Joining the Faculty

Baxter Ball was a giant man, figuratively and literally. The school had deep roots extending back 150 years, but in everyone’s living memory, he built it. When Baxter took over in 1990, the little suburban country day school that absorbed a bankrupt military boarding school had all sorts of problems. Fundamentally, the two schools didn’t belong together, and it showed. The administrative suite was located in a rundown farmhouse, and the theater was in an actual barn. The whole 16-acre campus educated fewer than 200 students. By the time I joined in 2010, “the little merger that could” had crested 600 in total enrollment and become the most prestigious private school in Central New York.

I’m a pretty affable guy, I think. But I couldn’t tell beans from apple butter when I started teaching. And sometimes my mouth moved faster than my brain. My first day came before the students’. There were many systems to learn, from grading and reporting, to lunch accounts and attendance. I ate my first foot sandwich during the attendance session.

“You mean I have to spend the first five minutes of class counting kids and checking boxes in the computer system?” I asked, the indignation in my tone framing words more like a statement than a question. “Don’t you realize how important the first five minutes of a class are? I’m trying to create an experience. It’s like the opening scene of a play. And you want me to take roll? Why can’t I pass around a piece of paper and enter it at the end of the period? That’s what I’ve always done in my college classes.”

“Well, uh, we need to make sure the students are all accounted for,” stammered the part-time, contracted, technology coordinator who was leading the session on this single day of orientation for new teachers. Apparently, knowing where the children were was part of our in loco parentis responsibility for the minors under our supervision. Attendance became the first item on the list of things I had not thought about when I took a job teaching high school after five years of professing college.

Later that day, over a lunch of three cheeseburgers, Baxter put it to me directly, “So I hear you’ve got a problem with attendance.”

“Well, not exactly,” I said sheepishly, trying to figure out how deep a hole I had dug on my very first day. “I just want to make the best experience for students, and it seems like wasting the first five minutes fiddling with the computer would stall out the class before it starts.”

Baxter laughed and slapped me on the back, his delight expanding the more I squirmed. “You’re not wrong, ya know, but we gotta keep track of those kids. They’ll wander off if you don’t watch ’em,” he chuckled as he ate half of his second burger in a single bite, mayonnaise dripping onto the third. I got the sense that he liked me.

For a guy in a position of authority, Baxter seemed to really like people who challenged authority, I suppose because he had that streak in himself. After New York State passed a law making school campuses smoke-free, he would take meetings in his car so he could chain-smoke as he drove teachers around the block a few times and discussed whatever they needed. Everyone knew you had a meeting with Baxter because your shirt smelled like stale cigarettes for the rest of the day. Not exactly your typical buttoned-down headmaster.

Baxter’s health caught up with him later that year. He died of a heart attack in February. The Saturday afternoon memorial was bigger than commencement and filled the gym and the standing room at the back of the aisles. I remember one tearful eulogy when a former student described the moment when Baxter stood in the doorway of his home, refusing to let the boy’s father take him because he had been drinking. “Go call the police,” Baxter told him, “You’re in no condition to parent this child,” the now-grown man recalled.

Baxter’s legend continued to inspire, and haunt, Manlius Pebble Hill School for the nine years of my tenure there. After he died, enrollment began to decline. The whole place had sprung from his persona, charisma, and the deep relationships he built with people – it was a beautiful human mess of things. Baxter’s way was great for building a dream, but a harder way to run a business. And it was the business side of things that eventually caught up with MPH, at about the same time the cheeseburgers and cigarettes got Baxter.

Financial Crisis

Three years and two headmasters later, I had built a decent reputation for myself at MPH. I was no Baxter, but I had solid relationships with students and colleagues. I was known as a teacher with high expectations, and therefore a hard grader, but kids liked my classes because they were interesting and fun, and because it feels good to grow. I had also impressed the new head of school with some ideas I developed to support indigenous students in our Oneida Nation scholarship program, as well as the work I did as chair of a faculty committee that liaised directly with him on major issues. So, when the Upper School Division Head position opened, D. Scott Wiggins encouraged me to apply.

Most of my ideas for the school were academic in nature. As enrollment declined, so did our array of course offerings. And the ones that remained were not creative, inspiring electives but rather the core curriculum we felt that we had to offer, including a pretty standard list of AP courses that every public school in the surrounding area taught for free. I proposed that we ditch the AP curriculum and build our own. This was a hot idea in independent school circles at the time, and it resonated enough to get me the job.

With my transition to school leadership underway, we approached the holiday break in mid-December. On Thursday afternoon, Scott sent a message to the school that the traditional holiday wassail was canceled, and instead we would gather on Friday afternoon for a meeting with the board chair in the church basement across the street. No one could recall a meeting held there, nor imagine a reason for doing so. Perhaps a surprise party? It didn’t seem likely from the tone of the email.

Once gathered, Scott thanked us for coming and handed the microphone to Pete Carmen, President of the Board of Trustees and Chief Operating Officer for the Oneida Indian Nation and the Turning Stone Casino that they operated. Scott and Pete were both lawyers by training, and their carefully chosen words and flat, stern affect evidenced their background.

“I’m afraid I have some troubling news,” Pete began. “We are facing serious financial challenges. We’ll need to make some changes pretty quickly, or we won’t be able to finish the year. But don’t worry, we’ve got a solid plan,” he said in a half-hard pivot.

“Wait, what do you mean ‘won’t be able to finish the year?’” someone asked as soon as Pete paused to open his PowerPoint deck.

“Well, as you know, our enrollment has been declining over the past few years,” Pete answered. “That means our tuition revenue has decreased too. We’ve tried to cut costs in several areas, but we’re quickly exhausting our reserves. At the current rate, we project that we’ll run out by April.”

“And what would happen at that point?” came the next question.

“Well, unless we take some quick action, we wouldn’t be able to make payroll, so you’d have to work for free, or we’d have to close,” Pete replied, knowing he shouldn’t laugh but realizing that might have come across like an absurdly timed joke.

Silence.

“But let me share with you our plan,” Pete continued. He went on to outline The Way Forward, the board’s plan to raise 2 million dollars, reduce the faculty by half, and trim the student body from 425 students to 155. That would right the ship, Pete said, and put the school on a sustainable path forward. Scott said nothing.

More silence.

As the presentation transitioned to questions and floppy, insulting attempts as reassurance, the teachers went in two directions: anger and despair. It felt like a wake. Mercifully, the meeting ended after two hours and we went somberly on our way home for the holidays.

In the New Year, we began to gather and plan. There were secret evening meetings at several faculty homes; hushed conversations in hallways, whispered through tears, as people channeled their rage into social media. The Post-Standard, Syracuse’s newspaper of record, picked up the story. An anonymous group of students started a website called The Wiggins Way, and things turned nasty. Scott was gone by the end of January. The leadership team had been in the dark along with everyone else, so we held some credibility for a time. But eventually the hard choices started falling and we were on the wrong side of them. No one cared about numbers. These were people, after all.

