Leadership+Design
"We design experiences for the people who create the future of teaching and learning."
In our work, we build capacity, create conversations, and make connections.
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Plan your professional learning adventures with L+D in 2018.
Design Studio
October 29-30, 2018
Baltimore, MD
Human Centered Design for Admissions (with AISAP)
The Santa Fe Seminar
November 4-8, 2018
Santa Fe, NM
A leadership journey about purpose and direction
Design Studio
March 20-21, 2019
Washington, DC
Designing for Student Civic Engagement
Design Studio
April 19, 2019
Tacoma, WA
Equity and Inclusion Action Lab
Wonder Women
June 24-27, 2019
Oakland, CA
Uncovering your Superpowers and Leadership Presence
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L+D Board of Directors
Ryan Baum
VP of Strategy Jump Associates, CA
Matt Glendinning (Secretary)
Head of School
Moses Brown School, RI
Trudy Hall (Board Chair)
Director of Strategic Initiatives
Forest Ridge School, WA
Brett Jacobsen (Vice Chair)
Head of School
Mount Vernon Presbyterian, GA
Barbara Kraus-Blackney (Treasurer)
Executive Director
Association of Delaware Valley Independent Schools (ADVIS), PA
Brenda Leaks
Head of School
Seattle Girls School, WA
Karan Merry
Retired Head of School
Brooklyn, NY
Jeanette Moore
CFO
The San Francisco School, CA
Natalie Nixon
Founder
Figure 8 Consulting, PA
Kaleb Rashad
Principal
High Tech High School, CA
Carla Robbins Silver (ex-officio)
Executive Director
Leadership+Design, CA
Matthew Stuart
Head of School
Caedmon School, NY
Brad Weaver
Head of School
Sonoma Country Day School, CA
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L+D Fellows
2018-19
Welcome to our amazing fellows! We are exited to meet you all in person next week.
RIPL Designer
McGillis School, UT
Michael Ecker Principal Calaveras, Middle School, CA
Kristen Erickson History Department Chair and Art Gallery Director Greenwich Academy, CT
Jon Freer Director of Technology and Innovative Teaching Solebury School, PA
Rhonda Hewer Learning Services Consultant Waterloo Region District School Board, Ontario, Canada
Louise Lindsay Innovation Coach Knoxville Jewish Day School, TN
Sonja McKay Teacher Exploris School, NC
Stephanie Mendrala Director of Professional Development STEM School Highlands Ranch, CO
Ingrid Moore Director of Lower School The Steward School, VA
Brian Mull Innovation and Learning Design Coordinator Trinity Episcopal School, NOLA
Hannah Nelson Science Teacher and Academic Dean Watershed School, CO
Gwenyth Nicholson 8th Grade Humanities Teacher Saco Middle School, ME
Bobby Pollicino Upper School Principal Bullis School, MD
Sara Slogesky K-12 Social Studies Curriculum Specialist Capital Region Education Council Magnet Schools, CT
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Carla Silver, Head L+Doer
Leadership+Design
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Happy September!
I am writing this month's article from WeWork, a collaborative work space. Many of you know about WeWork and other similar spaces where individuals and businesses can set up shop and share resources, exchange ideas and cross-pollinate by intersecting with people doing radically different things than they  are doing. Right now, I'm peering into the office of "ourJamz" which, for all I know, may become the next Spotify or maybe even a music streaming service disruptor! "Infronious Solutions" is just to my left. I have absolutely no idea what they do - but I will. What excites me about spending time here at WeWork and one reason why these collaborative work spaces are so popular is that on any given day, you can meet and talk to people who are contributing to the world with passion and self-direction and working to bring new ideas to life. They have identified a gap, a problem or a need and they are eagerly tried to find solutions or ways to meet that need. In this space are engineers, marketing professionals, CEOs, finance gurus, dreamers and doers. There is a sense of optimism here and a feeling that people are pursuing what they love. "Always Do What You Love" is the WeWork motto.
One of the reasons I've come to WeWork this fall is to get out into the world outside of school and see how work is being done, why and by whom. Every September all of us "school people" go back to school. We return to campus, to the classrooms, to our offices and often to a world that has changed very little. Many of us are doing what we love in a space we love that is familiar. We are educating students, presumably, for the next stages in their lives - which may include more school and, someday, work. But I'm not sure most of us know what on earth is happening outside of school and whether any of us are actually qualified to prepare young people for a world of work we know almost nothing about.
