The Authority Podcast — Expert Insights and Fresh Ideas for Education Leaders

Ross Romano: Welcome in everybody to another episode of The Authority Podcast here on the BE Podcast Network. Thanks as always for being with us. My guest today is Dr. Anthony Muhammed. Anthony is an author, an international thought leader, currently serves as the CEO of New Frontier 21 Consulting, a company dedicated to providing cutting edge professional development to schools all over the world.

He has served as a practitioner for nearly 20 years, as a teacher, assistant principal, and a principal. was named Michigan Middle School Principal of the Year back in 2005, and he has been honored by the Global Gurus Organization as one of the 30 most influential educators in the world for each of the past four years.

He's the author of a number of books, the latest of which is what we're talking about today. It's called The Way Forward. DLC at work and the bright future of education. Anthony, welcome to the show.

Anthony Muhammad: Ross. I appreciate it. And I appreciate your listeners for taking some time out of their very busy day to hear what we have to converse about today. And I'm excited. So thank you for having me.

Ross Romano: And this is a, I mean, I really [00:01:00] enjoyed going through this book and preparing for the episode. There's a lot of, it's not a long book, but there's a lot of big ideas in it. And so, along those lines kind of wanted to start with what is. the big idea the thing that drew you to write this book and kind of, if you want to sort of encapsulate what it's all about,

Anthony Muhammad: What are several things that led and I'll just try to be brief and succinct in describing what those things were. In my consulting career, I've had my foot in two worlds. One World as a a follower and a student of the late Dr. Rick DeFore and Robert Aker and the PLC at Work movement, but also with my own work on school culture.

And Dr. DeFore, Rick DeFore, who's one of the original architects along with Bob Aker of the PLC at Work process, passed away in 2017 after a valiant battle with lung cancer. Like most trailblazers. As he [00:02:00] saw his mortality start to become more of a reality he pegged folks to take on certain roles.

And he dropped some things on me in 2016 and 2017 that I just really didn't know how to move forward with. You know, sometimes an idea has to germinate and develop. And what he wanted me to do was to address with a level of vigor, the concept that he referred to as PLC light. It is knowing what a true professional learning community should be, but only embracing the parts of it that don't make us uncomfortable. And like any endeavor, if you only give partial commitment, then at best you'll get partial results. And I didn't know how to really approach that because I was disillusioned by that as well. And then the COVID 19 pandemic hit. In 2020, and people kept emailing me and asking just curious, Dr.

Ahmed, what do you think this [00:03:00] means and what, how do we move on from here? And as I thought about moving on from here, I thought about Dr. DeFore's concern about our partial commitment to PLC. And I said, the way forward is to embrace what we've been dabbling in for all these years. The focus on student learning, to work together collaboratively, to engage in certain very important practices like guaranteed and viable curriculum, and formative assessment, and RTI and intervention, and extension, and using evidence to improve individual and collective practice.

These things are not mysterious. They haven't been hiding from us. We've kicked a can down the road and now our profession is in such a dilemma with the impact of COVID 19 and things that happened before COVID. Record drops in student aptitude, record teacher shortage, record job [00:04:00] dissatisfaction, a confused, um, electorate.

That doesn't know which way it wants to go and using public schools like a tug of war. That the way forward is the path we should have been taking before COVID. But COVID gave me the platform to really make the case that okay guys, it's time to stop playing. our future is bright, and what I wanted to do in the subtitle of the book was PLC at work and the potentially bright future of education.

Because it's still really up to us. So that was the idea behind the book

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Ross Romano: we'll certainly come back to getting into more detail about PLC at work, what that should really look like. But I think it's worth some further investigation here of the situation, right? That's for us as you say, like this opportunity to make that potentially bright into truly bright.

And and one of the pieces that you've [00:05:00] just. referenced is COVID 19 pandemic. Some of the direct effects that it had, and also some of the existing trends that it either exacerbated or just highlighted, right. And and those effects are on both educators and on students, of course, on, we're talking about schools, so they're on everybody but within the context, there's.

