These days, of course, in places like Boston, teachers don't kids. Of, if they do, they face enormous trouble. I joke with my friends that as a teacher with tenure in a large urban district, I can teach miserably for years and years and comfortably keep my job, but that if I touch a kid, I'm out. And for good reason. The recent history of corporal punishment in schools has been ugly. Jonathan Kozol, in Savage Inequalities, exposed the brutality of the disipline as practiced in the Boston Public Schools over 40 years ago in his landmark work, Death at an Early Age. Just this year, I've read that in regions of the United States where teachers can still hit children, the discipline is applied with some disturbing patterns of injustice. Black students and those with special education needs are hit disproportionately, and parental release forms and mandatory parental notification policies are routinely ignored. So that's not a great track record in the whole kid-hitting direction.
What's funny is that when I talk about this issue with friends outside of publication, they speak with more ambivalence about the issue, as if they admit that teachers shouldn't be allowed to physically discipline children but that they must secretly - or maybe somewhat less secretly - wish they could. Two friends I spoke with this week wistfully recalled their own days in elementary school - on in Massachusetts Catholic schools and one in Texas public schools - when they and their friends were routinely smacked or paddled by teachers when they got into trouble.
I wonder how many of my colleagues, if you caught them in a totally honest or even mildly inebriated moment, would confess to the desire to smack, spank, or whack a misbehaving student now and then. I suspect that many wouldn't want that responsibility or would oppose it on other grounds, but I also know quite a few that wish they had this weapon in their arsenal. I use the military metaphor with intention because many insiders and outsiders to public education see many students as unruly and irresponsible by nature, in need of regular, strict, and severe correction and training to stay in line. Many view our poorer and darker-skinned students in particular in this light. Even if teachers can't or shouldn't hit kids, perhaps they should correct, discipline, and manage through stern authority-based methods. You see this assumption in the teacher that yells at her kids, in the hulk of a vice principal who walks the halls with seriousness, in the lining up and shutting up that so many of our young children are subjected to.
I, on the other hand, don't see the young men and women I teach and lead as primarily unruly, difficult, tough, or wayward, and I certainly don't see one of my main goals as "keeping them in line." I want them to find paths to success and achievement in their lives and for them to participate in making good decisions about their own habits and behaviors.
I'm really grateful that my school has a philosophy of management and discipline that is less authoritarian and yet more effective in reaching my goals. We practice cooperative discipline, so named because teachers cooperate with students, parents, and other partners as necessary to help students make good choices about their habits and behaviors. This philosophy believes that people thrive when they feel they are capable, connected, and contributing, and they tend to behave poorly when they feel a need for attention, power, or revenge, or when they are afraid of failing. My goal in praciting cooperative discipline with students is to figure out, when students misbehave, why they are acting that way and how I can help them connect, contribute, or feel more capable. The goal is to present students with natural consequences of their own behavior and to help them understand the choices they have in every situation. For, as the film Spiderman II reminded us, we always have a choice.
I did some brief training around this philosophy and practice with the staff at my school yesterday and came away grateful for the options it gives us in dealing with students who act in ways that hurt a classroom learning environment. So many of our defaults for dealing with these behaviors as teachers, or as humans really, are either bitter or authoritarian or both, and they neither help the student nor make us feel good about ourselves. We yell at kids or fill out reports without any personal follow-up, both of which undermine relationships and accomplish nothing. Or we gripe about students to our colleagues or lower students' grades, both of which are petty, and again, accomplish nothing. Or we go as far as to call home, but only notify parents of a problem or even complain about their child, rather than trying to build a relationship where all parties can look out for the young person's best interests and success.
Cooperative discipline encourages us to think of alternatives: to get to know a student, to find ways to include him or her in the life of the classroom, to always think through the consequences and alternatives to a student's behaviors and try to present those thoughtfully to that student.
I don't think many people get into education because they want to control, abuse, or otherwise boss around young people. Well, on second thought, there may be more than a few of those types around. But I believe that most enter the work to help young people succeed and thrive, and to have a good time doing it. Cooperative discipline is a great tool toward both of those goals. And even for those professionals who may have entered the game for other reasons, it's a chance for them to retool their game and find healthier ways of navigating their professional frustrations.
Yelling at kids or complaining about them or even, God forbid, hitting them, doesn't seem to do that so well.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
We Want You to be Heroes
Below is the text of a talk I gave at last Thursday's closing celebration for the Crimson Summer Academy. I was the faculty speaker for the event, held in the majestic Sanders Theater at Harvard University. I post the talk here because it gave me a chance to reflect on my most profound goals for my own involvement in urban education.
I've sometimes felt ambivalent about my worth with educating poor youth. Is my goal simply to allow them to access middle class America? In some ways, yes. At its best, public education has been a means to class mobility in this society and it should be. All young people should have a wide array of options for their future, and those options should include jobs and lifestyles we associate with the middle class and above. If that's the outcome of my work with students, then fine.
In the end, though, I want to teach and lead so that my students don't just have options, but have the inclination to use those options in certain ways. One of the very simple prayers that I pray for my own children virtually every day is that as they grow up, they'll feel they have something significant to give the world. I think that's a part of healthy development, to know that you have something to make the world a better place and to have the power and inclination to do that. Shouldn't education help enable this reality?
Here's the talk. Dave Schmelzer is the friend who shared the insight about heroic journeys, one he also writes about in his fun spiritual memoir, Not the Religious Type.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greetings, scholars, family and friends, faculty and staff, all of those in the Harvard community, distinguished guests. What a pleasure it is to be here, tonight – to bear witness to such talent and style. What a pleasure it’s been to teach writing at CSA these past three years – to bear witness to such beauty, such giftedness, such drive. No, I’m not talking about Maxine again, but this whole community, and specifically, you scholars. When people ask me what I do with my summers, I ask them how much time they have to listen because I just can’t stop talking about the marvelous people in this community. So thank you all, for including me as a fellow scholar, a fellow citizen.
In writing class, we improve our craft, of course, but as we do so, we explore. We explore what we see – finding images to capture the beauty of a photograph, or giving expression to the irony found in a painting. We explore what we read – analyzing characters and influences upon authors and discovering what old writers say to us today. And we explore ourselves: our identities, our communities, all the tributaries that have flowed into the rivers that are our lives. We explore.
So, in the spirit of exploration, I’d like to explore you for just a minute, if you’d permit me, to explore our goals for you as scholars and citizens, to explore with all of those who are gathered here and who stand behind you in pushing and supporting you to the successes that lie before you, ready for you to walk into them.
When we see you, we do indeed see scholars.
We see teenagers that can, given a week, tackle early understandings of evolutionary psychology and argue for their connection to the work of a Victorian novelist, in a week. We work with fifteen-year-olds that, given a day, can write sentences like, “Lights emanate from the boat, faintly, but visible in the night sky.” Or there's this one: “The Crucible, written by Arthur Miller, was subject to slander and calumnious accusations in the 1950’s.” Calumnious: it is a word, I looked it up, but certainly not one that I used as a teenager.
You are no lights emanating faintly, but bright stars blazing your path through our doors.
Now not all of you write like that, but you’re more than just writers. You are mathematicians, actors, scientists, filmmakers, readers, dancers, debaters, scholars. And in the months and years to come, we want you to explore all that that means. Go back to your high schools in Cambridge and Boston, go back, and thrive, show those schools your best, and then leave us, go to Smith, go to Tufts, go to Syracuse, go to Bowdoin, go to Columbia, go to Regis, come back to Harvard. Go to your college, whichever one it is, and thrive. Shine, and be the best scholars you can be.
You have our support and our blessing. And by that, I mean not just those of at CSA, much as we adore you, but even more, from those behind you, those supporters of your that are here tonight and those who aren’t here tonight as well because they work, because they speak a different language, because they are otherwise detained.
Family and friends that are here tonight, these remarkable young people so need our support and encouragement, don’t they? Our patience when they yell at us just because they’re stressed about their next test? Our flexibility when their commitments seem tiresome? Our love and affirmation when they seem weary? Scholars, we want so much for you, but you have our support.
We want you to be scholars. But that’s not enough. As much as an achievement as it would be, our dreams for you are more than that you should be educated, wealthier, and secure. Your best dreams for yourselves are more than that as well, I’d suggest.
We want you to be more than scholars, we want you to be heroes.
