growth has been evident in their 360 feedback, org health data, staff retention, and other organizational outcomes. Just as importantly, this work has reduced suffering, sparked hope, and helped leaders and the people they lead thrive in their work and their lives.
This book is essentially an EI‐based, replicable approach to social–emotional learning for leaders. Social–emotional leadership is a prerequisite to student growth because leaders are the creators and the keepers of the conditions for learning in our schools. Students depend on us to create the conditions for learning that everyone in our schools—from students to teachers to principals—needs to meet their full potential. I have learned that these conditions primarily result from the way that people feel. Because these conditions are difficult to name and measure, they tend to be overlooked and undervalued
Since the days when I first started teaching 27 years ago, our profession has been moving toward an increasingly technical approach to teaching and learning. We have reacted to the pressures to improve student achievement—increased exponentially with the arrival of Common Core—by building more efficient systems to grow academic skills as fast as possible, for as many students as possible. I have watched as these technical practices that serve us in improving student achievement have also led to disconnection, inequitable conditions, and a limited growth trajectory.
As a sector we have arrived at a moment of reckoning. Schools that have taken an increasingly technical approach have become increasingly unhappy places for both the adults and students. The conditions we have created hold everyone back—adults and students—from reaching their potential. This is because emotions are contagious, and they are most contagious when they come from leaders. When adults are working under leadership and conditions that are antithetical to social–emotional health and growth, they create those same conditions in their classrooms for students. Very few students will develop the social–emotional competencies to be strong learners in spaces that are unhealthy for adults. The learning and life outcomes of our children depend on healthy adults, and leaders create adult conditions to thrive. This has become even more painfully clear as we have all experienced the trauma of the Covid pandemic. Academic growth has stagnated for sure, but our collective emotional capacity to teach and learn as educators and students is at rock bottom. Without addressing the affective—the social–emotional—obstacles of the moment, most of us and our students will remain academically incapacitated.
It is time to rebalance the conditions for learning in our schools. That rebalancing must start with the adults; not the kids. And it must come from the leaders.
When I was immersed in schools as a teacher and then a leader, I felt but did not understand all of this. My eyes were opened when my work training school leaders collided with my introduction to Goleman's work on Emotional Intelligence (EI).
I became a principal after 11 years of teaching in urban neighborhood, magnet, charter, international, and private schools. Amistad Academy Middle School was the flagship school of the three‐school Achievement First (AF) charter network. When I left the principal seat six years later, we had expanded to 31 schools. During my tenure, I experienced a shift from an entrepreneurial spirit of “build it yourself while flying the plane” to a determined focus on aligning to a set of organizational systems. From student discipline and culture to curriculum and instruction, we were leveraging our collective wisdom and energy to create best‐in‐class resources for teachers and school leaders so that kids were consistently receiving the very best teaching in the very best schools we could build—and fast! Our sense of urgency came from the belief that kids who were behind simply did not have time for adults to slowly get better at teaching. We had to develop the very best teachers and leaders as fast as possible.
During my last two years as principal, we launched three major systemic initiatives. Our school was one of the first in the network to turn our merit/demerit‐based student culture approach into a tight, aligned system. We used Doug Lemov's Teach Like a Champion book and teaching model to double down on the technical training of core teaching strategies. This enabled us to take a giant leap forward in our ability to systematically and quickly teach teachers common instructional moves. Finally, during that same year, we launched a robust instructional coaching system in which every teacher was observed and received feedback and planning support weekly.
These three initiatives, supported by a data‐driven culture that regularly reflected on whether we were doing what we said we would do, and that we were doing it well, were some of the foundations on which we built breakthrough levels of student achievement across our network. We were proving that Amistad was not an anomaly, and that we could replicate its breakthrough results for kids. Meanwhile, we were also seeing early signs that our systemic approach might have an unintended effect on morale. These early signs didn't get much attention because of our focus on instructional expertise and student outcomes.
Then Common Core dropped like a bomb on public schools. We were horrified when we saw our students' test scores plummet; the new assessment showed that not half as many reached proficiency compared to the previous year's state test scores. We had thought that our kids were closing in on their counterparts in the wealthiest public school systems in the country. We were wrong. But we were not alone. Almost every public charter and district had the same wake‐up call. AF's response to this crisis was one of humility, accompanied by an all‐out instructional leadership campaign to build our capacity to meet the rigorous expectations of Common Core. I was proud of our organizational response. It was not long, however, before I started to understand the unintended consequences of our reaction.
During that first year's push to align to Common Core, I left Amistad to start a leadership development partnership with our district counterparts in New Haven, Hartford, and Bridgeport, CT. In this new program, built on the medical residency model, district leaders spent a half year in AF schools and then a half year in a strong district school, working with a principal mentor to apply what they had learned. Our pitch to Residents: “You are smart, passionate professionals. We are going to expose you to the best of what charter and district schools have to offer, and we expect you to make your own decisions about what works and doesn't work.”
Over time, clear themes emerged about what district leaders experienced at AF: “These instructional approaches and the teacher coaching practices are INCREDIBLE! But the student and adult culture systems and approaches? We can't figure out why you would do those things.”
With time, it became difficult to give my Residents a compelling rationale for some of our core practices around student and adult culture. From my new perspective gained from observing schools, I was seeing large numbers of unhappy, disinvested students on a spectrum from apathetic compliance to outright resistance. I was seeing many teachers, deeply invested in our teacher taxonomy skills, hanging their authentic selves up at the door of their classrooms and adopting a teaching persona—a kind of performance—that often disconnected them from their students. I was seeing teacher coaches who excelled at teaching instructional skills but were often stuck in a leadership persona that disconnected them from teachers and students. And I was seeing principals who, having been promoted because they were really good at teaching instructional moves to teachers, struggling mightily and sometimes failing miserably with the real, messy human aspects of their jobs.
Meanwhile, I was getting to know district schools that were happy, inclusive places for kids and adults. The challenge many of them faced, however, was that large percentages of their students were significantly underperforming academically. Between district and charter schools, I was experiencing a wide range of learning communities that fell on a continuum between two poles: on one end happy yet underperforming and enabling, and on the other negative, controlling, yet (relatively) academically high performing. I saw very few schools that were hitting the sweet spot where inclusive, nurturing cultures and high academic performance were embodied simultaneously.
A year into this work, I found myself questioning my beliefs and my training. I loved AF, our people, and our mission. I deeply believed in the direction that our curriculum and pedagogy was
