AJ Crabill [00:00:01]:
That failure of imagination right there is where all your aspirations for creativity die. Because we’re not actually thinking about what is it that students should know and be able to do. We’re just thinking about what are the operational things that we have to get done so that we don’t get in trouble.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:16]:
Hello everyone. My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood: [00:00:18]:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Wohrwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:21]:
This is the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Matthew Worwood: [00:00:25]:
On this show, we’ll be talking about creativity topics and how they apply to the field of education.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:30]:
We’ll be speaking with Scott scholars, educators and resident experts about their work, challenges they face and digging deeper into new and varying perspectives of creativity or with.

Matthew Worwood: [00:00:41]:
The goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers and parents with knowledge they can use at home or in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:49]:
So let’s begin.

Matthew Worwood: [00:00:51]:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast. And today we are delighted to introduce a guest who can help facilitate a discussion on how to change leadership starting at the very top, the school board. AJ Krabel serves as a conservator at DeSanto Independent School District where during his guidance DeSanto improved from F ratings in academics, finance and governance to B ratings. He’s also served as a deputy commissioner at Texas Education Agency and Board chair of Kansas City Public Schools. AJ welcome to the show and thank.

AJ Crabill [00:01:29]:
You so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Matthew Worwood: [00:01:31]:
Now, before we get started, could you tell us about your role as a conservator and also a little about the DeSanto Independent School District.

AJ Crabill [00:01:40]:
Essentially, DeSoto is like a lot of school systems is that it’s got really devoted community people who are deeply engaged and excited about what’s possible for their children and are eager to be invested in and active in the schools. But DeSoto Ranick on some hard times and needed some support and I was brought in to help offer that support. Most of my role has been providing coaching for the superintendent and the school board to really help them get focused on what are the things that the community most wants its students to know and be able to do and help them implement that from a governance and senior leadership position.

Cyndi Burnett [00:02:20]:
So what, what is it that communities want from the school?

AJ Crabill [00:02:24]:
Well, simply put, they want there to be increases in what students know and are able to do. Like the only reason that school systems exist is so that children will gain the knowledge and skills necessary to move and grow and live choice filled lives where they can care for themselves, care for their families. And that’s, that’s what communities want. Now, how that looks varies heavily from community to community. If I’m working with a school system on Texas Gulf coast, they may be interested in underwater welding, which is apparently a thing I didn’t know about, but those folks are making really good money. But if I’m in the heartland, the breadbasket of Kansas, maybe folks are more concerned about animal husbandry or genetics and agriculture. What it is that a community wants its students to know and be able to do will certainly vary by region. But what doesn’t really vary is that people want their kids to be set up for success.

AJ Crabill [00:03:27]:
And it’s the job of the school board to listen for that vision of the community and do everything in their power to make sure that that possibility is coming alive through the work of the school system. So what’s interesting is that it actually doesn’t matter how school board members arrive in their role, whether they’re appointed, whether they’re elected, or some other mechanism, their job is fundamentally the same, that they represent the vision and values of the community and are responsible for ensuring that that vision, which students should know will be able to do is being carried out in the schools and that the community’s values are being honored during that process.

Cyndi Burnett [00:04:05]:
So, A.J. how do you facilitate the process to find out what the community wants as a whole and then help the boards understand what, what is the vision? Who makes those decisions?

AJ Crabill [00:04:20]:
Yeah, this is a key responsibility of the board because the job of the board by whatever they’re called, and they’re called many different things. Some places they’re called school committees, some places they’re called boards of education, other places they’re called directors, some places they’re called trustees. And so as you cross the globe, you’re going to find a bunch of different names. But ultimately, somebody is responsible for governing the school system as distinct from managing the school system. The body that’s responsible for governing the school system I refer to as the school board. And the job of the school board is to represent the vision and values of its community. And so to do that effectively, they actually have to go out into the community and do a whole lot of listening. Part of what my coaches and I will support a board with doing is thinking through what is that listening process going to look like? How are we going to go out into the community and engage folks and in such a way that we harvest from them a collective sense of their vision for what students should know and be able to do, and their values, their non negotiables that should be honored along the journey.