Scholars of literature, of stories, see in so many of the best of our stories, a heroic journey that I invite you to tonight. The heroic journey starts off with a reluctant hero, one who live sin what seems like a small, ordinary world. But quickly, this small person is thrust out by a herald into some sort of cosmic battle of enormous stakes. Our herald says, “Oh, you hero, the world is wide and the stakes are large. Go and save!”
The hero then goes out on his quests, launches on her journey, and struggles immensely, meeting trials beyond their wildest dreams, until these trials often even come to a point of some enormous loss or death. But then, at their lowest point, our heroes triumph against great odds and find power and tools to come back home and better their environment, saving the world in some sense.
You see this story played out in one form or another in tales and myths all around the world. A friend of mine suggests that we see that because these stories a template of the very best that we could imagine our lives becoming, the heroic journey waiting for each of us who will step out of our small worlds and embrace the invitation.
You, scholars, have, of course already stepped out of your small worlds of East Cambridge, Dorchester, South Boston, Roxbury, Chinatown, Inman Square and all the other places you call home. You’ve stepped across the river, or across the street as it may be, but for many of you, this journey to Harvard has been a crossing of what seems like an ocean of differences. But it’s just the start of your journey.
The Crimson Summer Academy, with me as its voice tonight I suppose, stands a herald, calling you to go farther, and to accept a calling to be the heroes that save our world.
Now some of you are thinking, “Heroes? You’re kidding! This man’s been watching too much Batman the Dark Knight lately or hanging out with his little boys and their Superman Underoos. We’re not perfect, we’re not super-powered. We may be scholars, but we’re no heroes.”
And there you’re wrong. Because there are no perfect heroes. Sophomore scholars and I have crossed the path of a number of individuals who Americans consider great heroes: John F. Kennedy, Jr.: perhaps heroic in his charismatic leadership of a nation through trying times. Henry David Thoreau: perhaps heroic in his influence on so many people, so many young people to resist that which is unjust and to live simply and live well. Even John Proctor of old Salem: heroic in his principled unwillingness to join the witch hunt of his age, and heroic in his conviction to hold onto his honor and his name.
And yet we encountered these men too, didn’t we, as a president slow to action for justice and regularly making enormous blunders, as a hermit who spent two years in the woods and a night in jail and little else it would seem, as a philanderer, a self-protective man who cheated on his wife and first cowered before the authorities, afraid to tell the truth.
Flawed heroes – those with blind spots, character deficits, outright foolishness at times, are the only kind we have, but we need more of them.
We need you to, scholars, to be citizens, to be members of our world who make it better. We need you to lead criminally decrepit schools down paths of renewal. We need you to advance new treatments for the diseases the kill our friends and relatives. We need you to govern nations that don’t think through their actions and war foolishly, killing thousands. We need you to change the landscape of our cities, where is poverty or crime or just despair. We need you to stay at your colleges you attend and help them found more programs like Crimson Summer Academy, so we can send yet more heroes off into the world. We need you to not just emanate faintly with your gifts and beauty but to burn like torches in our shadowed world.
And you need this, for yourself. To be full is not just to be a scholar – to develop your mind and achieve a career and a paycheck and their benefits. To be full is also to be a hero, to play your part in making one spot of our earth more just, more beautiful, more fruitful.
As a father, I want to see my children outstrip me in my joy and my achievements. Friends, family, gathered guests, we want this for these scholars, don’t we, to see them surpass what we have been able to do?
Scholars, as you write the pages of your own life, be scholars indeed, but aspire to even greater heights. Be heroes!
Congratulations on your summer, scholars. You’ve been absolutely marvelous. And may you feel encouragement and power tonight as you march on toward your heroic journey!
I've sometimes felt ambivalent about my worth with educating poor youth. Is my goal simply to allow them to access middle class America? In some ways, yes. At its best, public education has been a means to class mobility in this society and it should be. All young people should have a wide array of options for their future, and those options should include jobs and lifestyles we associate with the middle class and above. If that's the outcome of my work with students, then fine.
In the end, though, I want to teach and lead so that my students don't just have options, but have the inclination to use those options in certain ways. One of the very simple prayers that I pray for my own children virtually every day is that as they grow up, they'll feel they have something significant to give the world. I think that's a part of healthy development, to know that you have something to make the world a better place and to have the power and inclination to do that. Shouldn't education help enable this reality?
Here's the talk. Dave Schmelzer is the friend who shared the insight about heroic journeys, one he also writes about in his fun spiritual memoir, Not the Religious Type.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greetings, scholars, family and friends, faculty and staff, all of those in the Harvard community, distinguished guests. What a pleasure it is to be here, tonight – to bear witness to such talent and style. What a pleasure it’s been to teach writing at CSA these past three years – to bear witness to such beauty, such giftedness, such drive. No, I’m not talking about Maxine again, but this whole community, and specifically, you scholars. When people ask me what I do with my summers, I ask them how much time they have to listen because I just can’t stop talking about the marvelous people in this community. So thank you all, for including me as a fellow scholar, a fellow citizen.
In writing class, we improve our craft, of course, but as we do so, we explore. We explore what we see – finding images to capture the beauty of a photograph, or giving expression to the irony found in a painting. We explore what we read – analyzing characters and influences upon authors and discovering what old writers say to us today. And we explore ourselves: our identities, our communities, all the tributaries that have flowed into the rivers that are our lives. We explore.
So, in the spirit of exploration, I’d like to explore you for just a minute, if you’d permit me, to explore our goals for you as scholars and citizens, to explore with all of those who are gathered here and who stand behind you in pushing and supporting you to the successes that lie before you, ready for you to walk into them.
When we see you, we do indeed see scholars.
We see teenagers that can, given a week, tackle early understandings of evolutionary psychology and argue for their connection to the work of a Victorian novelist, in a week. We work with fifteen-year-olds that, given a day, can write sentences like, “Lights emanate from the boat, faintly, but visible in the night sky.” Or there's this one: “The Crucible, written by Arthur Miller, was subject to slander and calumnious accusations in the 1950’s.” Calumnious: it is a word, I looked it up, but certainly not one that I used as a teenager.
You are no lights emanating faintly, but bright stars blazing your path through our doors.
Now not all of you write like that, but you’re more than just writers. You are mathematicians, actors, scientists, filmmakers, readers, dancers, debaters, scholars. And in the months and years to come, we want you to explore all that that means. Go back to your high schools in Cambridge and Boston, go back, and thrive, show those schools your best, and then leave us, go to Smith, go to Tufts, go to Syracuse, go to Bowdoin, go to Columbia, go to Regis, come back to Harvard. Go to your college, whichever one it is, and thrive. Shine, and be the best scholars you can be.
You have our support and our blessing. And by that, I mean not just those of at CSA, much as we adore you, but even more, from those behind you, those supporters of your that are here tonight and those who aren’t here tonight as well because they work, because they speak a different language, because they are otherwise detained.
Family and friends that are here tonight, these remarkable young people so need our support and encouragement, don’t they? Our patience when they yell at us just because they’re stressed about their next test? Our flexibility when their commitments seem tiresome? Our love and affirmation when they seem weary? Scholars, we want so much for you, but you have our support.
We want you to be scholars. But that’s not enough. As much as an achievement as it would be, our dreams for you are more than that you should be educated, wealthier, and secure. Your best dreams for yourselves are more than that as well, I’d suggest.
We want you to be more than scholars, we want you to be heroes.
Scholars of literature, of stories, see in so many of the best of our stories, a heroic journey that I invite you to tonight. The heroic journey starts off with a reluctant hero, one who live sin what seems like a small, ordinary world. But quickly, this small person is thrust out by a herald into some sort of cosmic battle of enormous stakes. Our herald says, “Oh, you hero, the world is wide and the stakes are large. Go and save!”
The hero then goes out on his quests, launches on her journey, and struggles immensely, meeting trials beyond their wildest dreams, until these trials often even come to a point of some enormous loss or death. But then, at their lowest point, our heroes triumph against great odds and find power and tools to come back home and better their environment, saving the world in some sense.
You see this story played out in one form or another in tales and myths all around the world. A friend of mine suggests that we see that because these stories a template of the very best that we could imagine our lives becoming, the heroic journey waiting for each of us who will step out of our small worlds and embrace the invitation.
You, scholars, have, of course already stepped out of your small worlds of East Cambridge, Dorchester, South Boston, Roxbury, Chinatown, Inman Square and all the other places you call home. You’ve stepped across the river, or across the street as it may be, but for many of you, this journey to Harvard has been a crossing of what seems like an ocean of differences. But it’s just the start of your journey.
