Introit

On Balance in Leadership

Heads Speak for Themselves, June 2012 Installment

Billy Handmaker, Head of School, Bosque School (NM)

Like other Heads of School, I think about leadership constantly. Whether the thoughts are generated by conversations with members of our administrative team about new initiatives we are contemplating, grappling with a difficult decision that I know will alienate at least one of our constituencies, or planning for an annual Board of Trustees retreat, we continually face questions around our philosophy, style, and beliefs about leadership. It comes with the territory, and we welcome these discussions. However, all too often, our musings on this topic are based on a crisis that requires an immediate resolution; consequently, we have little time to dissect or reflect critically on how we lead or how it reflects who we are as people. 

As is true with other colleagues, I look to biographies for inspiration and lessons that may be applicable to the work we do. Just recently, I spoke to our students about some lessons we can learn from Eric Foner’s book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. In this Pulitzer-winning biography, Foner analyzes the evolution in Lincoln’s views toward “the peculiar institution” of slavery and African-Americans. As Foner traces the change in Lincoln’s attitudes about abolition, he points out, on the book’s final page, what may have been our 16th President’s greatest trait: “Lincoln did not enter the White House expecting to preside over the destruction of slavery. A powerful combination of events, as we have seen, propelled him down the road to emancipation and then to a reconsideration of the place blacks would occupy in a post-slavery America. Of course, the unprecedented crisis in which, as one member of Congress put it, ‘the events of an entire century transpire in a year,’ made change the order of the day. Yet as the presidency of his successor demonstrated, not all men placed in a similar situation possessed the capacity for growth, the essence of Lincoln’s greatness. ‘I think we have reason to thank God for Abraham Lincoln,’ the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child wrote one week before his death. ‘With all his deficiencies, it must be admitted that he has grown continuously; and considering how slavery had weakened and perverted the moral sense of the whole county, it was great good luck to have the people elect a man who was willing to grow.’" 

In this first year serving as head of a second school, I feel as if I have been given a shot at redemption for the mistakes I made during my first headship which, even though it went well for fifteen years, still had some regrets. Starting over has been a shot in the arm professionally and a joy personally. However, a requirement for doing well has been a willingness to learn from earlier experiences, so that when a similar situation occurs, I don’t make the same mistake twice. In a startling scene from a Phillip Caputo novel, Horn of Africa, a character finds himself facing a situation, remarkably similar to one that occurred earlier in the book, that has haunted him all of his life. The reader gasps and wonders whether the character will redeem himself or fall victim to the temptation to repeat the behavior that caused the mistake in the first place. All too often, we are confronted with a situation that we have dealt with before, but we don’t have time to apply whatever lessons we could have taken from the previous instance. Maybe we need to keep a journal filled with thoughts on how we will respond if given a second chance.

The fourth volume in Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Passage of Power, like the other three volumes, contains a myriad of lessons for leaders. Particularly compelling are the descriptions of Johnson’s attempts to navigate between a desire to establish his own legitimacy as president following his predecessor’s assassination and his understanding that he needed to be sensitive to the shocked Kennedy family. While all of his instincts should have led Johnson to follow his innate tendency to charge ahead, consequences be damned, (which he did in some cases during those days), he was able to maintain a posture of reserve and patience during this critical transition. Similarly, in our roles, when others expect us to make quick, forceful decisions, as we so often need to do, and we also feel the need to establish our leadership credentials, we may neglect to look at the elements in a situation that would suggest slowing down and exercising prudence. The button on my desk that says, “Patience is such a waste of time” may be humorous, but we heed its advice at our own peril.

Perhaps one of the best metaphors for leadership comes from a scene I witnessed early one morning in a small river town in China back in the 1980’s. As I strolled along the fog-shrouded riverfront before dawn, I observed the elderly villagers practicing their tai-chi routines in a slow, mesmerizing routine.  This centuries-old martial art emphasizes balance as the practitioner makes gradual forward and backward movements, essentially alternating between advancing and retreating.  Attacks on one’s body are defused by slowly leaning back but not compromising one’s position while initiating contact entails a series of well-planned and considered forward steps. As in our leadership jobs, there are times to relax and give up today’s battle for the long-term good or goal: keeping our eyes on the prize.  On the other hand, though, there will be times when we need to go forward, but only after looking at all of the options available to us.  Next to the button on patience on my desk is a rock with one word engraved on it: balance. 

As we head into the summer and perhaps have more time to reflect on our own leadership, as well as lessons we can learn from others, may we have the willingness to grow like Lincoln, the strategic thinking of LBJ in those four days after Dallas (not always one of his greatest personality traits), and the wisdom of those tai chi masters by that river in China.

 

Fore! Measuring the Head's Performance

Heads Speak for Themselves: May 2012

It's May, which means that despite the underlying awareness of all the end-of-year events and unresolved matters, one eye is glancing hopefully at the calendar in search of an opportunity to schedule the season's first round of golf. Meanwhile, the other eye notices with somewhat less enthusiasm the e-mail that has just come across the screen from our Board Chair, reminding me that we need to arrange time for my yearly performance review. I should say at the outset that I embrace the concept of the review. Years ago, in encouraging me to undergo with the proper spirit my first performance review as a rookie head of school, the Chair reminded me sagely that "even though we might be in good health, it's wise to get a physical every year." Yet I am guessing that your experiences with evaluations of your own performance as school heads, like mine, have been as varied as I fear the results of my swings will be whenever that first round of golf comes to pass. In some years, there were no performance assessments done; in one way that was a relief, but also not conducive to professional growth. At other times a process was followed, but there was lack of clarity regarding the criteria on which the assessment was based. A third variety of review entailed exhaustive gathering of evidence, several times during the year, to demonstrate the scope and value of the work I had been doing as head. This approach generated a lot of information for analysis; the difficulty lay in the amount of time involved in chronicling the work on top of actually engaging in it.

