#NAISAC2017 Takeaways: Bringing Your Passion into Work

Can you be a better leader if you bring your work and your life together? The answer is a resounding YES! In his NAIS Annual Conference workshop entitled Leadership Lessons from the Seat of My Bicycle, George Swain of NYSAIS shared the lessons he learned from being an endurance rider and how he weaves his love of riding into his work life and into his leadership style.

In broad strokes, the leadership lessons George learned: Set high goals * Pace Yourself * Sweat the small stuff * Solve problems by not trying to solve them * Delegate * Pursue your passion

However, it's the last goal of "Pursue your Passion" that I want to focus on here.
George asked us to reflect on 3 simple questions:
* What is the thing in your life that you currently do, that's not work?
* What did you used to do that you no longer do, but miss?
* What do you wish to do, that you've put off?"

"If not now, when? We are our biggest enemy. Interrupt the narrative."

In the pair-share I met an educator who'd always wanted to learn to play the guitar. Despite the presentation, she still couldn't seem to see a way to make this happen and talked about how she had kids and just no time, maybe later in life. Needless to say our other partner and I couldn't let that be how she walked out of that room. I shared with her how I have a couple of colleagues, with children, who have learned to play an instrument at this point in their life and made time in the mornings to practice their art prior to going off to teach for the day. With some storytelling and some strong encouragement from us, she seemed a little more willing to consider that she shouldn't put off pursuing this interest any longer. Of course, it is also important for me to turn the mirror on myself and ask, what do I wish to do that I've put off due to a plethora of excuses..... finding time to play volleyball again, learning sign language, learning how to swim, learning to play an instrument (I'd even start with learning to read music), take another dance class (it's been about a decade since the last one).

In the end, George reminded us that you do not have to put your passions on hold just because the job of being an educator is, at times, all consuming. You just need to find a way to bring your whole authentic self into your job, make time for those things in your life that make you you and find ways to bring you passions to work. A good reminder for us all.

#NAISAC2017 Takeaways: Creating a Failure-Friendly Environment for Students

Friday of the NAIS annual conference was a good day to see another one of my colleagues in action. So I enjoyed learning from my Loomis Chaffee dean colleague Mike Donegan as he presented Failure 2.0: Creating a Failure Friendly Environment. Before I get into the heart of my takeaways, can I just say Mike had a full house (standing room only) and did a great job of engaging the audience. By the size of the audience, one could see that this topic is something that many educators are looking to tackle in all our schools. How do we help students "fail" and stopping seeing failure as the end of their worlds, but more of an opportunity? Now don't get me wrong, no one wants that "F" on a test, but creating "failure-friendly" environments is not just about supporting students through a bad grade, but it's also about creating an environment where students are willing to put themselves out there and take some risks even while knowing that it may not go their way (or be perfect). They may not get that position they applied for. Their voice may shake all throughout their entire chapel talk. They may not get that A, B or even C on that may test, but what can they learn in that moment about their preparation, their mastery, or about work more closely with their teachers that could help them be a better student in the long run. The thing is that there is something to be learned from each of these situations that a student would miss out on if they always play it safe because being wrong or vulnerable or not being elected/selected feels worse. So a few nuggets I walked away with were ....

Redefine Failure
It's important for us as educators to help students redefine, reframe what is. Failure can be a risk taken, lesson learned, and perhaps a message in the mess.

Redefine Resilience
Mike went on to show that redefining failure is not enough, but it's important to also define or expand on the definition of resilience, a word we hear a lot about in our schools.

 

Use a Failure Checklist

Have students reflect on a failure by asking themselves four questions.

1. What can I learn from this?
2. How could I have done things differently?
3. Where do I go from here?
4. What does this make possible?
(Richardson, J.W. The Failure Checklist (MS Word document). Retrieved from http://www.personasuccesstoday.com/the -failure-checklist)

Create a Failure Resume 

Have faculty share their failure stories or like Professor Haushofer, create a Failure Resume to share with students (example: http://bit.ly/1TaFEN4). We can also ask students to create their own failure resume where they also include what they learned from that. Students can also benefit from hearing their parents failure stories. After Mike's presentation, one head of school spoke about how this one evening he shared his personal and professionals with his daughter and how much more his daughter took away from that conversation than she had from knowing all of his successes.

"E" Them
One other approach Mike encouraged educators to consider when creating a "failure-friendly" environment for students, is to "E" them. Encourage. Endow. Empower. Enable. Embolden.



#NAISAC2017 Takeaways: Lead with Outrage

So one of the wonderful things about participating in the NAIS Aspiring Heads Fellowship is meeting other amazing educational leaders and cheering them on. The finale of our NAIS Aspiring Heads Fellowship year involved each mentee group presenting their action research project at the annual conference. While we were in Baltimore I wanted to make sure that in addition to delivering our presentation, that I made it to some of the other fellows' workshops. One of the workshops I had a chance to attended was: Why aren't we outraged? Using Moral Leadership to Achieve NAIS Equity & Justice Best practices. They grounded their presentation in literature, including Thomas Serbgiovanni's work, and research and left me wanting to learn (and read) more.

