Читать книгу Swimming in the Deep End - Jennifer Abrams - Страница 9
ОглавлениеIntroduction
I am interested in people who swim in the deep end.
—Amy Poehler
When I turned forty-eight, I began feeling older. Like I wanted to take everyone’s face into my hands and kiss his or her cheeks. Like I wanted to come over to the tables of participants at my workshops, lean over, and hug all of those who were doing the good day-to-day work in their schools. I was becoming maternal. Maybe not maternal; maybe more like a big sister. Everyone’s protective big sister. After twenty-eight years in education, I was older than many who attended my workshops. I talked to my friend Barbara about my protective feelings, and she smiled with understanding and told me I was “eldering.” Not becoming an elder per se, but eldering. I was and am, thank goodness, not just getting older but, I believe, also getting wiser. I am growing out of the ego-driven state of mind of my thirties and forties, and I have more firmly embraced the big-sister role. I want my colleagues, worldwide, to thrive. I want my fellow educators to proudly and effectively meet the challenges that education serves up to them each and every day. And, along with being the protective big sister, I am becoming a bit of the nagging and nudgy big sister as well. I want more for my colleagues and from my colleagues. I want us all to be able to swim in the deep end of the pool and to be around others who do the same.
The Deep End
What do I mean by swimming in the deep end? Well, at a young age, I attended swimming lessons at the nearby Howard Johnson hotel. At the beginning, we students sat at the edge of the pool. Then after a bit, we sat on the steps of the pool with our tushies and legs in the water, and we bent down to put our chins in the water and we blew bubbles. Then, in the next lesson we walked in up to our knees. Then stood in the shallow end with the water all the way up to our necks. Then our heads went below water! Soon we were treading water. Step by step, we were learning to swim but were always able to touch the bottom.
The day I remember vividly was when our swimming teacher Mr. Patton said it was time to swim under water all the way to the other side. To the deep end. I remember being incredibly nervous, but when I did it, I was thrilled. I had pushed myself. I found the strength and the ability and the discipline to hold my breath, pump my arms and legs and swim to the deep end. Fifty or so years later, and with decades of new teacher coaching under my belt, I have been there “blowing bubbles” with new teachers as they developed and honed their skills in the classroom. I have also worked with more experienced teachers as they pushed themselves in their careers, creating portfolios of their work and obtaining advanced credentials. I have coached teachers and administrators from their shallow ends to their deep ends, whatever that means to them. Teaching their own classes or leading schools are some of the ways educators swim without the safety net of being able to touch the bottom, but getting there sometimes requires guidance. As a coach and consultant, I have always tried to be like Mr. Patton, a guide on the side. It has been an honor.
Now, with the increased challenges that we face in education (see figure I.1 for an extensive list compiled from the Principal Life [n.d.] Facebook group) and a shortage of teachers and administrators, the field cannot afford to stay in the shallow end by continuing such practices as using sit and get instructional strategies or grouping students in the same ways we have for decades, to name just a few. From literacy strategies to whole-school change; from collaboration to equity and achievement for all; we need to swim in the deep end as a profession. We need to be able to work with all students so they grow socially, emotionally, and academically. We need the ability to work together collectively in teams. We need the discipline and the strength to sustain ourselves and our students through major curricular change and the development of additional student support programs, through working with new technologies and managing schools in times of increased bullying and worsening violence. We need to know how to swim in the deep end more than ever. We shortchange students when we do not address the increasingly complex challenges our students face. We must prepare our students for a world that requires them to have different skillsets than in the past: to be able to communicate globally, understand themselves intimately, be tech savvy and media literate, and so on. If we want to do what is right for our students we must up our game and venture into the deep end.
Source: Adapted from Principal Life, n.d.
Figure I.1: Deep-end challenges in schools.
Deep-End Opportunities
If we are asking our colleagues to up their game and stretch themselves, then we also need to get into the deep end more often. One simple way I keep pushing myself to the deep end, at least in my mind, is by subscribing to blogs by people who inspire, but also slightly scare me. These writers are bruised by life but also emboldened and confident. They have successfully taken on a deep-end challenge or other difficult experience and gone on to support others who want to swim in the deep end too. They write, speak, facilitate, and create communities of like-minded folks. When I get invitations to join them in their deep ends, sometimes the time or monetary commitment required prohibits me from doing so, but honestly, in most cases, I am just too scared. I don’t yet have the emotional bandwidth to swim with these folks. Yet is the operative word here.
