Kvistad describes process of changing a school's culture

Lisa Kvistad (Courtesy: MMSD)Lisa Kvistad was appointed Madison Metropolitan School District’s assistant superintendent for teaching and learning at the beginning of this school year. In this role, she works to tie together different departments throughout MMSD to help bring about cohesive instruction throughout the district.

Prior to the start of the school year, superintendent Jen Cheatham laid out a strategic framework, which among other goals, aims at lowering disparities in academic performance among students of different races. One of the framework’s central goals includes bringing about consistency in instruction across the district through adoption of the Common Core State Standards.

Prior to assuming this role, Kvistad served as principal at Lowell Elementary. When Kvistad started at Lowell in 2006, she sought to improve community engagement with the school and develop clear, high expectations for students. During her six years at Lowell, student reading and math test scores improved and disparities in performance among students of different races decreased.

Kvistad sat down for an interview with Madison Commons, which will be presented in two parts. Today, she talks about her experience at Lowell. Next week, she will discuss her new role at MMSD.

Madison Commons: How would you describe Lowell when you first arrived?

Lisa Kvistad: Lowell was in a state of transition. I would say that the climate and the culture there, there was a real sort of lack of cohesion and positive feeling about the work that was happening. There were systems that weren’t in place to support students. There weren’t necessarily feelings of real engagement by the community. We just really needed and we started to work on those systems to get the school running so that kids felt welcome, so that parents felt welcome so that staff felt affirmed in the work that they were doing. So we put lots of systems in place, put a positive behavior system in place with really clear expectations for kids. We put a leadership team in place where I had grade-level representatives and school-based staff meet with me once a month to inform the direction and to make sure we all had the same vision for the work that we were doing.

I met with tons of parents; I met with tons of families, tons of kids, rode the bus lots of mornings or nights home just to make sure I got a sense of where people were at. Had lots of summer meetings, coffee meetings and before school meetings with different groups of parents who had wonderings and just really talked about the new vision we had for working together and the high expectations that we were going to have.

MC: What was that new vision?

LK: You know, that really we were a community. And that our kids deserve to have the absolute best, the highest expectations for them, and that our teachers and the classrooms were going to be; that the classrooms were going to be the most important place in the school where the learning happened. And we wanted to keep kids in the classrooms, kids learning and have those teachers be the most important adult in that kid’s life while they’re at school. And … we talked to parents a lot about how proud we were to have kids come in the building every morning and that it was an absolute privilege to teach those kids every single day, and that the work was hard, the work was challenging and we couldn’t do it alone, that every day was a new day for kids. Kids make mistakes; grownups make mistakes, but every day was a new day for kids. And that whole sort of wraparound feeling about that positive approach to kids, that positive approach to learning, that whole restorative justice piece about how do we give back to the community in which we live; how do we give back to the school in which we are learning, that whole piece, how do we help kids to become independent learners, that was all part of our vision. And not once did I hear teachers say we couldn’t do it, not once did I see teachers complain or balk at the amount of work that we were doing. Things [at the school] changed; things really changed. I kept telling people, “Hold on. Hold on. We’re going to see test scores change. We’re doing a lot of building of systems and infrastructures.” and the scores did change. And if you look at the district report, Lowell’s scores are one of the top five schools on the state report card. And that is really something that they can be proud of because they’ve continued to that work.

MC: What specific practices contributed to that progress?

LK: We put teams together so that our instructional resource teacher in the building and the teams could really take a close look at how kids were learning and how we were teaching. And my instructional resource teacher went to all of team meetings.

We looked at data. We talked about kids. We made sure that we created a schedule during the day for every classroom teacher that blocked out instructional time in literacy and in math.

We redid the entire lunchtime, that whole sequence of lunches.

We instituted a community breakfast in the morning, which right off the bat reduced our tardies by 60 percent right off that bat when we implemented that. Whoever thought that having 300 children on the playground was a peaceful way to start the day? So we brought them in, and we had every morning we had a set routine in place. It was our community-building time. We talked about our themes for the week. Every child had a chance to eat. They went to class; they were all fed; they were ready to learn; there was nothing that came in off of the playground. Kids were calm, and they were ready to go into their classrooms and start their morning meeting. And that community breakfast--although it took some time in the morning to do--the return on that in instructional time was incredible.

MC: Can you describe that return?

LK: Kids were in classes. They weren’t hungry. They were ready to go. Teachers met the kids in breakfast room so they could check in with kids in the morning. They could say, “How did your night go?” They could check in on your homework; they were able to touch base with their students before school even started and get that day started really smoothly back in the classroom, so when students were in the classroom they were there and they were learning.

I used to tell families because the question always came up, “What if my little one eats at home?” And I said, you should certainly have your child eat at home; there’s no problem with that. But the real purpose of that morning for us was that community-building time and that coming-together time. I used say to parents, “Some kids eat at home; some kids eat at community breakfast; some kids eat once; some kids eat twice. That’s OK.” We did a morning affirmation every morning that affirmed kids about doing their best work about having pride in themselves about making the best use of their time. They saw every grown-up in the building with them, and it was just; it’s a really transformational piece of the culture.

MC: Do you think other schools in MMSD view things similarly?

LK: We took the community breakfast idea from other schools; we didn’t create that on our own. We modified it a little bit due to some of our space needs and the way our building was laid out. We really thought about some of the small things that make a school run. “Which door do kids walk in?” “What do they do with cold lunches?” All those things seem very trivial, but unless you pay attention to them, your systems don’t always work.

So we paid attention to all of that, and we had other principals and other staff members come and take a look at our community breakfast, and other schools have implemented that because of what Lowell did. So, good ideas beget good ideas, and people sort of took what they saw and adapted it to other buildings. That’s the work that we do; we share the things that are working, and other schools can benefit as well.