The Educated Inquiry

The good news is that baseball season is underway and watching my Chicago Cubs has always been a nice way to relax. As a youngster, I remember sitting with my dad in our living room chair after church on Sunday afternoons with WGN airing the game. Both of us were usually napping well before the 7th inning stretch. And while the Cubs have not always been a great example of championship caliber baseball, I have been their loyal fan since I can remember. I also just love the game. 

Maybe it’s the history. Maybe it’s the metrics. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s a true team sport even though play is executed through individual performances. I really can’t say. I just know I enjoy watching it and playing it. As I’ve written before, I think and process primarily through metaphors and analogies. Well, this time I’ve found multiple overlaps between baseball and education. Instead of processing through an extended metaphor, I found myself thinking about different aspects of both baseball and education through some different lenses. 

Need Multiple Skillsets to Win Consistently

The best teams in baseball are the ones who are able to win in multiple ways. Sometimes they are able to dominate the other team with their pitching. Other times, their hitters seem unable to stay off the basepaths forming a constant conga line to home plate. There are even games that are so tight that the defense needs to play almost perfectly while the offense finds ways to manufacture a rare run or two through strategic hitting. The point is a team that focuses only on one skillset will have a much harder time winning consistently. More often than not, these varied skillsets exist across multiple players. While there are superstars who are good, if not great, at many baseball skills, a pitcher still can’t score any runs for the team just like a batter can’t strike any of the opposing batters out. 

As educators, our teams function similarly in that we need all skillsets to consistently impact students in a positive way. We also can’t rely on individuals to be good at everything. That is not a recipe for sustained success. A better approach would be to view a teacher team like a baseball team where all players are reasonably competent at all baseball skills but there are individuals who are more proficient in certain areas where they can take the lead on aspects of work that match their skillset. To be effective, teams need to understand their assets and blindspots. 

Team Depth Helps Overcome the Adversity in a Long Season

It’s a long season folks. Major leaguers play 162 games over the course of six months. There’s a lot that can occur over that timespan: winning streaks, losing streaks, injuries, slumps, etc. The best teams are built to weather the adversity a long season all but guarantees. The Chicago Cubs were praised for the depth on their team at the start of the season. This proved to be a very necessary aspect of their team when not one, not two, but three of their five starting pitchers all found themselves on the injured list. Despite these injuries to key pieces of their lineup, the Cubs still managed to crack off two separate winning streaks of 10 games within their first 40 games. (We will ignore the fact that at the time of writing this blog they have lost 6 games in a row.)

It’s an even long school year ya’ll! Students attend 180 days over the course of ten months. There’s a lot that can occur over that timespan. The schools have a collaborative culture that provides the “depth” needed to withstand all the ups and downs throughout the year. Whether it’s student behaviors, adult behaviors, teachers on leave, student academic needs, or other organizational changes, having a strong collaborative culture develops collective teacher efficacy to weather adversity.

Use Data in Balance with Intuition and Situational Knowledge

If you’ve seen the movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, you’ve seen a glimpse of how analytics are used in baseball. As I mentioned before, baseball is a true team sport but it’s executed through individual performances. This means that there are many different ways to measure individual performance through statistics. It’s relatively easy to compare an individual player’s performance to other players within the current season, compare an individual player’s performance to their historic trends, and even comparing current players to player performance that occurred a century ago. However, with all this information available, analytics is used in concert with human scouting and situational context all playing a role in decision-making.

In education, we’ve never had more data available to us. You may be familiar with the concept of DRIP (Data Rich; Information Poor). Data is only as valuable as the inferences we make and the actions we take based on its information. We want to avoid using any one data set to inform our decisions because any given data set only tells part of a student’s data story. We need to base our decisions on as complete of a picture as possible, which means we need to bring the qualitative data (observations, anecdotal evidence, situational context, etc.) into the conversation. It’s a balance.

High Leverage Situations Call For Our Best and Most Intentional Approaches

In baseball, each team gets 27 outs to try to win the game. Your goal is to score as many runs as possible before you team gets out 27 times. Conversely, you want to get your opponent out 27 times as quickly as possible to minimize the runs they score. Viewing the game like this, you can identify key parts of the game that would be considered “high leverage.” Bases empty in the 2nd inning with the game still tied 0-0 is not a very high leverage situation. However, bases loaded with the tying run on first base and two outs in the top of the 9th inning is very high leverage. Teams often try to use their best pitchers out of the bullpen during these high leverage moments, especially in the playoffs. Rather than always saving them for the end of the game, a manager may pull their starter early to get a key matchup between their bullpen pitcher and the upcoming hitters in a high leverage situation. Because remember, there’s only 27 outs to either win or lose the game.