AJ Crabill [00:05:20]:
And then once the board has done all of that listening and collecting all the notes from all that listening, then my team and I will condense it down into a one to five page summary that says here’s all the things that we heard. Here are the most frequent issues that came up, the most common concerns, the most common aspirations. And then the board uses the totality of that information to define a set of policies that the school system follows. We refer to those as the goals. These describe what students should know and be able to do in the guardrails. These describe the non negotiable values that have to be honored. And so the board listens to the vision and values of the community, condenses them down to a set of goals and guardrails, and then holds the school leaders responsible for actually implementing that. The school leaders who would then make the day to day decisions about what actually happens in the school.

Matthew Worwood: [00:06:11]:
AJ Are you sharing your process and how you work with districts, or is this practice pretty common in school districts around the country?

AJ Crabill [00:06:19]:
It’s not nearly as common as I would enjoy and certainly not nearly as common as students deserve, but it is increasingly happening. The challenge is that when we think about optimal behavior in the classroom, we’ve really had decades and decades of research around that. And so if we want to know what behavior teachers should adopt, we have a ton of research around that that goes back many, many years. If we want to think about what’s the behavior of principals, the school leaders that makes a difference, we’ve really got a couple decades worth of really in depth analysis into that question. But it really is only the last decade or so that we’ve had a rich body of research inquiring into what are the adult behavior changes in the boardroom that would have the biggest impact on improving outcomes for students in the classroom. These ideas are certainly not my own, but they are ideas that are grounded in the research literature that is relatively nascent around what is it that school boards can do that can have the biggest effect on creating the conditions for improvements in student outcomes?

Cyndi Burnett [00:07:33]:
So, AJ, you know this is a podcast on fueling creativity. So I’m really curious, from your perspective, what role does creativity or creative thinking or even creative problem solving play in the board and the board’s process?

AJ Crabill [00:07:47]:
Yes. All right, so now we’ve gotten to the conversation that I knew we’d get to. So this is what excites me about this is often people have an opportunity for creativity, but they don’t even know it. And in the absence of realizing that there is freedom to be creative. Often what will happen is we’ll just rely on, well, what has always been done, what has always been so and so that there’s this safety in doing the things that are normative. And what I often find is that when you give people permission to be creative, when you give them permission to think outside of what have we always done? The people often latch onto that. They’ll grab it with both hands. And so part of the work that we do is we wind up visiting with school boards and inquiring into what is it that your community actually wants its students to know and be able to do.

AJ Crabill [00:08:37]:
The default response that we’ll get often has something to do with state assessments, because that is just a normal thing across the US and we’re not opposed to that. But we’d always want to nudge people to think, okay, got it. But as you listen to your community, do state assessments fully capture what their aspiration is for their children? And if so, then so be it. There are some context where maybe that’s the case. Each community is different, to each their own. But in a lot of places, it’s the first time that education leaders have really been nudged to think, okay, if we weren’t going to measure things based on a state assessment, what else does our community want us to measure things based on? And so that conversation, really freeing up school leaders and school system leaders to be thoughtful around, what are the things that we really, really want our students to know and be able to do? That’s where a lot of the excitement for me comes out. I’m working with the school system right now, and one of the goals they adopted really branched away from a focus on state assessment, which, again, I’m not opposed to, but I want to know that that’s an authentic expression of what your community most desires. In their case, as they thought more about it, it’s like, no, actually, what our community wants is students who are able to express creativity, who are able to collaborate effectively, who are able to think critically.