This was my entrée into school leadership. I set out to invigorate the curriculum and somehow became a pastor. In a time of collapse, people’s capacity for change craters. They need hugs and casserole; a cup of tea and a listening ear. Leadership is care and feeding.

Personal Growth

Indicator

Articulates a professional biography that is aligned with role, duties, and school community.

Exhibits self-awareness and emotional intelligence.

Displays patience and resilience navigating complex tasks and competing goods.

Invites and receives feedback, takes personal responsibility, and accepts accountability from others.

We all start out as little more than a human body. We can’t feed ourselves and the messes we make are incessant. Along the course of life, we figure out the basics, and sometimes a lot more. We develop awareness of our physical, emotional, and spiritual selves. We explore our surroundings and learn about other people. The best of us find ways to relate to others with selfless concern and compassion. But when the sh*t hits the fan, we go back to our bodies. That’s where we need to feel safe and protected. Our bodies store the trauma we experience, which bubbles up when the temperature rises for the rest of our lives. In my experience, everything I’ve learned about leading other people started with some kind of lesson about myself, so the human body provides an apt metaphor for a discussion of personal growth.

Head to Think

There is so much to say about my head that I hardly know where to begin. Maybe I should say that I spend too much time up there, spinning in circles, rehearsing and replaying conversations, basically just talking to myself. Another way to go at it would be write about the relative safety and comfort I find in rational, linear thinking. It’s not the pattern that my brain naturally follows, but it’s always seemed like a worthy goal and provided me with something to work toward. A third approach could be from the angle of limitations or irregularities, but although I experienced those from the beginning, I only came to understand my neurodivergence much later in life. But since this section is a condensed biography within a much larger, more nuanced, and more complete one, I’ll try to focus on mapping the contours of my brain as they relate to my professional trajectory.

As the reader probably realizes by now, I was only partially engaged with school as a learner through most of my education. I was curious and showed promise in elementary school. Things started to fall apart in middle school as I attended four different schools between the fifth and ninth grades. In high school, I was able to find success without bringing books home and completed most of my graduation requirements by eleventh grade. As an undergraduate, I was disillusioned with studies and barely scraped by until I found a passion and a teacher to challenge me. Throughout those years, I found writing particularly challenging and I struggled with procrastination, task initiation, and all manner of executive functioning. I have always been a reader who reaches the end of the page and realizes my mind wandered off somewhere in the middle and has to go back and re-read the second half. Those are the signs of an ADHD brain, but I wasn’t diagnosed until I was in my thirties.

The decision to become an educator was motivated by a desire to do something for students that my teachers (Richard Haly notwithstanding) were unable to do for me; to ignite a passion and drive to pursue innate curiosity to the max. After exploring alternative high school models and several teaching experiences in higher education, I found the goldilocks conditions in independent schools: curious kids, smart and creative teachers, supportive parents, unfettered by administrative bureaucracy. The teaching was challenging, but rich and rewarding too. I learned to find balance between individualizing instruction and developing a system that was sustainable for me and the majority of students. I started thinking about the systems we create in the classroom and how those were nested within school systems and within society more broadly.

My transition to school leadership came at a time when my school and all of its systems were in flux. I was excited by that emerging landscape and wanted to be a part of shaping the future. I saw an opportunity to make a better experience for more than just the 75 or so students in my classes, but the institution as a whole. Once I arrived in a leadership position, I quickly came to realize there were more systems operating simultaneously than I had imagined. Of course, the structure was built around the academic program, but adjacent to that were networks of relationship among the faculty, bonds of trust and expectation between the school and the parent community, and the institution’s standing within the broader community, especially a local university. And while I could navigate that landscape with the powers of reason that I had trained through my own education, there were so many feelings floating around, with which I frequently seemed clumsy and inept.

Overlapping this phase of my professional journey, I began to realize that my own children exhibited some neurodivergent traits and needed more support than academic programs traditionally provide. While my daughter simply learned to read over a two-week period in kindergarten, my son learned by decoding one excruciating word after another. And when my daughter reached middle school and encountered homework, she stalled, avoided, and lost track of assignments to our shared family frustration. Formal evaluations, diagnoses, and accommodations followed, but the challenges presented by school persisted.

I was drawn to Eastside Prep for many reasons, but chief among them was the recognition that the school had created an engaging, creative, and progressive academic experience that was accessible to a wide range of learners. I could see my children thriving here, and it seemed like a place where learners like us could continue to grow and find success. The school’s flat curriculum, without tracking or ability-based placement, and the faculty’s commitment to differentiation and collaborative learning inspired me.

In my time here, I have come to realize that our lofty aspirations carry with them a great deal of challenge. Any shared experience is inherently designed with compromises built in for people at the margins and extremes. At Eastside Prep, we do an excellent job of accommodating individual needs through personal dialogue and flexibility. Sometimes that carries a cost of inconsistency and a kind of labor intensity. As Terry used to say, “it’s harder to teach at EPS” because we go the extra mile to include everyone and meet their unique needs. Consequently, I have focused much of my energy on developing and implementing support systems that provide a balance of structure, accountability, and flexibility. I never want EPS to lose the ability to meet every student where they are, but I also want school systems that carry a greater proportion of the cognition and labor required to support them. This is my head at work.

Heart to Feel

Do you recall that scene from How the Grinch Stole Christmas when the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes? High up in the mountains above Whoville, his sleigh packed full with stolen presents and perched precariously on the precipice of a tall peak, the Grinch hears the townsfolk begin to sing. At first he’s confused, and “with his grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling: ‘How could it be so?’” The narrator tells us “he puzzled three hours till his puzzler was sore,” until finally he “thought of something he hadn’t before.” What happens next is open to interpretation, but “in Whoville they say, that the Grinch’s small heart grew three sizes that day.”

While Dr. Seuss covers this scene in one stanza and ends his story in just four lines with the Grinch returning the gifts, bringing food for the feast, and carving the roast beast as soon as “his heart didn’t feel quite so tight,” three different depictions are presented in the film versions. In the original 1966 cartoon TV special, Grinch’s face, scrunched in confusion as he puzzles, quickly melts into a warm glow as the sound of singing rises to his ears on the mountaintop. In the 2018 feature length animated film, Pharrell Williams narrates “and the luscious sound swelled, reaching up to the skies, and the Grinch heard with his heart and it tripled in size.” But in the 2020 live action feature film, Jim Carrey clutches his chest, a la Redd Foxx in Sanford and Son, and falls to the ground writhing in pain.

