Empowering Rural Educators: Secrets to Driving Growth and Retention
Summary:
Join Dr. Jim Lack and Chris Rogne, superintendent of Lake Mills, Iowa Community School District, as they dive into the challenge of fostering growth in rural K-12 schools. Chris shares strategies for embedding professional development and creating effective PLCs tailored to small districts. Discover how Lake Mills overcame constraints to promote culture and growth opportunities, ensuring high expectations and positive relationships within its tight-knit community. This conversation offers valuable insights for leaders seeking to enhance educator retention and development amidst unique challenges.
Key Takeaways:
- The significance of cultivating professional growth in rural K-12 districts to boost retention and employee engagement.
- Creative restructuring of PLCs and professional development programs to be more relevant and effective in small districts.
- The impact of high expectations, positive culture, and system-wide coherence on educational success and staff satisfaction.
- The crucial role of principals as drivers of educator growth and how supportive leadership fosters an empowering workplace.
- Engagement and feedback mechanisms as tools for ongoing improvement and adaptation in educational practices.
Chapters:
Embedding Growth Opportunities in Rural K-12 School Districts
Coaching and Teaching Experiences Shape Leadership Philosophy
Leadership Development and Growth in Rural School Districts
Adapting Professional Development for Small Rural School Districts
Building School Culture Through Feedback and Leadership
Building Positive Culture and Growth in Rural School Districts
Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk
Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung
Connect with Chris Rogne: https://www.lake-mills.k12.ia.us/
Music Credit: Shake it Up - Fesliyanstudios.com - David Renda
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Transcript
You can drive growth through special projects, lateral moves, promotions, . How do you bake in growth in the K through 12 space? That's an interesting question. And to make things even tougher, how do you bake in growth opportunities in rural K through 12 districts?
Answering these questions are a critical piece of your talent strategy and especially your employee growth and retention. Stories are going to be fed by how successfully you do that. Today's conversation. We'll tackle how to solve that in a rural K through 12 setting. So who do we have? That's going to share with us their story of success when it comes to embedding growth into their organization.
Mills, Iowa community school [:Now, while his roots are in physical education, his role as an alternative school teacher and coordinator really helped shaped his educational philosophy. Chris has been married to his wife, Courtney, who is also an educator. They have three children, so they're playing his own defense at home. And when he's not cheering on his kids at their activities, he's enjoying following the Minnesota twins or tackling odd jobs on the family acreage.
Chris, welcome to the show.
[:[00:01:41] Dr. Jim: Yeah, I'm looking forward to this this conversation. And if I were a white Sox fan, I'd be pretty irritated that you're a twins fan, but I'm not a white Sox fan, so that's okay. So I'm I'm looking forward to this discussion and I think it's important on a couple of different levels. We're going to get into some growth and retention and employee development [00:02:00] conversations.
But I especially am looking forward to the conversation that's focused on a rural context and also making sure that professional development and PLCs work the way they should for rural school districts. So really looking forward to that. But before we dive in, I think it's going to be important for you to fill the listeners in a little bit more on some of those key experiences throughout your career that helped shape your philosophy.
[:That, that made a lot of things set in for me. I used to be of the thought [00:03:00] that great leaders were born, great athletes were born that way. You didn't have to work at it. And then. Just I guess through my professional experience has been a lot of reading and things like this stuff is it's all intentional and and somebody did it for me and help me out to get to where I'm at.
So I want to do that. Start out as an athletic coach. Now it starts leading the whole district. Another really formative part of my life is when I became an alternative school teacher just my path led me to that through some professional connections and just our program that we set up was for high school kids, again, in a rural area high school kids, either deficient credits danger dropping out, have dropped out and returned just had a variety of obstacles.
nybody's fault, but that was [:And we can establish that relationship. We could teach them something we can learn and learn together often. So yeah, those two things really really shaped me.
[:Tell us a little bit more about how those two things combined to help make you a better leader of people throughout your career.
[:But we always coached up no matter what your role we want you to carry it out with pride. If we could get teams to do that we would be successful. Successful doesn't always mean Going undefeated, but it means learning and growing. And I look at it the same way at the larger level, either leading a building or a district is you want to get the people in [00:05:00] the roles where they can succeed and and you kinda, you gotta always be.
Plugging in, I guess giving people the chance to help you and when they can help you and more, I guess the organization they feel empowered, they feel, like they contributed and they're ready to help at the next level, whatever that might be their career.
[:What are the different things that you're doing to grow leadership throughout the district and level up all of those folks that you have underneath you?
[:And then in the classroom as well as some other teachers that, and we're talking about people that have been in leadership roles for over 20 years or in the classroom for over 30 and have done some really good things to for our district. And now that they're gone and moved on to other goals in their life we need to have the next group step in there, wherever they're at and Then the people I'm thinking of that retired, they had if somebody gave them a chance, somebody.