Two years into my current tenure, I was asked by the Board leaders to compile a semi-annual portfolio as a key element of my self-assessment. I recoiled at this directive initially, concerned once more about the time it would require and bothered by how tedious and redundant it might turn out to be--given the reports I was already doing prior to each Board meeting. Three years later, rather than being simply a compilation of meetings held, constituents contacted and plans developed, the portfolio has evolved into a “Journal of Leadership Practices.” It is the fruit of any progress I have made in becoming more self-reflective, and of our Board's great care in defining the leadership practices that are required to serve the school's best interests. These include: strategic thinking, pre-planning, maintaining thoughtful oversight of objectives the head and his/her team are pursuing, managing and shepherding the Board to advance the school's mission and vision, demonstrating initiative and focus, serving as the “voice” of the institution and its highest aspirations, and being an agent of positive, necessary changes. Thus, each January as well as June, I consider any relevant examples and enter them into the Journal. The list of entries is not so much a “snapshot” of discrete individual activities, but rather a “video” of a related series of actions which may (and I hope that is the case) or may not underscore a pattern of leadership behavior.

Considering the Journal entries in toto is similar to analyzing clips of great golf swings, something I have been doing with unwarranted optimism during the off-season. Unexpectedly, I've discovered a few interesting parallels between the elements of strong school leadership and what makes for a successful golf shot. We begin with club selection, the choice of the proper resources-- and personnel for the school head-- to make possible all that follows. The approach to the ball, proper stance included, are akin to the leader deciding to take initiative and to act. He or she must exercise foresight, carefully considering the intended goal, just as golfers visualize where they want the ball to wind up, and how to get it there. Proper grip is essential for a great shot, just as the school head needs to have a handle on issues both large and small. The swing is of course the key component, like the action the leader takes or the decisions the leader makes. The swing must occur in the right plane, with the club pointed at the target--and for the school head, actions must be aligned with the school's mission. The head and eyes of the golfer serve as anchors for the swing while the legs and arms turn; they are apt metaphors for the focus and steadiness that the school head must provide. And finally, there is the importance of follow through, whether we are referring to the golf swing, or to our leadership roles.

All of these elements and others must be in the mix in order to put together a beautiful swing or successful leadership. Watching the video reveals to the golfer why his or her shot was so good--because the golfer can pause the action, see the component parts of the shot, and then admire how well they flowed together. The process inspires the golfer to maintain and perfect those components to the point where they become habitual, routine, embedded in muscle memory. In the same way, by considering the inventory of leadership practices through the portfolio process, I have become more aware these past several years of the components or “stuff of school leadership,” to the point of noticing when I am engaged in those practices, and seeking to replicate them in a variety of circumstances. That is the ultimate value the “Journal of Leadership Practices” portfolio has had for this head of school.

Good luck with your own review process, and best wishes for a successful home stretch!

Richard J. O'Hara is President of John Carroll School (grades 9 to 12, Bel Air, Maryland). He can be reached at rohara@johncarroll.org.

Living the School Mission: A Haitian Experience

"Heads Speak for Themselves" - April 2012 installment

Recently, I spent five days in Haiti with our Lower School Chaplain, Modern Language Chair, and Maintenance Manager, who is a master carpenter.  The four of us traveled there over spring break to start our official relationship with a partner school, St. Mark’s, a K-6 school of 200 + students in Cerca, a village in the mountains of the Central Plateau. Our primary focus was to learn how we might be helpful to them and how their lives might inform ours.

The idea began at a board meeting for the National Association of Episcopal Schools (NAES) that I attended in January.  I joined the board a year ago, and, at that meeting in New York City, several school heads were clearly moved by their recent visits to their respective Haitian partner schools.  I listened intently as they described the great spirit and dedication shown by members of the Episcopal Church and clergy who serve in Haiti (10% of Haiti’s population is Protestant, and Haiti has the largest Episcopal diocese in the world with nearly 250 churches and schools) and of their need for financial assistance and service needs. As one of the largest and most affluent Episcopal schools in America, and because I believe it is important to connect The Episcopal Academy to the wider world, it made great sense to me to join the Episcopal partnership program in Haiti. We already support and work with St. James the Less Episcopal School, a start-up middle school for neighborhood children in the West Allegheny section of Philadelphia (PA), so why not expand our connections a bit further afield?

When we arrived, we were met by a retired Episcopal priest and former school head who now spends a few months in Haiti each year connecting American Episcopal schools with their Haitian counterparts.  The priest, Roger, drove us in a rented jeep through gridlocked traffic, past tent camps for some of the thousands still left homeless after the devastating earthquake of 2010.  More than two years after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck near Port au Prince, much of the city still looks like a war zone. The Presidential Palace remains in ruins, the main Catholic and Episcopal Cathedrals have only a few walls still standing, and a large number of federal buildings and much of the Central Hospital still lie completely destroyed. We eventually crawled our way out of Port au Prince and made our way to Mirebalais, the main city of the Central Plateau.

After spending the night and meeting our host, Père Jeannot, who is the Priest-in-Charge for 16 different churches in the district, we set out with him for the journey to our partner school.  We drove down bone-jarring roads for nearly an hour to the spot where our trek on foot began.  After donning sun hats and applying lots of sunscreen, and loaded with gifts for our counterparts at St. Mark’s, we began our hike.  All told, we were a party of about 20 people and several horses.

We hiked 45 minutes up a gentle slope to a wide river crossing where we were rowed across in dories.  The horses were unloaded, swam across, and all of us set out again up a steeper track this time.  Some two hours later, about six miles from where we set out, we straggled in to the village of Cerca, exhausted, but warmly welcomed by our new friends.

