“Winning” in the Broadest Sense: Lessons for Leaders

April 30, 2024

By Kippy Smith and Erica Crane

School improvement - and culture in schools overall - can have a deficit orientation: we can largely focus on gaps, problems and barriers, and feel a great deal of urgency to do better. Wanting to fix problems and better serve kids is a good thing - it’s THE thing - but a gap-focused approach depletes people’s energy, creativity, and belief in the possibilities. Then the big goals for change can fall by the wayside.  

An asset-based orientation - focusing on successes - fuels the team’s momentum and mindset rather than depleting it. To be clear, we are not trying to gaslight you into a toxically positive view of celebrating wins in schools. Seeing weaknesses in implementation and impact creates urgency for change, and seeing success creates the belief that we can. Educators need both.  

We take a holistic view of what success is. We believe winning is also learning from mistakes and failures. So it’s not about asking teachers to just have a better attitude, or about simply throwing confetti. It’s about building processes that enable teams to collectively determine goals and what success looks like, and to continuously learn together from what’s working and what isn’t. Throw confetti, but do so within a system that centers leadership and power in the team (versus a person), and that values collective learning. The Small Wins Dashboard is focused on the adult staff and empowering their collective learning together.

When wins (successes and learning from failure) are celebrated systemically, schools strengthen their learning culture and form an organizational habit of seeing the good. It helps sustain teachers and teams as they take on the tremendous work of their day to day. Valuing the act of professional learning as good - as something strong, successful people do versus something that’s done only when there’s a problem to fix - and recognizing success when it happens builds a cohesive team vision and develops a culture that sustains instead of drains. 

The Small Wins Dashboard was created with the idea that sharing wins generates the energy educators need to change schools. It shines a light on the bright spots and reveals where a team’s efforts are not yet matching their intended equitable impact. It reframes traditional progress monitoring as continual team learning. 

2023 National Teacher of the Year and writer of “One Good Thing,” Rebecka Peterson, shares how she began retroactively scanning her days for one good thing or one good moment before becoming proactive in how she would be looking for that good throughout her day. She explains how “I went from…actively noticing the good to proactively wanting to be the good. I found myself thinking not just…what am I going to notice, but…what am I going to bring and what good are we going to experience together” (SXSW EDU, 2024, 8:46). She acknowledges the systems at play and the real, hard work of teaching while also pointing to a practice of looking for wins as a way to practice the hope it takes to keep doing the work of co-creating a more equitable educational system. It is also a way to practice seeing where learning breakthroughs are happening so you can get unstuck and move forward toward this bold, necessary vision (Irby, 2021).

In considering how to build a learning (or winning!) culture, here are some tips:

• Define wins as having success and learning from your attempts. As a team, identify what success looks like for your big goals. Also define your “learning agenda”- what do you want to learn and what will you try? Encourage attempts, not perfection. Then learn together when the attempts don’t work.  

• Honor learning with confetti. Ok maybe not actually every time, but celebrate when a lesson has been learned with the same robustness as when an award has been won or a success story is shared.

• Point out the small, “one good things” that are happening across your community. We should be clear about deficits in our own impact and when we are not serving students equitably. We should also be clear about the positive steps forward we are taking to build a better school and world.

• Model learning. Adults - especially teachers and education leaders - are asked to know. And still, if we model that knowing is more important than learning in schools, we are creating a school community that undermines the power generated from learning.  Don’t let knowing get in the way of learning, because learning is the path to success. Act as a model yourself in showing how learning is valuable, necessary, and awesome.

References: 

SXSW EDU. (2024, March 6). How do we find the good at a time like this? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quhSkKpvlE4

Irby, D. (2021). Stuck improving: Racial equity and school leadership. Harvard Education Press.