Grow Your Own (GYO) is a complex change initiative for K–12 workforce development. In this post, I share learnings from a district GYO partnership, and why I advise caution with traditional goal-setting approaches, and advocate for including narrative-based strategies to set context-based goals. This builds on my first post (Don't Grow Your Own in Shallow Soil) where I laid out some foundational viewpoints about apprenticeship and GYO initiatives.
Who was Warren Township’s New Elementary Teacher of the Year last year? Raven Henry, a former bus driver of 10 years for the district becomes an elementary teacher. How did she do it? Simply put, really hard work - 5 a.m. bus routes, student teaching during the day, and college classes at night. You can learn more about Raven Henry’s inspiring journey [here].
Warren Township, with over 11,000 students, sits in the Indianapolis metro area. Like many metro areas, competition for teachers is strong and new graduates are too few to go around.
When I met Brian Simkins and Pam Griffin, Warren’s HR leadership team, it was clear they were deeply connected to these district stories and committed to investing in their people.
“Life be lifin’,” Brian said—describing the pattern many educators fall into that makes it extremely difficult to pursue traditional paths to advancing their professional learning and teaching career.
In one of our early planning meetings, I stated that we need to get clear on the types of problem(s) we are solving before moving to the solution phase. Pam quickly responded:
“We don’t have problems at Warren—we have 'prob-pportunities.'"
The immediate prob-pportunity we identified was to use teaching apprenticeship to expand access for returning paraeducators and allow graduating high school students to start their education career next fall.
I proposed some ambitious, outcome-based recruiting goals for next year’s apprenticeship pipeline. Pam liked the ambition—but questioned the method. There were still too many unknowns to confidently set numeric targets and then back our way into how to get there. The outcome-based approach didn’t account for the context or the unknowns (known, and unknown).
In a closed-ended project with predictable steps to completion, outcome-based goals make sense. But Grow Your Own is not that kind of project. It’s open-ended. It’s about creating the soil conditions for continuous transformation—at both the individual and systems level.
A vision of an ideal state can be useful if it serves as a north star for inspiration and alignment. But there’s a risk—getting so fixated on the ideal state that the possible and impossible (and improbable) blend together.
In a district hardest hit by the declining traditional teacher pipeline, there is immense pressure to make a significant transformation quickly. Vision is important, but GYO is not different than other complex change initiatives in that it must have wins that maximize value and minimize effort to build momentum and sustain.
It’s easy to take action when we can make sense of our situation. Often when we’re stuck and don’t know our options, it's because we haven’t made sufficient sense of where we are. Our approach to setting goals needs to not only serve as direction, but help us make better sense of our current situation.
Which of the following would tell us more about our context and what action we could take?
The first tells us how much of something is desired, but offers zero insights into that “something” or anything unique about our situation. It's a context-free goal. For all we know that goal could be posted in any district in the world.
With the second statement however, there are deeper and more actionable insights about our context packed in that statement- there is only one story of Raven that took place in a specific place and time. And people who share that place and time know this story.
Stories inform us of the situation we want to change and allow for more human-centered decision making. For example, by unpacking a story like Raven’s, we can see the factors (positive and negative) that were in her journey. We can use these factors to identify patterns of educators who are adjacent to this story and assess what system changes we can make to increase the probability of getting more stories like this.
Once we identify the possible changes and the effort they require, we can beginning rank ordering the changes from high-impact, low-effort down to low-impact, high effort.
Often these changes seem small—like modifying an instructional assistant job description to include “Teacher Apprentice” or filling a vacant teaching position with a trusted paraeducator while they finish their degree. But those small shifts can improve our position and make things that are hard today easier tomorrow.
As a former commercial builder and project manager turned education entrepreneur, I was classically trained in systems thinking—particularly the Critical Path Method (CPM). It’s very useful when you’re managing toward a defined end state with a clear beginning and defined activities in between.
That kind of thinking helped me get started in education, but it wasn’t enough.
Why? Because workforce transformation in education isn’t the same type of project. The goals are people and system based (not material-based), and the end state is open (not closed), and it’s tricky to make sense of your beginning. There are aspects that become more clear - such as once you start placing educators into programs, the programs are pretty codified.
So we needed a type of management framework for this type of project.
Theory has helped—especially complex systems theory—but practice of the theories has been even more essential.
One resource for practice we’ve learned from is Cynefin, a framework for complexity-informed decision making. It’s influenced how we think about education change initiatives, particularly in developing our own framework for sensemaking in education: the GROWTH Framework.
My co-founder, Dr. Kevin Berkopes, originally developed GROWTH as a sensemaking approach for teachers—to help them become storytellers and co-create mathematical knowledge with their students.
But we’ve discovered it is also helpful forming narrative-based strategies for K–12 GYO initiatives. More on GROWTH in a future post.
If you’re trying to lead change in a school or district, you’ll need more than KPIs and enrollment goals.
You’ll need stories using the real experiences of the people already in your system. From there you’ll be able to determine what is possible to change now - but most importantly, you’ll define what kind of stories you want less of and which ones you want more of.
Image created by ChatGPT using DALL·E, based on prompts provided by the user. This visual metaphor was intentionally designed to reflect the idea that progress requires focus on the best next step we can take now in the right direction with the least effort. The stepping stones do not fully connect in the distance, symbolizing that while we move forward to improve our position, the future is still unfolding. We cannot define exactly how things will look ahead—but we can choose our direction and the steps we take today.