The Crimson Summer Academy, with me as its voice tonight I suppose, stands a herald, calling you to go farther, and to accept a calling to be the heroes that save our world.
Now some of you are thinking, “Heroes? You’re kidding! This man’s been watching too much Batman the Dark Knight lately or hanging out with his little boys and their Superman Underoos. We’re not perfect, we’re not super-powered. We may be scholars, but we’re no heroes.”
And there you’re wrong. Because there are no perfect heroes. Sophomore scholars and I have crossed the path of a number of individuals who Americans consider great heroes: John F. Kennedy, Jr.: perhaps heroic in his charismatic leadership of a nation through trying times. Henry David Thoreau: perhaps heroic in his influence on so many people, so many young people to resist that which is unjust and to live simply and live well. Even John Proctor of old Salem: heroic in his principled unwillingness to join the witch hunt of his age, and heroic in his conviction to hold onto his honor and his name.
And yet we encountered these men too, didn’t we, as a president slow to action for justice and regularly making enormous blunders, as a hermit who spent two years in the woods and a night in jail and little else it would seem, as a philanderer, a self-protective man who cheated on his wife and first cowered before the authorities, afraid to tell the truth.
Flawed heroes – those with blind spots, character deficits, outright foolishness at times, are the only kind we have, but we need more of them.
We need you to, scholars, to be citizens, to be members of our world who make it better. We need you to lead criminally decrepit schools down paths of renewal. We need you to advance new treatments for the diseases the kill our friends and relatives. We need you to govern nations that don’t think through their actions and war foolishly, killing thousands. We need you to change the landscape of our cities, where is poverty or crime or just despair. We need you to stay at your colleges you attend and help them found more programs like Crimson Summer Academy, so we can send yet more heroes off into the world. We need you to not just emanate faintly with your gifts and beauty but to burn like torches in our shadowed world.
And you need this, for yourself. To be full is not just to be a scholar – to develop your mind and achieve a career and a paycheck and their benefits. To be full is also to be a hero, to play your part in making one spot of our earth more just, more beautiful, more fruitful.
As a father, I want to see my children outstrip me in my joy and my achievements. Friends, family, gathered guests, we want this for these scholars, don’t we, to see them surpass what we have been able to do?
Scholars, as you write the pages of your own life, be scholars indeed, but aspire to even greater heights. Be heroes!
Congratulations on your summer, scholars. You’ve been absolutely marvelous. And may you feel encouragement and power tonight as you march on toward your heroic journey!
Sunday, August 10, 2008
How Far We've Come?
Reading Deborah Meier's article "Retaining the Teacher's Perspective in the Principalship," I was first struck by how far schools have come since her day. She published the article in 1985 and looked back for the most part at school working conditions in the '60s and '70s. Though Meier's descriptions of the urban elementary schools she first worked in are evenhanded, the conditions still seem horrible. The schools she worked in seem petty, sexist, and boring. Teachers didn't necessarily know what they would teach before the first day of school, which undermines any efforts to make instruction well-planned, thoughtful, and innovating. Predominantly female teaching staffs were treated like children by their largely male principals and these same teachers, at least from Meier's viewpoint, sometimes acted with the maturity with which they were treated. Some teachers no doubt maintained tremendous vitality in this profession, largely out of a deep and authentic love for children and their learning. More teachers would deal with the frustration and humiliation of their positions through less positive outlets. Some "isolated themselves from the rest of the school," others "treated teaching as a stepping stone to more prestigious activities," others took their frustration out on their students, and still more "had learned to distance themselves from the whole experience." And, "of course, many quit." (Meier, 306)
All of this is tremendously sad. And much of it, at least from my experience in pilot schools in Boston, seems dated. Schools seem more equitable than before - at least when it comes to the roles men and women feel, and teachers' unions have made significant strides in professionalizing the work, so that there are saner working conditions that allow for care and preparation to be part of teaching.
Yet in other ways, the article feels just as current as when it was published. Meier writes that "schools should be interesting places for every one of us - children, teachers, and even principals." I'd argue that for many in all three camps, that just isn't true. Children still spend enormous amounts of time filling in worksheets and either completing or avoiding other tasks that add little value to their thinking and serve to quell more than stoke the fire of their curiosity. By the time I meet students in high school, they expect by habit to be disinterested in whatever material or work I bring their way. That, added to the demeaning physical and social conditions they often face in school, makes it no surprise that we have to urge so many so strongly just to stay on the ship until port.
And while some conditions for teachers are certainly better, others may not be. The so-called "teacher-proof curriculum" that Meier so presciently refers to has of course exploded since the writing of her article. I'm not sure that having schools be "personally or intellectually stimulating" for teachers is of the highest value for most leaders. It's still true that many teachers who don't quit survive their jobs through complaining to and about students, deadening their own hopes and dreams, or isolating themselves and their classroom in the hopes that it will be different from "the system."
Ironically, what is so appealing about the school culture Meier describes at the school she herself founded is the opposite of those three. Teachers were encouraged to use their intellect creatively and vigorously in shaping interesting curriculum and instruction. All parties involved had to work together for the common good, necessitating positive engagement and problem solving over complaint. Finally, and most personally appealing to me, teachers collaborated. They met together, planned together, and agreed on the common boundaries that they would live within. Shoot, they even "(shared) the cost of baby-sitting so that all staff could attend weekend retreats or after-school meetings." As a parent of three, that phrase strikes a deep chord, and one that's way outside of my experience working in public schools.
That sense of shared mission, one that isn't just generated by the principal and passed on to the teachers, but is developed by them together with the principal's leadership, seems critical to generating this type of professional community. Only when we all really own the purposes of our work will we want to make sacrifices to achieve them together. And only when we all feel a sense of hopefulness about our outcomes and freedom in unleashing our gifts toward their accomplishment will we find in the journey joy and fun: two pleasures that sustain many worthy human endeavors.
All of this is tremendously sad. And much of it, at least from my experience in pilot schools in Boston, seems dated. Schools seem more equitable than before - at least when it comes to the roles men and women feel, and teachers' unions have made significant strides in professionalizing the work, so that there are saner working conditions that allow for care and preparation to be part of teaching.
Yet in other ways, the article feels just as current as when it was published. Meier writes that "schools should be interesting places for every one of us - children, teachers, and even principals." I'd argue that for many in all three camps, that just isn't true. Children still spend enormous amounts of time filling in worksheets and either completing or avoiding other tasks that add little value to their thinking and serve to quell more than stoke the fire of their curiosity. By the time I meet students in high school, they expect by habit to be disinterested in whatever material or work I bring their way. That, added to the demeaning physical and social conditions they often face in school, makes it no surprise that we have to urge so many so strongly just to stay on the ship until port.
And while some conditions for teachers are certainly better, others may not be. The so-called "teacher-proof curriculum" that Meier so presciently refers to has of course exploded since the writing of her article. I'm not sure that having schools be "personally or intellectually stimulating" for teachers is of the highest value for most leaders. It's still true that many teachers who don't quit survive their jobs through complaining to and about students, deadening their own hopes and dreams, or isolating themselves and their classroom in the hopes that it will be different from "the system."
Ironically, what is so appealing about the school culture Meier describes at the school she herself founded is the opposite of those three. Teachers were encouraged to use their intellect creatively and vigorously in shaping interesting curriculum and instruction. All parties involved had to work together for the common good, necessitating positive engagement and problem solving over complaint. Finally, and most personally appealing to me, teachers collaborated. They met together, planned together, and agreed on the common boundaries that they would live within. Shoot, they even "(shared) the cost of baby-sitting so that all staff could attend weekend retreats or after-school meetings." As a parent of three, that phrase strikes a deep chord, and one that's way outside of my experience working in public schools.
That sense of shared mission, one that isn't just generated by the principal and passed on to the teachers, but is developed by them together with the principal's leadership, seems critical to generating this type of professional community. Only when we all really own the purposes of our work will we want to make sacrifices to achieve them together. And only when we all feel a sense of hopefulness about our outcomes and freedom in unleashing our gifts toward their accomplishment will we find in the journey joy and fun: two pleasures that sustain many worthy human endeavors.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Spoiled or Just Ripe?
Stephen Covey invites us to "begin with the end in mind" if we wish to achieve our goals. Good teachers use this advice all the time. We think of what we expect students to be able to do - assessment, in our jargon - and then give them the teaching and support they need to do it - scaffolding, we often call it. It strikes me that more broadly, leadership involves considering what end goals we have as well, so that our activity proves fruitful and not merely busy. Just as a farmer would be wise to consider the type of crop she wants to produce before farming, so school leaders should think about the types of people they hope their students are becoming.