We spent a day and night with the people of St. Mark’s, met with the principal, observed classes, played and danced with the children, attended mass, observed a flag ceremony, talked extensively with Père Jeannot, and began to form some ideas about what support we might be able to provide our new partners. Please see the photo below of the students at St. Mark's:

We are, of course, still in the very early stages of forming a long-term plan.  We know we would like to have a group return to Cerca at least once each year, and we would like to have a handful of Upper School students with us for every visit.  We know that anyone who has the opportunity to travel there will be forever changed.  That is what they will give to us.  When we departed they presented us with wild chicken eggs (for which they had hunted for all over the mountainside), giant yams, bananas, coconuts, and colorful baskets: incredibly generous gifts from those who have so little.  These material items, however, were not the most important gifts we received. The most important gift was being able to live our school mission in a real, tangible, and truly effective way – and the excitement that comes with imagining our students having this very same experience.

I close with several lines from a book handed to me by one of our parents just before I headed to Haiti.  Entitled Create Dangerously, by Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, it is the “Philadelphia Reads” book this year.  In her essay, Our Guernica, she writes, “Haitians like to tell each other that Haiti is ‘te glise,’ slippery ground. Even under the best of circumstances, the country can be stable one moment and crumbling the next.  Haiti has never been more slippery ground than after the earthquake, with bodies littering the streets, entire communities buried in rubble, homes pancacked to dust. Now Haitian hearts are also slippery ground, hopeful one moment and filled with despair the next.  Has 206 years of existence finally reached its abyss?  We wonder.  But now even the ground is no more.”

The most important thing now, I believe, is to continue on and to follow through and deliver on our partnership.  The people of Haiti have endured too much hardship and I would hate to disappoint them again. I want us to do our little part to keep their hope alive with a gift of tangible faith and mission in action.

L. Hamilton (Ham) Clark is The Greville Haslam Head of School at The Episcopal Academy (Newtown Square, PA). He can be reached at clark@episcopalacademy.org.

What Does It Take To Be a Head of School Today?

While attending an ISACS Head’s Conference in 1988, Rowland McKinley, the retiring twenty-five year Headmaster at the University School in Cleveland, stepped to the podium and proclaimed in a commanding, brusque voice, “I am a dinosaur!” His bigger than life, marine-like appearance with his penetrating eyes staring in my direction stunned me momentarily, reminding me of several school masters I shuttered to remember. I abruptly sat at attention quickly realizing that he spotted our table where four of us youthful and eager HOS were dining together. Rowland’s voice boomed once again, “Yes, you are the ones, the HOS who must carry on and deal with the new, independent school parent. You will not have the luxury that I enjoyed; when I spoke, everyone listened.” Well, I had no clue what Rowland was talking about except we knew we were far from being like this burly, drill sergeant headmaster complete with crew cut. Moments later it occurred to me that it was his very presence and voice that commanded immediate authority, something Rowland later claimed would no longer be a useful headmaster skill.  

A month later, I attended a workshop at an NAIS Conference where Rod Snelling, President of Independent School Management (ISM), offered his prediction, “Prepare for the Parents of the 90s.” His thesis was simply this: the children raised by post-1960s parents were offspring during the “Pepsi, ‘Me’ Generation.” In essence, it meant that parents would come to expect HOS to retrofit the school’s mission and educational program to the needs of the parents’ demands.

As part of a new breed of HOS, most of us took heed of Rod’s and Rowland’s predictions, not really knowing what such a parent might look like. A few years later, I knew their predictions had come true when a parent demanded, “I am paying thousands for this education, so I expect you to give me what my child deserves.” For a brief moment, my mind flashed back to Rowland picturing him saying in his day, “Well, m ‘am, your son is getting our very best here, so you can take him or leave him…” Quickly snapping back to reality, I asked, “Can you help me better understand what you mean by ‘what he deserves?’”  I did not respond like a dinosaur, but instead, I listened carefully to the parent so that I might adjust to meet the child’s needs.” How right Rowland and Rod were about the new and demanding parents who were by the late ‘90’s defined as “customers,” a far cry from the days when Rowland like dinosaurs roamed the hallowed halls of our independent schools.  

Now, I am a Rowland-like dinosaur in comparison to the parent of the 21^st century. Today’s parents, although nice enough, have no pangs about saying, "I am here to advocate for my child." Comparably more parents are now used to negotiating with school personnel to get their childrens' needs met, regardless of restraints or extra cost to the school, not to mention stretching the school’s mission to do so. Several years ago, I encountered a situation that told me I was on the onset of becoming a dinosaur. A new parent said she was not reenrolling her kindergarten child for the next year, because she and her husband did feel accepted at the school, although her child, after a bumpy start, was adjusting well with lots of friends. I said, “You mean you would pull your happy child out of school after one year because you are not happy in our school’s community?” It dawned on me that the new parents of the 21^st century not only were looking for their children to be accepted, but it mattered to them that they were accepted, too. I remember her saying, “Zack is fine, he loves it here, but this is just not the school for my husband and me.”

As a dinosaur, I have had to come to grips with adjusting to not only the newest iteration of parents as Rowland did but also to certain other trends complicating the present independent school landscape. To Rowland’s credit, he retired at an expected age of the times. But, today’s retirement age is a moving target. Today, HOS are faced with prolonged careers forgoing retirement, which means in some cases adjusting to a newer breed of parent more than once in their careers, in addition to facing other new trends, which I see as the following:

• Managing board and staff hard for greater effectiveness in achieving highly publicized goals and expectations.
• Strengthening the strategic function of boards in order to achieve certain outcomes.
• Opening up once closed processes in order to become more fully transparent to stakeholders.
• Utilizing social media and networking to understand the informal communication lines operating in your school.

Although the days of the Rowland dinosaur that we still may revere are long gone, I too can now say to the X-Generation HOS, “It is up to you.”  You must manage your staffs aggressively by monitoring their achievements rather than hiring good people and just letting them do their jobs well. You must identify strategic thinkers in your community to join your boards rather than filling positions by merely identifying needed expertise only. You must create transparency in all aspects of your organizations to the extent you can by utilizing a multitude of means and forums of communications. Finally, you must play by the dictates of the new social order arising out of the social media and networking by becoming a player and communicating firsthand about the good things going on in your schools.