AJ Crabill [00:10:00]:
It’s like, excellent. These are all descriptions of things that students could no longer be able to do. How will you measure those things? And of course, everybody’s like, we have no idea. Are these even measurable? And that’s where the real creativity of this comes in, is inviting people to start thinking about, okay, what could we be focused on? And how would we know whether or not our students are growing in that area? So that’s one of the exciting ways that I see this work, interacting with school boards is just inviting them to be courageous and creative about what is it that our community is actually saying that it wants its students to know and be able to do? And instead of leaning in toward the measures that are easily available, this. The assessments that are automatically handed to us, what are the things that your community really wants? And what would it look like for us as a school system to be courageous and creative in pursuing those things?

Cyndi Burnett [00:10:53]:
I love that approach so much, AJ and for me, I get really frustrated when I’m hearing about schools and people wanting to get into schools just because they have high standardized scores. Because from my own experience and going into schools with high standardized scores, they’re typically the ones that are like, we don’t need creativity because we’re just, you know, they’re focused on getting the right answers on the test. And I think when they look at the bigger picture of what do we actually want our kids to know, it’s not just how to find the right one, the one right answer. It’s about exploring the possibilities and solving complex problems and being able to navigate change, which is all what creativity focuses on. One of the things I’m really curious about that you said was around getting people to really think differently about what they want for their communities and the communities of children. So I’m curious, what kind of solutions have they come up with that you would be willing to share? So if they said they wanted creativity and you said, okay, how would we know that? What did they come up with?

AJ Crabill [00:11:53]:
Yeah, so I’ve got a school system right now that we’re working with, and this is something that they’ve been lingering on, is how would we know if we really wanted our children to grow in the area of creativity or collaboration or critical thinking? How would we actually know? The short answer is there are no clear and obvious winners in terms of assessment methodologies for knowing whether these things are true. And so that pushes folks to start thinking about, okay, so where would we find this? There’s a burgeoning set of companies that are looking into this and that believe that they have assessment instruments that can help identify these characteristics because they think that there will be a marketplace where employers will want to know, does a potential employee possess creativity, collaboration skills, critical thinking skills? There’s a growing number of university professors who are conducting research in this area and experimenting with different assessments to figure out, is there something in here that gives us some meaningful insight into these type of skill sets? But often what people are doing is looking at what is a rubric that we could create that Would look at a portfolio of a student’s work to try to identify was there authentically creativity that was employed in this work? Was there collaboration that was employed in this work? Was it critical thinking that was employed in this work? And so instead of having it be a standardized assessment in the normal sense, have standardization to some degree, but through a rubric that teachers and educators are evaluating to figure out how much of these desired traits are actually showing up in the work that our students are producing. All that to say simply having the conversation is causing people to think about this in new ways. And I personally am incredibly excited about.

Matthew Worwood: [00:13:49]:
That and just picking up on the conversation. How much space is it taking up in the room? I mean, are we talking about maybe 5% of the room, 10% of the room? Or do you think it’s now a big part of the discussion around the future of schooling?

AJ Crabill [00:14:03]:
The coaching that we offer suggests that boards really do need to focus. And so you should have somewhere between one and five goals. We recommend three. So if a district is following our advising, we’d say maybe have one, two or three goals. If one of those is about creativity, maybe one of those is about post secondary readiness. Are they ready for what comes after they leave high school? Then between those, that becomes the focus of that board, it becomes the focus of their budgeting work, it becomes the focus of their policy work, it becomes the focus of their monitoring. Are we actually making progress toward these things? And so to the extent that a board would move in this direction, if they’re following our guidance, this would force a fairly significant shift in that organization as they take these one, two or three goals, creativity in this ideal scenario being one of them, and really use that to drive the resource allocation for the school system. That is a huge shift going from essentially this is a good idea and this is a lovely thought experiment, to big this needs to be where a escalating percentage of our district’s resources are being applied.