Here are a few of the experiences for which I have yet to jump into the deep end and join.
• altMBA (https://altmba.com): Bestselling author Seth Godin (Tribes, Purple Cow, What to Do When It’s Your Turn) facilitates an intense four-week online leadership and management workshop with participants from around the world all learning about how to create businesses that have a global impact.
• Open Master’s Alt*Div (www.openmasters.org/altdiv): In this self-directed learning program, each member designs his or her own learning journey for the year. The members of this program, who might have thought about going to divinity school or into counseling, work in community with other Alt*Div students to create a product or a program to support the spiritual and emotional growth of the globe.
• Warriors of the Spirit (http://margaretwheatley.com): Margaret J. Wheatley, of Leadership and the New Science fame in the 1990s, offers a year-long training experience to strengthen participants’ ability to be in “dedicated service to the human spirit.”
Alas, the “shoulda couldas” don’t help. The good news is that deep-end opportunities show up daily, if we want to accept them. In your work, they are going to show up every day as well.
Looking back, I did participate in events that took me to what was then my deep end of the pool. I joined in a year-long set of Courage to Teach retreats, which are based on Parker J. Palmer’s (1998) book The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (www.couragerenewal.org). We explored the heart of a teacher through personal stories, reflections on classroom practice, and insights from poets and storytellers. I remember the afternoons in which we were to be in solitude. As an extrovert, asked to not interact with anyone but myself, those three-hour containers of silent time used to challenge me. Now I cherish my silence. Deep ends are different for each of us and change for us as we grow and develop.
One of my best deep-end experiences was at one of my favorite places in the world, Esalen Institute, a retreat center and learning environment on the Pacific coast in Big Sur, California, that, according to its website, is “devoted to cultivating deep change in self and society” (see www.esalen.org). I once spent a weekend there at a workshop led by teacher Sam Keen (2016), one of my cognitive crushes. In this workshop called What’s Next? Reviewing and Revisioning Our Lives, those in attendance considered the following questions (see https://bit.ly/2QfdWEB).
• Where are you on your journey?
• What have you accomplished?
• What hasn’t happened yet?
• What do you need to leave behind?
• For what, or for whom, are you grateful?
• What will your legacy will be?
• How will you fulfill the gift of your life?
• What decisions do you want to make?
I was afraid for three years of attending this workshop. Would I have to leave someone behind? What would I have to do next that freaked me out? I ultimately did leave a school district, and a beau, behind. And I am still standing. Deep end, what’s next?
There are many books we can turn to that will help us with the deep ends in our personal lives. The self-help corner of the local bookstore is full of them. This particular book is about the professional deep-end work we do in schools: the projects we undertake, the initiatives we are tasked to move forward with, the teams we are in charge of. What I hope this book will do is support you in seeing what the deep-end skills, capacities, and mindsets look like for you in your context, with your work as an ever-learning education leader—someone who is growing his or her leadership skills to be effective within your school or organization, no matter your role. If you are looking for some strategies to stay afloat in the deep end, dive on in.
The Four Foundational Deep-End Skills
The Institute for Education Leadership (2013) in Ontario, Canada, outlines specific personal leadership resources undergirding a set of education leadership capacities for administrators in their province, as follows.