This is less obvious than you would think, though.
The other day I walked into the teachers' room and stumbled upon a colleague of mine talking with a student that both she and I know and love. It was unusual to see a student just hanging out in the teachers' room in our school, a building with pretty traditional attitudes - if not always practices - toward chewing gum, last names, and exclusive - if not so well-equipped - teacher space. While the young woman was in the teachers' bathroom (another no-no) my colleague remarked to me in private that the student was really spoiled.
For a moment, I agreed. Here's a young woman who has one teacher who not infrequently takes her out to lunch and another who recently drove her several towns away to a scholarship interview. This is a woman who rolls into the teacher's lounge, or just about anywhere else in school, with boldness and who calls teachers by their first names and chats them up like old friends. This is a student who's part of a first-rate college preparatory program and has several supportive adults rooting for her at every turn. She's not anywhere near as meek or as generally deprived as her peers.
Which, as may be obvious at this point, is a wonderful thing.
As I reconsidered this young woman and that word "spoiled", I realized that she's not spoiled; she's simply well supported and cared for. She assumes she's worth others' attention and worth some quality treatment in her own school.
Sometimes those of us that help run high schools develop some bad habits. We want our students - especially the many who have been beaten down by life at far too young an age - to confidently navigate their worlds, to develop a firm sense of self, to access opportunities to be treated with dignity and care. And yet it makes our lives easier if they accept less than that, if they're willing to meekly shuffle along without expecting the best for themselves.
Well, that's a habit of thinking that we need to drop. Would that all students in my school expected warm and affirming relationships with their teachers. Would that all of them expected quality support for their dreams. Would that they all had a little more confidence, a little more boldness, and a lot more blessings in their lives.
See, I don't think this young woman is spoiled. That's the word for a fruit - or a person - that's gone bad through neglect, or through too much of a good thing. Instead, she's ripe. She's actually getting the attention and care that all young people need to be tasty and useful, to be people that add to the world and radiate with health.
Wanting students that are ripe, not spoiled, but also not hard and underdeveloped - beginning with that end in mind - changes our practice. To get hard, forever unripe students, we can just neglect them and treat them like the junk they fear they might be. To get spoiled students, we give them the type of "care" that asks nothing from them, that patronizes them perhaps while not expecting them to step up at all. To get ripe students, though, we need to give and give and give. They need seemingly endless amounts of care and opportunity and challenge. But it always needs to ask something of them, to ask them for greater responsibility, greater self-respect, greater hope.
No one gets there on their own. They get "spoiled" into it.
This is less obvious than you would think, though.
The other day I walked into the teachers' room and stumbled upon a colleague of mine talking with a student that both she and I know and love. It was unusual to see a student just hanging out in the teachers' room in our school, a building with pretty traditional attitudes - if not always practices - toward chewing gum, last names, and exclusive - if not so well-equipped - teacher space. While the young woman was in the teachers' bathroom (another no-no) my colleague remarked to me in private that the student was really spoiled.
For a moment, I agreed. Here's a young woman who has one teacher who not infrequently takes her out to lunch and another who recently drove her several towns away to a scholarship interview. This is a woman who rolls into the teacher's lounge, or just about anywhere else in school, with boldness and who calls teachers by their first names and chats them up like old friends. This is a student who's part of a first-rate college preparatory program and has several supportive adults rooting for her at every turn. She's not anywhere near as meek or as generally deprived as her peers.
Which, as may be obvious at this point, is a wonderful thing.
As I reconsidered this young woman and that word "spoiled", I realized that she's not spoiled; she's simply well supported and cared for. She assumes she's worth others' attention and worth some quality treatment in her own school.
Sometimes those of us that help run high schools develop some bad habits. We want our students - especially the many who have been beaten down by life at far too young an age - to confidently navigate their worlds, to develop a firm sense of self, to access opportunities to be treated with dignity and care. And yet it makes our lives easier if they accept less than that, if they're willing to meekly shuffle along without expecting the best for themselves.
Well, that's a habit of thinking that we need to drop. Would that all students in my school expected warm and affirming relationships with their teachers. Would that all of them expected quality support for their dreams. Would that they all had a little more confidence, a little more boldness, and a lot more blessings in their lives.
See, I don't think this young woman is spoiled. That's the word for a fruit - or a person - that's gone bad through neglect, or through too much of a good thing. Instead, she's ripe. She's actually getting the attention and care that all young people need to be tasty and useful, to be people that add to the world and radiate with health.
Wanting students that are ripe, not spoiled, but also not hard and underdeveloped - beginning with that end in mind - changes our practice. To get hard, forever unripe students, we can just neglect them and treat them like the junk they fear they might be. To get spoiled students, we give them the type of "care" that asks nothing from them, that patronizes them perhaps while not expecting them to step up at all. To get ripe students, though, we need to give and give and give. They need seemingly endless amounts of care and opportunity and challenge. But it always needs to ask something of them, to ask them for greater responsibility, greater self-respect, greater hope.
No one gets there on their own. They get "spoiled" into it.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Mentors or Morons?
I've been working with some fabulous English and history teachers in our school to reshape our seventh through tenth grade disorganized English and history programs into a well-planned humanities program. Their flexibility, thoughtfulness, knowledge and willingness to put student achievement over the ease of their planning has been encouraging - a story in itself for another day. In the process, though, we've been looking at my school district's social studies curriculum. The degree to which urban district curriculum is scripted is remarkable. Goals are pre-determined, as are all the units - including start and end dates, learning activities, assessments, and so forth.
It's as if teachers aren't trusted to be leaders or mentors at all. A mentor, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is a "wise and trusted counselor or teacher." I want my own children's teachers to be just that. I certainly don't want them trying to reparent my children, but I want to trust them to counsel and teach with wisdom. When I am a principal, I want to hire teachers who can do the same and help draw out that ability in my staff. Apparently, school boards and city administrators don't believe in their ability to hire or foster that wisdom. Instead, they script curriculum to the extent that a robot could deliver it, or at least a robot with classroom management and discipline skills. One wonders then why the "teaching" and "learning" that takes place is just that, robotic?
My own school has significant autonomy within its district, so we manage to avoid the worst of this control, but it is what it is: the lack of trust is still there. Consider the contrast between my summer employment with a university-based program and my year round employment in an urban public district.
At the university, I have keys to office space where I can print, copy, eat, read, relax, or anything else I might want to do during the day. I also have keys to a classroom that is clean, comfortable, and well-lit. In the district, I have keys to my file cabinet. I can't access technical equipment, paper supplies, extra markers, most bathrooms, or the building itself without borrowing keys or asking permission. Should I want to enter the building, I'll walk into a crumbling building where I might find mice feces on my desk and will certainly encounter lead in all the water pipes, where there is one bathroom in the entire building I can use without the whole world knowing about it, where shades don't work, where I haven't had a working desk in three years, and where heat pumps too strong and air conditioning doesn't work at all. Perhaps I'm better off without keys.
At the university, I have a laptop that is essentially mine, where I can download whatever I need and use it as I see fit. In the district, I have a laptop - more than most teachers can say! - where I can't download a program or install a printer without an administrator over my shoulder punching in secret codes.
At the university, I'm trusted to become a better and more professional teacher and work with colleagues who are highly skilled and motivated, but I largely direct my own growth. In the district - and again my experience is far better than most urban teachers in this regard, I work with a mix of gifted and not so gifted colleagues, both those motivated and shockingly apathetic, and together we're "professionally developed," led through experiences which are mandated by the state at times but may or may not improve how we teach and rarely impacts the type of mentors that we are.
At the university, my boss never formally evaluates me, but both she and much of the program's administration is in my classroom every single day: hearing what I say, observing what I do, and available for conversation around what's going on. In the district, my boss enters my classroom a few times a year for a few minutes and almost no one understands my class enough to consult with me on what I am doing, yet now and then, I am formally evaluated. I'm not sure where I've put those evaluations, but I'm not reading them when I'm trying to improve my practice.
At the university, I enjoy free access to all-you-can-eat, quality dining and fine exercise facilities and am trusted not to abuse the privileges. In the district, the lunch lady lets me have a free milk now and then when she's not swearing at the students and I get to climb the stairs throughout the day, since we have no elevator.
