forced onto all teachers, all teachers are regimented the exact same way, but there’s no agency or capacity building around individual leadership there, at the team member level, that you’ve said is the most important. So these educators predominantly in the classrooms working with students, I love the idea of pushing decisions close to students as possible, and I think that’s much more of an agentic way to think about school leadership, in a distributed way, than a compliance way. I think we’d acknowledge that at least what we’ve seen is that there are a lot of compliance-based systems, education itself is a compliance-based system, and we’re trying to shift that. Is this resonating with you, that this is about providing those closest to the students with more agency, but also the skills to use that agency well? Because just a free-for-all doesn’t work.

Lindsay Whorton: Yeah. Two things I’d play back that I really loved you highlighting. To this compliance point, I think the other flavor of it is, sometimes we can identify discrete technical problems that, if we solve them, bump student learning, but there’s no continued upside of that intervention. So I think part of it’s about compliance, but I also think part of it is just about nobody’s learning how to apply, to find a problem, to test an intervention, and to have that kind of adaptive muscle of responding to student data. And if we’re not building that capacity, or honoring the capacity that exists in teachers to do that work, then we’re just moving from one technical intervention to another to another, and it may result in an increase in student test scores, but I doubt it’s resulting in a transformation in student learning.

The other thing you highlighted that I think is so important, when you talked about the district had to have a vision, in order for delegation and distribution to work, the vision has to be super clear, because everybody has to know what we’re rowing toward and pointing toward. I think there are a lot of leaders in different roles who feel like they have to hold everything because that vision doesn’t exist and isn’t clear. In the absence of a vision, being very involved in everything is one way to achieve coherence. So as people make this shift, they’ve got to figure out how to be leaders who can set, communicate, and rally people around a very clear set of expectations of what they’re trying to achieve.

The other piece, I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the last few months, we’ve tried different ways of structuring roles lots of times over the last 40 years, but there’s a framework of organizational design that basically says what you’re trying to do is bring six things into alignment: goals and strategy, processes and systems, culture, rewards and incentives, people and structures, all in alignment. So many of the interventions we bring to school, including people interventions, don’t gain traction because they’re a random, hypothetically good idea, but have no relationship to the goals we’ve set for our system, the processes we’re running, the culture we have. That’s why this work is hard, and part of what Mark and Lockhart got right is that they really worked through all of those components: goals, process, culture, rewards, structures, and people.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. And your thoughts on technical versus adaptive, we also think a lot about that, when there’s a technical problem, you have an implementation, implementation science says you roll that out and there’s a specific set of structures, that’s much more of a compliance-based system, and there’s a role for implementation and solving technical problems. But if you don’t combine it with this idea of solving how you teach people and help them develop the skills and capacities to address adaptive challenges, we call that innovation, how do you help them say, alright, this isn’t working, what do I do next, and give them the flexibility, freedom, capacity to do that, that’s what your system is talking about. It’s the combination of both of those things, and recognizing when one needs to happen, when are we solving an adaptive problem, and when are we solving a technical problem. And often in systems where we’re doing technical solution after technical solution, we call it initiative soup, it’s like, okay, here’s the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, and there’s no coherence across the board.

What Only You Can Do: Advice for School Leaders

Nate McClennen: Okay, two things as we close up here. Someone’s listening to this, they are the superhero leader, other than going to buy your book or reaching out and reading blogs and things like that, what’s the very first step they should take? Let’s start with that question.

Lindsay Whorton: The simplest framing I’ve found to get started is to just encourage folks to really think about and get clear on, what is the work that only I can do? And it’s not because, and to be clear, when I think about myself as the president of the Holdsworth Center, I’m not asking, what can I, Lindsay Whorton, only do because I’m so special? But it’s because of the position I’m in, the information I have, the responsibilities I have, the needs of the organization, what are the things that only the person in my position can actually tackle and do.

I think if we get clearer on that, at a very simple level, then the question is, how do I make sure more of my time, energy, and focus is going to those things? And then I have to ask, what are the things I’m spending time on that are getting in the way of being able to do that really, really well? And from there, I think we tend to notice a couple of things. Some of those things that are getting in the way are things that are kind of a structural problem, I need to figure out who else could do that and how I could give it to someone else, which is either a delegation problem or a capacity-building problem, and that might be easy to do, or it might take some time to build that capacity, get that off my plate.

Lindsay Whorton: But the other thing we tend to notice is there’s a set of things on that list that I’m doing, not because I can’t figure out who else could do them, but because I love them, and I’m good at them, and they make me feel good about myself, they keep me connected to my mission and purpose, and it’s because of me that I’m doing that. We describe this as professional identity, and I think we’ve got to really challenge ourselves to say, how do I reframe where I find meaning, joy, and purpose? Our purpose to serve students is really the real asset we have here, there may be things that only I can do that I don’t feel as passionate about as some other areas, but if I can remind myself how doing those things well can make such a big difference to the success of my organization and the success of kids, then I’m motivated around that, and I can help rework that.

That’s a good place to start at a basic level, just to check ourselves on where we might have more opportunities to shift our time and focus in more strategic ways, through a bit of reflection.

Nate McClennen: I love it, I love it. I think we’re going to end there, because that was really, really great. So, what is the work that only I can do? What is getting in the way? And where do I find meaning, passion, joy, purpose? If we can have all of our school leaders answer those questions well, and set up systems and structures like you’ve shared today, I think the overall result is better for students. That’s the long run. Anything I haven’t asked that you really wish I should have asked today?

Lindsay Whorton: No, I love the conversation. Thanks so much for having me.

Closing Takeaways

Nate McClennen: Yeah, thank you. Here’s a couple things I take away, and we’ve reiterated these across the board: fundamentally, we need something to shift in principal leadership, and leadership in schools writ large, in order to achieve better results for students. And by better results, higher engagement, higher belonging, higher outcomes, it’s not just the test scores. You talk about these two or three big roles of leaders, building capacity and getting results, these bigger pieces, and getting results is connected to setting a vision. And I love that you added this third piece about community connections, how do you make sure there’s time for principals in their day to go out and be present in the community? In order to do that, you need to get some things off your plate.

The other takeaway for me that I’ll sit with, because I think it’s really, really important, is that as we think about learner-centeredness, how do we push decision-making as close to students as possible? I think, to me, that’s one of the big takeaways. Your structure allows that, these team members, the teachers who are closest, should be involved in helping and or making decisions that directly impact those students. That’s agentic, constrained by a broader system vision that’s articulated by the district. And then just the conversation around technical versus adaptive problems, and how do we help problem-solving, how do we help teach your team members and team leaders really think about how to address adaptive challenges.

So, Dr. Lindsay Whorton, thank you so much. Love the work you’re doing, love the book you’ve written. Encourage everybody listening to go out and take a look at the website and take a look at the book. I think it’ll help all of you out there trying to figure out how to not be that superhero every single day. So, thank you so much, and thanks for joining us at the Getting Smart podcast.

Lindsay Whorton: Thank you.

Guest Links

• LinkedIn Profile: Dr. Lindsay Whorton’s LinkedIn

Past Interviews:

• The Out of the Trenches Podcast
• Inspire Greatness Podcast
• The Assistant Principal Podcast
• Principal Center Radio

Organization Website: The Holdsworth Center