In education, each student only has one school year to master their grade level’s standards. We can all agree that some of these standards are more essential than others. While we still instruct all standards, a standard that is deemed essential requires the team’s commitment to not just instruct it, but to measure it commonly and provide additional time and support to students who still have not demonstrated mastery of it. It is this commitment that makes it impossible for every standard to be deemed essential since we wouldn’t be able to intervene on every single standard. Your essential standards are your high leverage moments and require us to intentionally match our best strategies and approaches to instruction. After all, there’s only one school year to either master the grade level standards or not.

My Inquiry

As the name of this blog implies, I will end each post with the question(s) bouncing around in my head. These are the questions I’m still asking:

• While I typically stay away from sports analogies, I couldn’t help but see the connections between baseball and education. What other connections am I missing? What about with other sports?
• It’s possible I’ve oversimplified or missed nuances within either baseball or education that might make these comparisons inaccurate. Have I missed something here or do these make sense?

Happy Hiring Season to Those Who Observe 

Springtime in education is akin to rounding the third corner of a running track. The race isn’t finished, but the finish line is in sight. The weather starts improving, Spring Break provides a welcome respite from the last few months of winter doldrums, and whether we should or not, we begin turning our attention to summer and next school year. For education leaders, we begin straddling the fence between finishing this year strong and following the necessary timelines for budgeting, planning, and personnel to make sure we are ready at the start of next school year. 

It’s around this time that staffing needs begin to become clearer as decisions with staff members on whether they will be returning or not are made. The promotional dominoes, whether internal or external, begin to fall and eventually we determine which holes we are not able to simply backfill through transfers, but need to actually hire someone new. I always enjoyed hiring season, for lots of reasons. I loved meeting new candidates, especially those just finishing their undergraduate programs. Their excitement and energy was usually contagious and helped snap me out of my typical thought patterns. I loved engaging with candidates who were already practitioners as well. They brought unique experiences and perspectives to the table that we might not have otherwise considered. 

To be honest, I even enjoyed the hiring season when I was on the other side of the table. Now, I’ve never been speed-dating, but the idea always intrigued me. Having a short amount of time to get to know those across the table, while also letting them get to know me was always kind of fun. I haven’t been part of a hiring process since leaving my full-time district position a few years ago, but I’ve found myself thinking about it quite a bit lately. Perhaps I’m simply longing for some professional speed-dating, but regardless, it’s led me to my next inquiry. Is talent or shared values more important when hiring an educator?

I understand that a combination of both is needed to consider a candidate as viable, but my wondering is not meant to treat them as mutually exclusive. Plus, answering this question simply with “both are important” does not make for a very interesting blog post. Now, before I go any further, I need to make my disclaimer. I am in no way a human resources expert, nor do I pretend to be. These are simply my thoughts, questions, and wonderings around the hiring process of educators.

The Case for Talent

Spring may be hiring season in education, but for many theatre organizations, it’s audition season. Ready to cast roles for their summer lineup, many theatres audition in the Spring so that rehearsals can follow soon after. In my younger years, when my time was as flexible as my body, I could often be found in local musical productions. Knowing that I love hiring season, it will come as no surprise that I also love audition season.

But even in cases where these intangibles aren’t areas of strength, talent will always win out when casting a show. Why? Because the audience only sees the performance, not the rehearsals or anything drama happening backstage. Here’s where the parallels between a theatre audition and an educator hiring process stop. Educators are not mere performers, they are part of a larger collaborative system. Talent and knowledge are still needed to be successful, but should interview teams give talent the most weight like a casting team would? I’m hesitant to agree.

Unlike auditions where a candidate’s talent is on full display, in an interview a candidate’s talent is described through hypotheticals or demonstrated in a context that is representative of the role they are after, but not an authentic simulation. I remember on the interview teams that I was part of, we did our best to draft questions that weren’t designed to be difficult to answer but attempted to separate candidates who were good at interviewing from candidates who truly possessed the target skills and knowledge. To that end, I always liked scenario-based questions that were future-facing. 

Instead of asking “Tell me about a time when…” questions, I usually preferred, “I’m going to give you a situation and I want you to tell me what you would do next and why” questions. This demanded two things from the candidate. First, their answer was in the context of the role they were interviewing for, not the context of their current role or past experience. Second, it required them to apply their knowledge and skills to a situation where they didn’t know the end result. Past events tell us how our decisions turned out. Future-facing scenarios show what talents the candidate will rely on because they believe it gives the best chance of success in that situation.