Matthew Worwood: [00:15:19]:
And sorry to be picky about this, but I’m really curious, what is the process to that? I mean, the scoreboard has identified the goals. They, I’m assuming then secure buy in from the principals or the superintendent, and then that translates into professional development and the distribution of these resources. Is that a fair summary or are there some other pieces to that? And then my second part is how long does it typically take to roll.

AJ Crabill [00:15:45]:
Out as boards are defining these goals and ideally having this more powerful expression of what those goals could possibly be in representation of what the community’s vision is? That is a Process that often takes the goal setting process often takes somewhere between two to six months. Now, keep in mind, we’re coaching them to create five year goals. So spending two to six months to create a goal that’s going to be driving your resource allocation for the next five years is a reasonable investment of time. And then once the board has done this in partnership with the superintendent, in partnership with its professional educators, then the educators need to take those and develop an implementation plan. Or what are the changes we’re going to make over the next five years to try to move from where we are today to where we want to be. And so that process of developing a strategic plan based on the goals that the board has provided to them often again takes somewhere between two to six months. And so you’ll spend anywhere from half a year to a full year of planning. But then that planning drives what are we going to do in this organization over the next five years? And how will we monitor whether or not we’re actually improving this area? How will we monitor whether we are investing an escalating percentage of our resources in this area? Is that responsive to your inquiry?

Matthew Worwood: [00:17:13]:
It does. It does. And you know what? I feel like I’m being difficult today. I think it’s because we never had an opportunity to talk to someone with as much knowledge as you in terms of what’s operating at the very top. So you’re painting what sounds like a really great picture. We have lots of people talking about creativity and why it’s of value. What are the barriers that we run into that might perhaps shift those visions or prevent that rollout?

AJ Crabill [00:17:39]:
Well, and most of the barrier that I see is just folks, what I mentioned earlier, folks not feeling like they are permissioned to color outside the box. There is a standard thinking about what it is that school boards are supposed to do. And normally what that winds up sounding like is, okay, we’ll have five goals, and one of those goals will be that we’ll have a balanced budget. And one of those goals will be that the facilities are in good shape. One of those goals will be that we retain teachers. And it’s all these tactical level things that aren’t actually aspirational of what are we trying to create in the world. They’re what are the things that our organization is doing? That failure of imagination right there is where all your aspirations for creativity die. Because we’re not actually thinking about what is it that students should know and be able to do.

AJ Crabill [00:18:27]:
We’re just thinking about what are the operational things that we have to get done so that we don’t get in trouble. And that deficit mindset that what is the de minimis that we live inside of, that’s not creating possibility for our students. And so freeing board members up to recognize that school systems don’t exist to have a balanced budget. If we have a balanced budget, that no way tells us what students know we’re able to do. That’s not why school systems exist. Getting outside of this belief that the thing to focus on most is what are these tactical level things that adults are doing that robs us of this freedom to go out and imagine what is it that we actually want our students to know and be able to do when they leave our institution. And so that challenge that’s a large part of what my team and I are constantly up against, is causing accelerating a shift from an adult inputs focused, the budgets, the books, the buses, all those things, to a student outcomes focused. And the moment we make a shift away from what are the things that the adults are doing to put into the system and cause our focus to be on what is it that we want students to leave with as they leave out of the system, all of us, that shift right there causes us to think very differently about why does this even exist in the first place.

AJ Crabill [00:19:43]:
And so that’s the nature of our work. That’s what we’re excited about, that’s what we’re fired up about, is how do we accelerate this transition from an adult inputs focused in the school board to a student outcomes focus in the school board. And then with that, encourage people to be just really open about what is it that our community is actually saying at once. And even if it’s something that we don’t currently have a measure for, that’s fine. That’s the superintendent’s problem, that’s not the community’s problem. The community’s job is to be listening for what do we want for our children, and then relaying that through the auspices of the board to the staff who then have to go figure it out. So in the example I gave earlier, the school district that said we really want creativity, collaboration, critical thinking as one of our three goals, the superintendent had no idea how she was going to measure that. None whatsoever.

