Introit

Humble Leadership in the Tour de France

This year's Tour de France was an exceptionally interesting race. Readers will recall my post earlier this month in which I highlighted Lance Armstrong's flat tire as a potential setback (depending on how we define that term, from a mindset perspective). Armstrong's fortunes only worsened from there, and with ten days or so to race, he gave up any hope on finishing on the podium in Paris.

The fascinating part of his part in this year's race, however, occurs after he accepted with humility that a podium finish was no longer attainable. In one of the multiple post-stage interviews that week, he stated that his job now was to help his team, Team Radio Shack, finish first in the overall team standings. In order to accomplish such a feat, a team must consistently place a certain number of riders in a certain swath of riders for each stage. Team Radio Shack is a new team for 2010, and for a new team to capture first place in that category is a true accomplishment. They did it, beating second-place Caisse d'Epargne by almost ten minutes, a "pounding" in the cycling world.

It's interesting to see how humility (positive humility, not humiliation) in a leader can serve the team; with his focus off finishing on the podium in Paris, Armstrong--a master strategist in the Tour de France--followed familiar formulae to place various Team Radio Shack riders in the appropriate places on each of the remaining stages, culminating in the first-place team finish.

Looking back only one year, the year of his return to the Tour after a four-year absence, tells a different story. Riding for Team Astana in 2009, Armstrong was in direct competition with Alberto Contador, the eventual winner of that Tour. There was no love lost in that relationship, which was tremendously awkward for the team.

Given Armstrong's success with the US Postal Team and Team Discovery, where there were no other "top dog" riders on the exact same level with him, it is odd that he would have considered riding with Team Astana, which had another Tour winner on board. Everyone saw that tension coming long before the Tour began. In a sense, then, the 2009 Tour was a remarkable non-sequitur for Armstrong.

A great leadership tale, to be sure. In a sense, Armstrong grew from his 2009 experience and his 2010 mishaps to become a more selfless leader within the team, placing the team first and foremost.

The moral of the story? Leadership is made even more effective by humility in one's service.

Cutting Through the Tedium

When planning instruction for a class, how do you plan for a student who will find the instruction rather tedious simply because s/he has mastered that material already? The usual path is to have the student "deal with it" anyway; eventually, we'll arrive at something with greater interest for this student.

Is it right that this student should have to "deal with it"? If said student is more advanced than the others, isn't "dealing with it" perceived of as some form of punishment? Think of how we feel when attending professional development workshops that cover material we consider ourselves to have mastered. What do we do? We tend to tune out. Is that a productive use of our time? The same question should be asked of the student in question.

Here's a thought: why not exempt said student from this particular piece of work? After all, would it really be that much trouble to come up something else that the student might do in the meantime?

Should we not challenge that student? Are we doing a service or a disservice to the student by forcing him/her to "deal with it" while we teach the rest of the class?

The usual response to such questions touches upon the sacredness of the status quo model of instruction: one size fits all. "I simply cannot come up with fifteen different tasks for all my students and their learning needs."

How about just one?

For all the talk about how we meet different learners' needs, do we really do it well, or are we providing lip service rather than instructional service? Are we too afraid of what highly-individualized instruction might mean for us, in terms of professional development expectations?

Wouldn't you want to cut through the tedium of the everyday?

Group or Team?

When you are trying to accomplish something in your school, do you form a group or a team? The difference may surprise you.

A group comprises a certain number of people who look to one specific person for leadership of that group. When it comes to providing input or ideas, strong members may feel entirely comfortable doing so, but members with less confidence in such a setting may acquiesce to their colleagues because it is easier to do so; they avoid tension. In other words, there will be less positive conflict, which translates to reduced chances for optimal solutions to issues. Furthermore, decisions are, by default, left to the group leader. Equally important, group members do not feel comfortable taking the lead outside of the group, i.e., when they are in a different setting, speaking with different people. They fear repercussion from group members or even from the group leader, so they choose to not exercise leadership outside of the group.