I’ve found including questions around specific values was extremely helpful. I think of the answers to these questions as a way for candidates to “show their work.” For example, let’s say I ask a candidate a scenario-based question where there isn’t enough time/bandwith to complete everything all at once that’s being asked of them. Instead of trying to design the question with a single correct answer of what should be prioritized, it could be more informative to instead design it so a case could be made for any of the tasks to be prioritized and ask about how they would communicate the rationale for their decision. This shows more of what values they used to make their decision rather than if they picked the right thing.

Conclusion

While both talent and values are important considerations in the hiring process, I think values carry more weight. I guess I have far more confidence that an organization can instill knowledge and develop skills in a candidate with aligned values than an organization changing someone’s values regardless of how much knowledge or skill they possess. I also think I emphasized values on the other side of the interview table. As a candidate, I honestly was most interested in learning about the values of the organization to determine my alignment. I guess I wanted to learn more about the “locker room” I’d be joining rather than the playbook I’d be following.

My Inquiry

As the name of this blog implies, I will end each post with the question(s) bouncing around in my head. These are the questions I’m still asking:

• Is talent or shared values more important when hiring an educator?
• Are organizations more reliable at building individual knowledge and skills than realigning an individual’s values? 
• What questions have you found to be the most useful when hiring new educators to your organization?
• What experiences, either as a candidate or on an interview team, have shaped how you weigh talent and values in your hiring process?

My original plan was to just stay on the Yosemite Valley Loop Trail. It was pretty much flat and served as a path between many other trailheads, but I would be able to view many of the famous landmarks from that path. Plus, there was a shuttle bus that I could hop on to speed up my journey if I wanted to skip to the next landmark. 

On the bus ride in, I was in awe of the sheer size of the landscape. At moments it didn’t look real. As the sun rose to splash light on the trees and rocks I caught a glimpse of a single, majestic waterfall. I decided that would be where I would start my trek around the loop. Once I hopped off the bus, I headed in the direction for the falls but then I saw a sign “Yosemite Falls – 3.5.” It was a trailhead marker that deviated from my planned course on the loop trail and instead was a trail to the top of the waterfall I had seen from the bus. I paused for a moment and made the decision to change course. 3.5 miles didn’t seem too bad and I figured I could do that trail, get back down in time for lunch and still have time to see many other things along the loop. 

The Tortuous Trail to the Top

This may not have been my most egregious underestimation ever made, but it is certainly in the running. The trail consisted of natural rocks in configurations made to resemble stairs that switched back and forth every 50-100 feet as you constantly climbed upward. While the sign indicated the trail was 3.5 miles in length, it failed to also mention that I would be climbing roughly 3,300 feet in elevation as well. My huffing and puffing soon rivaled that of the big bad wolf and might have stood a chance of blowing down the brick house, much to the dismay of the three little pigs. Luckily, I had gotten an early start so I was pretty much alone on the trail and could stop and rest as much as I needed. 

After 3 hours, I made it to the top to the overlook of the waterfall. I spent a solid 20 minutes sitting there enjoying the view, cosplaying a serious hiker as I ate my Lemon Cake Quest Bar and chicken jerky stick. Of my 48oz of water I had brought, I had only about 1/3 of the bottle remaining. I decided to save the rest for the trip down, which I told myself would be much easier. While the way down did go faster (2 hours), it was still hard work. My legs began to cramp in various places, I was running out of water, and now the trail was full of chatty hikers on their way up to get a glimpse from the top like I had. Many wanted to stop and ask about trail conditions at the top, seek affirmation that the view was worth the effort, or have an excuse to stand even footed for a moment to take a break from the neverending stone Stairmaster of a trail. During these conversations, I tried my best to keep the tremoring in my legs to a minimum, which was near impossible at this point. 

I lost the trail twice on the way down, but luckily there were enough folks headed up I realized it pretty quickly in both instances and found my way back to the path. By the time I made it down, I was no longer interested in hiking any more that day. I grabbed some lunch and tried to let me legs, lungs, and heart rest. At the end of the day I checked my Apple Watch which indicated I had burned over 2400 calories, exercised for almost 6 hours, took over 25,000 steps for a distance of 9.5 miles, and climbed 251 flights of stairs. Many of these were personal records, but what I was most proud of was that I could have turned around about halfway through the trail having gotten a really nice view of the waterfall by then. But I didn’t.

Defining the Path of Progress

The hike to the top of Yosemite Falls was difficult for me, and honestly, had I known how hard it was going to be, I probably would have passed that day. However, while my lack of being in shape played a major role in the difficulty of the hike, it was also difficult because the path was completely unknown to me. I didn’t know how high I’d have to climb. I didn’t know how much longer it would take me to get to the top. I didn’t have a good way to strategically use my energy and resources to set myself up for success. 

