Friends and colleagues,

My family and I love the cartoon series Bluey. There’s one episode where Dad takes the kids swimming; he brings the fun swim toys but forgets all the practical things they need. They start off delighting in the spontaneous, care-free spirit but then realize that the outing is a lot less fun without all the things they forgot. Mom saves the day by showing up with sunscreen, towels, snacks, and the mantra: “Boring is important.” 

At least five times a week, my six-year-old grumbles, “this is boring,” about any number of chore-like, repetitive, practical tasks that come with life. My husband—who has always been the one to bring the sunscreen in our family—now chirps back with glee, “boring is important!”

I have thought about this mantra a lot this month: personally, for leaders, and for our sector. 

Personally, like many others at the start of a new year, I am trying to bring some new discipline to what feel like important, but boring, routines that matter to my long-term goals. I am trying to do my physical therapy exercises completely and set and stick to one clearly defined priority each week. I find myself telling the contrarian voice in my head that has other ideas about how I should spend my time—often involving reacting to email or checking the news or social media—“shush: boring is important.” 

As I talk to school, system, and state leaders, I have been thinking about how hard it is to make time for what can feel like boring, repetitive instructional practices. Our team is doing a study to look at the different ways that districts and schools think about and distribute instructional roles and responsibilities. In interviews, as I hear leaders describe the pulls on their time, I remember again the crushing volume, range, and urgency of the work of running schools and school systems. And—amidst all those pulls—how boring and out-of-step the deeper instructional duties can feel. 

And yet, we know that disciplined execution of boring practices in schools is quite important. I recently asked the instructional leader of a school that had remarkable growth over the last three years what she thinks drove that growth. She said that a big driver of their gains was following through on a coaching regimen that nobody wanted to do, even while they were doing it. They committed that every single teacher would get feedback from one of the school leaders every single week—and that the leaders would thoroughly prepare for each session. They committed that the weekly feedback would be the last thing they would compromise on the list of competing priorities. She convinced everyone to give it a go, and she fought—over and over again—using every bit of formal and informal power she could muster, at real cost to her popularity in the school community, to keep everyone committed to following through. The constant grinding—and the constant fight to keep everyone focused on this grind—was relentless. Only in retrospect, seeing the impact, does the leadership team think this was a good idea. And, even seeing the outcomes, it still feels like a fight to stick to the discipline. 

If “boring is important” is a rare mantra in schools, it is even rarer in education debates and news. In the biggest reform efforts of the last twenty years—standards-based instruction, intervention systems, teacher evaluation, new standards, high-quality instructional materials—post-hoc analysis always concludes: “implementation quality mattered.” But the front-end discussions, in policy spaces and in the representation to the public, rarely focus real attention on what implementation quality requires—especially for leaders who have to lead it. Right now, science of reading coverage leans more toward coverage of policies and program developments than coverage of the ways leaders are adjusting their feedback for teachers or how to modify weekly PLC protocols to support implementation of new curriculum, let alone what expectations we want to take off of leaders' plates to give them the time they need to focus on these routines. I understand why this does not feel newsworthy: it feels boring and inside baseball. 

However, I am convinced that if we want to see real change in outcomes for students, we have to not only talk about but really obsess over the details of practices that can feel quite incremental and boring—especially with the leaders who are in a position to make those practices happen. And we have to be prepared to focus on these things for long periods of time. Like every hard problem we face, there needs to be space for big, transformational ideas—but the vast majority of progress is likely to come from helping leaders make incremental improvement to the systems we have. When I look at the topics covered in a master’s of education policy, the headline recaps for the year, and the agendas for education conferences, I worry our ratios of focus vastly undervalue the boring, incremental moves that may be our best hope for better outcomes. 

I predicted in December that this year will have plenty of novel, interesting, and urgent things that can and, at times, will have to command our attention. This will be a hard year to make the boring more important. And we all have a lot to learn about what it takes to follow through on strengthening discipline. I don’t know how to hack my competing mental frames and faithfully make myself follow through on finishing my boring but important knee exercises. I certainly don’t know how to overhaul the systems that create competing conditions and focus. But, I do know that many of the things we can do this year to meaningfully improve support for teachers and students will feel boring. And if we want the outcomes—we will have to work through, not around, that effort. 

One step at a time, together,

Emily