Capacity early on when we got brand new teachers walking in, which we will in a couple weeks straight out of college. We need to think about where they can be in three years, five years or 10 years because they're really the next generation to help lead. And with that is, Is everyone's got leadership capacity, and our mission is through our collective efforts, we're committed to teaching and learning for all.
And it takes the collective efforts. It takes everybody in every role. So really, leadership is expected at all areas.
[:[00:07:07] Chris Rogne: Yeah, Lake Mills, the city of Lake Mills is Got a population about 2, 100 people. Our district also includes the towns of Joyce and Scarville. Emmons is a town that's just north of the border in Minnesota, but we'd get a lot of open enrollments from that area also, but all told our district's about 3, 800 residents.
And I guess one of the, not struggles, but areas of concern is we got declining enrollment in rural Iowa, just many of the places across the Midwest. So how do we continue to offer the good programs that have been in place with Fewer students, less funding. Our staff we're about 50 teachers.
We've got 670 students pre K through 12 about a hundred total staff here. And, all of them work extremely hard. Many of them are alums of the district that, that comes with an extra sense of pride. And and I've never heard anybody say, this is how we've always done it, or we're not changing it.
this constant growth mindset [:[00:08:07] Dr. Jim: Thanks for that context. I think it sets the stage up really well for the rest of the conversation that we're going to have. When I opened the show, I talked about how growth is one of the factors that leads to people leaving organizations and in the K through 12 space.
And even in, in the rural K through 12 space, baking in growth into your organization is even more challenging because you only have a limited number of roles across your organization. You don't have a promotion cycle that like what exists in the private sector. So when you look at your leadership career, as you were climbing the ranks and now into your role at Lake Mills, how did you address that issue of.
Providing and delivering growth opportunities for the people that were in the district.
[:And it's through building leadership teams, district leadership teams. It's sometimes I don't want to say initiatives that come from those, but, and through the PLCs, how do we ask for help in the departments? How do we get their input? Who can be the next people that can step in and.
Take on roles. And like I stated earlier, we want to put people in areas of strength that way. So it's pretty natural for him to be able to help out and help students and help the whole organization move forward. So we look for a very specific things that way and we don't do a perfect. I'm sure we missed some things.
It is It is a goal of our school board recruitment, retention of talented and high quality staff. So they're constantly keeping it in front of my, in front of me and on my plate that how are we keeping our teachers here? We try to pay. within the market. Our teachers aren't the highest paid, but we want them to earn a good living here in Lake Mills doing this.
them here, gave them a good [:[00:10:01] Dr. Jim: So I want to dig in a little bit more on some of the mechanics on this. So when we talk about learning communities and professional development, and we have those conversations that specific to midsize and large districts, there's a lot of things that work well in those contexts. So what I'd like you to do is share with us some of the things that you noticed.
About how those are structured that don't work well for smaller schools .
[:We're down to a two section school in the elementary. So our grade level teams at the elementary and PLCs there are working at combining combining up and down. Just we're adding everybody around. Everybody's in it together. And it's less siloed and more I guess more, more a [00:11:00] focus on district wide and and it's, it, we're a pre K 12 building, so we're all under one roof here that makes it a little easier to where, all of our kids eat in the same lunchroom.
Everybody shares the same library media center. There's some really big benefits to that, that just having everybody here together, working together, seeing. They can see the growth of students from pre K all the way up to the 12th grade. Like when I was alluding to the coaching scenarios before, you can really see the growth happen in front of you.
[:[00:11:42] Chris Rogne: What we started focusing on is we want to focus on systems in, in, in PD. So systems that involve everybody. Formative assessment and instructional process is a system we use for assessment in the classroom. That's been an initiative pre K 12. Currently, the science of reading is the focus area of our [00:12:00] elementary, so PDs are on that system.
And then culture. Culture is another thing that we've tried to work on as a system. And the thing about all the things I said is they relate to all teachers through PD. So it might look a little different each grade level in each department, but it's something everybody can get behind because it affects them in their classrooms.
[:[00:12:28] Chris Rogne: I think what comes to mind is our formative assessment process in our classrooms about part of our mission vision and what we want all learners to do is identify essential learning standards for each grade level content area, seek and implement research based strategies focused on student learning, using formative assessment to monitor student progress and drive instruction, and then demonstrate a personal commitment.
ed to have these site visits [:That'd be the only time we'd ever talk about it was before that. We try to make our mission and vision here. ongoing and keep it out in the forefront. And if there's something that doesn't meet that, then we shouldn't be doing it. Really that mission vision, it starts at the board level, but it's not top down and it's something that we can all get behind as a system at the school with, and I got some collective commitments that were put together by our staff here that oftentimes it.
building level meetings, they're read out loud, so it stays at the forefront of everybody and reminds us why we're here and what we're here for. Sometimes in education, it's easy to get down on negative things that are happening, things in the media, a tough day XYZ, but, sticking to the mission, vision, our collective commitments, that's the system that's been successful for us.