While I would take exception with anyone else calling me a grinch, I must admit that his transformation rings with a truthful tone when I reflect on my development of self-awareness and emotional intelligence. And while I wish that I had passed quickly from puzzlement to warm and fuzzy glow, I relate most to Jim Carrey’s anguished mountaintop temper tantrum. In the end, although the 2018 film is the worst of the bunch and I hate the editing they did to Seuss’s poetry, learning to “hear with the heart” is really the essence of what this growth has meant for me.

In my first years of teaching, the emotional fatigue I felt was profound. My heart muscle had not been exercised nearly as much as my head muscle, so it didn’t have any base fitness. But I learned to listen, not just to what students were saying with their words, but with their affect and actions, and regular practice built capacity. The transition to school leadership brought more stretching and growth, and as I have described in relating the financial crisis at MPH, I encountered circumstances that called for deep heart-centered leadership. At EPS, the pandemic was another such time.

As we transitioned to remote operations in March of 2020, and in the year-and-a-half of remote and/or hybrid instruction that followed, there was analytic and critical thinking required, to be sure. We had to make up rules and guidelines that offered practical solutions to very concrete challenges faced by students and teachers alike. But just beneath the surface a steady fear buzzed and animated every conversation and interaction. The whole world was falling apart, it seemed, and here we were trying to keep math and Spanish classes afloat. At about the same time, George Floyd’s murder set in motion a national reckoning with racial injustice and the #BlackAt Instagram campaign called out racism in independent schools across the country, leading some to famously argue that “Private Schools have Become Truly Obscene” and that if they really cared about the values they espouse they would simply close, as Caitlin Flanagan wrote in The Atlantic in April 2021.

I will say more about the substance of my diversity, equity, and inclusion work in a later section, but here it is important to acknowledge that there was a deeply personal component of this work for me. It took me some time to realize how and why I frequently felt inadequate and ill-equipped to lead in these areas. My own identities, historically privileged as a white cisgender man, have saddled me with guilt and shame that I had to work through on a personal level before I could deeply engage with the work at school, with teachers, students, and parents. Both the personal and professional dimensions of this work continue and they are by no means complete. However, I do now have awareness to see how they impact me and prompt me to respond in particular ways.

In the end, self-awareness is a gateway to emotional intelligence, but it only opens the door, we still have to walk through. As a person, as a parent, and as an educator, I have worked long and hard to slowly and methodically build a broader emotional vocabulary, practice identifying and understanding felt emotion, and developing tools to regulate emotional responses. I believe this work is crucial in all aspects of school leadership, both working with adults and with adolescents. Mountaintop experiences like the Grinch’s can be profound and life-changing and they make for a powerful signal that the protagonist has changed at the end of their developmental arc. But in the real world, in my experience, this change happens slowly and develops out of persistent, methodical work in the trenches. I need practice and repetition for change of character to stick.

Lungs to Breathe

When an EPS employee completes five years of work, they have historically been recognized at the end-of-year champagne toast with the gift of a small doll. In a previous era, this doll was selected from the Plush Toys “Little Thinker” line to represent an aspect of the employee’s professional role or demeanor. A brief scan of the Unemployed Philosopher’s Guild website shows Frederick Douglass, Albert Einstein, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg among the miniaturized greats – you know, serious people. When I reached the five-year mark, Sam Uzwack, in a combination of whimsy, wit, woo, and wisdom that only he can muster, switched the selection to Funko dolls, which feature an enormous caricaturized head. For me, in recognition of five years of labor and “for racing around campus like his *ss is on fire,” Sam bestowed upon me a Funko Dale Earnhardt.

Now Dale Earnhardt is a respectable figure in some circles. He was known to be deadly serious about racing cars in left-hand circles across the American South, and he even started a few pit row brawls to assert his dominance of NASCAR’s Winston Cup Series back when big tobacco could still sponsor stuff. Known as “the intimidator,” a nom de guerre that referenced his unsmiling gaze, concealed by aviator glasses, as well as the ever-present threat of fisticuffs, Earnhardt was not to be trifled with. What was I to make of this tribute to my school leadership?

It sobered me. I don’t mind being lampooned, and much of our humor at EPS feels a bit like being roasted on Comedy Central. But this one cut because there was truth in it… an uncomfortable truth. I suppose that’s also why some found it funny, but I did not. It made me realize that I was perceived in a way that I was ashamed of. I did not, and do not, want to be an intimidating brawler of a school leader. People don’t grow under that kind of leadership. They don’t take risks when they’re afraid. And while they might comply, they rarely feel good about it. Joy withers and dark clouds envelop the land.

School leadership can be challenging and frustrating. As a divisional leader, I am frequently called on to resolve conflict and solve intractable problems. I find such challenging aspects of the work rewarding, but I don’t always experience, much less express, joy as I go about those parts of my day. I’m good at persistence and I bounce back from failure like a wobbly Weeble. As I have learned about my emotional responses, I have much greater recognition of emotion as I feel them, and I have come to accept that I do not conceal my feelings well. I wear them on my sleeve, my face, and sometimes project them with my whole body.

If I was going to become a calmer, more patient school leader, I would need to address those feelings at the source rather than interrupt their expression. The event described above precipitated, among some other personal experiences, a deep dive into the physiology and psychology of emotion. For more than a year I read widely about affect theory, complex trauma and post-traumatic stress, ways that trauma creates and perpetuates physiological changes in the body, and somatic treatments for recovery. I learned about polyvagal theory, contested as it is in the medical literature, and the ways that the autonomic nervous system stimulates fight, flight, and freeze responses and the body’s return to stasis after such a reaction. I learned to feel these things in my body and gradually implement strategies to regulate and compensate for the elevated energy that accompanied so many of my interactions throughout the day.

Riding my bike to school in the morning releases healthy endorphins that improve my mood and help me start the day positively. I sometimes take a few minutes to lay down and close my eyes right after lunch, not so much to nap as to simply slow my body down. If not a rest, sometimes a walk around the block can produce a similar effect. And riding my bike home again in the afternoon helps me flush the accumulated stress hormones from my body and sleep better at night. I’ve become a bit obsessive about sleep in recent years, tracking my stats with my watch and watching how my heart rate variability (HRV) declines over the course of the week and rebounds after a slow-paced weekend. I’m still working on healthier eating habits, particularly trying to reduce my sugar intake, which can be an easy shortcut to sooth emotional distress for me. And at the bottom of all this physiology is the breath.

Respiration brings oxygen to the body, enabling the basic chemical reaction that allows a human to go on being. In homage to that fact, a great many literary references and spiritual traditions center on breath as a core, irreducible function of the human experience. In the Abrahamic traditions, God animated the first human by breathing life into his nostrils, and Their sacred name in Hebrew (YWHW, or Yahweh) is surmised by some to be a derivative of the sound of breath entering and exiting the lungs. Meditation, in both the sacred Buddhist and western secular forms, often initiates by focusing the mind on the breath, including the manipulation of breath with counting, pauses, holds, and intentional releases (box breathing, for example). Breathing is unique in that it is both an unconscious, autonomic function, and one that can be intentionally controlled and altered.

