Creating the Opportunity to Grow

After I wrote about fractals last week, I found myself back in a book that’s sat on my shelf since my superintendent days: Creating the Opportunity to Learn, by A. Wade Boykin and Pedro Noguera. It’s written for educators, aimed squarely at closing the achievement gap. But today, re-reading it with a leadership lens, I kept underlining sentences and writing “leaders too” in the margin.

Here’s the idea that stopped me. Boykin and Noguera argue that achievement patterns tracking with race and class shouldn’t be waved away as differences in effort or ability. In fact, they’re evidence that the conditions for learning weren’t equally created, even when access technically was. Equity, they write, involves more than ensuring everyone has equal access to education. It also requires a focus on outcomes and results. In other words: if the gap persists, the answer isn’t “we gave them the same opportunity.”

That distinction landed hard, because I’ve watched leaders make the exact same mistake, myself included. We provide a stretch assignment. We say “my door is always open.” And then, when someone doesn’t grow the way we hoped, we quietly conclude it’s on them; they didn’t take the opportunity we gave them. Boykin and Noguera would say we’re confusing access with opportunity.

Real opportunity to learn isn’t offered. It’s constructed. So, what does that actually look like? Their framework has a few pieces I think map onto leadership almost exactly.

They talk about engagement and motivation as something the adult in the room is responsible for shaping, not just a trait some students walk in with and others don’t. As a leader, that means engagement on your team isn’t a personality issue to sort people by. It’s a condition you’re accountable for building.

They also name three specific “guiding functions”: self-efficacy, self-regulated learning, and incremental beliefs about intelligence. Translated for a team, that’s whether someone actually believes they’re capable of the hard thing in front of them, whether they can plan and monitor their own growth instead of waiting for you to steer every step, and whether they see their own ability as something that expands with effort or as fixed the day you hired them. For a leader, that’s the real work behind “creating an opportunity”; making sure those three beliefs are solid enough to carry someone through the hard project, before you ever hand it to them.

The piece that stuck with me most, though, is what they call asset-focused factors; interpersonal relationships, intersubjectivity, and information-processing quality. Interpersonal relationships is the trust layer; most of us already know this one instinctively, even if we may alternatively call it psychological safety. Intersubjectivity is the one leaders skip most often. It’s whether you’ve actually built a shared understanding of how the other person sees the work which is not simply transmitting your own frame and assuming it lands the way you mean it. And information-processing quality isn’t about how much feedback you give someone. It’s whether that feedback arrives in a form they can actually use such as with the right timing, the right level of detail, and is delivered in a way that fits how they take in information, not just how you prefer to give it.

I think about the leaders I coached during my superintendent years through this lens now. When people grew the fastest it wasn’t necessarily about handing out the most opportunities. It had more to do with if I’d built all three of these conditions - trust, shared understanding, and feedback that actually landed - before I handed anyone anything hard to do. This is also where the fractal pattern from a few weeks ago shows back up. Left unexamined, most of us create opportunity the way we were taught to learn; i.e.  if directness worked for you, you hand out directness; if independence worked for you, you hand out independence. That’s a fine approach for the people who learn the way you do, and quietly closes the door for everyone else. Creating real opportunity to learn means noticing that default pattern and deliberately building more than one path into it, the same way Boykin and Noguera ask a school to look past “we offered the same curriculum to everyone” and ask whether the conditions around that curriculum were actually equal too.

So, here’s the question I’m sitting with, and passing along to you: on your team right now, who has access to opportunity, and who actually has the conditions to make use of it? Those aren’t always the same list. Closing that gap -  not the access gap, the conditions gap -  might be the most courageous leadership work there is.