• Cognitive resources
• Problem-solving expertise
• Understanding and interpreting problems
• Identifying goals
• Articulating principles and values
• Identifying constraints
• Developing solution processes
• Maintaining calm and confidence in the face of challenging problems
• Knowledge about school and classroom conditions with direct effects on student learning
• Technical or rational conditions
• Emotional conditions
• Organizational conditions
• Family conditions
• Systems thinking
• Being able to understand the dense, complex, and reciprocal connections among different elements of the organization
• Having foresight to engage the organization in likely futures and consequences for action
• Social resources
• The ability to perceive emotions
• Recognizing our own emotional responses
• Discerning emotional responses in others through verbal and nonverbal cues
• The ability to manage emotions
• Reflecting on our own emotional responses and their potential consequences
• Persuading others to likewise reflect on their responses
• The ability to act in emotionally appropriate ways
• Being able to exercise control over which emotions guide our actions
• Being able to help others act on emotions that serve their best interests
• Psychological resources
• Optimism
• Habitually expecting positive results from our efforts
• Recognizing where we have, and do not have, opportunities for direct influence and control
• Taking positive risks
• Self-efficacy
• Believing in our own abilities to perform a task or achieve a goal
• As a result of positive self-efficacy, taking responsible risks, expending substantial effort, and persisting in the face of initial failure
• Resilience
• Being able to recover from, or adjust easily to, change or misfortune
• Being able to thrive in challenging circumstances
• Proactivity
• Being able to stimulate and effectively manage change on a large scale under complex circumstances
• Showing initiative and perseverance in bringing about meaningful change
Their list is broad and applicable in many contexts. The Institute for Education Leadership (2013) writes:
In addition to recognizing and undertaking effective leadership practices, effective leaders also tend to possess and draw on a small but critical number of personal leadership resources when enacting the leadership practices. There is a compelling research base for including cognitive, social and psychological resources. (p. 22)
Aspiring and emerging leaders should take note of these skills and mindsets and learn to develop them from the get-go; for more experienced leaders, the list is a terrific self-assessment for our continuing growth. The development of these three main capacities of personal leadership—the need for the development of (1) cognitive, (2) social, and (3) psychological resources—undergirds this book.
This book will look at the big-picture cognitive, social, and psychological capacities through a smaller frame and focus on the four foundational skills for leaders working in the deep end. The four foundational skills are as follows.
1. Thinking before we speak
2. Preempting resistance
3. Responding to resistance (for when we do speak)
4. Managing ourselves through change and resistance (after we speak)
These are not the only skills you need to swim in the deep end, but these skills will help you be more successful as you consider a new project or initiative that pushes you to uncharted waters in your leadership work. Those who are leading projects and initiatives for the first time as well as those who are more experienced but want to up their game for the next challenge that comes their way will benefit from cultivating these skills. Given that resistance to change is commonplace and inevitable, the focus on resistance in these foundational skills should not be unexpected. It is pervasive and normal. The skill sets we are building around anticipating resistance and verbally managing it when you encounter it will take a major role in this text. How to build up your ability to understand where it comes from and how to respond to it is key for leaders to effectively swim in the deep end.
The questionnaire in figure I.2 (pages 9–11) contains questions to guide you as you read the text in relation to your work at your school, and to help you see where you are in terms of the four foundational skills for deep-enders. The book is best read with a personal foundational case study in mind. Think of a real project or initiative you are beginning or will begin soon. (For examples of initiatives, see the list of deep-end challenges in schools [figure I.1, page 3].) The deep-end self-assessment questions provide the basis for the contents of the rest of the book. It is important to complete this assessment before moving on to the subsequent chapters, and to have it readily available as you work through chapters 1 through 4. This assessment, like all preassessments, is central to scaffolding the learning to come. Taking a minute to consider the questions as you begin gives you a sense of the whole and connects your work to this book so the text can be more relevant and timely for you in your work. Completing this assessment will also help you determine which chapters of the book you might want to focus on more deeply as you increase your capacity to be even more effective as a leader in your school. Responding to these questions will help you identify where you might have learning edges—areas where you need to grow and improve. Use the + or – column in figure I.2 to annotate where you might feel you need some more support for your project or initiative as you move forward. Mark a + for items that are strengths and a – for items you need to work on. I will address each of these questions as the book progresses.
Figure I.2: Deep-end self-assessment—four foundational skills.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/leadership for a reproducible version of this figure.
School-improvement initiatives, with their never-ending challenges, provide us with amazing opportunities to swim in the deep end. They require us to have robust cognitive skills, social acumen, linguistic facility, and psychological strength. This book is an attempt to give you some resources and strategies to strengthen your ability, no matter your role, to swim more confidently in the deep end. While I cannot be there to lift you back into the boat when your mask fills with water, I will try my best to help you have strategies to tread water and stay afloat.