AJ Crabill [00:20:35]:
But then that began the inquiry, that began the investigation, okay, so what would it look like? And they started calling companies and universities and trying to figure out what could we be doing? And that exploration, that exercise of leadership, creativity, is what my team and I are super fired up about being able to inspire across the nation.

Matthew Worwood: [00:20:58]:
So AJ how can parents or even teachers advocate for the type of learning environments that can kind of promote the needs of the students and from our perspective, promote creative behavior in the classroom?

AJ Crabill [00:21:08]:
Yeah, so I’ve been waiting for this one, because one of the things I wanted to offer for folks is that ways to promote creativity as a parent is to actually permission a focus on creativity with your board. What often happens, as I mentioned a moment ago, is the boards are hearing from all these different sources. What I would encourage parents to do, if this is really important for you, that you’ve got to come together as a team of parents. Don’t do this solo. This is really teamwork, not individual work. But come together as a team of parents and be clear about what is it that we want our students to know and be able to do and clarify that part of that lives in these effective domains, that it’s not just about literacy and numeracy, though we certainly want that for our children. But even above and beyond that, what are the additional areas of competency that we want our children to be nurtured in and grow in? And when parents come together and permission to the school board, this is something that’s important. You should focus on this.

AJ Crabill [00:22:07]:
It makes it a lot easier for the school board to actually lean into that. I think it’s honestly quite scary for most school boards to talk about things that don’t have the hard and crisp measurement associated with them, like literacy, like numeracy. I think it’s scary for board members to go out on that ledge and say, I don’t know how to measure this, but we should do it anyway. That is just a really tough position to take. And so if there are parents who really want to inspire and the way they can do that is they can make it less scary for leaders to do so by coming together as teams of parents and saying, actually, we’re okay with the ambiguity. We would rather live with a small amount of uncertainty in service of our children having the knowledge and skills that they need to be great than live with a high degree of certainty that our children don’t have the knowledge and skills necessary to be great.

Matthew Worwood: [00:22:58]:
And a similar question, how can educators within the community help their board?

AJ Crabill [00:23:02]:
No, no, this is a wonderful question, because what we’re trying to figure out is school boards do want to help educators really be effective with their craft. But the question is, what can educators do to help school boards help educators be effective with their craft? And so one of those challenges is, okay, well, then are we able to have a more Robust dialogue around what does assessment look like for students. If a bunch of educators come together and say, you know what? We think that we have a system for authentically measuring what students know and are able to do. It’s not the traditional system, but here’s the homework we’ve done, here’s the research we’ve done, and here are the tools that we think can allow us to do so that could free up boards in a powerful way. The reason that I mention this immediately is because what often happens is that we do gravitate toward the easy, the easy measurements out of fear that the more authentic systems of measurement are going to take up more staff time. But what we discount when we do that is that the style of summative assessment that a school system engages in has an influence on the nature of instruction. And so if the style of assessment that we’re deploying as a school system is all about filling in the bubble, that will have an impact on my instructional practices as a teacher that I’m going to be more likely to educate in a way that prepares children to be competent at filling in the bubble. If I know that the measure of effectiveness for my students is going to be that they have to complete an oral examination against a specific rubric, then maybe I’m more likely to include that type of examination practice in my day to day instruction.

AJ Crabill [00:24:51]:
Little AJ get up and explain to us in the voice of Nelson Mandela, why is it that you chose to make the stand that you chose that landed you in prison? And have little AJ have to explain that in that voice, like maybe that is a more authentic expression of knowledge and skills than little A.J. can you fill in the bubble on what year did Nelson Mandela give us, you know, go to prison? And so the nature of assessment often has a significant impact on the nature of instruction. And so when educators come together and say, actually we are willing to put in the time and the effort to think about assessment differently, recognizing that we’re going to need some psychometricians on board that we probably don’t have access to in house to help make sure that the measurement structures are actually valid and they’re actually capturing what we are trying to capture. Like, this is not easy stuff. The easy button is the other direction. But if educators come together and say, actually we’re okay with this not being the easy button, we think this is more powerful for the students we serve. That frees the school board up to lean in decisions like that, that otherwise they might lean away from thinking that they’re actually helping educators out, when in reality the educators making it clear that no. What would really help us out sometimes is giving us the freedom to think differently about assessment.