Unique effects. There's shared effects, but also unique effects, right? I think between those can you talk a little bit about what some of those are that are the critical ones to be paying attention to in this process of determining the way forward,

Anthony Muhammad: Absolutely. And I'll address it on the general effects and then the direct effect on educators. I wrote a book in 2011 called The Will to Lead, the Skill to Teach. And I'll kind of start with teacher mental health and mental health in [00:06:00] general. Mental health has been a taboo topic in our country for a long time.

And one of the things that COVID did was give people permission. to reflect upon their mental health. I wrote a book in 2011 called The Will to Lead, the Skill to Teach, and I had a chapter where I was really pleading with leaders to look at the mental health of our teachers, and if we didn't take that seriously, there was going to be a price to pay in the future.

And I called it The Recipe for Disaster. Inappropriate preparation or support systems and task overload. That's not a recipe for satisfaction in the long term. And the trends were bad before COVID. What COVID did is people started to take a look at it as they were isolated started to think about Is what I'm giving to my profession, my job this company, what toll is it taking on me psychologically, physically, et cetera?

And we [00:07:00] experienced the great resignation where about 5 percent of the American workforce just quit. Well, that didn't exclude educators, and the evidence that has come out from that has showed that the mental health of American educators was bad before COVID. But COVID gave us permission to actually look at really how bad it was.

As we were isolated, we had time to reflect, reprioritize, and many educators just quit. And Kansas State University found that last year the effect was 36, 500 unfilled vacancies. 163 and a half thousand vacancies filled with people that are not certified or certified in a credential area other than what they teach.

And it also Kansas State University also identified that most of those positions were filled in urban and rural communities where people need the most qualified teachers. Merritt Met College found that [00:08:00] in 20, I mean 2022, 12 percent of American educators reported being satisfied with their teachers, 12%.

That did improve to 20 percent in 2023. I don't think it's worth throwing a party or having a celebration over 80 percent of American teachers. saying that they're deeply dissatisfied with their job. And the, it was directly correlated with what I warned educators about back in 2011. So now we have kids who were learning on a platform that for many of them, they'd never learned on before Zoom or Google Classroom, often in homes with multiple children, drawing on the bandwidth, no human to human contact.

They were quiet dropouts, kids who never logged in, or parents who did not have the equipment to keep their kids up with the online learning wasn't really developmentally appropriate. Teachers were never trained, in many cases, on how to do [00:09:00] it. Many kids just disengaged. And we add all these things up and we had achievement gaps before COVID. When you add the effects that it had on teachers and what it revealed, and also it exacerbated or enhanced the achievement gaps that existed among children. We took a bad situation and accelerated it and made it worse. And now we're dealing with it. And many people want to go back to the same practices that were failed before COVID, as opposed to being reflective and asking. What's our best pathway forward?

Ross Romano: there's you know, your book, The Will to Lead, The Skill to Teach, and there's also the Will and Skill pieces of the teaching on its own. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but another way that you refer to them is kind of the moral and the professional sides of it. But and I'm interested in how those interact with each other, because one of the things you wrote I think in the introduction is this line I'm concerned that this profession is losing its soul, and I think a lot of [00:10:00] that touches on the will part and that moral, that mission, orientation, motivation to do it.

And I also think there's a two way interaction. I mean, one is when you're experienced, highly qualified educators lose their will and exit the profession. They're replaced by, if they can be replaced at all. Given the shortage, inexperienced, less skilled educators typically, right? So there's a loss of skill and an attrition of skill overall.

And as you referenced the areas with the higher need are usually the ones that are most affected by that. But also had many conversations and done a lot of investigation around the teacher shortage, retention recruitment, what's, what are the causes, what can be done better?

And there's numerous factors, but to boil it down to the top two, why do teachers leave? [00:11:00] One, for leadership, right? And that's consistent across all professions for the most part. Two, I basically no longer feel that I can be affected.

Anthony Muhammad: you add

Ross Romano: that goes to I feel as though my, whatever my skill level is, it is not going to have the impact I want.

And so it's clearly going to diminish my will because my will is why I'm here in the first place. This is why I accept the profession where I might believe, okay, I wish there was better compensation. I wish there was better work life balance, sometimes all these things, but as long as I feel like I'm having an impact.

