Specifically, Swimming in the Deep End focuses on knowing and understanding the challenges inherent in different initiatives so that our initiatives can make a difference. It also focuses on the importance of knowing one’s own and others’ values and paying attention to what schools and districts value as we implement important initiatives to bring about change and betterment. Throughout the book, Abrams offers many different kinds of learning lenses to help us understand these challenges and ourselves, so that we can more comfortably and confidently swim in the deep end as individuals and as a profession. The deep end, she wisely asserts, offers opportunities for us to grow and to help each other grow.
Not only does Abrams invite us to swim in the deep end and highlight the value of doing so, but she also shares courageously and powerfully some of the kinds of experiences we might consider—she calls these deep-end opportunities—that help us challenge and stretch ourselves and do the same for those in our care. Throughout her book, Abrams integrates and weaves together a tapestry of guiding questions, practices, and reflective questions that can help us to engage in four qualitatively different yet intimately connected foundational deep end skills that are linked to specific and vital internal capacities for leading successful school and system initiatives:
1. Thinking before we speak
2. Preempting resistance
3. Responding to resistance (for when we do speak)
4. Managing ourselves through change and resistance (after we speak) (p. 8)
Early on and throughout the book, Abrams reminds us that these are not only skills a person needs in and for the deep end, but also skills that will help each of us grow into fuller, more complete, and more effective versions of ourselves as leaders. This kind of stretching takes courage, Abrams notes, and her background as coach extraordinaire shines through especially clearly in the ideas, questions, and practices she offers to scaffold and support courageous change.
For example, as I read and reflected on the powerful chapters in Abrams’s book, I was—and continue to be—reminded of Rainer Maria Rilke’s (1993) thinking about questions:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. (p. 34)
Managing this—learning to live the questions—requires the internal capacity to manage complexity and ambiguity. Abrams’s book helps us grow ourselves and in so doing it will help us support growth of others as well.
Abrams also reminds us of the critical significance of strong emotional, academic, and instructional supports—and how all of these are necessary for students and adults to lead and grow in schools and systems. Toward these ends, Abrams powerfully highlights that we don’t have to swim in the deep end alone. We need each other. We need each other to trust and be trusting. We need each other to build trust where trust has been broken. We need each other to become better communicators. We need each other to see deeper into ourselves and each other. Like mirrors or windows that reflect back new possibilities, trusted coaches, guides, and resources like this book can remind us of the power we have to transform ourselves and our systems, as well as the beauty and importance of pausing—whether it’s pausing to care for ourselves, care for others, smile, laugh, seek input, reflect on next steps, restore, or notice life every day.
For these reasons and more, Abrams’s words will reach right inside your heart, mind, and soul: “I want my colleagues, worldwide, to thrive,” she writes—on the first page of the book’s introduction (p. 1). This hope, motivation, and intention lives throughout the pages of this book. She shows us how to build a better world together with hope and love. And, like change, this is a book that requires time and considered reflection. I encourage you, with all my heart, to invest your time and care into learning from Abrams and her wisdom. It will be a cherished gift you give yourself.
Introduction
I am interested in people who swim in the deep end.
—Amy Poehler
When I turned forty-eight, I began feeling older. Like I wanted to take everyone’s face into my hands and kiss his or her cheeks. Like I wanted to come over to the tables of participants at my workshops, lean over, and hug all of those who were doing the good day-to-day work in their schools. I was becoming maternal. Maybe not maternal; maybe more like a big sister. Everyone’s protective big sister. After twenty-eight years in education, I was older than many who attended my workshops. I talked to my friend Barbara about my protective feelings, and she smiled with understanding and told me I was “eldering.” Not becoming an elder per se, but eldering. I was and am, thank goodness, not just getting older but, I believe, also getting wiser. I am growing out of the ego-driven state of mind of my thirties and forties, and I have more firmly embraced the big-sister role. I want my colleagues, worldwide, to thrive. I want my fellow educators to proudly and effectively meet the challenges that education serves up to them each and every day. And, along with being the protective big sister, I am becoming a bit of the nagging and nudgy big sister as well. I want more for my colleagues and from my colleagues. I want us all to be able to swim in the deep end of the pool and to be around others who do the same.
The Deep End
What do I mean by swimming in the deep end? Well, at a young age, I attended swimming lessons at the nearby Howard Johnson hotel. At the beginning, we students sat at the edge of the pool. Then after a bit, we sat on the steps of the pool with our tushies and legs in the water, and we bent down to put our chins in the water and we blew bubbles. Then, in the next lesson we walked in up to our knees. Then stood in the shallow end with the water all the way up to our necks. Then our heads went below water! Soon we were treading water. Step by step, we were learning to swim but were always able to touch the bottom.
The day I remember vividly was when our swimming teacher Mr. Patton said it was time to swim under water all the way to the other side. To the deep end. I remember being incredibly nervous, but when I did it, I was thrilled. I had pushed myself. I found the strength and the ability and the discipline to hold my breath, pump my arms and legs and swim to the deep end. Fifty or so years later, and with decades of new teacher coaching under my belt, I have been there “blowing bubbles” with new teachers as they developed and honed their skills in the classroom. I have also worked with more experienced teachers as they pushed themselves in their careers, creating portfolios of their work and obtaining advanced credentials. I have coached teachers and administrators from their shallow ends to their deep ends, whatever that means to them. Teaching their own classes or leading schools are some of the ways educators swim without the safety net of being able to touch the bottom, but getting there sometimes requires guidance. As a coach and consultant, I have always tried to be like Mr. Patton, a guide on the side. It has been an honor.
Now, with the increased challenges that we face in education (see figure I.1 for an extensive list compiled from the Principal Life [n.d.] Facebook group) and a shortage of teachers and administrators, the field cannot afford to stay in the shallow end by continuing such practices as using sit and get instructional strategies or grouping students in the same ways we have for decades, to name just a few. From literacy strategies to whole-school