About This Book
When I share the swimming in the deep end metaphor with others for the first time, it brings forth many reactions. I tell folks I want to write for readers who want to push themselves to be more capable and courageous during moments of change. Some of the responses I receive include the following.
• “Hmm …”
• “You know, some might really want to be in the shallow end. That’s deep enough for them.”
• “You might lose a lot of readers if you go too far ahead of them.”
• “Some folks don’t want to know how to swim in the deep end. They are exhausted. Can the book just be a life jacket? Or a boat to come rescue them?”
I understand the concerns. Leaders have had little time to learn how to swim in the deep end and have either thrown themselves in for the sake of the students or have been put in deep waters without the supports they need. Leaders are struggling to breathe before they even really begin an initiative, and they burn out fast. Mental health challenges and turnover of administrators is seen in schools daily, and both the schools and the students suffer.
While this book isn’t an immediate Coast Guard rescue, it does provide support from the perspective of a swimming teacher—a Mr. Patton if you will—to help you build the skills to swim in the deep end and support you in facing whatever change is coming to you or that you are making happen at your site. We need to build up our strength cognitively, socially and psychologically so we can be more self-sufficient and swim in the deep end for longer. Our students need us.
Who This Book Is For
This book is not for everyone. This book isn’t for those who do not want to progress beyond blowing bubbles. It will challenge you. Yet it is meant to empower you. It is for those who want to build skills that will help move schools and the profession forward. It is for those who want to have more impact, no matter their role. It is for those who have been assigned an initiative to implement and are in need of some guidance and support to be successful. We all have roles in which we discover our credential programs did not teach us what it takes to do the work, and in which we need more cognitive, social, and psychological skills to be effective. These are what I refer to as deep-end skills.
If any of the following statements resonate with you, or you are an aspiring leader with no definitive leadership task ahead of you, yet you want to be even more prepared when you get a leadership role, this is your book.
• “I have this job, and I want to be successful, but I have no idea how to roll out this initiative I was just tasked to make happen.”
• “I was just told I am the person in charge of this project for the upcoming school year. What now?”
• “I have an idea I really would like to move forward in my school but there is so much pushback every time I bring it up.”
• “I know we have a lot on our plates but we still need to move ahead with a new curriculum because it is best for students. How do I negotiate the balance of caring for the teachers but dealing with the urgency of student needs?”
• “I became a leader because I see things can be better, and I want to make them better. And yet every day is a challenge, and I am overwhelmed. What do I need to know to stay afloat?”
You may be thinking, “What if I am an experienced leader who has rolled out quite a few initiatives? Can I still benefit from reading this book?” While some who pick up this book may be new to leadership or administrative roles, experienced leaders can also benefit from the ideas in this book. Some of the benefits it provides experienced leaders include, but are not limited to:
• Affirmation and validation of your existing work and efforts (and that is a good reason to read a book—to know you know a few things! How wonderful is that?)
• Reminders of a few things you want to be more consistent at doing in your role as a leader
• New strategies as you move along on your leadership journey
• Guidelines and support for your work as a mentor or coach of aspiring and emerging leaders
This book is a primer. A beginning. It doesn’t address in depth every skill you need to roll out a new idea, project, or initiative, or to take the lead in a group or a program, or to become a master administrator, but it is a good start. To paraphrase Abraham Maslow (as cited in Tracy, 2010), one will either step forward into growth or step backward into safety. This book will help you step forward.
How This Book Is Organized
As mentioned previously, there are certain cognitive, social, and psychological skills necessary for swimming in the deep end. I have identified four foundational skills for deep-end leadership: (1) thinking before you speak, (2) preempting resistance, (3) responding to resistance, and (4) managing yourself through change and resistance. These skills provide the main structure for this book no matter what your deep-end challenge will be; change management and resistance-related skills in this book cross all initiatives. From blended learning to changes in the mathematics curriculum at a school, from focusing more on wellness to moving from Advanced Placement to International Baccalaureate programs, change is change, and change often begets resistance. The concept of resistance and being aware of it, no matter the challenge, is a foundational skill.
