Highlights From Superintendent Finalist Dr. Hart Live Blog

Melrose Public Schools superintendent finalist Dr. William Hart met with the public and was interviewed by the School Committee on Thursday. Below are highlights from Melrose Patch's live blog of the meeting.

These are lightly edited selections from the live blog, a . Questions are in bold and Hart's responses start with "WH."

Team Building

Q: What are you most proud of?

WH: Background in team building and done a pretty good job with that. They have a set team they work on. They've all be trained on how to collaborate on instruction as a team. "Smart goals," specific measurable goals. Some of my work in teams and highly effective teams have a highly profound impact — they're the exception and not the rule. We all think we're collaborators but it's one of the hardest things to do, and to do well. I now have 60 teams growing and leadership in each one of those teams instead of the assistant superintendent or superintendent the sole person leading the charge. If you haven't developed and use a jargon word 'capacity' within your organization for distributive leadership, you're really not going to move your district forward at any reasonable pace.

Q: How do you build a strong team? Where do you look for leaders, hold them accountable?

WH: As far as team, I did my doctoral work and thesis on team building and highly effective teams. One, they have to spend the time and go through the deliberate process of building a common vision of the teams. With parameters, but still collaborative. People have to understand the team process. Really a pretty specific process. The forming stage where people are coming together, then the storming phase, critical. When people coming together from various philosophies and experiences, not until you get deeply into the work that you understanding what you face and what people are bringing to the process. At that point I say, stop have cake, candles and a celebration, because it means we're doing good work.

What we need to do is make sure is we rely on each other's strengths ... once you do that too it changes the whole dynamic. Finally people need to know if you're going to collaborate well and be open with your leadership practice and vulnerable about strengths and challenges you have, there needs to be a process for that dialogue. I've gone to the Annenberg Institute; they have work on "critical friends" group that gives people a concrete way of sharing their work together.

The Learning Environment

Mayor Dolan: Two things in public education today that makes you upset and what you'd do to improve?

WH: I hope this doesn't sound redundant, but I feel strongly about it. Spent my career asking people what powerful learning looks like. There's clear themes, and we haven't I don't think as a profession taken that definition and said that's a non-negotiable. We're creating experiences that students can say when I navigate through this, I'm a better learner, understand better what I'm looking at. This has been a meaningful learning experience for me and I can demonstrate how that's the case. I think we own, to a certain extent as educators, a focus that's been a test-prep focus. The state, I don't think that they own that. Flying through content because we need to cover things and not tending to making sure we're having students learn them and learn them in powerful settings. That is something I feel very strongly about. Getting people in teams, for most people it's a modification of their common practice and they need to be supported while doing that, I think that it needs to be something you're putting time and resources in, I can point to my last two experiences and said it's an impersonal place, we need to reconstruct the school to make sure teachers and students we’re in a setting that's most conducive to learning. Our MCAS scores (in Pentucket) have gone up and we're creating the environment we've talked about for the past 27 years in the profession.

Student and District Goals

Don Lehman: What would be your most important metric you'd advocate to measure the district as a whole ...how do we know when we get there, getting to where we want to be.

WH: It's about being really clear about where you want to be. It's really hard to get there if you don't know where it is you're trying to go. Spending time on that is critically important. A lot of school systems talk about 21st century skills and throw technology at it—quite frankly you can put bells and whistles on poor teaching and learning and it's still poor teaching and learning. Specific about what your goal is and can you measure it. You can say to yourself, students, the broader community, this is a tangible way we can demonstrate that we've gone from lower achievement to higher achievement. We talked with the mayor a little earlier about making practice public. One of the ways we've done that is have students demonstrate mastery and growth in 21st century skills in a public demonstration. Students in 4, 6, 8 and 11 in a very public way showing their growth in habits and skills and attributes that are well defined. Then the community too, we must've had about 600 parents, nothing more powerful than a parent coming in and seeing the tangible growth their child has made over the course of the school year or multiple school years. Define it first, making sure you can measure it, then making sure the community can see what their investment is, the result of their investment.

Q: (On marrying goals with student outcomes) Depends on the teacher, are there are teacher support specialists. We have a void, every teacher in the classroom, but the teachers don't have the support to necessarily draw on to do all the beautiful things you're talking about.

WH: One I would say is I haven't just talked about it, I've been able to do it and have some evidence to point to. You've had a level budget for past couple of years, Pentucket has not, it has decreased, but we've still created the environment we're talking about. It's about capacity building. When you have people being able to understand a research cycle, understand what you're trying to do, ID info and data that will tell you where you are, when you help people to develop skills to do research around whatever it is they're addressing, implementing that; have people whoa re open about their practice and saying I'm trying this new strategy but stumbling with it, they're meeting with a team member who has experience facilitating; when you have that type of environment embedded in the school day, you find you can address those issues. When you focus as a district on that capacity building—Summer Academy I mentioned; regular courses around the area we want people to develop competencies, get in-service credit to move on a salary scale—you build that capacity and start to do some good and innovative work.

The Budget

Carrie Kourkoumelis: How you build a budget. Talking earlier about building value. You have principals with wish lists and all these competing mandates, where do you start in forming that budget.

WH: Where you start, I think you folks have done a fine job of this, you spend time to talk about what's most important to you. You have a good, strong strategic plan. Why that's important is budgets, you don't look at a single year, you look at several years. You don't look at a strategic plan in one or two years, but several years. You spend a lot of time and effort and reach out to the stakeholders in the community—this is a reflection of what our values are as a community. That's your legs. Whatever you're advocating for at building, team or district level has to be on the legs of your strategic plan. When you're meeting with parents, community, selling the final product, you're not winging it. You're saying we've spent a lot of time and effort saying where you want to be five years from now and this is the first year of that process. Show we've either allocated new resources, which isn't common these days, or reallocated resources with the end in mind. I've been able to say we need to look at everything we're doing. If we can't do what's in our bull’s eye, we have to look at the periphery and make some tough decisions about that or else where not going to be where we want to be.

Working with School Committee about how we're going to use this strong document we've created to guide our decision-making. What I find is strong is that facilitating community to make decisions and discussion. If you don't frame, people start bringing things from out in left field and why aren't we doing this and that, well, let's look at what we said was most important to us and what we want to achieve over the next seven years. Take the broad feedback from community and fine tune that to our primary priority for this year. That's a healthy process for people to go through. People feel they have been heard and that we are making process. That whole process of being focused in our decision making and helping people get feedback that's focused that ends up moving your agenda forward. The final piece about the budget is that I think you need to help people, there are going to be good years and really challenging years. If we always focus on what we said was our objective, our bull’s eye, we keep making progress towards that end, even in the leanest environments.