Source: Adapted from Principal Life, n.d.
Figure I.1: Deep-end challenges in schools.
Deep-End Opportunities
If we are asking our colleagues to up their game and stretch themselves, then we also need to get into the deep end more often. One simple way I keep pushing myself to the deep end, at least in my mind, is by subscribing to blogs by people who inspire, but also slightly scare me. These writers are bruised by life but also emboldened and confident. They have successfully taken on a deep-end challenge or other difficult experience and gone on to support others who want to swim in the deep end too. They write, speak, facilitate, and create communities of like-minded folks. When I get invitations to join them in their deep ends, sometimes the time or monetary commitment required prohibits me from doing so, but honestly, in most cases, I am just too scared. I don’t yet have the emotional bandwidth to swim with these folks. Yet is the operative word here.
Here are a few of the experiences for which I have yet to jump into the deep end and join.
• altMBA (https://altmba.com): Bestselling author Seth Godin (Tribes, Purple Cow, What to Do When It’s Your Turn) facilitates an intense four-week online leadership and management workshop with participants from around the world all learning about how to create businesses that have a global impact.
• Open Master’s Alt*Div (www.openmasters.org/altdiv): In this self-directed learning program, each member designs his or her own learning journey for the year. The members of this program, who might have thought about going to divinity school or into counseling, work in community with other Alt*Div students to create a product or a program to support the spiritual and emotional growth of the globe.
• Warriors of the Spirit (http://margaretwheatley.com): Margaret J. Wheatley, of Leadership and the New Science fame in the 1990s, offers a year-long training experience to strengthen participants’ ability to be in “dedicated service to the human spirit.”
Alas, the “shoulda couldas” don’t help. The good news is that deep-end opportunities show up daily, if we want to accept them. In your work, they are going to show up every day as well.
Looking back, I did participate in events that took me to what was then my deep end of the pool. I joined in a year-long set of Courage to Teach retreats, which are based on Parker J. Palmer’s (1998) book The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (www.couragerenewal.org). We explored the heart of a teacher through personal stories, reflections on classroom practice, and insights from poets and storytellers. I remember the afternoons in which we were to be in solitude. As an extrovert, asked to not interact with anyone but myself, those three-hour containers of silent time used to challenge me. Now I cherish my silence. Deep ends are different for each of us and change for us as we grow and develop.
One of my best deep-end experiences was at one of my favorite places in the world, Esalen Institute, a retreat center and learning environment on the Pacific coast in Big Sur, California, that, according to its website, is “devoted to cultivating deep change in self and society” (see www.esalen.org). I once spent a weekend there at a workshop led by teacher Sam Keen (2016), one of my cognitive crushes. In this workshop called What’s Next? Reviewing and Revisioning Our Lives, those in attendance considered the following questions (see https://bit.ly/2QfdWEB).
• Where are you on your journey?
• What have you accomplished?
• What hasn’t happened yet?
• What do you need to leave behind?
• For what, or for whom, are you grateful?
• What will your legacy will be?
• How will you fulfill the gift of your life?
• What decisions do you want to make?
I was afraid for three years of attending this workshop. Would I have to leave someone behind? What would I have to do next that freaked me out? I ultimately did leave a school district, and a beau, behind. And I am still standing. Deep end, what’s next?
There are many books we can turn to that will help us with the deep ends in our personal lives. The self-help corner of the local bookstore is full of them. This particular book is about the professional deep-end work we do in schools: the projects we undertake, the initiatives we are tasked to move forward with, the teams we are in charge of. What I hope this book will do is support you in seeing what the deep-end skills, capacities, and mindsets look like for you in your context, with your work as an ever-learning education leader—someone who is growing his or her leadership skills to be effective within your school or organization, no matter your role. If you are looking for some strategies to stay afloat in the deep end, dive on in.
The Four Foundational Deep-End Skills
The Institute for Education Leadership (2013) in Ontario, Canada, outlines specific personal leadership resources undergirding a set of education leadership capacities for administrators in their province, as follows.
• Cognitive resources
• Problem-solving expertise
• Understanding and interpreting problems
• Identifying goals
• Articulating principles and values
• Identifying constraints
• Developing solution processes
• Maintaining calm and confidence in the face of challenging problems
• Knowledge about school and classroom conditions with direct effects on student learning
• Technical or rational conditions
• Emotional conditions
• Organizational conditions
• Family conditions
• Systems thinking
• Being able to understand the dense, complex, and reciprocal connections among different elements of the organization
• Having foresight to engage the organization in likely futures and consequences for action
• Social resources
• The ability to perceive emotions
• Recognizing our own emotional responses
• Discerning emotional responses in others through verbal and nonverbal cues
• The ability to manage emotions
• Reflecting on our own emotional responses and their potential consequences
• Persuading others to likewise reflect on their responses
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