Cyndi Burnett [00:26:11]:
So, aj, we have really enjoyed this conversation with you and we really appreciate your time and sharing your expertise around working with school boards. Now we finish every episode of the podcast with the following question. What three tips would you give to educators, board members, teachers to help bring creativity into the classroom?

AJ Crabill [00:26:32]:
Yeah, so from the role of board members to help bring creativity into the school system, I just encourage people to go and watch board meetings from a different state than yours. What I find is the variability from board meeting to board meeting inside of a state is pretty small, but the variability from state to state is pretty significant. All of this is about freeing people’s minds to pursue something different than what they’ve always done. And so one avenue for creativity for board members. We encourage watch some school board meetings from school boards outside of your state to get a sense of what else is possible beyond what you believe is possible. And as board members do that, I’ve just watched kind of this. Wait a minute, we can do that? That’s a thing? Well, yeah. You didn’t know.

AJ Crabill [00:27:16]:
In terms of. For educators, as an opportunity to really lean into the full expression of creativity, I would encourage folks to actually sit down and think through what would it take to create the most ideal lesson plan for one specific item. This idea of spending two, three, maybe even four months developing the perfect lesson plan. From everything around assessment of it, to materials to curriculum, research it, deeply go all in on creating this one perfect lesson plan over the span of six months as an access to just getting used to what is it like to create a plan for our children that isn’t bounded by I’ve got to deliver this next week. That often what happens in lesson planning is there is such the urgency around. We’ve got to have this ready to go. The principal wants to see the lesson plan. We’ve got to be ready to deliver this next week.

AJ Crabill [00:28:13]:
And I’ve got 10 more lesson plans I got to deliver beyond that. And so what often gets lost is this authentic lean into creativity. What I would encourage then is actually go the opposite direction. Say I’m going to spend the next six months working with a team of teachers. We’re going to write one lesson plan. It’s going to be the most amazing and epic lesson plan in the history of all lesson planning because we’ll spend six months on it. At the end of that, what I suspect people will find is they walk away from that experience with a lot more than one amazing lesson plan, but with a rejuvenation and the craft and thoughtfulness around things they would have never thought of inside of the artificial constraints that time often imposes on our educators. And then finally, for parents, if I had one pro tip around creativity, actually spend some time going through what is it that our children are expected to learn and try to identify which of these are things that I actually have an area of competence in.

AJ Crabill [00:29:10]:
What are things among the learning that my children is expected to learn are things that I can actually be a participant in and then consider partnering with your child’s educator in that particular area. Again, the intention here isn’t so much around having one great lesson plan, but it’s really looking at the work of educating your child in a different way and engaging in partnership with your child’s educator in a different way, but going through what are all the things that my child is expected to know? And this year, oh, I see that this one particular thing they’re expected to know this year that I know really, really well. Let me go partner with my teacher, kids teacher on that one thing. Just as a way of opening my eyes to their world, their eyes to my world, and both of us to what’s possible for our children.

Matthew Worwood: [00:29:59]:
Well, aj, thank you so much for coming on the show. We were thrilled before we interviewed you about the prospect of learning a little bit more about school boards and how we within the community can support school boards when it comes to creativity. And I encourage listeners, if you know a member of the school board, please take a link to this show, share it with them, because hopefully AJ’s story and AJ’s tips is something that can be adopted by your own school board to help creativity in your school and district. My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:30:29]:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This episode was produced by by Creativity and Education in partnership with warwoodclassroom.com.