Howdy Partner: Engaging with Superintendents

https://www.prp.group/blog/howdy-partner-engaging-with-superintendents

Matt Kinnamen is the president and co-founder of New Era Superintents, an organization dedicated to helping superintendents put the focus back on student success at a time when there’s a lot of distractions and political division. He’s an expert in the field. Before founding New Era, he was VP for events at Thoughtexchange, and group publisher at District Administration magazine, where he was part of the team that created and ran DALI, the District Administration Leadership Institute.

Quintin Shepherd, New Era chairman, is superintendent of the Victoria Independent School District in Victoria, Texas, and a nationally-recognized voice on transformational and collaborative leadership. Also, he recently published The Secret to Transformational Leadership.

I sat down recently to chat with Matt and Quintin to find out how vendors can better support superintendents and achieve district-level adoption.
Know the Hows and Whys of Your Product, Not Just the Whats
Shepherd said that he doesn’t want to start by hearing what a vendor has to offer, but why they are offering it.
“I want every kid to graduate with a high school diploma and something else,” Shepherd said. “They either need an industry certification so that they can go to work, they need a military enlistment letter, or they need acceptance to a college and university. I think of them as the three Es: it's either enlistment or it's enrollment or it's employment. Those are the three E's that I want for my own kids when they graduate.”
“If you keep that as your lodestar, that's it. That's why we're here,” Shepherd said. “And then, and only then when you answer that question, do you back out to the how and then you talk about what are we going to do.”

“Too many people start with the what, and then try to figure out the how, and they completely forget about the why,” added Shepherd, ”but if you stick to the why, and then the how, and then the what, things sort of fall into order in a pretty interesting way.”

Focus on Student Outcomes Everyone Wants

Kinnamen noted that though division seems ever-present in the United States these days, the mission of education can be a powerful unifying force.

“You could have a room of people who are bitterly divided on topics, but if one of us says to that room, ‘Look, every third grade student needs to be able to read at grade level because we know that if a third grade student can read a grade level, he or she has better lifelong prospects across all measures of success,’” Kinnamen said. “And we'll have agreement on that. There will be 100% agreement on that statement.”

That doesn’t mean that anything else is any less important, according to Kinnamen. It’s simply not the “We need to also start from being singularly focused on what we came here for in the first place and what we all can agree on rallying around, and that's delivering these levels of success to students.”

Explain How Your Product Will Improve Educator Capacity, Processes, or Resources
Quintin said that educators trying to improve teaching and learning have three domains within which to make those improvements. Comprising the supports of three-legged stool because no two will work on their own, those areas include capacity, resources, and processes.
In deployments that succeed, it’s because vendors have a solid understanding of the processes that make their product succeed when they’re deployed and fail when they’re not.

“They can tell us where it worked and why, and they can tell us where it didn't work and why,” Shepherd said. “They have unique insight into the processes that we don't have from our own system. So when we're trying to improve our capacity, the conversation that I want to have with the partners at the table is, ‘Where is it working? Where is it not...