Shift Happens: Greater student outcomes through increased adult ownership

Luqman Abdur-Rahman • Cahn Fellow 2022

The COVID pandemic had both obvious and much more subtle impacts on our students, staff, and families at Price Middle School. Our school serves a community that is extremely resource deficient, and we were forced to provide direct support and resources to many of our stakeholders during the height of the pandemic. However, once we transitioned from the immediate crises of the pandemic, we learned that there were residual effects that continued to impact our effectiveness. We were laser-focused on plugging student learning gaps and capturing all the growth we could once we returned to in-person learning. However, we found our progress was limited by a fixed mindset in our teachers, which informed their actions and as a result, the mindset of our students. This led to a compliance-based mentality, which slowed our growth and momentum. As a result, we found ourselves doing what we felt was the right work, but falling short of the passion required to truly become transformational.

The Cahn Fellowship experience helped our leadership team utilize systems thinking to reframe our challenge by questioning and exploring the role we played as administrators in the creation of a culture where agency and ownership were lacking. We knew that we had to build agency within our adults in order for them to subsequently empower our students. We also realized that we were fully responsible for the mindset of our teacher and staff. This caused us to rethink and revise how we communicated our expectations, observations, and results to our staff. As a result, we were able to foster a higher level of passion and grit for the work, even when it was difficult. Consequently, we have seen positive changes in our adult behaviors and student performance metrics, with much larger gains planned for this year since we are leveraging our learning from last year from the outset.