A team, on the other hand, has remarkably different dynamics. Team members are not chosen solely because they possess requisite knowledge or experience; they are chosen because of their attitude and personal traits, which allow for better decision-making in the event that a complex problem lies beyond the ken of team members. Here are some other benefits of a team approach rather than a group one:

• Problems surface earlier
• Superior decisions (when problems are complex and no one is expert)
• Greater coordination and control
• Members hold each other accountable, rather than slink away or hide under the table
• Greater support for the issue being dealt with, as well as for the eventual implementation of the solution
• Greater member autonomy and initiative
• Member learning occurs as a result of the setting

To be sure, a team has a leader, but this person serves two principal functions: 1) to keep the team focused on the ideas with the most merit; and 2) to act as final arbiter in case of disputes. The latter is more rare in a team setting, since members tend to hold each other accountable (not the case in a group).

Leading an effective team is an art as much as it is a science, and it requires an individual to be well-versed in the school's strategy (which informs the team's project), culture, overall environment, and knowledge of people's characteristics and personalities.

Can you think of groups or teams in your school? Frequently, entities form around such issues as curriculum, time and schedule, learning styles, service learning, and the like. When you have identified one of these entities, can you determine whether it is a group or a team? Is it called a "team" when, in reality, it is a group? Or vice-versa?

Does the fact that it's a team or a group help or hinder its productivity? There is a place for each, to be sure, but having the wrong one to focus on an issue will result in delay of a solution, or worse, a solution that is no better than what existed previously.

Getting to the Optimal Solution

Your department chairs have a problem, and they're searching eagerly for the solution. They have had four meetings over the fall term, yet they have not been successful in identifying a solution that works. Each department chair proposes an idea, that idea is vetted by his/her colleagues, and the result is always the same: lack of success.

Why does this scenario sound familiar?

In schools, we tend to be driven by factors that distract us, that keep us from focusing on the real goal: the school's strategy and how we're trying to meet it. Perhaps it's a question of a department wishing to keep its budget dollars entirely to itself because the chair is afraid that, if a possible solution involves budget sharing, the department will lose the budget line that it has currently, when looking ahead to the next school year. That's a distraction.

A beneficial solution to the problem will be identified only when everyone at the table agrees to give resources over to the larger pool. Don't forget: it's about the school's strategy, not that of an individual, a department, a program, or a division.

Neuroscience and the Nature of Learning

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Uta Frith's work on learning and remembering is tremendously useful for independent school educators, mostly because it provides us with a lexicon for discussions of how our students are learning. Consider the following list.

• episodic memory
• semantic memory
• procedural memory
• working memory
• prospective memory
• implicit learning
• conditioned response
• conditional learning
• explicit learning

How might we incorporate such terminology when writing progress reports or quarterly reports, for example? Should we? Would it involve too much explanation to parents (what each term means, etc.)? Would it be better to keep such a lexicon in-house for awhile?

We may not be neuroscientists, but using the aforementioned terms is probably more useful than conjecturing what interconnections (etc.) the following areas are exhibiting in Suzie or Johnny:

• cerebellum
• basal ganglia
• premotor
• anterior cingulate
• prefrontal cortex
• hippocampus
• frontopolar cortex
• frontal cortex
• entorhinal cortex
• temporal lobes

Even if you're a biology teacher, using such terms would overwhelm parents, to be sure (unless they're neuroscientists!). What is more, even the neuroscientists are trying to figure out just how these areas interrelate, or sometimes don't, and how learning is affected.

What we do know is that the brain is wonderfully complex, and that the ability to learn certain things is predicated on how well-wired these areas of the brain are, how much teachers use activities that encourage use of these areas, and so on. Learning and neuroscience needs to be a partnership of exploration.

Your School's Culture

Gideon Kunda, who specializes in organizational culture, writes articulately and brilliantly about how the culture of a workplace affects the emotional "underlife" of those who work there. His excellent study, Engineering Culture (revised, 2006), features a hi-tech company that insists that it promulgates a non-authoritarian work environment in which commitment, initiative, and creativity are rewarded, leading to exponential professional growth. Kunda's tale shows that, to the contrary, the company subtly pursues a form of normative control in which work behavior and sense of self are affected quite negatively. One culture is superficial, while another is invasive.