In the last several years, with varying degrees of success, I have made intentional efforts to slow my pace during the day: in meetings, walking across campus, physical movements, and patterns of speech. When I sense that emotion is rising in me or another person, I bring attention to my breath, lower my voice, relax my body, and slow my speech. I am beginning to find that this has a positive and accrued effect on my state of mind. I recently left a difficult meeting and realized sometime later that I wasn’t thinking about it the way I would have in the past, with circular thoughts and internal conflict.

I don’t know how many people have noticed these efforts from the outside, or even if there is a palpable change externally, but I have begun to feel it on the inside. A wise friend once said to me, “My state of mind is the most important thing to me.” At times when my state of mind is uncomfortable, agitated, or in distress, I have begun asking myself, “What would I do right now if my state of mind was the most important thing to me?” If I take the action that arises in response to that question, I almost always set myself on a path toward patience and resilience.

Eyes to See and Ears to Hear

Unlike the head, heart, and lungs, the eyes and ears are actual sense organs. One might assume, then, that their operation in requesting, receiving, and responding to feedback would therefore be straightforward. I find they are not, and for me, this category of personal growth is hard and humbling. I hold myself to high standards. I have a strong inner critic evaluating every move inside my head. One would think that would make feedback easy to digest, or at least make me familiar and therefore more comfortable with it. And yet, I find it is an acquired skill, requiring willingness, humility, courage, practice, repetition, and lots of partnership and trust. I make myself do it, and I’ve become a better school leader for the effort, but it ain’t easy.

In reality, we are all receiving, processing, and responding to feedback all day long. However, much of this information is subtle and filtered through our own subjectivity. In order to make good sense of this information, one needs to first build awareness of their own emotional state and the information one already holds. What do I already know about this person or conversation I’m about to engage? Am I comfortable talking with them? What is our history? Do I anticipate conflict or disagreement? Are we able to communicate freely and easily with a foundation of trust and mutual respect? Has trust been frayed or relationship strained? In addition to this anticipation, I continue to monitor my feelings and emotional state throughout the interaction, whether it’s personal and one-on-one, or a large meeting with a group of people.

Tuned into our own senses and feelings, without perseverating or becoming distracted by them, we begin to look and listen for information from others, and we find a wealth of data all around us. We activate our eyes and ears as sense organs and focus our attention on the information they are gathering. Is the person to whom we are speaking making eye contact? Do they seem nervous or at ease? How are they sitting in the chair or what is their posture when standing? How does this connect to the topic we are discussing? Is their affect or demeanor changing? What could be causing such a change? It may be appropriate to pause and ask how a person is feeling or request some feedback in the moment about how you are doing. This form of information gathering is familiar to most classroom teachers, who are constantly reading the room to monitor student engagement, adjust to student needs, and accommodate individual differences as they teach.

As helpful and important as this real-time interpersonal information is, there need to be points where one requests more formal and explicit feedback. It is important to consider school culture, context, and related practices when setting out to ask for such input. At my previous school, we developed an evaluation protocol for teaching faculty that was carried out by the division head as supervisor. As soon as the system was developed, the school went through a crisis and the process was only partially implemented. After things stabilized, we picked up the effort and quickly realized that while we had a robust system for evaluating a teacher’s performance and providing them feedback, there was no equivalent system for school leaders. So I took it upon myself to develop and pilot a system. I based it on the 360-degree method, which asked for input from supervisors, leadership colleagues, and direct reports. Gathered anonymously, I found that much of the feedback, while expressly about my leadership, reflected pent up frustration that no one in a leadership position had asked for such feedback until that point, not to mention the frustration and hurt from several years of turmoil and instability. It was hard to hear, and even harder to know what the lessons really were and how to respond to them.

Since arriving at EPS, I have gradually developed a cycle of requesting faculty input, in three distinct domains, at least once each year. I ask for feedback on my personal work and leadership because I want to know how I’m doing. I ask for feedback on our divisional program and culture because I want to know how things are working, recognizing that not everything that happens is a direct result of my action or inaction. This gives people a chance to reflect on their personal experience with students, colleagues, me, and the school more broadly and to share that perspective. Finally, I ask people to help me identify areas of focus for our collective work in the upcoming year. All of this information, and especially that from the third category, helps me to build an annual work plan over the summer and share it with folks in the fall, to plan and execute medium and long term projects over the course of a year or more.

When the feedback comes in, I have developed a method for myself to read and most effectively absorb the information shared. It involves reading survey results three separate times, in three distinct phases and settings, to thoroughly parse the information and work through my personal reactions to it. First, I find myself a comfortable time and place, away from campus, usually on a weekend with a good cup of coffee and a delicious pastry, to make an initial first pass through the results. I look at the numbers, graphs, and charts to identify patterns and areas of concern from the relative altitude of aggregate figures and percentages. I then read through the comments and allow myself to have whatever reaction feels appropriate. I don’t take notes or write anything down. In this phase I can’t help myself from responding in my head to what feels unfair, inaccurate, or incomplete, and I can pretty well expect to have several imaginary conversations on the way home.

With the second pass, necessarily a minimum of several days later (preferably a week), I take notes. First, I summarize the data trends. Next, I summarize the narrative comments, translating each section into my own words, but including direct quotes when they seem relevant, poignant, or irreducible. On the right side of the page, at an angle and adjacent to my bulleted list, I draft a series of brief responses. At this point I try to move past my initial emotional response and craft well-reasoned and non-judgmental statements that either affirm, reject, or qualify the feedback and what I might do with it.

In the third pass, again with some considerable time elapsed since the previous phase, I re-read my summary and responses. I check it for accuracy with the original numbers and text, but I don’t re-read the entirety of the raw material. Then I check it for bias and my own wounded pride in what I have written. Where does it sound defensive? What have I written off as unfair that actually has a kernel of truth in it that I can use, even if there may be mitigating factors? What hurts because it’s true? At this point, I am getting to the point of the inventory where I can begin to read the feedback impersonally, as if it weren’t about me. But I need time and several stages to separate myself from the task at hand. I am just too sensitive and fragile otherwise.

Finally, it is critical to share a summary of findings with the people who generously offered me the gift of feedback. I need to let them know that I’ve heard them, and share a plan for what I intend to do with that valuable information. In some cases, I am very concrete and direct with a detailed plan for future action. In other cases, I acknowledge that something is hard for me and ask for grace and time to make mistakes, learn, and grow. I believe that this process, opening up, exposing weaknesses and making vulnerable the tender places, is an act of courage and self-compassion. As a result, I get stronger, gentler, and better in the broken places.

Interpersonal Skills

Indicator

Communicates ideas efficiently and effectively – verbally, in writing and/or through other relevant mediums.