[:[00:14:08] Chris Rogne: There's a couple things that we heard is At one time, our PD was an event. It, it was a once a month. We have PD. You maybe close the book after that and open it up the next month. Through our instructional coaching and teacher leadership, that became ongoing. Our instructional coaches are constantly in classrooms asking reflective questions, checking in seeing what the needs of teachers are, how can how can we help you move forward.
A lot of times they're hearing themes from a couple teachers and they would say, I've heard this in this department, this is this department, let's get together, we'll get this figured out. And then the other feedback we got was our staff wanted time to learn with colleagues. And. And we wanted to put that together.
eachers to work together. We [:We take care of the needs we need to, and then try to give any excess time there for our students. PLC content team work also,
[:You're actually getting more hands on deck to help make this more effective. What, how do you handle that challenge?
[:Working with the team that needs to hear that as they need it at the time they need it. Somebody might need that work with the AEA in September and October. Somebody else might not need it to January. And we try to have our PD, we want [00:16:00] it to model the expectations of the classroom. So we want it to be data driven, differentiated.
And higher levels of thinking. So if it's what our staff needs or that department needs now, we want to get that in there as soon as we can, not wait till it's scheduled months later. Just if a student needs an intervention or some, Enrichment, we don't want to wait till three months later, we want to get it to them in real time.
So we try to model that through PD.
[:Employee population. What were the what was the pushback that you got? And how did you navigate that pushback? Because people are generally not fans of change.
[:I guess maybe not improve it, but yeah, improve it or make it more efficient. Or what can I do to, yeah, just to help with whatever's needed. And we try to be myself in the principles. We try to be part of it also again, modeling what Model and what we expect out of students and the staff. And when we ask for feedback at the end of some of the different initiatives, and certainly at the end of the year, I share all the feedback publicly with the teachers.
I take the names off of people only leave their name if they want me to follow up individually with my take that off so it doesn't. offend somebody or people can't pick that out. But we sent, this is, we send that out to staff. This is what we heard. This is why this year we're going to try to do it this way.
rship and We'll just be open [:So this year, this is why you might see me doing this more often or, just so they know why. And I think when they see that we ask for feedback, we really read it, we take action on it. They have some input. I think it helps build the momentum that we're trying to get.
[:So what were the steps that you took to make sure that you weren't creating this scenario or this situation where everybody's just fried with a never ending task list?
[:And When people, like those things I think help people see the hard work's worth it. And it doesn't mean that we're going to be slave drivers and oh, you work harder and we get better. So celebrating our successes is one thing that's been helpful with that. So acknowledging that acknowledging yes, number one, the work is hard.
Okay not sugarcoating that yep, it's a lot of work and it's a tough time of year. But coming back to the why this is why we do it, whether it's our essential learner outcomes, mission, vision, or it's what students need now, and then celebrating the successes that are seen there. Help. have helped keep it together so far.
But that's definitely yeah, an ongoing concern that we're aware of because it's really easy to become fried in this job.
[:[00:20:08] Chris Rogne: Yeah, one of the things that happened is I talked about that end of the year feedback and we asked for feedback more often than just the end of the year. But some of it there's a theme that said maybe we had some culture culture issues or culture that they would at least myself and the principals to be aware of and getting, reading this off of forums, one thing.
And like I said we're. Like we want to look for themes in it. So we our administrative team cracked open a book about school culture, found a tool in that to assess it that each teacher did. We went through that and assessed it. And then, but the teachers did this together in department teams together, talk through it and then after that, at the building level Time our teacher leaders took the ownership in it and said, what are we doing?
oesn't mean that there's not [:We tried to take some stages or steps to correct it and not that we did it from the top down. We just tried to put the, I guess the framework in to do it and then let our teacher leaders really do the hard, the dirty work of it. And And that seemed to be successful at least for the past year anyway, so
[:Is there a listening mechanism in place that helps you figure out, okay, what are we prioritizing for this semester versus next semester?
[:We have those formal feedback, mechanisms that we take through, usually it's a Google form and we're not sending them out every week or day or month even, but but we look at that and then we run, we run through district leadership or building leadership teams and they help decide, what the next steps are too.