The benefits of doing business in this way will far outweigh the tried and true old methods of overseeing people left to do their jobs and reacting to whatever comes along. Although our generation of HOS learned long ago that whatever we said was not going to be taken as gospel, we did surround ourselves with people who would do their jobs well and deliver the messages. Now, it is expected that the HOS closely monitor the progress and detailed achievement of the school’s personnel, knowing full well that Facebook and Twitter can be used to communicate these small but important little achievements in a less controlled environment.

Not long ago, I hired an employee who, in spite of a background check, was reported to have harassed someone in a former school. I had no sooner stepped out of my classroom when a reporter and parent were at my doorstep. The speed of light with which social media took up this issue and presented to me only serves to illustrate a HOS leadership in such situations is automatically compromised: no time to get the facts; only the recipient of a community who has already tried and juried all those involved. HOS today know not what is in store for them, but they do know that whatever comes their way, they must adjust with lightning speed to the situations at hand.  In doing so, heads will be accorded a certain amount of respect in the school’s community. However, I will say to future heads: it is a decision, but no longer a choice, to be an actor on social media networks.

What more do you think it will take for a HOS today to keep from being a dinosaur in this second decade of the twenty-first century?

Charles F. Clark is Head of School at the Nantucket-Lighthouse School (MA).

Rules of Thumb: Guest Blogger William Wharton

This is my twelfth year running and my twenty-sixth working at a very small school in Boston’s Back Bay, one that enjoys a remarkable group of teachers and motivated students.  I like to think that I’ve figured a few things out, usually after a couple of significant blunders.  But as I think back I realize that though I’m a slow learner, eventually patterns of what works and what doesn’t come into focus and are understood.  I like to distill some of those lessons into economical rules of thumb— common sense reminders—that keep me on track.  Here are a few about leadership and our schools.

There is no such thing as an interruption. I learned this one quickly, thanks to my predecessor who used to tell everyone at the start of the year that her door was open and that teachers and students were welcome to bring any ideas or concerns to her, adding that she did not promise to agree with them, but she did promise to listen.  I repeat those lines at the start of every year. My office is an ornate 19^th-century oval dining room whose double doors (gorgeous curved mahogany) open onto a busy landing across from our library. Teachers, staff, or students drop in frequently with questions and comments ranging from the inconsequential to the momentous.  A teacher may present a problem with a proposal for a sensible solution; a student may float a far-fetched idea for a new program or sport.  But if I don’t drop what I’m doing and give my full attention, they will leave feeling that they have been rejected.  Even if all that I have to say is “Good idea, go for it,” it is important for all to know that they have been fully heard. The attention I give assures them of their franchise, of their responsibility for the community.  The rule of thumb helps keep me from treating a teacher, student, or parent as a distraction.

The leader sets the tone.  General Eisenhower realized that “optimism and pessimism are infectious and they spread more rapidly from the head downward than in any other direction.” Of his time on Gibraltar while planning the North African invasion in the fall of 1942 he wrote, “I did my best to meet everyone from general to private with a smile, a pat on the back, and a definite interest in his problem.”  I have seen in schools how the Head’s treatment of colleagues and students creates the atmosphere in which all live and work.  Students and adults smell suspicion and doubt; they can sense when they are trusted and liked.  The rule reminds me that the health of a community depends on the leadership’s confidence, even if occasionally misplaced, in everyone’s good will and effort. Besides, if the boss is having fun, everyone will have more fun.

The facts can clear a lot of fog. What social psychologists call the availability principle ensures that what stands out will be taken as typical: people fear flying, even though it’s safer than driving, because plane crashes are dramatic, or as the pros say, psychologically salient.  When teachers come to complain about an epidemic of tardiness or sloth or when students or parents tell of outrageous demands by a new teacher, it’s worth asking for specifics. Detailed, sympathetic questioning about the facts both conveys your care and attention to the matter and also clarifies the scope and nature of the issue. Two or three students who are slacking or frequently sauntering in late absorb can be dealt with more readily than an epidemic. Likewise, a couple of unexpectedly tough assignments are easier to raise with a new teacher than are charges of piling it on.  The rule can quickly reduce a crisis to a manageable problem.   

I’m not in as big a hurry as the teachers are.  I remember my outrage in my first year as a Latin teacher when the middle school head told me that in ten years it would not really matter whether my students got to chapter twenty-five in first year Latin. I know now that she was absolutely right.  Three times a year our entire faculty meets and over one or two days reviews together the grades and comments of each one of our 150 students. In the four to five minutes we spend on each child, a biology teacher or advisor will agonize to figure out what is keeping their charges from doing their best work.  They want to fix the problem now.  Such devotion almost justifies our tuition, but I often cut these conversations short. From outside the classroom trenches I’ve watched hundreds of students move through the school and beyond to successful, flourishing lives—including a few whom we asked to leave and who have come back to visit in their second year of medical school.  I can see that time and maturation often do more than many of the interventions we can devise (though we do devise plenty).  If teachers resist my suggestion that a student’s chief need is simply further growth of the frontal cortex—they are on to me—we’ll keep talking. It’s a healthy tension.

Parents have far fewer data points about young people and the school than we do.  This is the home-front corollary to the rule above.  Parents have had, at most, a few children pass through adolescence; we’ve watched hundreds.  We have to orient parents to our school and to what they can expect in their years with us.  We have handbooks and back-to-school nights to get things rolling, but they don’t know what the coming years are going to feel like. I wrote a short manual for parents on raising Commonwealth students that spells out “the interesting, frustrating, delightful, and worrisome white-knuckle ride” they may face as their children grow into young adults. It gives a year-by-year account of hurdles their kids will face, and counsels a patient ear and regular communication with the advisor.  With the first set of grades we send a cover letter that prepares parents for our teachers’ sometimes frank comments and orients them to our grading, assuring them, among other things, that B’s and C’s are well within the normal range for 9^th graders in the early part of the year. Parents need some sense of the normal range of behavior and performance in order to understand their children.  The rule reminds us that we always have to communicate to keep parents’ expectations realistic.