Listens deeply and intentionally to understand and consider multiple perspectives.

Utilizes earned respect, compelling arguments, and relational trust to influence others toward shared goals.

Families come in lots of different forms, from nuclear to extended, some with same-sex parents, adopted children, or families of choice determined later in life. The point is not to examine the individuals who make up the unit or their identities, rather to look at what holds them together. Families have many different relationship styles too, some that are influenced by personality or culture. But despite many differences, a healthy family needs a few key behaviors to function effectively and support the growth and well-being of members. Those core aptitudes, implemented regularly enough to become habits, are similar to the interpersonal skills that a school leader needs to support the well-being and performance of faculty, students, and every member of the school community.

Family Dinner

Many families find that a regular family dinner serves not only to feed the people, but also to connect them and facilitate communication. My Uncle Phil used to call the time after the dinner “family meeting,” so that he could talk to my cousins about serious stuff on a full stomach. Uncle Phil was pretty smart! Similarly, at EPS, our regularly scheduled Monday morning email communication and Wednesday morning division meetings provide opportunities to disseminate information. To really drive home a message and be sure that everyone receives it, an email announcement, followed by a meeting announcement, and perhaps followed by a third email announcement in SamAntics or the Weekly Newsletter, provides wider coverage and the benefit of repetition.

In my own family, I have found that some of the best, deepest, and most meaningful conversations happen in the car, whether we’re on a long road trip where we finally get around to real talk after 14 hours on the highway, or the everyday trips to school when the kids would ask an honest question from the back seat when I least expected it. While proximity is close in the car, you’re usually not making direct eye contact, which strangely opens up opportunities for the expression of fear, doubt, excitement, or other feelings. At school, students and teachers regularly approach me for a conversation after a meeting, in the hallway, or in the LPC over breakfast or lunch. It seems that the casualness of those “flyby” meetings provides a level of security and comfort to at least broach a delicate conversation, even if it may not be concluded in the few moments we have for interaction. And mealtime meetings provide the “full belly” effect that Uncle Phil was after, and the limited eye contact of the passenger seat convo. After all, you have to be sure you don’t spill Javi’s eggs down the front of your shirt before school even starts, so don’t take your eyes off the omelet!

But when a topic is particularly delicate or even modestly important, I will usually try to schedule a meeting to discuss. Whenever possible, I am sure to share the topic of the meeting in my email invitation, otherwise people’s minds may run to a worst-case scenario and worry that they are being summoned because they’re in trouble; the “principal’s office effect” impacts teachers as well as students, I’m afraid. The in-person meeting has the benefit of communication in multiple, overlapping, and simultaneous modalities. It gives both parties full access to verbal, visual, and auditory processing of words, facial expressions, and body language, and full access to nuances of tone, volume, and other subtleties. I find it’s harder to be misunderstood in person, and if I am, I can sense it and clarify.

When I anticipate that a meeting will be challenging, either because the stakes are high, or because I foresee some kind of conflict or disagreement, or because other emotions may influence the course of the talk, I will prepare a few notes in advance. I try not to over plan, because too much detail in the notes makes them hard to read and gives the impression of a more formal intervention. Sometimes it’s convenient to have something on a computer screen, and sometimes having the computer open inhibits the open exchange and personal connection, so this approach is context specific. Sometimes the notes are just for planning in my head and I don’t need to have them in front of me.

In especially difficult circumstances, I may anticipate that I want to follow the meeting with an email that documents what we discussed. This is a tactic to bring accountability to the exchange, either for myself and some kind of follow-up that I’ve offered, or to the other person, like if a change of behavior is necessary. Sometimes I will write the follow-up email before the meeting as a way to plan and rehearse what I intend to discuss in person. After the meeting, I will review, edit, and send the email promptly. The prework helps me prepare, helps ensure that the necessary topics are covered, and shortens the turnaround time on sending the email afterward because I already have a draft prepared.

One final note about particularly challenging topics. I take great pains to lean into difficult conversations, especially those that present some interpersonal awkwardness, and to host them promptly. It’s important not to rush, and occasionally situations resolve themselves with a modest and prudent delay. But in most cases, I find that awkward conversations just get more awkward and difficult the more they are delayed. I also find that such meetings, and they are usually in person, necessitate me bringing all of my skills to bear, including the intrapersonal ones reviewed in the previous category. I need to be especially careful to monitor and regulate my own emotional state if there is a chance for heightened emotion in the other party. And to gauge their state of mind, I need to watch and listen carefully for changes in affect.

Really Listening

In any kind of partnership, but especially the kind between people who build family, it is important that partners really listen to one another. While words convey important information, they have limits too. When you come to know someone over a period of years and share lots of experiences together, you can kind of anticipate how they’re feeling about things in ways that supersede the definition of the words being used. Think of the meaning embedded in a look between your parents or grandparents. They speak volumes. But it takes time, practice, and skill to write those volumes.

Have you ever had a conversation with a person who, after making their point, continued to drone on for another five minutes? Was that a frustrating experience? I once read that halfway through a conversational exchange, the listener anticipates the rest of what the other person is about to say and begins composing their own response in their head. Then, clued into the secret, I began to notice my mind doing just that. And then I realized that the frustration I felt with the over-exemplified, drive-home-the-point conversationalist wasn’t their fault, it actually stemmed from my own mental practice of tuning out once I thought I had the gist of their point. I was frustrated because I had to hold onto my carefully scripted reply and I was spending my mental energy on that task rather than listening all the way to the end. So I wondered what it might be like if I listened all the way to the end instead, and I began to try.

First, I felt more present. I took away the expectation that I would be quick to jump back with a reply, which felt like it reduced some kind of self-imposed pressure. This freed me to listen more and better. I compensated by pausing briefly to compose my reply after the other person had finished, which had the effect of slowing the pace of the conversation and signaling to the other person that I had really heard them and was deeply considering what they had said. I realized such exchanges felt better, to both of us, and that I was actually learning more by slowing down and focusing my attention in this way.

Truly listening is a skill that can be cultivated. It includes specific behaviors that are identifiable, concrete, and can be practiced. To listen deeply, one needs to tune in with their whole body and mind to try and discern all that is being said. What is the context of the conversation? What talks preceded it? What do you know about this person and what do they know about you? Try to think of a person who makes you feel like they’ve really heard you, a conversation you had where you felt like you got it all out, or a person who you dread talking to because if feels like they’re not listening. What was the other person doing or not doing in those exchanges? I’ll provide two examples from my own experience to illustrate.