At the university, I'm told that I can order whatever I need and spend whatever is necessary on field trips, and I see results to my requests immediately. Except when they're excessive, and then I'm given a thoughtful explanation to why my request can't be honored. In the district, I have no budget and no sense of what I can order. I have to plan very far ahead and work the system to get what I need and when I do receive approval for disbursement, there's sometimes a long lag time until the money or supplies show up.
The university trusts and supports me. The district does neither. It assumes my colleagues and I are morons, not mentors.
Public schools, in order to do well, don't necessarily need the lavish riches I mention in my university summer program in order to do well. The point is one of trust and support. Again, my school is a paradise in this regard compared to most urban public schools. I work in a school with some autonomy and teach under a creative headmaster who is seeking to lead our school through more humane, honorable means that honor teachers as leaders and counselors.
Still, though, I can't help but suspect that someone assumes I am a moron. Yes, moron: that offensive word coined by psychometricians in the early twentieth century to refer to an individual who could do manual labor and simple tasks but couldn't think independently or creatively beyond the level of a child. The folks who coined this word were of the same era and persuasion of our eugenicists: humane and progressive folks that they were.
Well, so often in life, we get what we ask for and our predictions fulfill themselves with ease. Assume teachers are morons and you won't trust or support them. A moron doing manual labor doesn't need support; he needs clear instructions and procedures. A moron teaching a classroom doesn't need support either and certainly doesn't deserve trust. And if that teacher truly is a moron, he'll happily and contentedly follow the rules, collect a paycheck, and take the summer off to veg out.
If that teacher is not a moron, though, than he might be subversive for a while, but sooner or later, he's out of there. Most interesting people can only stand being treated like an idiot for so long.
It's as if teachers aren't trusted to be leaders or mentors at all. A mentor, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is a "wise and trusted counselor or teacher." I want my own children's teachers to be just that. I certainly don't want them trying to reparent my children, but I want to trust them to counsel and teach with wisdom. When I am a principal, I want to hire teachers who can do the same and help draw out that ability in my staff. Apparently, school boards and city administrators don't believe in their ability to hire or foster that wisdom. Instead, they script curriculum to the extent that a robot could deliver it, or at least a robot with classroom management and discipline skills. One wonders then why the "teaching" and "learning" that takes place is just that, robotic?
My own school has significant autonomy within its district, so we manage to avoid the worst of this control, but it is what it is: the lack of trust is still there. Consider the contrast between my summer employment with a university-based program and my year round employment in an urban public district.
At the university, I have keys to office space where I can print, copy, eat, read, relax, or anything else I might want to do during the day. I also have keys to a classroom that is clean, comfortable, and well-lit. In the district, I have keys to my file cabinet. I can't access technical equipment, paper supplies, extra markers, most bathrooms, or the building itself without borrowing keys or asking permission. Should I want to enter the building, I'll walk into a crumbling building where I might find mice feces on my desk and will certainly encounter lead in all the water pipes, where there is one bathroom in the entire building I can use without the whole world knowing about it, where shades don't work, where I haven't had a working desk in three years, and where heat pumps too strong and air conditioning doesn't work at all. Perhaps I'm better off without keys.
At the university, I have a laptop that is essentially mine, where I can download whatever I need and use it as I see fit. In the district, I have a laptop - more than most teachers can say! - where I can't download a program or install a printer without an administrator over my shoulder punching in secret codes.
At the university, I'm trusted to become a better and more professional teacher and work with colleagues who are highly skilled and motivated, but I largely direct my own growth. In the district - and again my experience is far better than most urban teachers in this regard, I work with a mix of gifted and not so gifted colleagues, both those motivated and shockingly apathetic, and together we're "professionally developed," led through experiences which are mandated by the state at times but may or may not improve how we teach and rarely impacts the type of mentors that we are.
At the university, my boss never formally evaluates me, but both she and much of the program's administration is in my classroom every single day: hearing what I say, observing what I do, and available for conversation around what's going on. In the district, my boss enters my classroom a few times a year for a few minutes and almost no one understands my class enough to consult with me on what I am doing, yet now and then, I am formally evaluated. I'm not sure where I've put those evaluations, but I'm not reading them when I'm trying to improve my practice.
At the university, I enjoy free access to all-you-can-eat, quality dining and fine exercise facilities and am trusted not to abuse the privileges. In the district, the lunch lady lets me have a free milk now and then when she's not swearing at the students and I get to climb the stairs throughout the day, since we have no elevator.
At the university, I'm told that I can order whatever I need and spend whatever is necessary on field trips, and I see results to my requests immediately. Except when they're excessive, and then I'm given a thoughtful explanation to why my request can't be honored. In the district, I have no budget and no sense of what I can order. I have to plan very far ahead and work the system to get what I need and when I do receive approval for disbursement, there's sometimes a long lag time until the money or supplies show up.
The university trusts and supports me. The district does neither. It assumes my colleagues and I are morons, not mentors.
Public schools, in order to do well, don't necessarily need the lavish riches I mention in my university summer program in order to do well. The point is one of trust and support. Again, my school is a paradise in this regard compared to most urban public schools. I work in a school with some autonomy and teach under a creative headmaster who is seeking to lead our school through more humane, honorable means that honor teachers as leaders and counselors.
Still, though, I can't help but suspect that someone assumes I am a moron. Yes, moron: that offensive word coined by psychometricians in the early twentieth century to refer to an individual who could do manual labor and simple tasks but couldn't think independently or creatively beyond the level of a child. The folks who coined this word were of the same era and persuasion of our eugenicists: humane and progressive folks that they were.
Well, so often in life, we get what we ask for and our predictions fulfill themselves with ease. Assume teachers are morons and you won't trust or support them. A moron doing manual labor doesn't need support; he needs clear instructions and procedures. A moron teaching a classroom doesn't need support either and certainly doesn't deserve trust. And if that teacher truly is a moron, he'll happily and contentedly follow the rules, collect a paycheck, and take the summer off to veg out.
If that teacher is not a moron, though, than he might be subversive for a while, but sooner or later, he's out of there. Most interesting people can only stand being treated like an idiot for so long.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Soul Force
A few weeks back I had an interesting and troubling confrontation with a student. The upshot of it all was that the student was suspended and I, for the first time in my life I'm sure, was called a nigga -- repeatedly. And I was left with more thoughts and questions about how we nourish the growth of students who aren't invested in the kinds of futures we see for them.
I had asked the student to talk about an incident in the hallway that he had observed, but before I could finish that question, he burst out in anger, assuming that I was accusing him of something he didn't do. Oddly enough, I had never taught this student, but we had a cordial, casual relationship up until that moment. He then proceeded to rant obscenity-laced angry comments and borderline threats in my direction for almost a minute as he walked around the hallway, bumping me slightly for effect at one point.
Where had this outrage come from? What were the seeds of this young man's anger? Clearly - as he even recognized later - it had nothing to do with me. He suggested his own issues with authority. A friend suggested that perhaps he needed to let off steam and chose a person and situation that subconsciously felt safe in which to do so. Who knows?
But I know that this is the type of reality that blocks student achievement and student joy in the city where I teach. Young people's anger, or apathy, or fear, or lack of self-worth drive the lack of achievement more than skill deficits. Good teaching can address skill deficits. The other issues I mention are larger issues of humanity for our schools and our leaders inside and outside of those schools to address.
Martin Luther King, Jr., in his most famous speech, suggests that the thousands of heroic fighters for civil rights meet the obstacles of physical force with soul force. He equates this soul force with "dignity and discipline," in contrast to "bitterness and hatred."
Dignity, discipline, soul force: perhaps a school leader in our times needs these weapons to combat the abandonment and despair so many urban youth sense in their spirits, which is our own "urgency of the moment." I am confident that in my interaction with this student I showed the first two qualities. I can only hope to apprehend and cultivate more of the third.
I had asked the student to talk about an incident in the hallway that he had observed, but before I could finish that question, he burst out in anger, assuming that I was accusing him of something he didn't do. Oddly enough, I had never taught this student, but we had a cordial, casual relationship up until that moment. He then proceeded to rant obscenity-laced angry comments and borderline threats in my direction for almost a minute as he walked around the hallway, bumping me slightly for effect at one point.
Where had this outrage come from? What were the seeds of this young man's anger? Clearly - as he even recognized later - it had nothing to do with me. He suggested his own issues with authority. A friend suggested that perhaps he needed to let off steam and chose a person and situation that subconsciously felt safe in which to do so. Who knows?
But I know that this is the type of reality that blocks student achievement and student joy in the city where I teach. Young people's anger, or apathy, or fear, or lack of self-worth drive the lack of achievement more than skill deficits. Good teaching can address skill deficits. The other issues I mention are larger issues of humanity for our schools and our leaders inside and outside of those schools to address.