Be honest about your mistakes.  I recently lifted everyone’s morale when I sent a desperate e-mail to teachers asking if anyone had seen Alexis’s Language and Ethics test, which I had lost.  (Language and Ethics is a short class I teach to all freshmen.) We didn’t find the test, and Alexis was gracious about having to re-take it (not to mention tickled that the Headmaster apologized to her).  The teachers felt terrific relief that I had broadcast my own fallibility.  They could let go of their own fear of blundering—at least some of it. I teach students that honest argument requires that we be open to the possibility that we’re wrong. Teachers—and parents—know that I’ve been persuaded to change decisions.  They know, therefore, that discussion at Commonwealth matters and that we learn from mistakes.  And given that this principle accords with Carol Dweck’s Mindset and Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong (both highly recommended), it’s proven a fashionable rule in school circles.

 There are more where these came from.  Perhaps the master of this blog could set up a bank of such adages, with glosses.  This brings me to the last rule for this piece. Borrowing what has worked for others can save a lot of time, money, and grief.  

William Wharton has been Headmaster of Commonwealth School in Boston since July 2000. Bill joined Commonwealth’s faculty in 1985 as a teacher of history, Latin, and Greek, and over his 25 years at Commonwealth his courses have included current events, ancient philosophy, and world religions. He also serves on the Board of College Year in Athens. You can reach him at bwharton@commschool.org.

 

Words to Live By -- Guest Blogger Thomas Main

Almost ten years ago, in the early summer of 2002, I was sitting in my office, newly minted as Head of a PK-12 day school in Fairfield County, CT.  I knew the school well, having had a previous tenure there (1983-1990). I loved the community, and I was full of the passion and energy that it would take to impact the school in all sorts of ways.  I was looking forward to a meeting with a long time acquaintance later that morning; a man I had known professionally since I began my career as a teacher, 19 previous to this date.  He had just stepped down from a highly successful and long-term headship, and was working on a new educational venture.  He arrived, and after some introductory chat, I asked him for advice; what could he tell me that would really help as I began this voyage.  He looked at me and said: “I think that the most important thing for you to understand is that by any intelligent, reasonable standard, the job you are starting is completely impossible, and it is unreasonable to expect that you will be able to do it all well. No one can.”

 

Obviously, this took a little wind out of my sails, but we continued, and he elaborated.  He said I would be expected to be a skilled financial manager (I knew very little at the time), a savvy marketing and admission professional (I had never worked in admission), a strategic thinker that always had the big picture in mind and a detailed manager that would get to know the program at the grassroots level, a construction manager with a good sense for building design, and a leader that was both highly collaborative and extremely decisive.  I would need to be an active fund-raiser, but not seem driven by fund-raising.  I would be expected to be highly visible, which meant being at games, plays, Pre-K events, the Upper School Cum Laude induction, and Middle School sports awards (the list goes on forever), as well as extremely accessible, which meant being in my office for anyone (parent, student, teacher) who wanted to have a private conversation with me.  My expertise in faculty evaluation and hiring (which was largely untested), would need to yield immediate results.  My educational expertise would be expected to inspire and inform the work of faculty and students, and my gift for public speaking must engage crowds from every constituency ( I was pretty sure I didn’t have this gift).  I would quickly understand the deep history of the school and have a sixth sense for the needs and concerns of the alumni.  The Board would expect me to lead, but also meet all of their expectations.  And, without fail, I should know every student, all 685 of them, by name! My friend then said he could go on, but he was betting I had the idea.  I couldn’t do it!

 

No doubt, I was feeling a little deflated, chagrined, almost embarrassed by the youthful enthusiasm that had defined my first 2 weeks in office, but it was then that the real advice was offered: “So, Tom, if you want to be successful, the thing you have to do, above all else, is to determine your priorities.  What are you going to focus on, what is going to be most important to you.  You need to commit your time and your resources to that – in a relentless, and laser like manner.  You are not going to please everyone, and you are going to have to let some things go, and that will irritate some people, but you are going to succeed and you will accomplish what you set out to do.”  It was good advice then, and it is good advice now.  It’s one of those few pearls of wisdom that you live by – that you back your heels onto when you are immobilized by the sheer volume coming at you – and you need to re-center and decide what to do next.  I am better at it than I was way back then, but it is more also complicated - because I know more. This is a crazy job.  It’s so crazy sometimes that often I can’t describe it to anyone that isn’t a school head.  Problems are so complex that I can’t ask for advice, simply because it would take me two hours to adequately create the context for the issue that needs solving.  I stay grounded by knowing what to focus on, what my priorities are, and knowing those things that might not be a priority for a given year or few years.  The job is not impossible, at all, and my friend knew that. He did me a great favor that morning.  In fact, it is a great job, and all those things that seemed overwhelming a decade ago seem much more understandable today, and maybe a little less overwhelming. But in order for it to be a great job, I must stay focused on making it a job that it is possible to do.  And that is rooted in understanding my priorities and attending to them.

 

Tom Main is the Head of School at King Low Heywood Thomas in Stamford, CT. You can reach him at tmain@klht.org.

Technology Changes Everything: Guest Blogger John Davies

The first books created by Gutenberg on his new invention were designed and printed to look like a handwritten manuscript.  When his financial partner, Joachim Furst, took a dozen copies of their Bible to Paris to sell, he received a very hostile reception from the book trade guild.  The guild hauled Furst and his newly-printed scriptures off to court, convinced that he was in consort with Satan.  Furst’s accusers argued that so many identical texts could have been created only with the assistance of the devil.  This story is but one of many anecdotes about the chilly reception that mechanically reproduced texts received in the aftermath of Gutenberg’s marvelous technology.  In many ways, the response to electronic texts today parallels those of the printing press.  Academic and religious institutions wasted little time in seeking censorship of books.  Critics argued that too many books lent themselves to superficial knowledge.   Authorities worried that works with illustrations with sexual content or erotic poetry would fall into the hands of the young.  Meanwhile, proponents of the handwritten manuscript, often beautiful works of art in and of themselves, denounced printed texts as vulgarizing intellectual life.  Academics, initially thrilled to find their works in publication, soon grew nervous.  The multiplication of texts meant greater access.  Greater access translated into their students becoming independent thinkers.  The history of the printed word reveals a concerted effort to limit access to reading.  Laws were passed to prevent texts from being printed in the vernacular.  Well into the eighteenth century, many European universities limited undergraduate students access to the library to a few hours per week.