Pacing: A team that has created a clear learning progression for a standard can appropriately pace their instruction to match the sequence of steps toward mastery of the standard. Some steps may take longer than others to learn, so the pacing may not have an even cadence throughout the entire progression. Just like a hiking trail, some sections might be more complex than others and take a larger investment of time and energy. A learning progression helps to anticipate this need and allow for teams to account for it in their pacing. 

Strategies: Rather than have a general approach to teaching a standard, a learning progression affords teachers to specifically plan for incremental progress. Doing so makes their planning more focused on student learning instead of simply covering standards. Specific strategies can be intentionally matched with each step of the learning progression to support student success along the way. If I had a better understanding of the trail I was hiking, I would have been able to not only allocate my pacing more appropriately, but I would have been able to approach each section of the trail more strategically. I could adjust my speed, rationing of water, and timed out my rest and stretch breaks at key moments. With a learning progression, teachers can strategize in a more anticipated manner, rather than having to wait for an end of unit assessment and reactively employ strategies to address missing skills and concepts.

Assessment: Learning progressions also help to schedule formative assessments at strategic times within the unit of instruction. By using a learning progression in this way, the team “intentionally times its gathering of data to occur at critical junctures in student learning to check in on progress, provide feedback, and adjust” (Williams, 2026, p.61). Hikers who were headed on their way up were able to gather additional information from me to help them adjust their approach to the top. Based on the information they gained, they could make better informed decisions around their speed, rationing of water, and general approach to the terrain. 

Intervention/Extension: When formative assessments are designed to align with specific steps on a learning progression, planning for intervention or extension becomes more efficient. For students who are not yet at mastery, a team can look at where each student is at on the progression and design the intervention around getting to the next step on the progression. This connects to one of the most difficult aspects of my hike. I would have greatly benefited from intermittent goals to work toward during my trek to the top. Knowing that this steep section of the trail ends after the next switchback gives me a more concrete success criteria that seems attainable than looking at my watch and seeing I’ve only completed 1 mile so far. The goal is still to get to the top (mastery of the standard) but intervening specifically on skills or concepts in the progression helps to make incremental progress more defined and doable. Extensions can be approached similarly. For students who are already showing mastery, what is the next clearly defined step for their learning? A learning progression can expand beyond the grade level standard to bring consistency to how the team approaches their extension as well. (I don’t have an analogy from my hike for extension since I was clearly in need of some targeted intervention!)

In my work with teacher teams I have come to believe that creating a learning progression as a coherent sequence of skills and concepts that leads to mastery of a standard is arguably the most critical part of any unit plan. Not only do they provide the structure to bring alignment and coherence to the other aspects of unit planning, the instructional planning can become more efficient over time as the team identifies quality assessments, impactful strategies, and successful interventions and extensions to use with each step. Trying to engage in other aspects of unit planning or instructional design without first charting a path for progress runs the risk of the journey being more difficult than needed, or perhaps, even diverging from the intended trail. 

My Inquiry

As the name of this blog implies, I will end each blog with the question(s) bouncing around in my head. These are the questions I’m still asking:

• Are learning progressions as important as I feel like they are? If they aren’t, how are teams able to engage in their unit planning and instructional planning efficiently and sustainably?
• What seems to be the biggest obstacle in bringing learning progressions to the forefront of collaborative team discussions?
• What are there other benefits to creating and using learning progressions that I haven’t discussed?

Erkens, C., Schimmer, T., Dimich, N. (2017). Essential assessment: Six tenets for bringing hope, efficacy, and achievement in the classroom. Solution Tree Press.

Williams, J. (2026). Shared data, shared decisions: A student-centered framework for a healthy data culture. Solution Tree Press. 

Chaos Creeps In

The food was so good and popular that a line would usually form outside the door before we would open at 4pm. Most nights, there was a wait time to be seated all the way up until close. While this was great for business, it stressed the kitchen. The cooking crew began making mistakes and couldn’t keep up with the rapid pace of the orders. The servers would get behind on their tables and not take the plates out in a timely manner. The dishwasher wasn’t able to turn over the dirty dishes fast enough to replenish what was needed. Soon, each night ended with everyone exhausted with an apology or two given out for a flared temper in a particularly stressful moment. Our cajun kitchen had become cajun chaos. Luckily, Cajun Ron had an idea, “We’re gonna add an expediter.”

Now, none of us had gone to culinary school so we didn’t know what an expediter was. Truth be told, at first I thought Cajun Ron had made up the word. But if you’ve watched awarding winning show The Bear, you know the expediter, or “expo” for short, is not only real, but an critical part of the restaurant system.