This year we are offering our newsletter writers and readers a series of fill-in the blank prompts to respond to - think Mad Libs for educators. For the September issue, we asked our writers to respond to the prompt: This year in school we should do less of ______________ and more of _________________. My response to this prompt: This year in school, we should do less of staying in and more of getting out.
Is school relevant? Is YOUR school relevant? I imagine this is a scary provocation for schools and their professional communities to consider, but I believe it among the three essential questions we should be asking ourselves as we design the future of teaching and learning; -
Are we relevant? (Do we provide learning experiences that prepare students not just for more school but the world beyond school?)
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Are we engaging? (Do we design our program so that students are emotionally and intellectually connected to the work they are doing and that they are active participants in and not passive recipients of their learning? Are they curious? Are they joyful?)
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Is what we offer meaningful? (Are students deriving a sense of purpose larger than the self and a desire for meaningful contribution from our program? Are they discovering passions and pursuing them?)
To answer that question requires getting out of school and being curious about what you see and learn. In an world of ubiquitous information, where the answers to many test questions can be answered by Alexa, and where the pursuit of college admissions trumps deep intellectual inquiry in almost every scenario, we have to be more relevant than our college lists, and our AP, SAT and other standardized test scores and we have to really understand the landscape our students will graduate into
In 2015 The World Economic Forum published a list of skills that would be most necessary for success in the world of work in 2020 (just two years from now).
As my fellow-presenter Christian Talbot likes to remind our audiences, schools really only explicitly teach one of the skills (critical thinking). The rest, we hope, emerge in our students as a result of our program. But what if we explicitly taught "coordinating with others" when we launched group projects? What would an interdisciplinary course on "decision making" look like? What if we disbanded our current academic departments and instead had a problem solving department, an emotional intelligence department, and a creativity department? It's so hard to imagine schools outside of our own mental models unless we get out.
L+D has worked with schools to plan "Hack Your City"  Challenges - professional development days largely focused on bringing educators to innovative companies to spend part of the day exploring the the world of work and then returning to campus to unpack their visits and consider how space, tasks, and interpersonal relationships compared to school. In many cases, even this small taste has prompted schools to wonder "What in our program is obsolete? What is really worth preserving? What are we missing? How are people working together? What are we not teaching - both content and skill?" These "hack" days have been both refreshing and daunting at the same time, sometimes revealing a deep disconnect between the world of work and the world of school - a widening chasm that many of us are unwilling to admit but are deeply felt in the workplace when you ask managers of recent college-graduates.
Other schools, Episcopal High School in VA and Hillbrook School in CA to name two, have acquired memberships at WeWork or draw on other collaborative works spaces and encourage both students and teachers to get out dip their toes in the world outside of school and to blur the lines of work and school in a healthy, exploratory way. If we are truly interested in ensuring our own relevance, we need to get out more and stay in less. What are you waiting for? What if every single member of your faculty and staff spent a day out this year? What is the risk of doing it? What is the risk of NOT doing it?
Speaking of getting out, there is still time to register for an upcoming program with Leadership+Design that can also get you out of your normal routine and out of your comfort zone. We have two upcoming programs: Human Centered Design for Admissions Professionals - a collaboration with AISAP - October 29 and 30. Come in costume for extra fun! And of course, the Santa Fe Seminar, November 4-7, which is designed specifically for school leaders in all roles and at all points in their careers to get out of school and enjoy journey of renewal, reconnection and discovery.
We look forward to the many provocations in the year ahead and reading the inspiring responses to them. This month you'll hear from Ryan Burke, L+D Senior Partner, Emma Wellman, 2017-18 L+D Fellow and Rolland Hall School Beginning School Principal, and Ryan Welsh, innovator extraordinaire and Chief Design Strategist from Providence Day School (Ryan and I had the great fortune connect with this summer through the AltMBA program). And if you want to be a voice in this year's newsletter, reach out to Erin Cohn at [email protected]. We'd love to hear you!