I'm okay with that bargain. But once we hit the point where the trends are such and then during COVID, right, we have you referenced it as quiet dropouts based on the basically widespread truancy that, okay, well, of course I can't teach a kid who's not there. [00:12:00] And then depending on where I am, some of these schools had better or worse setups for delivering any kind of instruction, any kind of family engagement, anything.

Once the kids came back into the school, they were at all different levels. And then the political climate made it such that, okay, this is just too much to deal with for a lot of

Anthony Muhammad: And then your mental health is suffering in the midst of all of that, which makes it very difficult unless you're truly responsible. deeply engaged and a part of the strong learning community, it becomes difficult to row that boat alone.

Ross Romano: you know, yeah, I'm wondering if you could talk a bit about what it would look like, I guess, to, to reclaim that soul, it's profession, right? If that's the trend, how do we, what are we identifying here to say, all right, how do we reverse that trend? Or how do we recommit to.

what it's supposed to be.

Anthony Muhammad: Well, will and [00:13:00] skill they are they're interwoven. They both affect one another. And I refer to skill as practice and will as the human component or the culture. In order to create an optimal environment where a student could thrive and an educator could thrive we know what high will and high skill looks like.

So let's kind of start with the skill. The skill is much more tangible and there are things like experience with the curriculum, instructional delivery, assessment practices. Data analysis protocol, having a system of student interventions, a strong policy for teacher support, retention, growth, development.

Those are very important and leaders need to always refine. How does that have an effect on will? Well, I could have a very strong and will is the human component. Optimism, compassion, efficacy, concern, the willingness to be adaptable, [00:14:00] child-centered, flexible. These are qualities that the human being brings that are part of our makeup.

Well, if I have poor skill and a strong will, eventually, poor skill will negatively impact strong will. If I have this passion, the student centers, but I'm using bad practices, I am not gathering evidence on student progress. We don't have a system of support. Of course, you're going to feel disillusioned because you're not getting the impact you want because you're using bad antiquated or ineffective practices.

Now, how does. will affect skill. Well, if you're pessimistic, if you want to work in isolation, you're not flexible, you lack optimism, then you don't grow your practices. Your despair locks you into your practice. And a bad will doesn't give [00:15:00] you the platform or the foundation to challenge your practices and to get better.

So if I really cared about Ross, your literacy, And I'm passionate about it, and what I'm doing is not working. I would seek better practices. I'd want to work with my colleagues. I'd want some professional learning or some professional growth. So high will can affect the development of low skill. High skill can adversely affect low, I mean, low skill can adversely affect high will.

They're interconnected. And you can't really separate them from the two. So the PLC at Work process, which organizes educators into teams, which focuses them on issues of practice, curriculum, assessment, instruction, intervention, extension, and focuses their work in a certain area with the support of their colleagues, supportive leadership.

High expectations, high [00:16:00] goals doing it for a moral purpose. This represents the best opportunity to develop both the will and the skill. So a lot of what you describe that educators are, we're talking about, that are pushing people out of the profession. Well, they don't care. Well, let's pause for a minute.

Are there instructional practices or research on building student engagement? Maybe the lesson is boring. Maybe the kids don't find it relevant. Maybe it's the pace. Maybe it's your lack of use of multimedia. So, yeah, there can be all kinds of reasons why kids aren't engaged, or coming to school, or optimistic, but that's an issue of practice that can be fixed.

So don't let the needs of the patient or the client justify bad practice. In Pessimism, we have to work on both simultaneously.

Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, how did it get here? I mean, as far as there's the, I guess, the [00:17:00] history of schooling and of public schooling

The promise of it is supposed to be. And then it does feel like, particularly in more recent years, that's been muddied a lot. And that Being part of the challenge when we talk about that will piece with the individual educators you want to feel like there's alignment between why you're in the profession and what you believe the purpose of the profession is and the purpose of the system that you're working in.

And you know, of course, it's been, there's been on. a longer term investigation of the effectiveness of the schooling system and of school choice and alternatives. But it feels like more recently, I believe this is like more on still more, more on fringe belief, but you know, where there's people who would go so as far as to say we shouldn't even have public schools and it should all just be right.

And

Anthony Muhammad: book?

Ross Romano: I have. Thoughts about [00:18:00] how people can come to that conclusion, and I just think it's you get to a certain point where you've had an institution for a long enough time that there's nobody left around who remembers what it was like before that institution existed, right, and it gets taken for granted and it's easy for people whether they're in good faith or not to just say, well, this whole thing is worthless just because it needs improvement.