Martin Luther King, Jr., in his most famous speech, suggests that the thousands of heroic fighters for civil rights meet the obstacles of physical force with soul force. He equates this soul force with "dignity and discipline," in contrast to "bitterness and hatred."
Dignity, discipline, soul force: perhaps a school leader in our times needs these weapons to combat the abandonment and despair so many urban youth sense in their spirits, which is our own "urgency of the moment." I am confident that in my interaction with this student I showed the first two qualities. I can only hope to apprehend and cultivate more of the third.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Three Strengths and a Weakness
I was recently asked by my headmaster to identify three of my strengths as a rising school leader and at least one blind spot. Here's what I came up with, posted for our small world to see:
It’s like Three Men and a Baby, except there’s just one of me, and no baby, and not much humor. So, never mind. Let’s get the weakness out of the way first. I work too hard. I care too much. I’m too humble. That’s three actually, and they’re largely not true. I will share three, but I’ll go ahead and save them for the end. First, the strengths:
1) I’m entrepreneurial. I have a habit of seeing something that could be better or that doesn’t exist and then bringing it into being. In my school, I’ve been part of doing this with our common planning time manual, the International Baccalaureate program, the independent reading program, Facing History and Ourselves, a school library, AP English, portfolio-based assessment, Teaching for Understanding, a cross country team, and more. Most all of these have involved great partners, but I’ve played a substantial and often primary role in getting them off the ground. I think that fundamentally this strength springs from intangible qualities I’ve had since my youth: idealism, self-confidence, hope, and the habit of seeing ideas somewhat fully formed in their details.
2) I have an unusual mix of intellect and leadership skills. Again, from youth, I’ve always been tagged as a “smart guy,” and have sought to maintain and further my intellect through broad reading, studies, and life experiences. Unlike some intellectuals, though, I communicate and lead fairly well. So I’ve tended to be put in places where both formally and informally, a mix of intellect, communication, and leadership are required. This was true in my non-profit work, true in my ongoing volunteer commitments, and true in my school.
3) I have compassion for others and a habit of seeing things from their perspectives. There’s something to being a middle child here, and something too to having experienced a degree of personal brokenness. I assume that all people are flawed in a number of ways and that these flaws are part of a human core that is both awesomely beautiful and frighteningly damaged. This tendency toward empathy can become its own internal burden but it has seemed valuable in winning trust and honoring others.
An Interlude
It’s been said that inside every white man there’s a serpent waiting to reveal itself. I may not be a serpent, but I’m not only a white man, but one that hails from a well-privileged suburban school system. Though myself from a family with all kinds of working class routes, my background is strikingly different from the students in the schools I’m drawn to. That itself isn’t a strikeout, but it is an initial strike against me, and rightfully so. Too often privileged outsiders have maliciously used working class people of color, and so I should have to earn trust, given who I am. I’m also aware of and sobered by what an African-American colleague called a habit of white men to treat urban schools as playthings with which to experiment and prove their ingenuity. I don’t want to be in this for myself, but for the schools: for the families. I also have cultivated as cross-cultural a life style as possible, from my friends to my own nuclear family to travel experiences to explicit training in cross-cultural living and work. There’s a reason that my resume says that I’m “experienced in and passionate about cross-cultural relationships.”
Three Weaknesses
1) That said, I’m impatient. My tendency toward compassion often lends me great reservoirs of patience, but there are people that I just cannot abide. I can’t stand people that ask no questions or assume they know everything. I also struggle with conservatives – not necessarily politically so, but simply risk and change averse. So when a teacher asks no questions and makes no apparent moves to improve practice but then acts as if small changes are threatening and require training, well, that’s both issues right there, and I just bite my tongue.
2) I bore too easily and can have a hard time completing things. (See the flip-side, strength number one.) I’ve become a reasonably organized person and a competent manager, but neither comes naturally, and I struggle to stay engaged at the ends of tasks.
3) As a school leader, perhaps most obviously I lack experience. What I bring from my five years of experience in non-profit leadership and seven in teaching is valuable, but I need more. I have insufficient experience in issues around school law, special education, organizational budget management, urban community relations, and student discipline on a larger level. I hope to gain significant experience in some of these areas during my principal residency.
It’s like Three Men and a Baby, except there’s just one of me, and no baby, and not much humor. So, never mind. Let’s get the weakness out of the way first. I work too hard. I care too much. I’m too humble. That’s three actually, and they’re largely not true. I will share three, but I’ll go ahead and save them for the end. First, the strengths:
1) I’m entrepreneurial. I have a habit of seeing something that could be better or that doesn’t exist and then bringing it into being. In my school, I’ve been part of doing this with our common planning time manual, the International Baccalaureate program, the independent reading program, Facing History and Ourselves, a school library, AP English, portfolio-based assessment, Teaching for Understanding, a cross country team, and more. Most all of these have involved great partners, but I’ve played a substantial and often primary role in getting them off the ground. I think that fundamentally this strength springs from intangible qualities I’ve had since my youth: idealism, self-confidence, hope, and the habit of seeing ideas somewhat fully formed in their details.
2) I have an unusual mix of intellect and leadership skills. Again, from youth, I’ve always been tagged as a “smart guy,” and have sought to maintain and further my intellect through broad reading, studies, and life experiences. Unlike some intellectuals, though, I communicate and lead fairly well. So I’ve tended to be put in places where both formally and informally, a mix of intellect, communication, and leadership are required. This was true in my non-profit work, true in my ongoing volunteer commitments, and true in my school.
3) I have compassion for others and a habit of seeing things from their perspectives. There’s something to being a middle child here, and something too to having experienced a degree of personal brokenness. I assume that all people are flawed in a number of ways and that these flaws are part of a human core that is both awesomely beautiful and frighteningly damaged. This tendency toward empathy can become its own internal burden but it has seemed valuable in winning trust and honoring others.
An Interlude
It’s been said that inside every white man there’s a serpent waiting to reveal itself. I may not be a serpent, but I’m not only a white man, but one that hails from a well-privileged suburban school system. Though myself from a family with all kinds of working class routes, my background is strikingly different from the students in the schools I’m drawn to. That itself isn’t a strikeout, but it is an initial strike against me, and rightfully so. Too often privileged outsiders have maliciously used working class people of color, and so I should have to earn trust, given who I am. I’m also aware of and sobered by what an African-American colleague called a habit of white men to treat urban schools as playthings with which to experiment and prove their ingenuity. I don’t want to be in this for myself, but for the schools: for the families. I also have cultivated as cross-cultural a life style as possible, from my friends to my own nuclear family to travel experiences to explicit training in cross-cultural living and work. There’s a reason that my resume says that I’m “experienced in and passionate about cross-cultural relationships.”
Three Weaknesses
1) That said, I’m impatient. My tendency toward compassion often lends me great reservoirs of patience, but there are people that I just cannot abide. I can’t stand people that ask no questions or assume they know everything. I also struggle with conservatives – not necessarily politically so, but simply risk and change averse. So when a teacher asks no questions and makes no apparent moves to improve practice but then acts as if small changes are threatening and require training, well, that’s both issues right there, and I just bite my tongue.
2) I bore too easily and can have a hard time completing things. (See the flip-side, strength number one.) I’ve become a reasonably organized person and a competent manager, but neither comes naturally, and I struggle to stay engaged at the ends of tasks.
3) As a school leader, perhaps most obviously I lack experience. What I bring from my five years of experience in non-profit leadership and seven in teaching is valuable, but I need more. I have insufficient experience in issues around school law, special education, organizational budget management, urban community relations, and student discipline on a larger level. I hope to gain significant experience in some of these areas during my principal residency.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Reading and Leading, Vol. I
As an avid reader and English teacher, I plow through hundreds of pages a week. So it made sense to me to post some book blurbs in this space. So, not beacause it's the best, but because it's the most recent, here we have the very corporate inspirational-branding-sounding title, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You, by John C. Maxwell.
O.K, it hurt to type that title, but I'm going to get over it because there's (surprise, surprise) 21 chapter titles where that came from, and they're coming our way.
1) The Law of the Lid, wherein we are told that leadership is the key to effectiveness. Our level of leadership ability is in fact the lid on how effective individuals can be.
2) The Law of Influence, in which Maxwell argues that leadership is not primarily Management, Entrepreneurship, Knowledge, Pioneering, or Position. It is Influence.