The printing press, one of the most important technologies in the history of communication changed everything, including our understanding of education.   Digital technology is doing the same thing.  Today the pace is radically different.  Another  brief story as a point of comparison.  When Martin Luther posted his “Ninety-five Theses” on the church doors in Wittenberg, his ideas made their way around Germany in two weeks and spread across Europe in a few months.  This would have hardly been possible in the age of the handwritten manuscript.  Today, we can post an idea on the Internet, and it can make its way around the globe in a matter of seconds.  The availability of knowledge and information, without the constraints of time and distance, is changing everything, including how our students are learning.  The rapidity at which data moves around the globe is mirrored by accessibility.  A middle school student studying the history of slavery has access to historical sources that would have been available to only a handful of scholars a decade ago.  Now add to the equation that much of this knowledge and information is free.  And this is only the beginning.

What makes the change coming to education unprecedented is the dynamic way in which digital technology scales, i.e., faster, cheaper, better.  As heads, it may not feel like it’s cheaper when we look at technology as a line item in our budgets.  Tech budgets keep growing because our world (and our students)  find more and more ways to harness digital technology.  Bandwidth keeps getting cheaper while the demand grows exponentially.  In January of this year, you could find 300,000 iPhone apps.  It’s November, and that number is now  closer to 500,000.

I often reflect on author educator David Warlick’s comment, “For the first time in history our job as educators is to prepare our children for a future that we cannot describe.”  As a head of school, I find Warlick’s observation exciting, challenging, fascinating, and sobering.  It is because technology clearly changes everything that we stare head on into a future not yet known.  Finding ourselves at this historical moment presents interesting questions and challenges for heads of schools.  I would like to mention two.

Trying to manage change when one of its largest byproducts is uncertainty is a challenge.  It makes predicting enrollment seem easy.  I occasionally joke that, if I told people what I really believed will happen to education in the next five to ten years, I would be out of a job.  But I’m only half joking.  In the past, education has had the luxury of embracing change at a conservative  pace, especially in terms of technology.   For independent schools, a certain irony may be at work.  Our institutions sometimes evidence a built-in resistance to change because we are so successful at what we do.  Consider that a quarter of the schools in the  2011 NAIS survey on hybrid/blended learning do not offer or plan to offer online courses.  Ironically, it is this independence that should create opportunities to more readily embrace, if not create, change.  I am absolutely convinced that education will change dramatically, and it will come sooner than many independent schools expect.  Every aspect of our lives is being reinvented by technology, particularly how we learn.  If the way our students are learning is dramatically different, then I suggest that teaching should be as well.  We have already reached a point where our students live and learn in one type of culture, call it the electronic culture, while education continues to be practiced from a very traditional perspective.  So how do we manage an unprecedented wave of change?  The truth is that I don’t know.  What I do know is that it will require being open to a very different, perhaps radical, way of approaching education that will require us to question our favorite assumptions, to think counter intuitively, and to be willing to take risks in the face of uncertainty.  I predict discussions regarding the marvelous benefits of risk and failure in just about everything including education will become a national, if not global conversation.

Most of us have written somewhere in our job descriptions something about being the “instructional leader.”  The traditional title of “headmaster” is partially rooted in this idea.  And while that role has been marginalized by our ever growing list of responsibilities, we still need to be able to articulate a vision for teaching and learning to all our school’s constituencies.  This may present the greatest and perhaps most exciting challenge that technology presents for us as heads of school. Individualized education is a powerful example.  If we’re honest with ourselves, I think many of us will admit that our schools still have vestiges of the “one size fits all” approach to learning.  Mine certainly does.  Yet, in every corner of the marketplace, customization is the order of the day.  The new generation of independent school parents don’t just want this, they expect it.  And why shouldn’t they?  As the new NAIS Trendbook highlights, choice abounds in the educational marketplace.  Schools that continue with business as usual will cease to be competitive.  Again, technology is the culprit.  It creates a myriad of opportunities for independent school teachers to individualize instruction.  Pat Bassett wisely observes that in the ever expanding universe of educational choice, differentiated instruction is that one area where independent schools have huge opportunities not readily available to our public schools.

As instructional leaders, in order to create this vision we need to have an engaging dialogue within ourselves about where we believe education is going?  What do we really understand about what has changed in the teaching learning process?  What fears do we have regarding change in our schools?  (I would love to sit with a group of my colleagues and openly discuss this question.)  What things are truly worth knowing?  What skills are truly worth acquiring?  What is our understanding of literacy in a world that is becoming increasingly visual and iconic?  These are but a few of the questions that might shape part of that internal conversation.   What a daunting responsibility; creating and communicating an educational vision that will prepare young people for the future, but a future that is still very much unknown.

I conclude as I began, with a story.  The pencil had been around for nearly 300 years when the first pencil factory opened in the United States in 1861.  Around the same time, an enterprising pencil maker decided to add an eraser to the end of the pencil.  The fear that combining these two technologies into one writing implement would encourage students to make errors created quite a stir in education circles. The pencil with an eraser was attacked by teachers and even banned in some classrooms. Indeed, technology does change everything.

John Davies is Head of School at Miami Country Day School (FL) and can be reached at daviesj@miamicountryday.org.