But. You know, the power and purpose of education and universal access to education and to that being a public good really shouldn't be disputed how we're doing it. And if we're doing it well and if it's effective and equitable, right, those are all things that we questions that we need to answer.

But there's a lot of real people affected by that, right? Educators, students, families who are in the middle of those tugs of war [00:19:00] around. You know, things that aren't really accounting for them, or it's used as a as a political football or

And also where it becomes further and further detached.

And that to me even going back to how do we make things better for educators, and we're going to talk practice and certainly the PLC piece, but it's about like, what are the, what's the role of leadership to try to have an impact beyond just their narrow, direct, Jurisdiction, I guess.

And you know, it's partially speculation you can correct, but I think that's part of the reason why you personally are motivated to do the work that you do to reach as far as you can, because it's important to have a voice and a voice of people who actually are in the field and who understand what's going on and who can speak from an educated, experienced perspective to try to advocate and make positive [00:20:00] change that these conversations can't just be happening all around the periphery of the people who have never been in those buildings.

And to, in a lot of ways, Show don't tell that the people who work in this profession are in it for the right reasons that they want students to be successful, right? When there's a lot of questioning of their motivations or what they're trying to do or again, we can, it needs to be better, but the way to, to make it better is going to be to have people who are supported, who are well trained, who are able to gain experience, right, and continue to become more and more effective if it's constant churn or just resources are being pulled out instead of that doesn't seem like it but yeah, I mean, like where do you think things stand as far as I guess our attentiveness to, or maybe [00:21:00] what are we like our separation from that promise of bullying and

Anthony Muhammad: Well,

Ross Romano: it's supposed to be?

Anthony Muhammad: schools are a microcosm of the greater society. It's an institution that exists within a greater society. And I think what's going on in schools that you just described is symptomatic of what's happening at a greater level. And I tried to address that. In the book as well on the part about history one of the things that we're struggling with as a society is the matching of matching ideals.

with reality. I don't think anybody can look at the Declaration of Independence or the U. S. Constitution and have any qualms with the ideals, things like freedom, like liberty, like access and the Declaration of Independence, all men, and I'm going to edit in that, women, are created equal and are endowed where they're created with certain inalienable rights.

I mean, these are, these are very lofty principles, and I cite in the book the original intention of Horace Mann, When being kind of the [00:22:00] brainchild of the thought leader of what a public system might look like, it was a place to socialize immigrants. To integrate them into society, to reduce crime, to have a level of equity and certainty.

That's why he called it the common school. You shouldn't be able to predict quality based upon neighborhood. It was to teach the preservation of a democracy. I mean, these are lofty, big ideas. In those realities, there are always a duality. As we talk about the issue of freedom, at the same time that document was signed, it was enslavement, the same time we talk about access and education for all women and children of color were locked out.

So we've always wrestled with this duality and the promise of the system both as a greater society and a school is lovely, but I think we've had over the past 20 plus years a reckoning with that reality. The othering of people, the [00:23:00] manipulation of curriculum, who can be validated and who can't, who should be included and who can't, these are all antithetical to the ideals that these institutions were built around and we're struggling with how do you reckon reality with those ideals and another piece that I'll throw at your listeners is the weaponization of standardized tests.

for listening. And there was a lot of questions we don't ask. No Child Left Behind will go down as one of the worst public policy decisions in American history because it narrowed down school quality to average performance on one standardized, culturally biased test, linguistically biased test that's given once a year on two subjects. And a school's whole self esteem And analysis of value is wrapped up in that week worth of assessment in two areas that's done in one language, cultural [00:24:00] orientation, and it's connected to real estate values, it's connected to population trends and the ethnicity of certain neighborhoods. So. As we preach inclusion, we live exclusion.

As we teach egalitarianism, we live meritocracy. I mean, what a lesson in hypocrisy. So there's some very basic rudimentary things we're going to have to ask. And I think that people like Dr. Martin Luther King, suffrage movement people who, who led the, who did the advocacy for inclusion of kids with disabilities.