The first is a parent I once knew at school. This person had a way about them that I would describe as serious and imposing. I had the opportunity to interact with her many times, and in social exchanges, usually standing up at some kind of a mixer, she smiled, her body was relaxed, she moved her head from side to side; she appeared comfortable and that made me comfortable talking with her. I can picture her now in my mind, standing on the TALI rooftop, head tilted slightly, leaned toward me, talking casually in a friendly exchange. In meetings I had a different experience. She sat stiff in her chair, body upright, facial expression flat, very little movement. She appeared to listen intently but gave nothing back: no affirmation of what I had said, no nodding in agreement or shaking of the head in dissent. I can picture myself beginning to squirm in my chair, becoming increasingly uneasy as the conversation unfolded. She was in no way unpleasant or disagreeable, she just didn’t give me much to communicate that she was hearing me. It was like my words traveled into a void with no echo bouncing back.

By contrast, consider my boss, who is the best listener I know, and from whom I have learned much on this subject. Always in motion, this person is. When I say something, he nods to acknowledge, not necessarily to agree. If I make a significant point, he speaks it back to me to confirm receipt of the message. And when I conclude, he summarizes before transitioning to his reply. Often, he won’t offer a full reply in the moment, letting me know that he wants to consider the idea, think it over, and get back to me. His body position changes throughout the exchange, sometimes sitting up and leaning in to engage, other times leaning back in ponderous thought, but always relaxed. I don’t always leave fully satisfied because I don’t necessarily get what I want, but I always feel like I have been given a full hearing and that I had the opportunity to express myself and make my feelings known.

And that is the goal of listening: fora person to be heard; to empower them, trust them, acknowledge their thoughts and feelings and perspective. There is one final component that often goes beyond the conversation itself, which is extending the same to other stakeholders, and that’s where things get harder. If I am to truly and authentically respect a person’s perspective, I need to extend that same respect to every member of the community, and their perspectives are always at least slightly different. So if listening is to be true and meaningful and more than just performative, a school leader needs to take what they’ve heard, intentionally gather more perspectives, and find some way to reconcile them in a decision. That’s the hard part.

The Ties that Bind

For those who have raised children, we have come to know firsthand the incessant questioning of the two-year-old. At least once in this phase of life, most children will take their caregivers on a conversational journey, asking “Why?” after each logical explanation. At some point the parent begins to wonder if they are being toyed with, as if the game is seeing how far the adult will go with their logical responses to the increasingly illogical question. For me, that became a game too, and when I was at my best as a parent, I would happily play along, sometimes making my replies increasingly absurd to elicit a laugh from my kid and thereby find the bottom of that well of questions. But when I was not at my best, when the frustration of a long day had preceded the exchange, or when I felt like my child was being naughty, I might resort to that most fatal parenting error, the assertion of authority: “Because I told you so!”

I knew as those words came out of my mouth that this was not the kind of parent I wanted to be; that I wanted to reason with my child, explain things to them, and have them make good choices for themselves when presented with enough, or the correct, information. But I was human, and so were they, so sometimes we simply disagreed. Our perspectives were too far apart to bridge with shared understanding because we were viewing the situation from different angles. And it was in those moments that I didn’t always know what to do. There are so many life lessons in parenting, but the leadership lesson derived from this silly example is about how, as school leaders, we cultivate and hold authority, on what basis it is constructed, and the dangers or limitations of positional authority.

We have established that a leader must be skilled and thorough in their communication, which includes not only speaking and writing clearly, it also means listening well. These are the tools we use to motivate, inspire, and respond to people we lead. The purpose to which we apply those tools is “influence others toward shared goals.” I would submit that if we are not trying to further a shared goal we are not really leading. So how then, if not through positional authority alone, do we influence others?

There are many trite sayings about how respect needs to be earned. Rather than quote one, allow me to explain how I think this happens. People in leadership positions must recognize that they are being watched and evaluated, even in moments when attention seems to be focused elsewhere. Students, parents, and teachers will listen to the school leader’s words. They will observe their actions. And they will scrutinize the alignment between the two. If the actions don’t line up with the words, if a leader does not appear to be living up to the ideals they espouse, respect is lost. This is about core qualities like honesty, integrity, and character. And it is important to recognize that respect is very slowly accrued through consistent, steadfast, and reliable action, but can quickly be lost in a moment of misalignment.

While there are many ways in which a leader should attune to the felt emotional experience of an individual or a group, reason and logic remain important components of the influence one exerts to inspire and align a school community. If one cannot explain one’s actions or requests, they carry little weight. And while this may seem straightforward at first blush, it can be particularly challenging for a school leader when some of the reasons for their actions cannot be made known to those with whom they are seeking alignment. Students have rights and needs that are protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Teachers are entitled to privacy and confidentiality that is protected by employment law. A leader needs people to share information with her, and in order to share candidly, people need to trust that the leader will remain discreet.

Just like respect, trust is slowly earned and quickly squandered, so it must be cultivated carefully and protected steadfastly. It is possible to say to someone at a critical juncture, “I’m sorry I can’t share all the information that I’m basing my decision on, so I need you to trust me in this situation,” but only infrequently. In a more general sense, if a leader cultivates broad trust through the alignment of their words and actions, and they show that they genuinely care about individuals over the long haul, trust can be utilized to cultivate shared purpose and actions.

Even when all of the above is kept front and center, when the leader works to persuade logically, demonstrate care and concern, and earnestly builds trust and respect, there are times when we are not able to build consensus or agreement about our goals. What is one to do in such a circumstance? It may be better to yield, to give way, to acquiesce, or perhaps postpone to a more distant future, the controversial decision in the midst of unresolvable conflict. This is not surrender or defeat, though it may feel like a loss in the moment. It is a humble recognition that without earned respect, a compelling argument, or relational trust, all one has is positional authority. And “because I said so” is not enough if one aspires to lead with character and compassion.

Team Dynamics

Indicator

Plans and leads meetings effectively.

Identifies and resolves conflicts among and between teams.

Creates a culture of inclusivity, responding appropriately to differences of ability, identity, perspective, and interests.

I will do my best to at least avoid the most tired sports metaphors in this section, but please indulge me a few. After all, the word “team” is right there in the title, so I can only write my way around it so much before I will start to feel like I’m just avoiding something. In order that partially mapped and poorly constructed analogies do not become my only rhetorical device, I will define team here as “a group assembled to work together toward specific shared goals with a performance orientation.” By that I mean to distinguish a team from a community, or the family unit I was describing in the previous section. In those latter two types of groups, the orientation is toward more permanent and durable bonds, and sometimes specific performance goals should be sacrificed for the preservation of individual belonging, group cohesion, or relational trust as I have just argued. In a school setting, a team could be considered a subgroup within the larger collective, and an individual might work (or play) on several different teams at the same time. They might also rotate onto, or off of, specific teams over the course of time, and that does not, or at least should not, diminish their value or belonging within the community.

Game Plan

Planning and leading meetings is a bit like the preparation and orchestration of a game. Consider football. Coaches and players watch film of their opponent’s previous contests to get a sense of their players, strategies, strengths, and weaknesses. Then the coaches plan a strategy for the game; they might even script the opening drive or defensive set. Of course, plans will evolve as the game unfolds. The team may even start the second half with an entirely different strategy, but they think about how they will begin before the kickoff.

