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Introduction

You’re leading, or aspiring to lead, a complex system—not just a team or even a professional learning community (PLC), but a broad scope learning community of students, teachers, staff, parents, and even local businesses and other stakeholders—and you’re doing it in what leadership experts are now calling a VUCA world—a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.

In systems, if you push too hard on one place, something else gets out of whack. If you pay too much attention to A, B starts acting up out of neglect. Particularly as a school leader, when you implement a solution, you just may see a dozen other problems pop up as unintended consequences. So, what can a leader do to navigate this complexity?

Part of it is being able to see the whole of a system, but it also requires you to look two ways at once, learning to see the value in both A and B. If you’re truly going to lead a school that meets the needs of the whole child—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—then recognizing and working with ongoing paradigms, rather than searching for a magic bullet, becomes your number one, ongoing, always-evolving priority for leadership development. It’s about leading holistically so that your school thrives.

It’s easy to default to a checklist when we think about whole-child learning. Physical education? Check. Academics? Check. Anti-bullying and social-emotional learning curriculum? Check. But to me, whole-child learning is a much bigger concept. Move away from buzz words like full potential and 21st century skills and global citizen and really think about both a child’s holistic experience of school and the holistic experience of the adults in the building. Do they get out of bed with a sense of purpose? Do they feel part of a family—a condition necessary for collective efficacy? Are they working on something each and every day that puts to use their skills and involves their interests? Are they growing not just in knowledge but in the wisdom that helps people see both their own needs and the needs of others? Are they able to navigate creating a meaningful life while making a living and to learning that fosters their own goals and growth that also fits with community goals? In other words, are they holistically thriving? This can only happen if the leaders take a holistic, wise approach to both the day-to-day decisions and long-term choices that affect both students and staff.

If it sounds easy, know that most adults never really learn to hold such tensions well, navigating that holistic view from 30,000 feet up and all of the details that go into leadership (Berger, 2012). This book will help you see and work with the whole system through a series of twelve core leadership paradigms represented in this book as lenses. It will help you recognize which one or two of them are at play in a given decision or initiative, and then target what you need to know and do so that you don’t lose sight of one set of a paradigm’s values or the other.

For a warm-up, try this: think through a current decision you are facing through the lens of adult educators and the lens of the students in your charge.

Were you ever a child? I ask this because sometimes I hear people arguing over learning strategies or school rules or education policies when they could answer disputes by considering, “How would each of us have reacted to this as a child?”

I was once a child. I loved school, and I want all students to end their secondary education experience with the same enthusiasm they had when they finally got to board that kindergarten bus, their backpack awaiting the treasures of learning. Granted, I was wired for school—my favorite T-shirt reads, “A day without reading is like …. Actually, I have no idea.”

I honestly don’t think I’ve gone a day without reading for pleasure since that moment in September of first grade when I asked my teacher, Miss Witzigrueter (it took us a week to learn how to say her name), what s-i-t spelled and the magical world of books opened up for me. I remember field trips to the fossil beds by the Mississippi and experimenting with mystery powders (flour, sugar, and baking soda) in science class. I remember pick-up games of kickball at recess and playing in the band and learning to make pie crust and figuring out a tough geometry proof while sprawled out on the floor in front of the television.

Of course, not every moment was pleasant. I also remember cringing when teachers weren’t fair. I can still see little Susie crying when two girls told her they wouldn’t play with her anymore. My stomach flips when I recall getting in trouble for—well, let’s let that stay a secret!

I hope you noted that my memories are a mix of academics and all the other things that make up a school day. Do you remember how your whole self came to school and not just your brain? Do you remember how it felt to try to sit still when you could hear the birds singing outside, or how much easier it was to dig into a tough assignment for a teacher who had somehow shown you respect than, for example, the eighth-grade teacher who told me I positively lacked any talent for writing?

Remembering what it is like to be a child (and a student) is as important to education decisions as other data in deciding what our schools should be like—remember, memories are a form of empirical data.

