NZ Leads the World in Goal P Eileen Piggot-Irvine Formerly Director NZ Principal and Leadership Centre Currently Professor of Leadership in Canada but from August on half in Canada: half NZ
I have quoted in my recent book (Piggot-Irvine, 2015) that despite the strong rationale for goal pursuit in schools provided by many authors, Conzemius and O’Neill (2006) remind us that goal setting has yet to become real and compelling in schools at either a personal or organisational level. I believe this may be true for many countries but increasingly it is not accurate for many NZ schools. I will be bold and suggest that I think we lead the world in goal pursuit. Not that I am a biased and fiercely patriotic kiwi . . . well, maybe a little given that I have always been enthusiastic, some might say ‘doggedly determined’, about moving principals and schools towards clarity of direction when pursuing goals in strategic planning, team planning and personal performance appraisal. During the last three years, whilst having a blast heading up one of the largest leadership development masters programmes in North America in a university that has a castle for an administration building, I have never lost my interest in goal pursuit! You can see the castle in the background on my first snowy day in Canada. In my time away I have been lucky enough to peek into what is happening in several other countries with performance appraisal, as well as goal pursuit. About a year ago I felt the strong need to profile how well NZ schools are practising goal pursuit. The result is a new book entitled ‘Goal pursuit in education using focused action research’. A key element in the book is a case study of a real NZ school (School A) to illustrate practical application of a raft of recent research and theory. During my two years working with School A, the Board, principal, other leaders, teachers and students were all part of a ‘meta-level’ goal focused on how to implement deep goal pursuit. Although this book is written in response to, and details, escalating international research (e.g. Locke & Latham’s 2013 work) showing the importance of alignment and focus of goals, I am painfully aware that not everyone, including myself, finds it easy to focus on goals through to full pursuit. The pain is reflected in the title of the first chapter of the book i.e. ‘Introduction to how a reluctant goal pursuer became converted’. The pain has led me to create a simple approach to goal pursuit fitting my own inclinations favouring the three principles of depth of development, lift (stretch and challenge) in performance, and an authentic collaborative underpinning to the action research (inquiry learning) approach to improvement. How the principles align strongly with evidence from neuroscience has also been relevant to my approach.
In this article, I don’t have space to outline all of the theory and tools covered in the book associated with the three principles. However, I do want to briefly introduce a link I have made between these three principles and current thinking from the field of neuroleadership which interprets for leaders the neuroscience research about brain response in goal pursuit. As a former biologist, lately I have become fascinated with what we are learning about the brain’s response to stimuli. We know, largely from MRI scanning, that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) region (see Figure 1) of the brain is stimulated in goal pursuit. Ochnser et al (2002) suggest that ‘prefrontal regions enable one to selectively attend to and maintain goal-relevant information in mind and resist interference’ (p.1215).
Figure 1: Location of Prefrontal Regions of Brain As I suggest in the book, like several others (Louie & Glimcher, 2012; Miller, 2008) I have a slightly cautious, ‘amber-light’ view of the way the neuroleadership field is interpreting the results of neuroscience research. However, I could not resist including some of this material, because even though we know relatively little about how the brain works, many of the ideas drawn by the neuroleadership proponents (such as Rock, 2008; Street, 2011) fit very well with my own experience of goal pursuit. In a recent workshop in Timaru I introduced school leaders to my own adaptation of two neuroleadership models – SCARF (Street, 2011) and AIM (Berkman & Rock, 2012) – that indicate elements enhancing conditions for focus and success in goal pursuit. My interpretation of these elements is summarised on the left side of Table 1 and you will notice that there are some overlaps between elements. On the right side of the table I have outlined the way that School A implemented strategies matching the elements in the two models.
ursuit in Schools!
Table 1: Neuroleadership Models and School A Strategy Match Neuroleadership Element
Strategy Match in Goal Pursuit for All Students, Teachers and Leaders in School A
SCARF Status (goals should create learning and improvement; positive feedback given)
Learning, development, focus in all goals. Public display of student goals. Continual discussion of progress with student-parents, teachers-leaders.
Certainty (clear planning; incremental steps)
Goal setting and achievement itself was a demonstration of certainty. Goal pursuit model had clear planning, action and outcome steps in distinct phases in the Focused Action Research model.
Autonomy (goal pursuer in the driver seat; ownership, not imposition of goals)
Establishing the plan and phases for goal pursuit was controlled primarily by the person who set the goal whether student, teacher or leader.
Relatedness (collaborative, supportive, sharing ethos; lowering of defensiveness and enhancing dialogue)
Approach for authentic collaboration and lowered defensiveness modelled by Principal A and then mirrored in leader, teacher, parent/caregiver and student interactions.
Fairness (increasing transparency, openness; clarity around expectations of achievement)
Both ‘Relatedness’ and ‘Fairness’ were evidenced in non-defensive, transparent, and open interactions as well as clarity in deep planning.
AIM Antecedents (create stickiness, motivation, enhance social context)
Goals were visible – student goals were hanging up in all classrooms and therefore tangible, memorable. Gain-framed goals were set for all goal pursuers. Students, caregivers, teachers, team leaders and Principal A all engaged collaboratively in dialogue about goals.
Integration (knowing and articulating ‘why’ you are setting a goal and ‘how’ you will achieve it. Including implementation intentions and knowledge of obstacles and ways to overcome those, is essential.
‘Why’ and ‘how’ elements were made evident in deep plans for goals. Clear actions and outcomes were shown in plans. Honesty about obstacles and intentions was encouraged in dialogue sessions. Data/evidence on progress was collected to indicate areas for further improvement.
Managing Rewards and Anticipation (create goal habit formation. The brain loves to anticipate and ‘predict’ receiving rewards. Habits are formed through small victories and resulting rewards) (Elements adapted from Berkman & Rock, 2012; Street, 2010).
Occurred with the action and outcome steps in deep action plans making achievement visible, the sharing of success continuously encouraged during varied dialogue settings, the rewards made explicit in the evaluation phase of the goal pursuit model; and the goal pursuit model implemented in an aligned way throughout the school.
School A is only one of many schools in NZ implementing goal pursuit that creates depth in improvement, lift in performance and doing this in an authentically collaborative way. Such schools have made goal pursuit real and compelling at a personal and organisational level!
References Berkman, E. & Rock, D. (2012). Focus your AIM: A social cognitive neuroscience model for goal pursuit. 2012 Neuroleadership Summit Highlights. http://blog.neuroleadership. org/2012_11_01_archive.html Conzemius, A., & O’Neill, J. (2006). Building shared responsibility for student learning. Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Louie, K., & Glimcher, P.W. (2012). Efficient coding and the neural representation of value. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1251, 13–32. Issue: The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience. doi: 10.1111/j.1749–6632.2012.06496.x Miller, G. (2008). Growing pains for fMRI. SCIENCE, 320, 1412–1414. www.sciencemag.org Ochsner, K.N., Bunge, S.A., Gross, J.J., & Gabrieli, J.D.E. (2002). Rethinking feelings: An fMRI Study of the cognitive regulation of emotion. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14(8), 1215–1229. Piggot-Irvine, E. (2015). Goal pursuit in education using focused action research. New York: Palgrave McMillan. ISBN 9781137505125 Rock, D. (2008). SCARF: a brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others. NeuroLeadership Journal, 1, 44–52. Street, C. (2010). Application of neuroscience in executive team coaching: The WSR Case. NeuroLeadership Journal, 3, 64–77.
Locke, E.A., & Latham, G.P. (2013). New developments in goal setting and task performance. New York: Routledge.