We all think about school culture at one time or another, although we don't always identify "culture" as the object of those thoughts. Schools tend to be interesting places because of their cultures, yet each school has a unique culture: we tend to call it "fit" when talking about teachers. Some schools exhibit strong cultures (almost corporate), while others are defined by a loose culture. Yet others are in-between or elsewhere. However, school culture does remain one of the most important elements in obtaining success for faculty and students alike. I wonder to what extent the current economic crisis is highlighting cultural issues within our schools?

Some food for thought, paraphrasing (sometimes quoting) Kunda:

1. Is your school an organization of the future? Or, is it a futuristic revival of the past?

2. Are your colleagues "happy automatons? Brainwashed Yuppies? Self-actualizing human beings? Do they think of their experiences at work as authentic expressions of themselves or as stylized roles?"

Alignment and Execution

If you are in charge of directing a special project at your school, what have been the obstacles to executing that project? Schools are culturally-charged places, and a new project can make plenty of folks nervous.

Successful execution of a project is not easy. It's not as easy, for example, as saying, "Here's what we're doing, it's great, and I expect you to join me." School culture doesn't work that way. First, you have to pursue alignment: cultural alignment with the strategy that is being proposed. If you can't get alignment right, you won't get execution right, either. You may obtain some form of output, but you'll experience dissatisfaction with the final product. That begs the question, "Was it worth it?" If the final product--which probably works, albeit not well--is mediocre, then your execution of the project was also mediocre.

Executing a special project is hard, gritty work that takes tremendous interpersonal skills, knowledge of the core mission of the school across any and all divisions, and the ability to lead a team of people who will help to execute the project.

We have a tendency to identify a strategy, propose a project, and hand it off to someone else to execute. We don't tend to give much thought to a team-based approach (not a group approach, that's different...) as a means of helping to align the school culture so that the project makes sense, so that it "fits" the school and its mission.

Also, we tend to impose a one-school-year time frame on implementing projects. Reality, on the other hand, would suggest a bit more time, at least in most schools. Get the ideation and environment aligned, and the execution and performance should fall into place more easily!

Neuromyths for Digestion

In a 2002 report, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), proposed the term "neuromyths". The term is meant to suggest that findings in neuroscience can be easily misunderstood, which, in turn, leads to inaccurate information, which is then propagated. Following are three neuromyths that we hear frequently in independent schools, some of which we ourselves propagate.

(1)There are hemispheric differences between the "left brain" and the "right brain."

(2) The brain has critical periods when certain skill sets should be learned, and that this education must occur at precise moments of development, or all is lost.

(3) The most effective educational interventions have to occur simultaneously alongside periods of synaptogenesis (formation of synapses, or interconnections, in brain cells).

Here are some things to consider when dealing with the aforementioned neuromyths. The numbers below correspond to the numbers above.

(1) The brain has complex, cross-hemisphere connections, and both hemispheres work in concert on the cognitive tasks that neuroimaging has explored to-date. There is, to be sure, some "hemispheric specialization" regarding where certain skills are housed, but even these hemispheric specializations are challenged by subsets of people (those who are blind, as well as non-native English learners, for example).

(2) The term "critical period" is a misnomer, as it suggests that, if this time period is missed, the brain can never acquire that skill to the same extent. A replacement term of "sensitive period" has been proposed, and makes more sense. Foreign language acquisition (my own field) is where one most often hears this argument, and, while there is probably a higher degree of acquisition ability at a younger age, it does not mean that older students cannot learn a language competently without having begun at an earlier age.

(3) Any new, specific, environmental stimulation will cause the brain to form new connections, new synapses. It is not tied to age, nor is "synaptic density" any predictor of a greater capacity to learn. The evidence is simply not there.

Division-level meetings and/or full-faculty meetings would provide useful fora in which to discuss these neuromyths. I suspect that such discussions would lead to re-evaluations of some assumptions that have informed the development of our curricula these past ten years or so.