“I don’t remember at all,” some educators tell me. I refrain from retorting that it shows in their unrealistic expectations of six-year-olds, and instead say, “I do. I loved learning, but I couldn’t sit still for more than thirty minutes at a stretch. In middle school, my favorite classes were band and cooking, not mathematics or English—and I’m an English major with an MBA in finance!”

Or, I might relay the story of an eleven-year-old I was tutoring for mathematics. When I started to fill out her hall pass, she said she was headed to tutoring for reading. That meant she had six straight hours of academic courses in her day.

“Wow, that’s a tough schedule,” I said.

“Yeah, I don’t get to do anything fun. Not even Spanish,” she mourned.

Would you, like me, have lost a love of school in that kind of environment? If you can’t remember, spend some time reflecting on any artifacts you have—report cards, class pictures, programs from assemblies, yearbooks, and so on. What might jar your memory and help you think like a child? Doing so doesn’t mean you’re putting students in charge of things they’re too immature to grasp but rather that you’re including the natural knee-jerk reactions, needs, aspirations, feelings, and frustrations of those for whom schools exist. You aren’t letting go of adult wisdom but are instead moving toward and-based thinking—how adult and child mindsets can work together to inform decisions and planning.

Holistically leading thriving schools isn’t just about adding social-emotional learning for students to an already-packed curriculum. Instead, it means recognizing:

♦ One’s own ongoing need for development; most experts recognize at least five stages of adult development (Berger, 2012) and believe that few adults reach the top two stages (think of that education leader you seek out for wisdom and advice).

♦ The need to be constantly on the lookout for one’s own biases and blind spots, understanding that every strength comes with a blind spot and, when overdone, becomes a weakness

♦ The value of power with—leading collaboratively to multiply what can be accomplished—and power to—leading others toward a vision worthy of the students in your charge (McFarland, 2006)

♦ That if we over-focus on academics, students’ other needs go unmet; holistic leaders know the value of learning to look in two directions at the same time.

The era of standardized testing that the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) ushered in is an example of looking in just one direction—of implementing a solution in a system and seeing a dozen other problems pop up as unintended consequences. The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) worked to call attention to this one-way thinking by launching its Whole Child Initiative in 2007, stating, “Each child, in each school, in each of our communities deserves to be healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. That’s what a whole-child approach to learning, teaching, and community engagement really is” (ASCD, 2014, p. 9).

But leading a whole-child school, one that truly embraces meeting these varied needs, means you’re constantly making trade-offs, doesn’t it? Time for academics or time for recess and responsive classrooms and antibullying initiatives and extra tutoring and … the list goes on. Add in the efficiencies of top-down leadership versus the richness of shared leadership, the need for teachers to do the work and prepare to do the work, the role of the school and the role of families and communities … the lists of these interdependencies go on and on, too, don’t they?

Again, you’re leading a complex system in a VUCA world.

About This Book

If you’re looking for a practical guide to school leadership, this is it. But you may not recognize it as such right away because it doesn’t have a definitive list of what you need to do to succeed. Why not? Because lists are linear, and you aren’t leading a linear organization.

Instead of a list of characteristics or responsibilities or essential tasks—although I mention many of these in this book—I’m offering tools for identifying where you should focus given who you are, who you are leading, and what you are trying to accomplish, all within a framework that helps you see when competing priorities are at play. It’s a framework that will help you set aside the human tendency to think in terms of either–or and instead embrace the necessity of both–and thinking in which you can recognize the tension between two competing, yet interdependent, priorities and understand how to benefit from the valuable contributions of both.

This book is designed around twelve such interdependencies, or as I call them, the Twelve Lenses of Leadership, to help you identify when you’re at risk of engaging in either–or thinking instead of both–and thinking. The following are the lenses you will learn about.

