learn more about Jane’s work, visit her website (www.janekise.com).
To book Jane A. G. Kise for professional development, contact [email protected].
Introduction
You’re leading, or aspiring to lead, a complex system—not just a team or even a professional learning community (PLC), but a broad scope learning community of students, teachers, staff, parents, and even local businesses and other stakeholders—and you’re doing it in what leadership experts are now calling a VUCA world—a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.
In systems, if you push too hard on one place, something else gets out of whack. If you pay too much attention to A, B starts acting up out of neglect. Particularly as a school leader, when you implement a solution, you just may see a dozen other problems pop up as unintended consequences. So, what can a leader do to navigate this complexity?
Part of it is being able to see the whole of a system, but it also requires you to look two ways at once, learning to see the value in both A and B. If you’re truly going to lead a school that meets the needs of the whole child—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—then recognizing and working with ongoing paradigms, rather than searching for a magic bullet, becomes your number one, ongoing, always-evolving priority for leadership development. It’s about leading holistically so that your school thrives.
It’s easy to default to a checklist when we think about whole-child learning. Physical education? Check. Academics? Check. Anti-bullying and social-emotional learning curriculum? Check. But to me, whole-child learning is a much bigger concept. Move away from buzz words like full potential and 21st century skills and global citizen and really think about both a child’s holistic experience of school and the holistic experience of the adults in the building. Do they get out of bed with a sense of purpose? Do they feel part of a family—a condition necessary for collective efficacy? Are they working on something each and every day that puts to use their skills and involves their interests? Are they growing not just in knowledge but in the wisdom that helps people see both their own needs and the needs of others? Are they able to navigate creating a meaningful life while making a living and to learning that fosters their own goals and growth that also fits with community goals? In other words, are they holistically thriving? This can only happen if the leaders take a holistic, wise approach to both the day-to-day decisions and long-term choices that affect both students and staff.
If it sounds easy, know that most adults never really learn to hold such tensions well, navigating that holistic view from 30,000 feet up and all of the details that go into leadership (Berger, 2012). This book will help you see and work with the whole system through a series of twelve core leadership paradigms represented in this book as lenses. It will help you recognize which one or two of them are at play in a given decision or initiative, and then target what you need to know and do so that you don’t lose sight of one set of a paradigm’s values or the other.
For a warm-up, try this: think through a current decision you are facing through the lens of adult educators and the lens of the students in your charge.
Were you ever a child? I ask this because sometimes I hear people arguing over learning strategies or school rules or education policies when they could answer disputes by considering, “How would each of us have reacted to this as a child?”
I was once a child. I loved school, and I want all students to end their secondary education experience with the same enthusiasm they had when they finally got to board that kindergarten bus, their backpack awaiting the treasures of learning. Granted, I was wired for school—my favorite T-shirt reads, “A day without reading is like …. Actually, I have no idea.”
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)
♦