Warmly,
Carla
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| Less Compliance = More Possibility |
| Ryan Burke, Senior Partner, Leadership+Design |
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Good morning, afternoon or evening. I imagine that you are reading this having just had your first couple of weeks with students. This year's theme for our newsletter is tantamount to my own life path right now. As some of you know, I recently switched paths to come on to L+D full time. L+D has been a passion, an opportunity and a calling, but it is only recently what I do full-time.
All of our newsletter articles this year will tackle a "Do less of ________ and do more of ________" statement or questions like, "What if we did ________ instead of ________? If you have a great one of these prompt for us, pass it along. For me personally, it amounts to "Do less of what you have always done to make sure you make money for your family and do more of what you are good at and believe in."
I have chosen to amend that a tad for this article:
"We should try doing a lot less (following directions) and a lot more (I hope this works)."
For this topic, I wanted to highlight a book that we have taken on reading as an organization, Linchpin: Are you Indispensable? b y Seth Godin. I will save you the hyperbole, it is worth a read. As a  person that is living the fear of change, that is giving up what I know for something I love and doing things that some of my friends and family believe to be weird, I could not have found this book or L+D at a better time. I just turned 40, and I guess it is better to read a book than buy something expensive that I cannot afford.
At its core, this book is about fear. A feeling that is traditionally taboo for men and women in the working world in which we must always present as competent. We must fight and kill wooly mammoths to provide for our family or we must get an "A"...and we must do it all without fear. When you write it out, it seems even more stupid than the thought is to start with, but the truth seems to be that this archaic, culturally driven force is alive and present for men and women, and choosing to leave the safety of what is expected of you can feel paralyzing.
Seth Godin, in the introduction to this book, argues that we all have a choice. "A choice to buy into the fear and the system or to chart your own path and create value as you do". He goes on to point out how school has gotten us to where we are, "The scam is that just about everything you were taught in school and by the media was an invented myth, a fable designed to prep you to be a compliant worker".
You are reading this at the beginning of your own school year with all of the yearly opportunity in front of you. I am arguing that now is the time! Our students, our faculty, and our board members and parents need our leadership. Helping students born in this generation become Linchpins is paramount. These Linchpins are in short supply according to Godin who say they, "are able to walk into chaos and create order, someone who can invent, connect, create, and make things happen", "Indispensable linchpins are not waiting for instructions, but instead, figuring out what to do next. If you have a job where someone is telling you what to do next, you've given up the chance to add value." This shortage is on us as educators. We have helped them too much, we have carefully scripted their lives in hopes that they would "act appropriate", "comply", "get in line", "buy-in", "be quiet", "speak up" or some other axiom that has not been fully vetted. Being quiet is great, but what about when somebody needs to speak up? The real skill is to know what is needed and deliver it without fear of failure or judgement.
So leaders, it is time to do less following directions and more confident wondering about hope and possibility. Carla Silver, L+D's Executive Director, refers to herself as a possibilian. I love that, and she is a possibilian. It is time to empower our teachers to look to us less, to collaborate on their creative vision instead of looking to leaders for clarity of what is expected. As a school leader, 90% of the people at my door wanted clarity of what was expected of them, and like many of you, I probably tried to give it to them. It is what I thought my job was. I was wrong, and it didn't work. Reading Seth Godin actually got me physically fired up. I read this book standing up, pacing across the room, talking to my teenage daughter as she rolled her eyes in my direction, and I hope you will read it too. Compliance is overrated, and while I am not arguing that we all go out and get arrested, I do believe we could benefit from a substantial nudge in that direction.
Following directions less, and trying more psychologically risky and creative things will not work 100% of the time. As Godin points out, "Einstein was not always a genius, he often got lost walking home from work to his house". If you follow this article's path, there will be pain ahead, and it will hurt. Not only will this pain suck, it will be your fault, and that is why your amygdala will try and convince you to play it safe. The only way that I have gotten through hard things is with my people, so now is the time to gather your people. When you read this book, read it with your people. Read it as a team, read it is a tribe that will do this important work together. That way, when you fall, it will hurt, but you will have team members to take care of you as well as help you suck it up and keep going.
And, teach this willingness and courage as well as a skill set to young people. Do this so they can look to us less and look inward to their own genius and compass more. What a gift we have the opportunity to give them and to our schools.
