Organizational Culture and Intelligent Failure: A Conversation with Isobel Stevenson

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On Monday, December 19, Debra Crouch and I spoke with Isobel Stevenson.

Isobel is the author of The Coaching Letter, a newsletter that is about “organizational culture and intelligent failure”. She is also the author of multiple books, including Making Coaching Matter: Leading Continuous Improvement in Schools, with Sarah Woulfin and Kerry Lord (Teachers College Press, 2023).

In our conversation we explored a number of questions around continuous school improvement, including:

* You promote “intelligent failure” as an organizational disposition, where teachers and leaders are intentionally making mistakes. This feels counter to most school cultures. What conditions need to exist for this to be a reality?

* Is a “culture of coaching” the answer to the problem of the status quo? If not, what else?

* If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about schools as they currently are, what would it be?

Listeners will walk away with a better appreciation for the complexities of school improvement, along with clear action steps for engaging in this work.

Take care,

Matt

What we are reading

* Isobel listed several favorite professional titles, including The Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson, Being Wrong by Kathryn Schultz, The Voltage Effect by John List, and Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales.

* Debra enjoyed The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. She shared the following quote from this novel: “Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives.”

* Matt is planning to start The Reformatory by Tananarive Due soon, a Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Best Horror (2023).

* Isobel just posted her December edition of her newsletter, in which she shares more about the instructional design practice of “co-developing recipes—which are NOT the same as checklists or scripts”.

* For more information on continuous school improvement, check out my conversation with Isobel’s co-author Sarah Woulfin along with Rachael Gabriel.

Take care,

Matt

P.S. No post/newsletter next week - 🎁enjoy the holiday break!🎄

P.P.S. In addition to live professional conversations with educational experts like Isobel, full subscribers also have access to the video archive of the Zoom chat plus the discussion guide. See below. You can use these resources to support professional learning in your context.

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