I don't think there's anything more American than a person can do, is to call the society, with its attention, call this attention to the, congruence, or lack of congruence, between the behavior and the reality. And until we are willing, and I wrote about it in the book, Rick DeFore told me, don't play in the grain, he said, don't tinker in [00:25:00] the grain, tell it like it is, and we're either gonna live up to it, those ideals, We'll be talking in this.

This loose circle of slack talk and half truths. The reality is, Ross, every child doesn't matter to people in our society. Many don't care about what happened to kids on the east side of Detroit, to kids in Appalachia whose families have been decimated by opioids. people don't care. So we have this circle talk about fringe issues.

We can do anything we put our mind to, and we value. If in your state, kids in bedroom suburban communities we value. had a 40 50 percent drop in reading proficiency. There'd be an ex there'd be an emergency session in your legislature.

Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. It's that's all true. And and it's it's a critical issue to, to, that's why I look

Anthony Muhammad: what I'm optimistic about [00:26:00] is that if we truly engage in the structure, culture, and practices of the PLC at work process, we could address a lot of those issues that I just said. It's almost like a test of our authenticity. You want it? Here's the way forward. Do it.

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Ross Romano: I like to have the conversations about who, like what opportunities and responsibilities do You know, people in positions at every level have to create a better situation that it's not you know, to look at it on the side of politics, briefly. You know, I was recently on vacation and overheard a conversation in a restaurant of people from a small local community there that were complaining about the way the economy has been in their community.

And then they started turning it toward looking forward to the next thing. national elections. And their community, I don't think and I'm sure they're, what they're saying is true, right, about the struggles that they're having [00:27:00] economically, but it's not necessarily representative of If you were to look at the national picture, and I don't believe that it's the national political landscape that's going to make change for them, right?

But there's a lot of people that should be focusing on that, but it's like we're focusing all over here and looking at, okay, there's only one power here that can make change. And the same thing happening in, in schooling here where it's easy I guess, adopt somewhat of a victim mentality and say, well you know, the department of ed or the this or that, or or just general public sentiment is such that, well, there's this, there's a national teacher shortage.

What are we supposed to do about it? Well, that's a reality, but the fact that there's a national shortage is, Not, does not need to be determinative of what happens in my school or my

Anthony Muhammad: What happens [00:28:00] tomorrow?

Ross Romano: right, well, if we, what can we do to change that, to change attitudes, to change realities, to change those factors, those narrow factors that we can say, okay, Poor leadership in a feeling of inability to be effective.

Okay, well, I can, if I'm a school leader, I can do something about that. And then there's educators that are here and what do I do for them? Is this a unique window for innovation or unique timeframe opportunity for the profession to make an impact?

Anthony Muhammad: It could.

Ross Romano: toward the future.

Anthony Muhammad: It could be if we seize the moment. And I'll be very honest with you, Ross, the window was closing. As I did research on tragedy, aftermaths of tragedies, Like the Spanish flu or 9 11. Society gets a window of time to almost like a like time resets. And you get a chance to confront some things because of the [00:29:00] instability that you should have confronted before, but now the window of opportunity gives you, and all historians say that window is usually about three to five years that you get to do that.

If not, you double down on old behaviors or even they become worse. So I'd like to address your question in two different two different directions. One is the work of John Hattie and his effect size research around collective advocacy. Efficacy simply means the ability to produce a desired effect. So, if we want all kids to learn, it's the effect of doing whatever it takes together to make that happen.

And I want to take that concept to Stephen Covey's kind of visual between a circle of influence and a circle of concern. According to Covey, people operate in two circles. The first inner circle, he calls your circle of influence. Those are things that you can do. something directly about. No state legislator [00:30:00] has forbidden teachers to collaborate. That's a choice. No state legislator has told teachers that they cannot, from that curriculum or those standards, pick and commit to a certain set of very profound ones to make sure every kid, nobody's forbidden us from assessing. Nobody's forbidding us for giving kids extra time. Those are things that are directly within our circle of influence.

But there are also things that you mentioned are in our circle of concern. Public policy, funding. Well, you don't have direct control over things, but you have influence. So, could people, a principal or a district leader or board of education, lean on their union to put leverage on state legislation? There are folks who are influencing policy decisions We both know that, particularly during COVID, and right after COVID, in many cities and towns, there were 3, rabble rousers who went to every board meeting.