Evaluating a Head of School: Guest Blogger John C. Allman

Entering my fourteenth year as a Head of School, at two different schools, I continue to find board evaluation of the Head to be a fragile process, even as I have worked with supportive, sophisticated, grounded boards members committed to advance the best interests of the institutions they serve.

Below are five fundamental perplexities that, from my perspective, can make Head of School evaluation so fragile. Please understand that these observations are not a description of the annual realities I’ve experienced at either of the schools at which I have served as Head. Rather, I offer these observations as distillations of elements I’ve noticed at various times and in various circumstances at schools where I have served as a trustee, as a part of reaccreditation teams examining board governance, and as a head.

I wish I could report that my years as Head have provided me with the wisdom to resolve these perplexities, but they have not. Perhaps what my experience has provided me is a deeper awareness of and keener sensitivity to the unsettling dynamics that can underlie head evaluation.

Intelligence Gathering
How does the board get good information about the Head of School’s performance? Can or should the board trust information provided by the Head of School? Are there reliable sources of information, independent of the Head of School?

Shared Standards
How does a board comprising diverse individuals (often 20 or more) with differing visions of effective leadership and with differing levels of familiarity with the school’s current operations arrive at a common understanding of the Head’s performance, stable enough to withstand contrary opinions expressed by various power brokers within and outside the board?

The Secret Scorecard
In the absence of clear evaluative benchmarks, Head of School evaluation can be governed by The Secret Scorecard (working in concert with the Unwritten Mission) – the varied, unspoken standards of evaluation used by individual trustees to assess performance, at times based on individual or small-group perspectives presumed to be widespread. The effect of the Secret Scorecard on the Head’s performance can be to manage and lead in response to individual trustee agendas.

Avoidable and Unavoidable Turbulence
In the process of implementing difficult improvements, how much turbulence do various trustees expect and how much will they tolerate? In such circumstances, how does the board distinguish between unavoidable turbulence and turbulence amplified by clumsy, careless, imprudent leadership?  How can a board anticipate the intensity of turbulence likely to accompany difficult change and prepare itself to withstand criticism for its support of such change and its support of the change agents involved.

Community Approval
It is the rare board that doesn’t harbor hopes that its Head will enjoy high approval ratings from various constituencies. To what extent is popularity, over time, a key benchmark for Head of School performance. If so, how ought the board evaluate the community’s satisfaction with the Head? If not, how can the board justify its support of its Head in the face of opposition from those displeased with the Head?

I share these observations primarily to see if my observations resonate with other heads, and I would welcome insights from others about ways in which they have addressed any of these challenges.

John C. Allman is Head of School at Trinity School (New York City). You can reach him at john.allman@trinityschoolnyc.org.

In Pursuit of The Independent School Press: Guest Blogger Colley W. Bell

Last year as I stood in Jefferson’s Monticello, a student with me thought out loud about what he was seeing before him as he eyed Jefferson’s bed from the founding father’s personal library.  As we moved from the library to bedroom, he wondered about the ideals that Jefferson espoused. “How do we reconcile the contradictions in Jefferson?” he whispered.  This was not about Sally Hemings or the scope and nature of government, but about Jefferson’s debt and the chaos he left behind, affecting those closest to him. The student recalled a class discussion that stemmed from a reading from Henry Bragdon’s and Thomas Eliot’s work, The Bright Constellation.  In the reading was made the point that Jefferson changed the word property to happiness, thus, comes our very American aphorism, “in the pursuit of happiness.”  The student thought Jefferson’s pursuit of his own happiness brought a catastrophic scene to Monticello, six months after his death, when all was auctioned off and property severed from what remained of the Jefferson family.

The aforementioned work, The Bright Constellation – published by The Independent School Press leaves me with today’s question: what ever happened to The Independent School Press?  I am not sure if there are many among us who remember, but there once existed a publisher that brought to independent school classrooms extraordinary academic materials.  As a child in the 1960s, and not the garden variety, but one who grew up in an independent school, The Independent School Press was a part of the daily discussions as was the opera of school life.

The authors in The Independent School Press stables were brilliant teachers and well engaged in the happy pursuits of independent school life.  Henry Bragdon was a schoolmaster at The Brooks School before moving to Exeter where he retired. Thomas Eliot was not only a U.S. Congressman and Chancellor of Washington University – but taught at Buckingham Browne & Nichols. Others were connected with Choate, Andover and Mount Hermon. One of the most well known was William Kellogg who was a master at St. Paul’s School. 

 I write this as a history teacher who fondly remembers a number of William Kellogg’s works. When I began to teach in the early 1980s, I was handed an American history textbook and thumbed through the eye candy of boldface text, color photos and ah, the review questions.  This was not entirely what I expected as conversations with my department chair circled around “getting through the material.”  This threatened to be quite an ordeal when I carried Kellogg, Bragdon and Eliot on one arm, and the latest teacher’s edition from one of the publishing leviathans on the other.

 These paperback gems from The Independent School Press, usually about 300 pages, were the ideal drilling rigs to penetrate not only great topics but to reveal the discipline beneath the surface of a survey course.  I found that these works invited substantive exchanges based on balanced outlooks in the historiography; it was not merely shaped by relativism. These works were also absent of the politically charged predisposition of committee writing. An old independent school sage once pleaded with us to think and express in paragraphs, and that simply was not invited by connecting the boldface print of a textbook as we “get through the material.” I think a good Saturday Night Live skit should include a dinner party where everyone is conversing by multiple-choice questions – worthy of Jean-Paul Sartre.

In our own happy pursuits comes the annual September waterfall under which I find myself on the issue of textbooks and rising costs.  A student showed me her phone that included an “App” with all of the functions of the $100 graphing calculator we instructed our math students to purchase—she found the app for free.  Of course, the technically recalcitrant math teacher will dismiss this because “students could cheat.”  I have heard stories about teachers who, when offered an iPad to explore and test for classroom use; make the reply, “I’m entirely too busy with all I have to do.”  At another school I remember certain purists moving desks in front of SmartBoards in protest of their arrival – Thoreau would be proud.   My light in August is my own librarian who stops me in the halls to talk QR codes and a phone app that turns the phone into an interactive remote with the web. We have a Technology Advisory Board made up of our own faculty now thinking of the content that may be crafted and contained in a Kindle, Nook or iPad.