1. Leadership and listening

2. Breadth and depth

3. Community and individual

4. Reality and vision

5. Continuity and change

6. Short term and long term

7. Logic and values

8. Outcomes and people

9. Power to and power with

10. Clarity and flexibility

11. Predictability and possibility

12. Goal orientation and engagement

Each of these lenses comes from research on effective leaders (Coyle, 2018; Kouzes & Pozner, 2010), but recognize that choosing one lens to focus on still requires you to be savvy about how it intertwines with other lenses. Priorities inherent in each lens are interdependent with things that might not even seem important in the moment but will come to be so.

With this book, I will help you to recognize how to engage both–and thinking to accomplish the following.

♦ Improve your ability to create an environment where collaborative teacher efficacy exists in an atmosphere of trust—the number-one predictor of student achievement (DeWitt, 2017).

♦ Hone your skills at inspiring and empowering others for the long haul of change.

♦ Ensure that you, the other adults in the building, and the students, are energized, efficient, empowered, and engaged for the tough, tough work of becoming thinking, creative contributors.

Go back to my question of, “Were you ever a child?” Think for a moment about the kind of school you would like to attend if you were seven, or eleven, or sixteen years old again. What would keep you engaged, foster your curiosity, encourage you to persevere, help you learn to ask good questions, and trust that your efforts will bring about results? Are you seeing the answers to these questions reflected in the schools around you?

A vision of such a school, supported by research on what truly works, should be the most motivating force for a school leader. Leadership expert Margaret Wheatley (2017) states:

What are the values, intentions, principles for behavior that describe who we want to be? Once established, are these common knowledge, known by all? As we work together, do we refer to our identity to make decisions? How do we respond when something goes wrong? Do we each feel accountable for maintaining the integrity of this identity? … Only the leader is in the position to see the whole of the organization. No matter how willing people might be, everyone is overwhelmed and consumed with their own work. Sane leadership is developing the capacity to observe what’s going on in the whole system and then either reflect that back or bring people together to consider where we are now. (pp. 232–233)

Because a leader is the one person best positioned to see the whole of a learning community, I designed these pages to help you see that whole, even as you set goals for yourself and for other parts of it. To get the most out of Holistic Leadership, Thriving Schools, please don’t just read these pages. Instead, commit to the following process.

♦ Work on real goals for your development: Chapter 1 highlights the five essential components of effective leadership development and offers guidance for choosing the right kinds of goals and priorities using the Twelve Lenses of Leadership. It is the first step toward focusing your priorities.

♦ Learn to think in terms of both and and: Chapter 2 explains both–and thinking as it relates to the concept of polarities and how each of the leadership lenses in this book illustrates a basic interdependency between two seemingly competing poles.

♦ Develop your understanding of emotional intelligence: Chapter 3 explains the top-five truths about critical soft skills and then helps you to discover which of these are most important to you as they relate to the Twelve Lenses of Leadership.

♦ Understand the leadership lenses that are most critical to you: Chapters 4–15 each explain a specific leadership lens. Depending on the school you’re leading, your goals for the short term and long term, and your focus for leadership development, you will use specific chapters to build your understanding of the leadership lenses and develop your leadership abilities.

♦ Try the full Priority Focus™ process: Chapter 16 outlines a process, including reflection activities, for setting your focus on a goal that will guide your leadership development. What happens as a result?

♦ Partner with another leader: This final step occurs after you’ve put this book’s content to work for you. Meet with another leader to discuss ideas and to hold each other accountable in making progress toward your respective goals. In fact, use the reflection questions on page 209 (A Goal That Guides Development) together, offering the gift of listening carefully to each other to help clarify what is working.

Further, know that this book isn’t a one-time read. Instead, it’s a reference guide full of tools you can use for each new goal, position, team, initiative, responsibility, and more.

The goal is to become the best leader you can be by focusing your strengths, ensuring your blind spots don’t get in the way, and building your capacity to reach the goals you’ve set to make your learning community a visionary place for students and adults. Great leaders never stop developing; may these pages help you meet the ongoing challenges of guiding the schools upon which every student’s future, and the future of all who will benefit from what they can contribute to society, depend.