They screamed about mass, [00:31:00] they screamed about LGBTQ, and they got those bodies to change policies with a very minuscule minority. Leverage and influence works both ways. And what I ask people, for as many people who watch those things unfold on television and say isn't that terrible?

How many of them showed up at the same board meeting to offer a counter narrative? If there's a few people who are willing to have a megaphone for policies, decisions. Influence that go counter what's best for kids. Then where are the hundreds of thousands of educators at city cap, at state capitals in Washington, DC, using or demanding that their unions at the teacher and the administrative level, go to those decision makers in the education committees and say, you're not going to get our votes.

If you don't do X, Y, or Z, you can't make them, but you can certainly leverage enough pressure, [00:32:00] leverage enough influence to make them think twice about it and will probably be a lot more successful than unsuccessful. So my, my message to my fellow educators is time is out for being a punching bag. Our kids can't let our inaction be the reason that they have, that they're one of the first generations in American society to regress educationally as opposed to advance because we were afraid to speak up.

Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think there's so much, there's so many lessons about the importance of getting out there, being proactive, being communicative. I mean one, I think one of the voids that was available that created the opportunity for some of those loud belligerent voices to have a lot of oxygen is lack of communication, lack of transparency in the first place, right?

If we're not getting out there and really demonstrating the nine, [00:33:00] 10 good things we're doing, then it leaves an opening for somebody to make a big fuss about the one thing that goes wrong. Also when we kind of back down and think, Oh, look, we were, we're just, this is all happening and now we can no longer do what we do.

There was just a piece from Kappen magazine that's, that was following along with the some of those groups the running for the school boards or and looking, or just even for local politics and saying, look, most of them ended up losing. I mean, when it came down to it, the general public is not supportive of this stuff, but the schools need to.

To be bold and

Anthony Muhammad: Be their best advocates.

Ross Romano: that most people want them to succeed, they need to go out there and do it and not be afraid of that, like you said, and I think there was also an investigation, right, with like the book banning in Florida where [00:34:00] 95 percent of them are going to be traced back to two people.

That's submitted, right? And it became the, oh, look everybody wants this to happen. No, they don't. Right. But If we allow the mi those extreme minority voices to win or to cause fear and or to learn the wrong lessons from it, oh, the lesson is we need to be more quiet versus it was the fact that we were quiet in the first place that allow that left the air open for those voices.

Let's get to, let's get to solutions. So PLC at work. You know, I'm sure many of our listeners are familiar, but some are not but to make sure they're doing it right, right? Like, what is the PLC at work? And you talked about your journey with it a little bit, but yeah what is making it so critical that we really focus on this right now?

Anthony Muhammad: Great question. Well, I'd like to give folks a little bit of history to distinguish the concept of professional learning communities at [00:35:00] work from the evolution of the process. And I want to say, I'm a student of Rick DeFore and Robert Aker, and they are the architects of what's called the professional learning communities at work process.

But they did not invent the concept of professional learning community. They added to a body of literature. But evolved over a period of time. So I'm going to take your listeners on just a quick little history lesson. The concept of collaborative organizations or learning organizations was coined by Peter Senge in his book, The Fifth Discipline, which looked at the most effective organizations are those that are collaborative and they're, they integrate into a common focus and he called them learning organizations.

It was the rave of the business, the social science community. Thomas Sergiovani, who's an education professor who was enamored with Senge's work, felt before this concept started to resonate with educators, there's a modification. He didn't like the term [00:36:00] organization for education. He said it was too corporate, it was too sterile.

He said all gatherings of human beings aren't organizations. We have families, we have neighborhoods, and one of those descriptors was a community. They said educators are not really organized. We're more of a community. So we changed it to learning community. Shirley Hoard and Milby McLaughlin, both education professors, felt that the real value of collaboration among educators was to improve professional practice.

And they coined the phrase in the framework of professional learning communities that the real value was to improve professional practice. Well, Rick DeFore and Bob Baker came along and said that is true. Well, what is the purpose of improving professional practice, if not to influence directly student learning, student comprehension, student growth?

