Moving at the Speed of Trust in Vallejo, California
Client · California Collaborative for Educational Excellence
The California Collaborative for Educational Excellence (CCEE) is an organization established by the California State Legislature and Governor to advise and assist school districts, county offices of education, and charter schools to achieve their goals and objectives so that every student is inspired and prepared to thrive as their best self in the world.
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Situation
At the end of 2018, CCEE began work with Vallejo City Unified School District through a joint request from the district and its county office of education. This work included a Systemic Instructional Review (SIR) in 2020, a comprehensive analysis of instructional systems and implementation of teaching, learning, and leading practices that identifies strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities. In the review of Vallejo, CCEE identified four areas that the district needed to address to serve students better:
- Effective communication system
- Coherent continuous improvement framework, grounded in data analysis
- Comprehensive, multi-year professional learning plan grounded in the district’s strategic vision
- A culture of accountability to achieving stated goals
These four areas for improvement are common levers for changing systems, so it’s not surprising to see these in a report about how an underperforming system can improve its results. Making these improvements is anything but simple, though. Our public school districts are complex systems. They are made up of multiple actors with different roles, interacting with one another and making decisions every day. In Vallejo, this included the district, the county office, and CCEE. These three organizations were working together to address the needs identified in the SIR; however, collaborating across organizational boundaries is not easy. This constant interaction of actors across system boundaries leads to ongoing change called emergence, and it makes it very challenging to improve the system in parts. You have to look at the whole. That’s where we came in.
SDL was hired to ease this coordination challenge by facilitating leaders to develop an understanding of the whole system and its interrelated parts, and then begin to strategize collectively for how to shift the results.
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Approach
Our first task was to analyze a set of strategic documents. Our engagements with a new client often begin this way, with a technical analysis that the organization or team is seeking to better determine the best way forward. Our hope in engaging in these analyses is that they become a tool that surfaces a need to work differently to achieve better results.
In Vallejo, each of the documents we reviewed was developed by a different organization for a different reason; yet, all these artifacts offered recommendations to district leaders about how they should focus their efforts and resources. In short: the district was getting a lot of advice about what to prioritize, but had not yet chosen a starting place or moved forward in an integrated way.
To help, SDL developed a crosswalk that allowed leaders across organizations to see the interconnections across these documents, including focal areas that were highlighted in multiple places and might be high-potential areas to begin.
When we met with CCEE to review the crosswalk and explore how it would be used, their team shared it has been challenging to hold dual roles of participating in and facilitating cross-organizational meetings with the district and county. Of course this is challenging! CCEE has a state-mandated role to improve outcomes in the district and, as instructional experts, they have opinions about how the group should focus their efforts see improvement. Having a stake in the decisions of a group makes process facilitation especially challenging. In particular, in this scenario, the district leaders were eager for space to be heard and to have their context and its complexity understood. We all agreed it would be valuable for a third-party to facilitate that exploration.
So where do we begin? At SDL, we believe that you change complex systems by making radical changes at the root, and often that root has to do with relationships and trust. As a next step, we agreed to a small test: SDL would facilitate a summer retreat where leaders across the three organizations could pause to examine the last 20 years in the district and establish a shared understanding of what led to the current context. Our guiding star in this first session came from adrienne marie brown’s Emergent Strategy: “focus on critical connections more than critical mass –build the resilience by building the relationships.”
Together, leaders from all three organizations created a timeline of events, feelings, data, and transitions. After this session, participants expressed relief and gratitude for having a safe space to talk about challenges. SDL was asked to come back on a regular basis to continue strengthening cross-organizational relationships and infrastructure for collaboration.
Operationally, we established a design-deliver-debrief process where we co-designed with CCEE and the district superintendent to ensure the retreat structure is responsive to the current state, we delivered the retreat, and then debriefed the retreat with CCEE and offered them guidance on support to the district between retreats. This structure ensured we were able to drive forward a technical process (i.e., goal setting and monitoring) while advancing the real objective of deeper trust and interdependence. The timeline below describes the arc of this process.
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Impact
At the final retreat in June 2024, participants reflected on the 2023/24 school year, creating a map of the year and their insights.
After this reflective exercise, participants identified three themes that characterize their work and improvement in 2023/24: strong start, acting as a pit crew, and more to do.
STRONG START
Participants agreed that the group launched 2023/24 with a sharper focus, deepened data use, and a strategic approach to capacity and infrastructure development. SDL agrees; we observed greater authenticity and candor during the June 2024 session than was present at the first session in August 2022. Participants reflected that this was enabled by greater trust and stronger working relationships across organizations.
“There’s a strong energy right now…the last two years, you have been able to keep us focused across the three entities. In each of the meetings, you were able to draw out productive outcomes and goal setting, keeping everybody objective and on task. We are getting very early signs we’re heading in the right direction and going to see results.” -Superintendent William Spalding, June 2024
ACTING AS A PIT CREW
Participants described evidence of increasing their ability to improve together. Notably, the district leadership team has improved their collaboration across departments. All of the quantified goals for 2023/24 that were achieved were focused on adult behaviors that require interdependent work across departments.
“You both gave us the space to talk very transparently and you know, I felt comfortable…I think we make assumptions because we work in the same district but if it wasn’t for that structure I don’t think I would have known certain things about how things are operating. [After the retreats] I had a better idea of the context of [my colleagues’] work, not just the work, but how their systems in their departments operated. Definitely, that bringing us together – leveling out the playing field – was really helpful to make our connections as a district between departments…just getting us to think differently is really important because what we’ve been doing just hasn’t worked.” -Director of Professional Development Amy Parangan, June 2024
MORE TO DO
Participants noted that they have greater clarity about the district’s goals for student learning, which allowed everyone – from student services to communications to facilities – to feel connected to the mission. As a result, they identified a mantra of togetherness through clarity to anchor their service to students moving forward. They want to take this progress to the next level in 2024/25.
“We crave greater clarity and better internal alignment and integration – all while increasing quality standards. We need transformational (not transactional) change through humility and courage.” -District leadership team, June 2024