3) The Law of Process: leaders develop slowly through daily growth.
4) The Law of Navigation: leaders see the journey ahead and lead people through it well. Navigators draw on past experience, listen to others, and plan carefully to ensure success. And, hey, they can remember an acronym too!
Predetermine a course of action.
Lay out your goals.
Adjust your priorities.
Notify key personnel.
Allow time for acceptance.
Head into action.
Expect problems.
Always point to the successes.
Daily review your plan.
5) The Law of E.F. Hutton: real leaders are the ones others listen to, not necessarily the ones who hold titles. Positional leaders speak first, while real leaders speak later. Positional leaders need real leaders to get things done, while real leaders just need their own influence. Positional leaders only influence others with positions, while real leaders influence all those around them. Real leaders are listened to because of their character, relationships, knowledge, intuition, experience, past successes, and ability. So those would be seven things you'd want to accumulate to lead well.
6) The Law of Solid Ground: always earn and keep trust; it's the foundation of leadership.
7) The Law of Respect: people follow those whom they respect.
8) The Law of Intuition: leaders either naturally have, or must develop, informed intuition. Leader read their situations carefully, while also reading trends, resources, people, and themselves. Intuition, as Maxwell defines it, is paying attention to these things through our lenses as leaders.
9) The Law of Magnetism: leaders tend to attract people like themselves, in terms of attitude, generation, background, values, life experience, and life ability. There's some possibility here to cultivate those qualities in yourself that you'd like your followers to have, some acceptance of this reality, and perhaps some caution to try to move against this trend and gather others who complement the leader but wouldn't naturally follow that leader.
10) The Law of Connection: leaders touch a heart before they ask for a hand. So reach out and feel that beating, pulsing blood. This is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom territory, folks...
11) The Law of the Inner Circle: all organizations have an inner circle and leaders surround themselves with the best one possible, with people who raise up themse selves, people who raise others' morale, people who raise up the leader, and people who raise up and multiply other leaders.
12) The Law of Empowerment: leaders empower others, especially other leaders. If a leader is worried about job security, resistant to change, or lacking a sense of self-worth, it won't happen, but that will always, at best, be limiting for the leader and for the cause.
13) The Law of Reproduction: most leaders become leaders because of the influence of another leader. So leaders ought to attract and develop other leaders, making this one of their very highest priorities.
14) The Law of Buy-In: people tend to rally to a leader first, then to a vision. It's counterintuitive, but a leader can always change visions, but even a good vision requires a leader to succeed.
15) The Law of Victory: leaders find ways to achieve, to win. (And I thought leaders were all about endless searches for ways to lose....) Victory requires unity of vision, diversity of skills, and dedication to victory and helping others reach their potential.
16) The Law of the Big Mo:
Just kidding. Momentum is hard to stop; it's a powerful change agent, but it's easier to steer than to start. So leaders prepare and motivate in order to build momentum, which then makes leaders look better and makes followers perform better.
17) The Law of Priorities: activity isn't necessarily accomplishment. So leaders prioritize what is required, what gives the greatest return, and what brings the greatest reward.
18) The Law of Sacrifice: leaders give up to go up. Sacrifice is an enormous part of leadership, and the path toward greater leadership is often greater sacrifice.
19) The Law of Timing: mistakes in timing can lead to resistance, mistake, lost opportunity, or disaster. The right action at the right time produces success.
20) The Law of Explosive Growth: leading followers produces incremental growth, leading leaders produces explosive growth. (Or it can, he should probably say.) Developing leaders takes wanting to be succeeded, focusing on strengths, treating leaders as individuals (and giving them greater attention than others), giving power away, investing time in others, and so impacting people far beyond their reach.
21) The Law of Legacy: leaders who want a legacy take a long view, create a leadership culture, make sacrifices, and value team leadership. Then they can walk away with integrity and watch others succeed, in both senses of the word.
Despite my snobbery of style and sarcasm, there's plenty of wisdom here to digest and work with.
O.K, it hurt to type that title, but I'm going to get over it because there's (surprise, surprise) 21 chapter titles where that came from, and they're coming our way.
1) The Law of the Lid, wherein we are told that leadership is the key to effectiveness. Our level of leadership ability is in fact the lid on how effective individuals can be.
2) The Law of Influence, in which Maxwell argues that leadership is not primarily Management, Entrepreneurship, Knowledge, Pioneering, or Position. It is Influence.
3) The Law of Process: leaders develop slowly through daily growth.
4) The Law of Navigation: leaders see the journey ahead and lead people through it well. Navigators draw on past experience, listen to others, and plan carefully to ensure success. And, hey, they can remember an acronym too!
Predetermine a course of action.
Lay out your goals.
Adjust your priorities.
Notify key personnel.
Allow time for acceptance.
Head into action.
Expect problems.
Always point to the successes.
Daily review your plan.
5) The Law of E.F. Hutton: real leaders are the ones others listen to, not necessarily the ones who hold titles. Positional leaders speak first, while real leaders speak later. Positional leaders need real leaders to get things done, while real leaders just need their own influence. Positional leaders only influence others with positions, while real leaders influence all those around them. Real leaders are listened to because of their character, relationships, knowledge, intuition, experience, past successes, and ability. So those would be seven things you'd want to accumulate to lead well.
6) The Law of Solid Ground: always earn and keep trust; it's the foundation of leadership.
7) The Law of Respect: people follow those whom they respect.
8) The Law of Intuition: leaders either naturally have, or must develop, informed intuition. Leader read their situations carefully, while also reading trends, resources, people, and themselves. Intuition, as Maxwell defines it, is paying attention to these things through our lenses as leaders.
9) The Law of Magnetism: leaders tend to attract people like themselves, in terms of attitude, generation, background, values, life experience, and life ability. There's some possibility here to cultivate those qualities in yourself that you'd like your followers to have, some acceptance of this reality, and perhaps some caution to try to move against this trend and gather others who complement the leader but wouldn't naturally follow that leader.
10) The Law of Connection: leaders touch a heart before they ask for a hand. So reach out and feel that beating, pulsing blood. This is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom territory, folks...
11) The Law of the Inner Circle: all organizations have an inner circle and leaders surround themselves with the best one possible, with people who raise up themse selves, people who raise others' morale, people who raise up the leader, and people who raise up and multiply other leaders.
12) The Law of Empowerment: leaders empower others, especially other leaders. If a leader is worried about job security, resistant to change, or lacking a sense of self-worth, it won't happen, but that will always, at best, be limiting for the leader and for the cause.
13) The Law of Reproduction: most leaders become leaders because of the influence of another leader. So leaders ought to attract and develop other leaders, making this one of their very highest priorities.
14) The Law of Buy-In: people tend to rally to a leader first, then to a vision. It's counterintuitive, but a leader can always change visions, but even a good vision requires a leader to succeed.
15) The Law of Victory: leaders find ways to achieve, to win. (And I thought leaders were all about endless searches for ways to lose....) Victory requires unity of vision, diversity of skills, and dedication to victory and helping others reach their potential.
16) The Law of the Big Mo:
Just kidding. Momentum is hard to stop; it's a powerful change agent, but it's easier to steer than to start. So leaders prepare and motivate in order to build momentum, which then makes leaders look better and makes followers perform better. 17) The Law of Priorities: activity isn't necessarily accomplishment. So leaders prioritize what is required, what gives the greatest return, and what brings the greatest reward.
18) The Law of Sacrifice: leaders give up to go up. Sacrifice is an enormous part of leadership, and the path toward greater leadership is often greater sacrifice.
19) The Law of Timing: mistakes in timing can lead to resistance, mistake, lost opportunity, or disaster. The right action at the right time produces success.
20) The Law of Explosive Growth: leading followers produces incremental growth, leading leaders produces explosive growth. (Or it can, he should probably say.) Developing leaders takes wanting to be succeeded, focusing on strengths, treating leaders as individuals (and giving them greater attention than others), giving power away, investing time in others, and so impacting people far beyond their reach.
21) The Law of Legacy: leaders who want a legacy take a long view, create a leadership culture, make sacrifices, and value team leadership. Then they can walk away with integrity and watch others succeed, in both senses of the word.
Despite my snobbery of style and sarcasm, there's plenty of wisdom here to digest and work with.
Let their Fears Become your Fears
My school is undertaking a major change initiative that I am helping to push forward and last week, our school leaders discussed the climate of fear some of us have sensed in our school. I am convinced that much of the fear is simply fear of the unknown and have wanted to quickly respond with an information and marketing campaign of sorts.
