style="font-size:15px;"> ♦ Partner with another leader: This final step occurs after you’ve put this book’s content to work for you. Meet with another leader to discuss ideas and to hold each other accountable in making progress toward your respective goals. In fact, use the reflection questions on page 209 (A Goal That Guides Development) together, offering the gift of listening carefully to each other to help clarify what is working.
Further, know that this book isn’t a one-time read. Instead, it’s a reference guide full of tools you can use for each new goal, position, team, initiative, responsibility, and more.
The goal is to become the best leader you can be by focusing your strengths, ensuring your blind spots don’t get in the way, and building your capacity to reach the goals you’ve set to make your learning community a visionary place for students and adults. Great leaders never stop developing; may these pages help you meet the ongoing challenges of guiding the schools upon which every student’s future, and the future of all who will benefit from what they can contribute to society, depend.
CHAPTER 1
Developing Leadership for Whole-Child Schools
ASCD (n.d.) well-defines the whole-child approach to education: “A whole child approach, which ensures that each student is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged, sets the standard for comprehensive, sustainable school improvement and provides for long-term student success.” Before we delve into the importance of this critical statement, let’s start where it all starts—at the top.
Here’s the repeating story of my work with school leaders. I’m called in to work on a specific initiative: creating collective efficacy through building trust and collaborative skills; launching effective, sustainable collaborative learning communities; differentiating instruction; improving instructional coaching; or resolving conflict are a few examples. Over the weeks or months that I’m involved, the leader gains a heightened awareness of his or her leadership style, its impact on a diverse staff, and strategies for avoiding overuse of strengths and related blind spots.
The leader moves to a new position, or a new building, or perhaps launches a major new initiative. “I’m set for the time being, what with all I’ve learned about leadership,” he or she tells me. “I’ll start with getting a good read on my new colleagues and team, listening to their ideas and working on strategies. Then I might call you in again. Thanks.”
And? Often within a month, I get a call, “I need you now. This staff is so different. We need to understand one another better.” Or, “I focused on A, lost track of B, and I can feel resistance on the rise. Help!”
These are effective, intentional leaders. They quickly grasp the situational nature of school leadership and have internalized the following.
♦ Each learning community is unique, with different histories, personnel, resources, assets, and challenges.
♦ Staff chemistry, habits, beliefs, values, and fears vary widely.
♦ To truly lead for academic success and success for the whole child involves more roles and responsibilities than any one person can shoulder.
♦ The most important leadership roles and responsibilities vary from situation to situation.
♦ Prioritize everything, and nothing will get done.
Further, they have learned that leadership roles are often in tension with one another. For example, it isn’t easy to communicate high expectations and create an atmosphere where teachers feel safe sharing dilemmas and mistakes. Nor is it easy for schools to ensure they are meeting each student’s academic needs and physical, social, and emotional needs.
That’s what this book is about: providing tools so that you can lead from who you are and focus on the right priorities for the students, teachers, staff, parents, local businesses, and other stakeholders that comprise your specific learning community.
To accomplish this, you’ll use a process aligned with the conditions necessary for true leadership development. Through stories of leaders who have successfully navigated competing priorities and stopped the pendulum swings so rampant in education reform efforts, you’ll learn about balancing twelve pairs of core leadership responsibilities that are essential for leading whole-child schools. These are the Twelve Lenses of Leadership I introduced at the start of this book.
You’ll come to know each of these lenses well, but to start off, the key concept to understand is that these lenses represent ongoing interdependencies between two equally important sets of values. A simple example of one of these ongoing interdependencies is also a major theme of this book: focusing on academics while also focusing on the whole child. They’re interdependent, aren’t they? After all, we know that physical, social, and mental well-being affect academic performance—and academic performance can affect the physical, social, and mental well-being of students (Jensen, 2005; Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013). You’ll read more about how these lenses work in chapter 2 (page 23). Here, you’ll first tackle your own leadership mindset by gauging how your natural priorities align with these twelve lenses and how your skills with eight core competencies of emotional intelligence support or thwart your efforts.
Leadership lenses? Interdependencies? Mindsets? Priorities? Emotional intelligence? There are so many components because developing as a leader—not just mastering management skills but engaging everyone in effectively working toward a meaningful shared purpose—is very difficult. In fact, most leadership development programs have little or no impact on actual leadership practices. However, if you use this book’s process, you will become a more thoughtful, balanced leader who is capable of adjusting to an ever-changing educational landscape. You’ll be using all of these components to maximize your strengths while avoiding your blind spots. As theologian Richard Rohr (2013) puts it, “We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are” (p. 82).
Your journey begins in this chapter with exploring five elements crucial for effective leadership development along with learning a holistic leadership development process for establishing your focus on whole-teacher instruction and whole-child learning.
Five Essential Components for Effective Leadership Development
McKinsey & Company is a consulting firm heavily involved in understanding and implementing what works best in leadership and change initiatives. Its deep analysis of what it takes to develop leaders identifies four key components (Gurdjian, Halbeisen, & Lane, 2014). The fifth essential component that you’ll find in the following list is something I believe is a crucial addition to the mix.
1. The skills and dispositions you need depend on your context: What works in one learning community may not fit with the needs, values, or chemistry of another. You’ll be using the tools in this book to choose the right focus for your context.
2. Skill development happens not in isolation, but while working and reflecting on real responsibilities and issues: Case studies and retreats may have their place, but combining leadership development with important workplace projects and initiatives fosters real growth. As you will soon see, it’s ultimately about setting a specific goal to focus on, and that will derive from your real work. (See Choosing Your Development Focus,