Yeah, from everything from. Yeah, curriculum updates to, facilities needs to. Initiatives for PD, like it's all there and we leave open ended questions on them too. Is there anything you wish we would ask but didn't on this? So there's hopefully a chance for somebody to to say something and there, there could be, there's things that come up on that, that you know what, we have neglected that, we better update this part of what we're doing and it just helps us and, helps us be better.
And we don't have all the answers in the principal's office or superintendent's office that we need to listen to those with boots on the ground because they're doing the work and it's our job to support them, to get them what they need so they can support the kids.
[:So when you look at Building principles. They probably have the most influence on whether an educator is going to stay or leave. So when you look at how you're leveraging your principles to drive culture, tell us a little bit more about how they're driving both culture as well as growth in their interactions with their teams.
[:There's a lot of top down initiatives. Now, there's some top down goal setting, some top down [00:24:00] frameworks and top down. How do we support you to get here? But yeah, our principals are doing the work alongside the staff. They're including building leadership teams, the other. I guess sometimes we use it.
We call it flying air cover. They're flying air cover for the staff taking care of odds and ends discipline issues other things that come up so the teachers can teach kids can learn. And a key part of this, like I said, is our instructional coaches to that. They're in a lot of ways. They're the key instructional leaders.
in our schools, that they're the ones that are freed up to be in the classrooms, that have the good relationships with the teachers, that teachers can be vulnerable with, can share with, and then, and that the instructional coaches can provide, yeah timely, constructive coaching resources, connections to other teachers in the building or neighboring districts or whatever it might be to to help resolve any issues or things that might come up.
[:What I'm curious about is. Give us a view into where you were when you started and what's been the impact now that you're a few years in what's changed? What impact have you made making these adjustments within your district?
[:And immediately it didn't take me long at all to understand that's something that I couldn't let erode and I can't let it erode because that high expectations for all we set the bar high, we help people. Give them what they need to get there and they'll need it. And that's one thing I really appreciate about our staff is the high expectations they have and the work they do to keep high expectations for themselves.
ere's a candy bar cart going [:And it's not that it's not that we're slave drivers again, but it's just Hey, these are the expectations that we have and we're going to get there. And it's easier to do that because the person on either the classroom beside people are doing the same thing. So that's the first thing I learned is.
istrict's mission and vision [:The structures are in place there as the framework, but then, yeah, trusting our teachers, our learner assistants I could add bus drivers, cooks, custodian, central office staff. Yeah, we trust you to do your job. And yeah. And they feel empowered by that. And that's, and that helps us not have to micromanage things.
Are we there to support? I hope everybody would agree with that, that yet we're there to help support. We're there to provide what, what's needed to help. But we trust them to, make the best, They can work together, do what's best in their areas for the students here.
[:[00:27:53] Chris Rogne: One thing I think I'd say is, I I don't think I've done any of this myself. I know I haven't, that we've done it together. [00:28:00] And yeah, how do you build capacity in others? And how do you put the people that, I know every district's got people with strengths people with passion, how can you empower them to to attack their areas.
How can you let them grow the most they can so they can help others around them grow the most too. And I've said it before, like it really starts at the top with our school board and our school board sets the direction and they're there out of a supportive role. And they want student academic success.
They want the recruitment retention of our staff. They want to be fiscally sound progressive with their resources. They set the direction not top down though, and I don't think people would say that I'm top down in the superintendent's office. I don't think our principals are top down. It's really a we, how do we do this collectively.
learner outcomes that's the [:So some kids have heard this language the whole way through our teachers know what we're talking about all the way through. So that systems of that and then a point of emphasis now is a reflective practice. How can we reflect on what we're doing and make it even better? How can we reflect and I guess make weaknesses, strengths and keep building on our strengths.
And really, our admin's part of it. The community is super supportive. We've had some favorable outcomes of student achievement culture some success on the stage the music venues, the athletic arenas, that stuff all helps. All helps make it move too, but it's not one person. It's not one department.
It's not one building. It's everybody. When I say everybody, it's everybody in our community school district. And that's what's special about Lake Mills.
[:[00:29:52] Chris Rogne: Shoot me a call text message, call an email are the best ways I really like to share some of the framework we have it's not I don't, [00:30:00] it's unique to us, it works here, I think there's bits and pieces that could be helpful in other places we I know myself, our principals, our instructional coaches are all happy to share, because we're really proud of the work we do.
So we hope that there's somebody listening that would take a little bit from this and like to learn a little more. We're happy to share. So if you have text, call, email, we'll get it done. We'll get you connected to the right person.
[:So I appreciate you sharing your thoughts for those of you who have been listening to this conversation. If you liked the show, make sure you leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. And if you haven't already done so make sure you join our our community, and then tune in next time where we'll have another great leader hanging out with us and sharing with us the game changing insights that help them build a high performing team.