For further reading, I recommend the excellent article, "Neuroscience and Education" by Usha Goswami, professor of education at Cambridge University, whose work is readily available in multiple scholarly journals.

Ethics and the Post-Industrial Creative Brain

"At its best, ethical decision making weaves together emotion, high reasoning, creativity, and social functioning, all in a cultural context"

(Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio, "We Feel, Therefore We Learn" in The Brain and Learning, 183-98; citing research by Gardner, Csikszentmihaly, and Damon, Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet)

Given the vibrant and regular research on the intersection of neuroscience and education that is now happening, and given that independent school graduates need to have "creativity" as a 21st-century skill, why do we not do more in our schools insofar as ethics education is concerned? It seems a natural crossroads for research and practice. What is more, why shouldn't schools begin to do more with social technologies as a means of complementing how the brain learns, particularly how it blends cognition and emotion, a feat which allows us to make ethical and moral decisions?

As Immordino-Yang and Damasio go on to state, "the processes of recognizing and responding to complex situations, which  [...] hold the origins of creativity, are fundamentally emotional and social" (192). Creativity, then, becomes a way in which we all survive; it makes us adaptable. It is nurtured most successfully in a socially stimulative environment.

Why then would we have students sit in "industrial" rows, always facing a specific direction and a specific visual (either the teacher or the board, for example)? If creativity is adaptable, and if adaptability heightens creativity, why would we continue to adhere to an industrial formula of education?

Are we as educators looking for output (industrial) or outcomes (21st century)?

Rich Kid Syndrome

In numerous case studies, we find examples of the 'rich kid syndrome.' A child from a wealthy family grows up, always able to use monies from his/her trust fund. Over time, the expectation is that these funds will always be there. Depending on the corpus involved and the age of the child, expenditures are low when the child is young and increase as the child grows into his/her teenage years, into college, and so on. If the trustee of the trust fund feels that the child is becoming too exorbitant in terms of spending patterns, the trustee may have the right to limit the draw on the trust fund. As a result, the child is somewhat mystified: why would I have all this money whenever I want it, but now I'm on a budget? The shock to the system can be quite strong, and the effect may be disbelief followed by belligerence, or some form of incredibly negative arrogance. In brief, the system has changed, the sugar has been taken away, and the child is unhappy. There is now discord and anger, perhaps coupled with ambivalence regarding the future.

This post, however, is not about children from wealthy families. It's about change in independent schools.

Don't many of our schools suffer from 'rich kid syndrome'? Hasn't the recessionary economy brought schools to this same point, introducing tighter controls on expenditures, etc? For years, schools were able to raise tuition above CPI, adding programs, faculty, and expanding physical plants. And now the sugar (easy money) has been taken away.

How might this syndrome manifest itself in your school? Who are the rich kids? Answer: almost anyone--heads, administrators, faculty, staff, even trustees. Before, everyone could "hide" (not on purpose, mind you) behind the easy money. That is to say, easy money facilitated an ignorance of issues that were manifesting themselves over a period of time, e.g. falling enrollment in a program, in the entire school, lack of volunteers, increasing difficulty in finding a cast, etc. Because times were good and the money was there to support a full (perhaps bloated, whether slightly or egregiously) faculty in order to staff myriad programs deemed to be crucial to the overall program, the status quo continued on, quite happily.

Now, however, we are forced to examine our bottom line at every occasion. We are getting back to basics: what do we need? What don't we need? If a program is in decline, do we keep it? Do we add another program while deciding what to do with that first one, thereby having two somewhat similar programs?

Where are the sacred cows in your school? Will the 'rich kid syndrome' prevent you (yes, you personally) from taking a hard look at those sacred cows and determining whether they're as sacred as you thought? What if you're invested personally in a sacred cow? Will you be open to examining it, in light of monetary pressures on schools? Whose interests will you serve, yours or your school's?

No easy questions; no easy answers.

Discuss. But not too long. Very soon, someone will make a decision. Will that person be you? Or the trustee of your trust fund (the head)?