As someone unfamiliar with Sergiovanni's work, I was definitely intrigued by how he framed moral leadership and how my colleagues connected with the work we do in schools. With in Sergiovanni's work he talked about leading with outrage and that concept struck me. First, it struck me because when you hear the word outrage you think anger and that really has no place in a school setting. However, when you dig deeper you see that it is not about being angry, it's about having your emotions move you to action because something just isn't right and because something important is not being tended to. I love that! We talk about students bystanderism and say to them "see something, say something." So should we really lead any differently? I would say no and that leading with outrage encourages us to operate the same way. If we see something that isn't right, could be better, or is one of those "we've just always done it this way", but shouldn't continue to then it's time to lead with outrage and remember that as Sergiovanni (1992) said "nobody has a special license to protect the standard." So really, we can't afford not to lead with outrage, for the students sake. They always deserve the best of what we have to offer and, therefore, leading with outrage is really the least we can do in all of our schools.

*Brandt, R. (1992). On Rethinking Leadership: A Conversation with Tom Sergiovanni. Educational Leadership, 49 (5), 46-49.

#NAISAC2017 Takeaways: Getting Strategic about Cultural Compentency Leadership

Almost two weeks ago, I was in Baltimore at the 2017 NAIS Annual Conference. The thing about large scale conferences is that you attend all of these sessions, take tons of notes, eat up all this inspiration, and then return to your school not knowing where to start or what to do with all of that inspiration that now lives in a notebook in your desk. With that said, I decided to take some time to think about what were those things, those takeaways that really resonated with me. What did I hear that I can apply to my work to positively impact my school, my students, and my own professional (and personal) growth. So instead of doing a large scale information dump, I have broken up my takeaways into a five part blog post series so I can hone in on 5 sessions from which I walked away with a nugget or two that really spoke to me. So here we go.....

On Day 1, I started my day at 8:00am with Ronnie Codrington-Cazeau and Robert Greene who were presenting "You Can't Get Strategic, Unless You Get Strategic: Cultural Competency Leadership in Practice". Ronnie is the Head of School at the Evergreen School (WA) and, full-disclosure, she was also my mentor during my 2016-17 year in the NAIS Aspiring Heads Fellowship. Robert Greene is a diversity practitioner and consultant with Jones Consulting (CA). Ronnie hired Robert as a consultant to work with her and her senior leadership team at Evergreen, and the presentation took the audience through some of the work they did together, lessons learned, and progress made. So while I found the entire presentation so useful and applicable, my goal of this post is not to recap everything they took us through. I just want to share 3 things said during the presentation that continue to resonate with me two weeks later.

1. One of the key cornerstones to advancing a school's accessibility, diversity, and inclusion efforts is that they need to "identify and reduce internal and external obstacles to promoting, maintaining and supporting a climate of inclusivity for students, faculty and families." This is critical. Schools work so hard in to creating cultural programming, talking about bias, stereotype threat, and privilege (hopefully), commit to being an inclusive community, aim to have a diverse student and faculty body, and yet, if time is not spent one this key element then we'll keep spinning our wheels. Tackling this means being willing to take a good hard look in the mirror and acknowledge what may really be standing in the way of a school having a truly inclusive school climate and community.

2. A part of the work with the senior leadership team focused on culturally competent communication. Robert and Ronnie shared the 13 Skills for Cultural Competent Communication and while I had encountered some of the skills (or a version of a skill) on previous community norm lists, it was the skills listed first and last that really stuck with me.

** "Greet others genuinely and make an effort to pronounce their name accurately"
    This skill stuck out to me as something I make an effort to have in my daily practice. Some of it comes from my name sensitivity that stems from having grown up with a maiden name that often got butchered. I also grew up overseas and so part of the education of that experience was learning to pronounce people's name correctly and to not short change a name for my own personal ease. So seeing this skill in right was a first for me and yet, I can not say enough how important this is in a school community.

** "Celebrate Successes and Have Fun"
     I loved seeing this skill and was surprised at how its absence from list had never stood out to me before. Equity and Inclusion work can be hard, personal draining, rewarding, impactful, and forever ongoing. Through all that work, there does not seem to be enough moments where we celebrate our successes and embrace the fun. Simply put, we need to do this more.

3. "If you don't have a diverse pool of candidates, then you are not looking hard enough."
   Schools have a variety of methods when it comes to hiring that may include using particular search firms focused on this area, reaching out to affinity groups and organizations, connecting with nontraditional teaching candidates (i.e. career changes), etc. So there is tons that can be done to positively impact a school's results in this area and yet, some will still default to the reasons why they believe they cannot attract a diverse pool of candidates and hires. It definitely begs the questions - are schools really looking hard enough and are schools really stepping up their efforts and exhausting all the ways in which they build their candidate pools?

Reminder to self...

So my blog has been a little slow-going. Imposter syndrome at play. There is this narrative going on in my head that whatever I write and post must be important, profound, and useful for others. However, when this is the narrative, I am letting the "others" (whoever they may be) define what is deemed important, profound, and useful. I am acting off some perfectionistic definition of important. This narrative stops my ideas and much of my writing from moving forward. So I am interrupting the narrative. I am going to write that blog post, article, and story that I feel needs to be written and needs to be told as defined by me. If a post resonates with just one person, then that's a win.