Measuring what we care about : confident individuals who continuously challenge themselves

Abstract

This is the story of an education organization trying to adapt to a shifting purpose and hold itself accountable for the things its community really cares about. It is about the early efforts of a public school district to create a practitioner knowledge base around how to support the development of confident individuals who continuously challenge themselves. Bellingham Public Schools serves 10,600 children in northwest Washington. The community wants its children to have the opportunity to engage in a collection of learning tasks that support their holistic learning and healthy development. The organization showed that it listens to its community by adopting these outcomes in its strategic plan, The Bellingham Promise. Academic tenacity is about the mindsets and skills that help children look beyond short-term concerns to long-term, higher-order goals, and to withstand challenge and persevere toward goals (Dweck, Walton, & Cohen, 2012, p. 5). This Capstone illustrates a specific effort to move recent research on academic tenacity into practice to directly impact the instructional core in a public school district while also connecting it to the community’s values. It focuses on a public report intended to help members of the Bellingham community and School Board know whether its schools are helping to develop confident individuals who continuously challenge themselves—one of The Bellingham Promise outcomes. The capstone examines the interactions of two district leadership teams with the report. It examines data use among the leadership teams in order to better understand how the system’s learning works, unearth adaptive challenges, and make recommendations to support the organization’s system of learning and continuous improvement. An adaptive challenge diagnostic tool (Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009, pp. 74- 75) is used to identify barriers, and an Immunity to Change (Kegan & Lahey, 2009) process uncovers collective systems of protection. Research on the behaviors of successful teaming is used to support recommendations to the organization. This capstone contributes to the sector by illustrating the level of organizational and team learning necessary to design instructional tasks that keep pace with the changing nature of learning and deepening understanding of whole child development. The capstone illustrates how teaming is a basic unit of organizational learning and explores the type of change asked of education organizations interested in supporting the development of the whole child. Finally, the document demonstrates the importance of making systems of self-protection explicit to allow for continuous improvement.