And they asked, if teachers were to collaborate as a professional learning community, what work would they do specifically that would improve [00:37:00] practice? and improve student learning. So I want you to listen. So this has been building since the late 80s. They said that they would do six things and they would do, they call them the PLC tights.

They would agree collectively, number one, that student learning is our purpose. That teaching is a process or a means to an end. That student learning is what's important and we do it better together. If doing it together is important and learning is our focus, type number two is the collaborative team becomes the platform where we engage to improve students, improve practice, improve learning.

So learning is our focus, we do it together, everybody becomes, has to be a part of a team. What do those teams do? Type number three is that the first thing a team does, if their focus is student learning, is that they clarify learn what. Anybody that's ever been a teacher would know that standards and curriculum, [00:38:00] they're full of outcomes.

It's just too many. But historically, tea Teachers have autonomously determined what's important and what's not. The four and acre state of learning is your focus, you do that together. So Roth, if both of you and I taught geometry, it shouldn't be your version of geometry versus mine. The teacher should clarify what are the absolutely essential learning outcomes of geometry.

What would they do next? They would engage in the creation and administering of tools of assessment to give us feedback on those essentials of where kids are growing. and where they may need support. Now we use that. We'd use that data to identify kids who need extra time and support, those who might be ready for extension, but also to share good practice.

So if on a particular target, your kids did really well, you're not a better teacher, you used a more effective strategy. And now we get to look for [00:39:00] expertise among the team. that evidence from those assessments, we'd set up an organized, multi tiered system of support. on all of the essentials that student by student, target by target.

And we'd also give kids extension to go deeper if they've met the targets of proficiency. And last but not least, we'd agree that this process and the evidence that we've gathered through this process, we would use to improve individual and collective practice. There was nothing in the tights of this PLC process that educators listening right now, if you're really committed, you couldn't start doing tomorrow. One of the pieces I'd like to add is that what Rick DeFore was delusioned about is that, The process was made logical. It was research affirmed. He called it elegantly simple, but yet people would cherry pick the parts that they didn't, that didn't make them uncomfortable. They liked teams, but they didn't want to do assessments because it was too [00:40:00] personal. They're okay with assessments, but doing interventions was just too inconvenient. So they pick and choose and he called that PLC light. And after 26 years of studying this, we found that partial commitment to that process I laid out for you is almost as bad as not doing it at all. Go big or go home.

Ross Romano: Yeah, and then that's, that was one, what I was going to ask is like, with those indicators of PLC light and you know, maybe schools that already believe they're doing it right, but but need to evaluate their practices, say, okay, are we fully committed to each of these things, or are we being selective?

Anthony Muhammad: And the best way to know is, are you seeing trends that the kids are improving exponentially because of the change in our practice? That you see that the impact of our improvement is leading to more kids learning at deeper levels more often. If not, probably some part of the process you're not fully [00:41:00] engaging.

Ross Romano: Yeah. So Anthony, when we talk about this potentially bright future of education what's your hope? What does it look like if it is a bright future? What does that look like?

Anthony Muhammad: It means that we have a systemic paradigm shift in our culture, that every child is valuable and that the development of human potential is our most serious mandate. And in order to do that, we have to do it together. We have to be clear about how we're trying to impact. We have to share with one another.

We have to look for promising practices. We have to set up systems that respond to kids very unique needs. We want every kid, when they walk across the stage with graduation, to say that we have helped contribute to the happiness, development, and liberation of that individual, but at a greater level, we've contributed to the development of our community.

In the longevity of our environment, our system our city, our state, our county, our nation, our world, that our, that [00:42:00] educators would wake up and realize how much power and influence we have and how our nation will only go as far as our influence on kids. And that's a pretty lofty responsibility, but it's one that when you go to your grave, you'll go knowing that the world is a better place because of it.

I want to reawaken the soul. Quit talking about test scores so much and what grade you got with the state or that's just all tools of division. Tools of of stratification based upon our perceived value of a community or group of people. To reawaken the humane core, a society with a poor education system is going nowhere fast.

Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. And there's a, and sometimes particularly due to some of what we've discussed, some of the oppositional antagonistic dynamics that have been heightening in recent years. Yeah. To each of us [00:43:00] having creating what we, what needs to be created. There's a little bit of a perspective shift or a protective reminder needed from time to say where we want the same things.

