I honestly don’t think I’ve gone a day without reading for pleasure since that moment in September of first grade when I asked my teacher, Miss Witzigrueter (it took us a week to learn how to say her name), what s-i-t spelled and the magical world of books opened up for me. I remember field trips to the fossil beds by the Mississippi and experimenting with mystery powders (flour, sugar, and baking soda) in science class. I remember pick-up games of kickball at recess and playing in the band and learning to make pie crust and figuring out a tough geometry proof while sprawled out on the floor in front of the television.
Of course, not every moment was pleasant. I also remember cringing when teachers weren’t fair. I can still see little Susie crying when two girls told her they wouldn’t play with her anymore. My stomach flips when I recall getting in trouble for—well, let’s let that stay a secret!
I hope you noted that my memories are a mix of academics and all the other things that make up a school day. Do you remember how your whole self came to school and not just your brain? Do you remember how it felt to try to sit still when you could hear the birds singing outside, or how much easier it was to dig into a tough assignment for a teacher who had somehow shown you respect than, for example, the eighth-grade teacher who told me I positively lacked any talent for writing?
Remembering what it is like to be a child (and a student) is as important to education decisions as other data in deciding what our schools should be like—remember, memories are a form of empirical data.
“I don’t remember at all,” some educators tell me. I refrain from retorting that it shows in their unrealistic expectations of six-year-olds, and instead say, “I do. I loved learning, but I couldn’t sit still for more than thirty minutes at a stretch. In middle school, my favorite classes were band and cooking, not mathematics or English—and I’m an English major with an MBA in finance!”
Or, I might relay the story of an eleven-year-old I was tutoring for mathematics. When I started to fill out her hall pass, she said she was headed to tutoring for reading. That meant she had six straight hours of academic courses in her day.
“Wow, that’s a tough schedule,” I said.
“Yeah, I don’t get to do anything fun. Not even Spanish,” she mourned.
Would you, like me, have lost a love of school in that kind of environment? If you can’t remember, spend some time reflecting on any artifacts you have—report cards, class pictures, programs from assemblies, yearbooks, and so on. What might jar your memory and help you think like a child? Doing so doesn’t mean you’re putting students in charge of things they’re too immature to grasp but rather that you’re including the natural knee-jerk reactions, needs, aspirations, feelings, and frustrations of those for whom schools exist. You aren’t letting go of adult wisdom but are instead moving toward and-based thinking—how adult and child mindsets can work together to inform decisions and planning.
Holistically leading thriving schools isn’t just about adding social-emotional learning for students to an already-packed curriculum. Instead, it means recognizing:
♦ One’s own ongoing need for development; most experts recognize at least five stages of adult development (Berger, 2012) and believe that few adults reach the top two stages (think of that education leader you seek out for wisdom and advice).
♦ The need to be constantly on the lookout for one’s own biases and blind spots, understanding that every strength comes with a blind spot and, when overdone, becomes a weakness
♦ The value of power with—leading collaboratively to multiply what can be accomplished—and power to—leading others toward a vision worthy of the students in your charge (McFarland, 2006)
♦ That if we over-focus on academics, students’ other needs go unmet; holistic leaders know the value of learning to look in two directions at the same time.
The era of standardized testing that the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) ushered in is an example of looking in just one direction—of implementing a solution in a system and seeing a dozen other problems pop up as unintended consequences. The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) worked to call attention to this one-way thinking by launching its Whole Child Initiative in 2007, stating, “Each child, in each school, in each of our communities deserves to be healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. That’s what a whole-child approach to learning, teaching, and community engagement really is” (ASCD, 2014, p. 9).
But leading a whole-child school, one that truly embraces meeting these varied needs, means you’re constantly making trade-offs, doesn’t it? Time for academics or time for recess and responsive classrooms and antibullying initiatives and extra tutoring and … the list goes on. Add in the efficiencies of top-down leadership versus the richness of shared leadership, the need for teachers to do the work and prepare to do the work, the role of the school and the role of families and communities … the lists of these interdependencies go on and on, too, don’t they?
Again, you’re leading a complex system in a VUCA world.
About This Book
If you’re looking for a practical guide to school leadership, this is it. But you may not recognize it as such right away because it doesn’t have a definitive list of what you need to do to succeed. Why not? Because lists are linear, and you aren’t leading a linear organization.
Instead of a list of characteristics or responsibilities or essential tasks—although I mention many of these in this book—I’m offering tools for identifying where you should focus given who you are, who you are leading, and what you are trying to accomplish, all within a framework that helps you see when competing priorities are at play. It’s a framework that will help you set aside the human tendency to think in terms of either–or and instead embrace the necessity of both–and thinking in which you can recognize the tension between two competing, yet interdependent, priorities and understand how to benefit from the valuable contributions of both.
This book is designed around twelve such interdependencies, or as I call them, the Twelve Lenses of Leadership, to help you identify when you’re at risk of engaging in either–or thinking instead of both–and thinking. The following are the lenses you will learn about.
1. Leadership and listening
2. Breadth and depth
3. Community and individual
4. Reality and vision
5. Continuity and change
6. Short term and long term
7. Logic and values
8. Outcomes and people
9. Power to and power with
10. Clarity and flexibility
11. Predictability and possibility
12. Goal orientation and engagement
Each of these lenses comes from research on effective leaders (Coyle, 2018; Kouzes & Pozner, 2010), but recognize that choosing one lens to focus on still requires you to be savvy about how it intertwines with other lenses. Priorities inherent in each lens are interdependent with things that might not even seem important in the moment but will come to be so.
With this book, I will help you to recognize how to engage both–and thinking to accomplish the following.
♦ Improve your ability to create an environment where collaborative teacher efficacy exists in an atmosphere of trust—the number-one predictor of student achievement (DeWitt, 2017).
♦ Hone your skills at inspiring and empowering others