"You don't understand? You're afraid. Let me help you see the light!"
In the midst of the meeting, my principal took a different tack and sought to validate the fears we were hearing. He said that as leaders, we need to let their fears become our fears. Even if we have more knowledge and more perspective, we need to see things from the perspective of those we wish to lead. Fears are always real, and the emotion behind fears should never be judged and always be validated.
Another moment earlier in the meeting connects for me. My colleague and friend who coaches wrestling at my school was talking about his sons' mimickry of his wrestlers' behavior. He has to deal with his third grader acting like an immature fifteen-year-old hormonal boy. And it's not always clear that's a plus.
My friend, though, is letting his wrestlers' issues become his issues. He hasn't insulated his family from his professional life but has let his own children feel the effect - for good or for ill - of his work.
Friends of mine who are very spiritual have a word for this: they call it incarnational ministry. That's a fancy way of saying service in the body. It means being with people to the extent that you let their issues become your issues, helping people out from up close, not at an arms length.
Of course, this notion has all sorts of risks to boundaries and personal sanity that need to be worked out. But it may just be the only way to really know the people we serve, and so the only way to lead.
"You don't understand? You're afraid. Let me help you see the light!"
In the midst of the meeting, my principal took a different tack and sought to validate the fears we were hearing. He said that as leaders, we need to let their fears become our fears. Even if we have more knowledge and more perspective, we need to see things from the perspective of those we wish to lead. Fears are always real, and the emotion behind fears should never be judged and always be validated.
Another moment earlier in the meeting connects for me. My colleague and friend who coaches wrestling at my school was talking about his sons' mimickry of his wrestlers' behavior. He has to deal with his third grader acting like an immature fifteen-year-old hormonal boy. And it's not always clear that's a plus.
My friend, though, is letting his wrestlers' issues become his issues. He hasn't insulated his family from his professional life but has let his own children feel the effect - for good or for ill - of his work.
Friends of mine who are very spiritual have a word for this: they call it incarnational ministry. That's a fancy way of saying service in the body. It means being with people to the extent that you let their issues become your issues, helping people out from up close, not at an arms length.
Of course, this notion has all sorts of risks to boundaries and personal sanity that need to be worked out. But it may just be the only way to really know the people we serve, and so the only way to lead.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
"I'd Send My Kids to Your School"
I teach all of the freshmen in my school this year and have tried to really adopt them as a class and make an investment in their development. As part of that process, I've created an area of my classroom called "Going to College" where I post seniors' acceptance letters from colleges and universities.
Recently I was accepted into a university-based program myself, and I so I posted my own letter. Northeastern University and the Center for Collaborative Education accepted me as a member of next year's Principal Residency cohort, and I posted my acceptance in order to highlight my own desire to continue to further my education and professional life.
The letter has prompted a number of interesting conversations. In one heartening moment, a student of mine asked me about my desire to be a principal one day and told me, "I'd send my kids to your school." I felt honored by the moment but not surprised; she's been a fan for months. Just today, though, another student told me that if there could be a vote for his principal, he'd vote for me. This from a student who's been kicked out of my class three or four times in the past two weeks and I felt sure was fast becoming my enemy.
He made me think about what young people expect in a leader and what they see in me. My conclusions may be obvious, but as with much truth that we all know in our minds, it can take time to truly lodge itself in our spirits. Young people want their leaders to be involved in their lives, to have vision for their future, to be competent at what they do, and to demand the best for them. It's not much more complicated in their minds, and perhaps they're right.
As a professional leader, I want to keep this "amateur" spirit about me: the one who loves to lead, rather than the one who simply does it for a job. I want to always be involved in others' lives, I want to see hope for their futures, I want to manage competently, and I want to help people rise to their best selves. I want to lead.
Recently I was accepted into a university-based program myself, and I so I posted my own letter. Northeastern University and the Center for Collaborative Education accepted me as a member of next year's Principal Residency cohort, and I posted my acceptance in order to highlight my own desire to continue to further my education and professional life.
The letter has prompted a number of interesting conversations. In one heartening moment, a student of mine asked me about my desire to be a principal one day and told me, "I'd send my kids to your school." I felt honored by the moment but not surprised; she's been a fan for months. Just today, though, another student told me that if there could be a vote for his principal, he'd vote for me. This from a student who's been kicked out of my class three or four times in the past two weeks and I felt sure was fast becoming my enemy.
He made me think about what young people expect in a leader and what they see in me. My conclusions may be obvious, but as with much truth that we all know in our minds, it can take time to truly lodge itself in our spirits. Young people want their leaders to be involved in their lives, to have vision for their future, to be competent at what they do, and to demand the best for them. It's not much more complicated in their minds, and perhaps they're right.
As a professional leader, I want to keep this "amateur" spirit about me: the one who loves to lead, rather than the one who simply does it for a job. I want to always be involved in others' lives, I want to see hope for their futures, I want to manage competently, and I want to help people rise to their best selves. I want to lead.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
"To Do the Impossible, You Need to See the Invisible"
One of my mentors, my principal, loves to pull out short, cryptic maxims in response to complex situations. This has to be one of my favorites. I first heard it indirectly, through a friend of mine who also leads in my school. Imagine being in a meeting, wrestling with some challenging leadership dilemna, and then, after a pause, hearing this: You just need to understand that to do the impossible, you need to see the invisible. And then another pause, as if that was enough.
These pithy bits of wisdom can feel comical, almost ridiculous at first, like something written on the label of a tea bag. But, as with the tea bag, let it steep, and you'll have something to drink.
In my leadership journey, I want to do the impossible. I want to help my high-poverty, urban public school become a home to rich learning and high quality teaching. I want to help us be the first International Baccalaureate School in the Boston Public Schools. And I want more than that. I'd love to found other schools and help lead in a movement to truly reform schools so that they are no longer the schools of our youth but those that shape hope and access and well-being in their members, adults and students alike.
I want to do the impossible, so I need to see the invisible. Young leaders see obstacles, so we dream smaller dreams. Young leaders see incompetent or uncaring adults in schools, so we turn cynical. Young leaders see our own shortcomings, so we think someone else must do the great things of our time. Yet there is also the tremendous potential in even our most troubled youth. There is the huge amount of talent, good will, and funding waiting to be spent upon great efforts to do justice in our urban schools. There is the mysterious power unleashed when we find ways to marshall whole communities behind a common vision. It's invisible, but it's there.
Now the corralary is of course true as well: If you want to do what's possible, you need to see what's visible. Huge vision is no substitute for thoughtful mangagement and hands-on engagement in the life of an organization. Leaders need a kind of bifurcated vision - attentive to the small while cultivating the large, thoughtful about the present and prepared for the future, faithfully doing the possible while trying our hands (and hearts, and minds) at the impossible as well.
So there's the title for this blog. Like most blogs, this one will probably have five or six readers at best. (I'm not sure whether my mom counts.) But if you're one of them, welcome and enjoy.
These pithy bits of wisdom can feel comical, almost ridiculous at first, like something written on the label of a tea bag. But, as with the tea bag, let it steep, and you'll have something to drink.
In my leadership journey, I want to do the impossible. I want to help my high-poverty, urban public school become a home to rich learning and high quality teaching. I want to help us be the first International Baccalaureate School in the Boston Public Schools. And I want more than that. I'd love to found other schools and help lead in a movement to truly reform schools so that they are no longer the schools of our youth but those that shape hope and access and well-being in their members, adults and students alike.
I want to do the impossible, so I need to see the invisible. Young leaders see obstacles, so we dream smaller dreams. Young leaders see incompetent or uncaring adults in schools, so we turn cynical. Young leaders see our own shortcomings, so we think someone else must do the great things of our time. Yet there is also the tremendous potential in even our most troubled youth. There is the huge amount of talent, good will, and funding waiting to be spent upon great efforts to do justice in our urban schools. There is the mysterious power unleashed when we find ways to marshall whole communities behind a common vision. It's invisible, but it's there.
Now the corralary is of course true as well: If you want to do what's possible, you need to see what's visible. Huge vision is no substitute for thoughtful mangagement and hands-on engagement in the life of an organization. Leaders need a kind of bifurcated vision - attentive to the small while cultivating the large, thoughtful about the present and prepared for the future, faithfully doing the possible while trying our hands (and hearts, and minds) at the impossible as well.
So there's the title for this blog. Like most blogs, this one will probably have five or six readers at best. (I'm not sure whether my mom counts.) But if you're one of them, welcome and enjoy.
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