Over the last couple of years, in our individual coaching and long-term hybrid Instructional Leadership Collective work, the two of us have discovered a pattern. Regardless of which country we are working in, school and district leaders and their teams are focused on the same common themes when we engage them in cycles of inquiry to come up with a problem they want to solve.
In surveys with nearly 1,000 leaders we have worked with over the last couple of years, it has become clear that there are 11 problems educators are working really hard to solve. So, for this post in the new year, we wanted to highlight the problems, which we also refer to as critical issues. In our inquiry cycles, leaders tell us they have been working on them for multiple years.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of critical issues, nor is it written in any particular order of importance, but we have grouped them into three categories, which you will see below. As we know, politics, especially the divisive politics we are experiencing in the U.S., infiltrate our schools, but the reality is that none of the leaders who we work with talks about politics as one of their top priorities. Politics is merely something they have to navigate—the topic for a future blog post—so they can get to those other problems.