The meeting agenda is the equivalent of a game plan. The school leader drafts a set of topics or activities that indicate how the group will spend their time together and distributes it to the group ahead of time. That way participants can mentally prepare and bring needed supplies or information to the meeting. I find the agenda is more effective if I include time targets, even if we need to diverge or extend the allotted time, beginning with an estimate of how much time something will take helps the group stay on task and move on when necessary. In addition to sharing ahead of time, I like to publicly display the agenda during the meeting to help me and the group orient ourselves to the tasks before us throughout the meeting. There are some activities that increase a team’s effectiveness with periodic implementation, but the agenda should be present for every meeting.

The leader’s role in running a meeting is to facilitate the contributions of the team members. That means the leader may need to say some words at the beginning to set the stage, intervene periodically to maintain or adjust the course of the conversation, or summarize and check for understanding as the group develops their thinking. However, the leader of the meeting cannot be the only person to speak, and probably shouldn’t be the person who speaks most. Instead, the meeting facilitator should work to include all voices in the conversation. To do so, she or he may use structural devices, like timers or “around the room” responses, or more subtle and subjective techniques like inviting a person who appears quiet or pensive to contribute their thoughts at an opportune moment. In this way, “facilitation” is not a passive activity; it requires constant monitoring and intervention, but it is done in a way that elevates the contributions of others in the room.

Less frequently, a leader should solicit feedback from the team. While this is a super important component of a well-led and well-functioning team, the team needs to see their feedback implemented for change, which requires time between rounds of feedback. For permanent or established teams, an annual feedback rotation is sufficient. For ad hoc committees, teams in transition, or teams whose work is more intense or time-consuming, more frequent repetition is advisable. I’ll return to this topic in the third section below to describe how to solicit feedback, how to report it back to the team, and how to use feedback as a mechanism for building trust, inclusivity, and belonging.

While the feedback described above is envisioned as a formal survey of some kind, there are other, more frequent ways that team members can and should have input into the team’s goals and projects. One way to do that is to invite team members to contribute to goal setting at the beginning or end of a cycle. Another is to create mechanisms for team members to suggest agenda items and/or lead portions of meetings periodically, possibly in a rotation. This practice shares some leadership responsibilities, empowers individuals, generates buy-in and shared purpose, and provides opportunities to develop leadership skills. There will come a time in the lifecycle of most teams when the leader will step aside and a new leader will emerge. In many cases, that leader will come from within the group, so this practice begins to prepare the group for that eventuality in ways that are likely to smooth the transition and maintain effectiveness through periods of transition.

Five Minutes for Fighting

As I compose this section, my hometown Buffalo Sabres are up two games to one against the Boston Bruins in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. I played hockey in Buffalo as a kid. My buddy Justin’s dad was a defenseman and later coach for the Sabres, and Tim’s dad was the play-by-play announcer, now a member of the NHL Hall of Fame. Hockey is personal for me, and there is plenty of conflict involved, so it provides a frame for introducing conflict resolution as a necessary component of managing dynamics within a team. That said, it is a better counter-example of what not to do than it is a paragon of virtuous or enlightened problem solving.

Hockey players have to protect their net from the opposing players, who are trying to slip the puck past the goalkeeper. The goalie, clad in forty to fifty pounds of protective gear to protect them from 100-mile-per-hour slapshots, not only gets bombarded with hard rubber projectiles, the opposing team frequently rushes and crashes into the net, potentially pinning the goalie against the crossbar or otherwise inflicting serious injury. So the skaters protect the goalie at all cost, especially the defensemen. As the opposing forwards camp in front of the net, the defensemen push and shove them out of the way and interrupt their stickwork. If the opponent interferes with the goalie, enters the crease, or heaven forbid makes contact with the goalie, the forward is likely to get more than a shove. In some cases, players drop their gloves, grab their opponent’s jersey with one hand, and pound away at their face, head, or helmet with the other. This prompts the fans to cheer like mad, and some of their favorite players are the tough guy “enforcers,” whose role within the team is to stand up for their teammates and start fights if anyone gets out of line.     

Fighting is not technically allowed in hockey, and dropping the gloves will land a player in the penalty box for a five-minute major, as opposed to a two-minute minor penalty like tripping. But it is the only professional sport I’m aware of where a player is not immediately ejected, fined, and perhaps suspended from future games for openly slugging an opponent. The consequence for breaking most rules in hockey is a temporary ostracism from the team and the contest by sitting all alone in a little box on the opposite side of the ice from the coaches and the rest of the players. It’s kind of like a time out for grown-ups. Both fighting and banishment have long been strategies for resolving conflict in the sweep of human history, and wars, violence, and excommunication still serve as last resort measures at the level of state, nation, and church. Fortunately, schools have many better ways of resolving conflict than fighting or excommunication. Nevertheless this history and comparison is worth keeping in mind when working through conflict, especially to help understand the level of heightened emotion presented by fear, threats of violence, or exclusion from the group.

Conflict in schools is much harder to spot than in a hockey game. Students, teachers, and parents are more likely to withdraw in silent opposition than drop their gloves, or express frustration by clenching their jaw before they raise a clenched fist. In order to resolve a conflict, a school leader must go through several steps to first identify and then understand a conflict, before ultimately negotiating a solution. This process will sometimes unfold for an extended period of time, thus raising the potential for a period of awkwardness, discomfort, or reduced performance while the conflict is being resolved.

The first step, spotting the conflict, bears some further discussion. When a team is functioning well, communication is clear, people say what they mean and understand each other. If they don’t, they ask for, and receive, clarification. There is a positive energy flowing between participants, and people usually leave a meeting feeling more energized than drained by the experience. When there is underlying conflict within a team, we find the opposite. People tend to speak with oblique references and passive constructions. Their sentences contain few clear subjects and largely inactive verbs. People and things are not named. The air in a meeting smells stale, if not sour, and people leave feeling drained without accomplishing much or perhaps really understanding why. For a leader, it can sometimes be easier to spot this when coming into a team fresh or as an occasional participant. When one is the member of such a team and experiences buried conflict, the feeling can become normalized over time and we may accept it without giving it much thought.

The leader’s perception is the first diagnostic tool, and their emotional intelligence will be the most operative kind of smarts throughout the experience. Simply asking “What’s going on here?” may be tempting, but the response takes courage and carries risk, and is therefore unlikely to surface the problem. So one should consider some kind of survey or other practical and systemic mechanism for gathering information. Personal conversations are likely to yield more candor than group ones, and the leader will rely upon the relational trust they already have to open doors. Meanwhile, they should exercise caution to build and maintain further trust with team members.

