what all-star teachers do after holiday break that we all should, part 1
Before I became a talent consultant and executive coach, I spent a long career in schools that specialized in developing teachers who taught kids how to grow incredibly fast in the face of exceptional odds. My team and I ran a school system that started in New Orleans exactly 35 months after Hurricane Katrina decimated the city. Our students were not just living in poverty and academically behind. In many cases, they had either switched schools so many times that they hadn’t taken in much academic learning, or they’d literally not attended a school for months or years at a time. Yet our teachers consistently gave them three years of learning in just one, allowing them to compete for college spots with peers from the most illustrious schools down the road.
These all-star teachers have signature moves for getting kids out of a rut. They use these moves all the time, including at difficult moments, like the sleepy return from a holiday break. Most CEOs and managers I work with never even think about these moves, but they should.
First move: Declare that we’re all learning twice as fast, even before we are.
Great teachers brand their classrooms. They post future headlines on day one and declare uncomfortably high expectations. Those with the most impressive impact come summertime will greet their classes after the holiday break by ensuring they make those expectations seem normal. They will say things like,
“Welcome back to the hardest-working math classroom in the state!”
“I don’t care how you’ve done in reading so far—all my students always leave well above level, so strap on your seatbelt.”
Or, “Welcome to Ms. Morales’ third grade class, boys and girls. Do we want third grade work today or fourth grade work today?”
If this sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking right now of one of the most effective teachers you’ve ever had. When they made statements like these, you felt a little intimidated, but also proud of yourself for what you were about to do, which meant you were motivated to live up to these new identities that, like medals, you’d just been handed. These teachers set ambitious expectations for performance, even long before performance itself improves. They tell stories of students who beat the odds in class before and turn them into legends in their classrooms. They notice every time every kid improves.
Why is this effective? Indulge my asking you to do two things right this second: first, count yourself tapping your finger as fast as you can on a table for ten seconds; second, do it again, but beat your last score.
Stories of people performing unexpectedly well should not startle us. Our performance potential is extraordinary and anything but miraculous. You may have noticed that, even though the first time you tapped “as fast as you could,” you found the second time you could go faster. You underestimated “as fast as you could.”
You’ve probably noticed yourself beating your own expectations before. Think of when you shoot hoops with with a new and better partner and notice yourself upping your game, or when a track coach didn’t let up on you until you beat your best. Recall a time you were told a production quota was twice as high as you thought, and somehow you figured out how to meet it; or the time you accidentally overheard a mentor tell someone how great a writer we were, when we’d thought we were lousy. Wow, we think, I better keep at this writing thing. When pushed, we learn that our expectations for ourselves are almost always lower than our actual potential. It’s that simple.
During slumps, great leaders build this kind of momentum by straddling the tricky gap between ambition and realism, but they always cheat upwards. Why? Because the rest of us are usually cheating downwards. We expect less of ourselves than we’re capable of delivering.
Roger Bannister proved that humans could run a mile in under four minutes, never done in recorded history, and inspired runners the world over to run it even faster, breaking this inconceivable record even within a couple months of his breakthrough. Stephan Curry’s consistently successful three-pointers have dramatically shifted the number of those shots taken and made across all of basketball, from middle school to the NBA.
To illustrate how this plays out in school all the time, Robert Rosenthal conducted an experiment in a California elementary school, where a random selection of students were secretly labeled “intellectual bloomers” in their teachers’ files. Though the labels were chosen at random, students assigned them had increased performance by years’ end well over those not assigned them. The experiment demonstrated that teachers implicitly communicated these identities to their students, which in turn impacted their psyches, work ethics, and overall performances, a phenomenon often termed the Observer-Expectancy Effect” or Pygmalion Effect.
A radically higher expectation, bestowed as our new identity, is almost always met if the leaders we trust convince us of it. Find a teacher who consistently helps students beat the odds, and I guarantee you they’re doing this intentionally.
What a leader can start doing: reminding yourself of all those times your team has moved at twice or three-times the usual pace, the time Marcella put in an extra hour that saved the team an extra week, how Felix started out making tons of mistakes but was able to turn himself around.
Now, remind the team. “We are a record-breaking team, where going above and beyond is normal, whose biggest challenges always become our biggest triumphs. Welcome to 2024, team. Let’s get to work.”
-Ben