Expo Keeps the Flow

An expediter communicates with the cooks about dishes that are in progress and haven’t been started, commands the timing of their preparation, and keeps track of service for all of the tables in the restaurant. They are the link between the kitchen and the servers. They set the pace and the rhythm for the restaurant’s operation. And finally, they directly help where support is needed.

I was fortunate (or perhaps not so fortunate) enough to be tapped as the first expo. Luckily, by this time I had worked every other position in the restaurant at one point or another, so I not only knew what needed to happen at each individual station, but also deeply understood the cause and effect relationship each role could have with the others. It took a few nights for us to find our footing, but pretty soon we weren’t running out of any food or supplies, nobody was yelling at someone else for not completing a task fast enough, customer wait times were down, and the chaos disappeared.

I stayed at The Cajun Connection for ten years. I worked there all through high school and through my undergraduate program, driving back and forth from campus each weekend to cook, serve, or expedite. Don’t get me wrong, we were still incredibly busy and some nights were quite stressful. But it was also fun because we were now collectively successful at it. 

We were good at it. We were proud of it.

School Leaders as Expediters 

I often learn and process through analogies and see the expediter in a restaurant as a parallel to an effective school leader. I acknowledge it isn’t a perfect comparison since expediters aren’t supervising the other roles and aren’t the boss of anyone else like a school leader. There are times where educators in formal leadership roles are responsible for evaluating staff and holding all roles accountable to clear expectations as a supervisor. But outside of a leader’s supervisory responsibilities, I do think their role can be viewed as the expo of their campus. Allow me to explain my thinking:

As students and teachers return from Winter Break, the chaos will slowly start to creep in. And this chaos is different than the beginning of the year craziness. Leaders and their staff likely will begin to feel the increased pressure from a majority of the year’s deadlines taking place in the latter part of the year. Teacher evaluations, IEP annual reviews, state assessments, placement tests, field trips, graduation, end of year traditions and events, and more! The chaos begins to bubble because these extra requirements and events are added to an already full plate of priorities and initiatives set from the beginning of the year. Student (and adult) behaviors increase, patience wears thin, and it might start to feel like my cajun kitchen did where everyone ends their shifts exhausted and sorry. 

As leaders, we need to expedite the operation of our campus. It is on us to communicate to the staff about which priorities in progress and which ones we aren’t cooking yet. We need to command the prioritization of time and energy. Which tasks are immediately essential? Which ones are on pause?  Which ones do we need to prepare for because we will need to prioritize it soon? We need to command the timing of our collective work so each role is engaged in the right task at the right time. Sometimes, we may even jump in and provide moments of direct support when specific roles need it. And ultimately, we need to keep track of our service to our students to ensure that we are making a positive impact on all learners. While we aren’t at risk of receiving one star reviews on Yelp from our students, we do risk adversely affecting their learning if the chaos takes control.

An expediter doesn’t micromanage every role in the restaurant, but they do provide feedback and guidance on where to focus time and energy. They view the operation from the balcony and understand the connections between the immediate tasks and the long term outcomes. Just like the roles in a restaurant, I’m sure the staff members fulfilling various roles on your campus are working as best they can to accomplish tasks quickly and to a high quality. However, they may lack the balcony view and need guidance of where time and energy is best spent at certain times. To be clear, it would be an unfair ask for someone to take this balcony view and still focus on completing the immediate tasks demanded by their role. A cook isn’t simultaneously an expediter. 

So what does a leader as an expo look like in a school? Leaders not only clarify what to prioritize but also clarify what can or should be de-prioritized to make sure there is enough time and energy to truly tackle what is presently essential. Leaders set clear incremental goals with concrete, observable or measurable success criteria and monitor it. Leaders analyze student data and support their teams in responding to it in a way that maximizes meeting the needs of individual students. Leaders create coherence so that all staff members can be prepared for the task at hand, as well as the important tasks coming in the near future. Leaders foster the collective success of all roles on their campus.

My Inquiry

As the name of this blog implies, I will end each blog with the question(s) bouncing around in my head. These are the questions I’m still asking:

• What causes chaos in our schools and can we realistically control it?
• How do we as leaders make sure we aren’t adding to the chaos, but instead bringing clarity, coherence, and collective success?
• Does my expediter analogy fit for school leaders? Is this an appropriate lens to view this role through?
• What’s keeping leaders from being expediters?

If you’re interested in joining the conversation, or simply curious as to what I’m wondering about, be sure to subscribe to receive updates when new posts go live. I’m excited to use this new format to wonder out loud and maybe even get a few more answers to my steady stream of questions!