It is difficult to proceed much further than this without specific circumstances to carry our analysis. To illustrate two possible pathways, I will imagine two distinct scenarios that provide examples of how one might proceed. In the first case, a level of dysfunction has become endemic within a group, not because of any particular issue or interpersonal conflict, but rather because the team did not have clear values, priorities, norms, or shared philosophy. In this case, the “conflict” is not acute, and therefore no specific negotiation will resolve it. Instead, the leader must start from a foundational level to create shared purpose, practice, and principles. The “forming, norming, storming, and performing” progression can be helpful here, and usually a team begins to work toward a solution by locating themselves on that continuum and taking a partial step backward before again progressing.

If the conflict is acute, for example between one or more members of a team, or when a contentious issue has divided the group, the leader can proceed more substantively toward a negotiated or compromise solution. In most cases, team members will be only partially satisfied with the outcome, and potentially greatly unhappy in a way that resentments need to be identified and released. This may be personal work for one or more members of the team, or group work for the team for a period of time going forward. The leader’s task is to identify the kind of conflict and then the follow-up work that is needed. In most cases, the more systemic approach described in the preceding paragraph will be necessary, or at least helpful, to some degree following the resolution of an acute conflict.

The Win-Win

And here is the place where we intentionally drop the metaphor. In very important ways, a school team is NOT the equivalent of a sports team. In competitive athletics, for one team to win, another must lose. Another way of saying it is that sports is a zero-sum game. School teams play positive-sum games, where it is possible for all involved to benefit mutually, even if not always equally. In order to perform efficiently and effectively without competing against one another, the school team emphasizes cooperation, collaboration, and synergy. And to do so, the leader of a school team optimizes the performance of a group by fostering diversity of thought, identity, and experience, and accounting for the many benefits that such an array of talents bring by creating space for each person to fully be themselves.

There are many ways to think about building a diverse and inclusive school team, and each element of diversity may require different adaptations to make them inclusive. Given the limited space for this analysis, I will limit its scope to three: gender, neurodivergence, and role or professional domain. In order to discuss these broad categories of the human experience, we must generalize by necessity. However, in order to avoid slippage or reduction of the analysis, let us distinguish between a generalization, understood to be a broad and flexible description of tendencies within groups, from stereotypes, which are narrow and determinate prescriptions of group tendencies to individual people. This distinction is foundational, important, and it can be difficult to discern in many cases, therefore let us exercise caution and care as we take the risk of engaging difficult and sensitive topics that have divided human beings for generations, and perhaps since the beginning of recorded history. It is precisely those historical precedents that we must work to improve.

To work against the insipient tendencies of the stereotype as we introduce some common manifestations of gender for our analysis, we can acknowledge that in western society, women have traditionally been assigned roles that trend toward emotional and physical caregiving, raising young people, and tending relationships within the family and outside of it. Meanwhile, men have been discouraged from expressing emotion and assigned roles that accumulate material and social rewards outside of the family, and offered a privileged position within it. As a team forms and begins to function, the weight of this long legacy may exhibit pressures, often unseen by some and felt acutely by others, to push people into particular roles that align with these historical trends. The leader’s job is to remain aware of those tendencies and guard against the inequity they produce and sustain. Instead, the leader should endeavor to make space for people with all manner of gender expression, support individuals to access resources and opportunities, and contribute from their areas of strength. 

Much has been written about how learning environments are tuned toward feminine expressions of gender, especially as female-identifying students have come to outperform and outnumber boys in secondary and higher education. In faculty teams, we often find that tasks like note-taking and the preparation of course or meeting materials are assigned to women, while men take up more airtime in meetings and are more likely to be recognized and promoted for their contributions. Those tendencies create and sustain gender-based inequity and discrimination, pushing women’s contributions behind the scenes and making men’s more public. Therefore, a school leader should take steps to spot and correct such trends. In order to become effective at doing so, they may need to undertake some personal identity work to better understand the associated dynamics, impact, and feelings. Because the impact and operation of gender creates different sets of circumstances for men and women, their personal work on the topic may differ. I have found, as a white cisgender man, that I have to process feelings of shame, guilt, and embarrassment to effectively confront and dismantle the patriarchal system of gender oppression that is always operating in social systems.

Alongside the gendering of our social landscape, lie the natural variations in human beings’ neurological capabilities, captured and distilled within the concepts of neurodiversity and neurodivergence. In these terms, “diversity” references and normalizes the broad spectrum of neurological function, and “divergence” refers to variation from statistical norms within the human population. The term “neurodivergent” is typically used to refer to minority neurotypes, including formal diagnoses like Autism Spectrum Disorder, ADHD, and Dyslexia/Dysgraphia/Dyscalculia. Although such conditions carry challenges for those who have them, they also represent significant and distinctive strengths.

To illustrate the importance of focusing on the neurological strengths associated with different kinds of thinking, we might consider the differences associated with linear and non-linear thought patterns. Linear thinking is predictable, structured, and efficient. It is good for solving logistical problems and challenges related to coordination of large groups or variables, but sometimes linear thought can miss big picture or collateral issues. Meanwhile, non-linear thinking is associative and divergent. It captures ancillary or related topics and is useful in understanding and solving problems related to complex and interconnected systems, and incorporates ambiguity well. Almost any team working within a school requires a combination of linear and non-linear thinking. Therefore a team leader is wise to build her team with a diverse array of thinkers and incorporate roles and tasks associated with each.

Finally, because school systems are complex, diverse, and interconnected, the team leader must consider the various roles and perspectives of each member of the team to more fully understand the direction from which they might approach and solve problems. For example, a committee on school curriculum is likely to include members of each academic discipline, who understandably think about the learning experience very differently. The PE classroom, which in many cases is a gymnasium, weight room, or athletic field, is a very different environment than a science laboratory. And the kinds of thinkers that gravitate toward Fine Arts and Literature might be quite distinct from the more linear and sequential curricula of mathematics or world languages. In addition, due to a whole range of historical and contextual factors, the disciplines may have distinctly different gender representation and operation among their constituencies. So one can quickly see how our example curriculum team would need to reckon with differences of gender, neurodiversity, and representation of roles and interests simultaneously.

Lest the reader become discouraged or overwhelmed by the complexity of such a scenario, we should conclude with a way to move through these challenges, which can be found by grounding actions, decisions, and participation within a field of shared values and mutually agreed-upon norms. For example, the leader might work with the team to establish shared commitment to “including all voices in every discussion,” or “prioritizing equity in all decisions.” The group might even generate methods for incorporating those values into the regular practices of the group, like building a mechanism whereby any member of the team can add items to the agenda, or by developing decision-making protocols to ensure that even if one disagrees with an outcome, the outcome was fair because it derived from a process that each member contributed and agreed to. Such processes may at times be laborious, ambiguous, complicated, and even frustrating. In short, the school team might be as messy as the rest of the human experience. And we can find beauty and promise within just such a mess.