Chapter 1 starts with the first of the four foundational skills for deep-end leadership: thinking before you speak. This chapter focuses on planning before beginning an initiative. If you have tasks and projects under your purview or you are asked to move a specific initiative forward, thinking before you speak and take action is critical. What do you need to think through before you roll out an initiative? What questions can you anticipate others will have for you as you begin a project or introduce a new program? How can you align this work with something that the folks at your site already value and support? How can you make sense of something in terms of both its story and the data so you connect with different types of colleagues as the rollout begins? How will you communicate a coherent plan while still knowing there are so many bumps in the road that you won’t anticipate?
Chapter 2 discusses the second foundational skill: preempting resistance. This chapter focuses on the ever-present need for understanding others that will arise when leaders present something new. Since pushback is a given when a leader brings forth an initiative, what might we need to know in order to work even more effectively with others at this crucial juncture? We examine filters of perception and how seeing through your colleagues’ eyes might assist you in preempting resistance, as well as learning about the neurology of threat so others can work with you in a more safe, understandable way.
Chapter 3 explores our third skill: how to respond to resistance once it occurs. This is social awareness in action. How do we speak to one another, promote a given point of view constructively, and articulate our perspectives with strength but without rigidity? What nonverbal and verbal skills do we need? How can we advocate effectively in both verbal and nonverbal ways?
Chapter 4 addresses the fourth foundational skill for deep-end work: managing yourself through change and resistance. Do you have structures and supports in place in your life to help you physically manage the challenges and challenging moments that will come your way? How do you stay calm in the face of conflict? How do you manage stress over the long term? This chapter shares strategies and techniques for managing yourself as you swim in the deep end.
Each of these four chapters dives into key questions I believe leaders need to be especially mindful of if they want to swim in the deep end. I explain each of these questions and offer resources or strategies to use in order to answer these questions more effectively as the chapter moves forward. After each question, I provide additional information or suggest resources that will help you stretch to make sure you have answered the question to the degree necessary to move forward with confidence.
The epilogue concludes our work in this book by answering the question, What is next? As this book is meant to establish the beginning of deep-end work, and is not the final word, you must ask yourself where you need to move to next on your leadership journey. This epilogue gives you some ideas of where you might want to go in the deep end of learning.
I offer reflection questions at the end of each chapter for individual readers, professional learning group discussions, or book studies to prompt readers to bring what they have learned from the book into the real world. These questions will involve you in conversation so you can evolve and then apply the work to your setting and context.
I have also included appendices with additional content to support your deep-end work. Appendix A includes links to online resources for building resilience. Appendix B lists online resources you can access to help you dive deeper into the concepts you encounter in this book. Visit go.SolutionTree.com/leadership for free reproducible versions of these appendices. Additionally, visit www.jenniferabrams.com/inspiration for a collection of inspirational quotes to keep yourself and your colleagues inspired to do deep-end work.
Now, on to the deep end. A Buddhist scripture says, “Few are they among humans, / The people who reach the short beyond. / But these other folk / Only run along the [hither] bank” (Carter & Palihawadana, 2000, p. 17). In schools, given the urgency and the importance of our work, we cannot just run up and down on this side of the river. We need to do more. We need to cross over. To do that we need to head into the deep end. Let’s jump in.
Reflection Questions
Wade into the following questions for team or individual reflection.
• What does swimming in the deep end mean for you?
• What deep-end challenges do you feel you are facing at this time?
• Before you read through the chapters that follow, what are you most intrigued by or think will be useful to you?
• What deep-end learning opportunities have you passed up? Which ones did you take advantage of?
• In what deep-end professional learning opportunities might you engage in the next few years?
• As you take the self-assessment with regard to a specific project or initiative at your site, where do you find yourself feeling validated? Where do you find some learning edges?
• As you reflect on items in your self-assessment that contain learning edges for you, which ones can you research online for more information, or which books can you begin reading to access some new strategies? To find books to access new strategies, a good starting place is the References and Resources section in this book (page 91).