We're in this together. This is not a, Us versus them schools versus even when we feel like there's dispute and attack we have to figure out how to form those alliances and collaborate and said, right, collaboration being so critical to success within the organizations.

There's also collaboration knows no bounds. Is there. I guess as we wrap this up, a strategic partner, whatever that may be, a group, and you know, that schools have not you know, typically leverage that could really make a difference. You know, I, with education in particular, there's often [00:44:00] limited overlap between those who have the most hands on experience, and the most first hand awareness of what it means to, like, fulfill that foundational mission day to day with those who have the most societal influence and largest platform, right? But it's the combination and integration of those things and finding some opportunities to combine them that is needed.

Otherwise, Everything's happening separately and we're not really moving forward, but where does that begin? I mean,

Anthony Muhammad: Well,

Ross Romano: Aaron's communities but where can we be collaborating better?

Anthony Muhammad: I see you said it on the inhale and my head went, start with parents. who better as a partner? I mean, what parent doesn't want their child to have a great experience and to be highly successful? So we have built in advocates that we haven't tapped into. And I realized as a principal myself that I [00:45:00] didn't realize.

The untapped resource of parents at the end of my career, like the last three years, like, why did I wait so long to do this? And my parents were very healthy, but I was socialized as a new teacher to believe the parents were a burden as opposed to a potential partner. Also tapped into community resources agencies like boys and girls club, United Way, Big Brother Big Sister, Fraternal and Sorority Organizations, our universities partnerships with companies who want a, an educated workforce. It didn't have to always be money, it could be an internship. That kids can be provided. What about connecting with government and community agencies, like the areas agency on aging, wouldn't it be a great thing to build character to have our high school students go spend time with seniors and read to them and serve them and and help clean up our parks.

The work of Parks and Recreation. [00:46:00] Wouldn't that give you a lot of equity when it's time to pass a bond for building renovations or construction in your community? I mean, it's only, our limit, only limitation is our imagination. But if we have a victim mentality and believe that we're powerless, we don't have any efficacy, the frontal lobe is not even activated and we can't even start to think about these things. So the more we dwell in what we can't do, the harder it is to imagine what we could do. And to those who are detractors of that, maybe I'm just different, they just don't bother me. Like, there was a school board race in Texas where the school, one of the school board candidates came to a training I did and took a picture with me.

And his opponent weaponized it and circulated it in cities, this equity person, this woke. I got a good laugh, I almost wanted to make it like wallpaper. Bye. Really? You little [00:47:00] imp? Like, that's all you got? Yes, I'm gonna stand on being advocates for all kids, and not being discriminatory. I'm not afraid of the term equity.

Ooh, the big bad E word. Like, really? When did equity become a bad word? It's time for us to quit playing in the gray. And those handful of folks who are just insufferable, who have a megaphone, you don't bother me. You didn't make me and you can't break me. So quit being afraid of things that aren't worthy of your fear.

Ross Romano: Listeners, you can find this book, The Way Forward from Solution Tree or wherever you get your books. Anthony, anything else listeners should check out?

Anthony Muhammad: We got PLC conferences coming up this summer so look on Solution Tree's website and go to one near you so your teachers can get trained in this. Also Learning by Doing, which is the handbook for PLC, the fourth edition comes out next month. We've added a chapter on coaching teams. We revised a lot of the data, totally redid the chapter on responding to [00:48:00] resistance.

It's very updated. So there's just so many resources. Don't sit on your hands and just listen to the podcast and say, that was nice. Figure out how you can get engaged. And that's it

Ross Romano: Awesome. Well, everybody listening in, we'll put the link below to where you can find the book on the Solution Tree site. Once you're on the site see what else is there. Check out some of these different workshops and resources and all the different ways that you can get the support you need to implement.

The ideas that you want to implement that'll make a difference for your students. Also, if you're still with us, we know you're dedicated. So please do also support our sponsors. They really make a lot of this work possible and that we don't have them as sponsors if we don't believe in what they're doing.

So check them out as well. And if you're not already subscribed to the authority for more author interviews like this one, Anthony Muhammad, thanks for being on the show.

Anthony Muhammad: as well. So I appreciate you.