 Perhaps a kind of a technological spirit of The Independent School Press is at work, and has been at work for some time.  What was it Jefferson said about revolutions and subsequent generations? As more and more teachers utilize a variety of web tools, along with Cloud technology evolving as a viable platform for collaborating and assessing, might we see a more hearty return to independent school practices beyond external forces of The College Board and college admission practices?  As independent school leaders, we are lucky not to be saddled with the weight of the bureaucratic mechanisms under which our public school brethren operate.  The dual-headedness of a textbook industry conjoined with the geometric expansion of the Advanced Placement conglomerate looms large.  The demise of The Independent School Press seems in direct correlation with this national expansion on standards. As one public school peer so aptly expressed to me, “since when did our work become the business of awarding college credits?”  It finds me invoking Thomas Paine:

 “O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”

Last year I invited Dr. Alf Mapp, Jr. and his lovely wife, Ramona, to join my seminar for lunch.  We were lucky; Dr. Mapp, a Jefferson biographer, had retired and was a neighbor of ours.   We showed him his work on an iPad that my students used as the primary instrument of instruction (and consumption).  He looked at the screen in wonderment, sweeping his work across the screen with slight of finger to and fro. The students then showed off the other materials in the iPad, including materials from The Independent School Press.

A student asked Dr. Mapp, “do you think Thomas Jefferson would have looked favorably on an iPad?”  Dr. Mapp didn’t look up, fixed on the iPad he simply and emphatically replied – “oh, yes!”  Like Jefferson, we struggle with our own contradictions, and as we say in Virginia, Sic Semper Tyrannis!

[Note from Kevin: info on The Independent School Press can be found here.]

Colley W. Bell, III, is Head of School at Nansemond-Suffolk Academy (PS-12, 800 students) in Suffolk, Virginia. You may reach him at cbell@nsacademy.org.

Measuring Heterogeneity -- Guest Blogger Landis Green

Why’s it so hard to measure the successes of heterogeneity?

Perhaps it’s the range of topics on my summer reading list, but I’ve been thinking about the testing craze of recent years, especially as it relates to independent schools.  Our schools, at once influenced by and influencing of the broader culture, are constantly walking along a ridge that balances what has been with what will be.  That balance can feel like a struggle—sometimes a mighty struggle—that isn’t new to humankind, but that seems profoundly important in an age of such great and fast transition.  

At a time when those both inside and outside of schools, private and public, are arguing, legislating, and directing those most centrally involved in the work of school to focus on performance outcomes, many of us fear that much is getting lost.  I, for one, am concerned that in an effort to standardize and then hold school people accountable for meeting standards, we are losing the acceptance of heterogeneity that has brought our nation and our culture to this place.

Differing camps can argue about the virtues and values of the range of programs and services being affected by the ongoing debate regarding the sustained testing-related focus in education.  The focus on standardization—which can foster academic, intellectual, artistic, and social-emotional homogeneity—puts at risk what heterogeneity is already present in our schools.   Independent schools have an opportunity—some would argue a responsibility—to inform and, perhaps, lead the conversation regarding what’s gained and lost by standardization.
   
I know of many independent schools that work diligently to find the balance between establishing base-level standards to which all students and teachers should be held accountable while also honoring the unique background, interest, and skill set of the individual members of their school communities.  I also know of few independent schools that don’t have a clear, public, and earnest commitment to fostering a culture of respect and inclusion among both the student and adult members of their communities.
   
Work toward a truly multicultural community sometimes requires us to make difficult choices to bring to an end exclusionary programs or services, while introducing to our school communities language, programming, and events that foster the inclusion of those who might be marginalized in some way.  While those of us who want our schools to reflect a range of human experience journey on, the movement toward standardization and homogeneity subtly whittles away at the potential for future success in creating the type of complex school communities that reflect the diversity of cultures that have been at the center of our country’s rich, resilient, and generally—albeit, evolving—respectful culture.  Our society’s strength lies in the coming together of differing cultures, informed by the differences among us, including the varying religious, racial, socio-economic, and ethnic backgrounds that have been a part of our history from the very beginning—and the diverse talents and passions of the populace.

Please don’t misunderstand my point.  I’m not arguing against standards or scope and sequence or the calibration of programs aimed at educating children in ways that are consistent with our individual school missions or which provide our students with the baseline they’ll need for responsible and healthy participation in a democratic society.  My colleagues and I work tirelessly to create and maintain high standards for our students and ourselves.  

To use language common to my own school—which represents one of the core elements of our formal evaluation of every student in every project, class, and grade—I want our students to develop the habit of perspective.  Doing so—as deeply as one can, understanding the perspectives of others—requires that students first understand and bear witness to their own perspective.  For our students to reach that goal, we as educators must affirm and respect the individuals who are in our care—their strengths, passions, talents, and weaknesses.  A myopic focus on standardization can impede our work.  

All too often absent from the debate about the race toward standardization is the degree to which it compromises the focus on the individual and the unique set of cultural identifiers, talents, and humanity each of us brings to our communities.  Respecting and appreciating the individual—avoiding the homogenization that arises from a one-size-fits-all pedagogical bent—is the surest way for schools and school people to preserve and expand that which is best about our culture.

It’s difficult to measure because it’s immeasurably important.

Landis Green is head of school at Wildwood School, a progressive, K-12, college preparatory day school of 700 students on the west side of Los Angeles.  His work in independent schools encompasses the last twenty years and includes work in a Quaker School in Delaware, a “Town Academy” in Maine, and now a progressive school in Los Angeles. The three very different school communities have all explored in ways unique to their mission the intersection of testing, standardization, and individualization.