Have a great year and call L+D to co-conspire on this work. It's what we do.
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In Support of Summarily Subtracting
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Emma Wellman, Beginning School Principal, Rowland Hall
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As we push back from the gate for another school year, we often find ourselves picking out some new things to add to our journey during the year ahead. We get fired up learning about the work of others, having read some book/article/blog post or attended a conference, and before we know it, we're piloting a new program/way to run meetings/assessment tool/curricular component/dress code policy, etc. Trying new things is fun and after all, iteration is built in to the way we do school. It's what helps keep the work fun and interesting for many of us.
Add to this the increasingly competitive market for indie schools, and it can feel urgently important to be sure you're covering all  your bases, having one of each, appealing to as broad a swath of the market as possible in order to meet your enrollment targets. There can be a lot of new initiatives and pressure to add programs, features, headcount, buildings, events and more. It can start to feel like there is some MAXIMUM ULTIMATE education that we're striving to provide.
But I'd like to suggest that we should try doing a lot less adding and a lot more subtracting in schools. Editing is hard and important work and can lead to clarity, focus, and deeper commitment.
Let's pretend that our schools are restaurants. I'd argue that our schools should not be an all-you-can-eat buffet, where the mac and cheese has that orange layer of grease sitting on top, and the peas are mushy and brown, but rather something closer to an interactive culinary experience where chefs and diners agree on some key ingredients at the outset and then something novel and delicious happens.
Here's an example: before I began working in schools, I founded and ran a small daycare called Banana Mashers. We worked with very young children from 10 weeks to four and a half, and it was a marvelous time. In my first couple of years, I was so eager to keep parents (my clients) happy that I wrote these incredibly long and detailed daily reports about what was happening for their infants. There had timestamps and multiple paragraphs and flowery language. After a time, these began to feel perfunctory, and I begin to feel guilty--after all, these folks were entrusting me with their precious tiny humans so I owed them a rich and comprehensive run down on the books, poops, songs, and discoveries of the day. Plus, the other daycares always provided a daily written log; it was standard operating procedure. One day while dutifully recording the minutia of a child's day (we'll call her Sadie), she awoke earlier than expected from a rest and asked what I was doing. I told her that I was writing about what she had done so far that day and--because she was two at the time, she said, "why?". That's when it hit me: I wasn't actually sure that all the work I was putting in was having the impact I hoped. So I decided to tinker and get some feedback from parents. It turned out that almost all the parents were scanning these long-winded documents for a few key pieces of information, and felt guilty themselves for not "making the time" to read them more carefully. So we scrapped the narrative reports, and shared only essential info daily. This freed me up to begin writing more interesting weekly (or bi-weekly) newsletters, which felt better aligned with the process of learning and growing for young children. It also meant that I was doing less work and a better job. So much win.
So here is my advice: figure out who your school is and what you do, then be okay with doing that. It doesn't mean letting yourself off the hook for working hard to learn and grow, or that you shouldn't consider what your families need from you. Instead it means getting clear about your priorities and letting other things go--or sometimes even burning stuff down!
Here is one helpful tool to help you decide what you can get rid of because it's dead/more trouble than it's worth/a soul-eater. Ask yourself, "if we blew this up, would we miss it?" In our culture of acquisition, we learn that more is more, so we make Pinterest boards and wish lists of things to buy online, and have a container store for all our things that we bought online. But we are learning about the risks of overstimulation, and the value of elimination, simplification, and purging! Perhaps this year, you can be making a SUBTRACTION/DESTRUCTION list, rather than a WISH list.
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Ryan C. Welsh, PhD, Chief Design Strategist,
Providence Day School
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Welcome back and welcome aboard. At this time of year, schools bring their people together to launch the new year. We welcome. We onboard. We acculturate. We induct. We orient. We enculturate. We assimilate. We survive.
At the start of my second decade at Providence Day, I find myself wondering aloud (usually in conversation with colleagues) about how we might set the conditions to catalyze the most meaningful year for everyone in our community. We should do a lot less onboarding to faculty and a lot more welcoming with faculty. What if we welcomed and embraced all faculty?
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| | Welcoming and embracing faculty |
We have been redesigning the ways we support faculty in their first year, and I wrestled with verbs for much of the summer working toward our design questions. How might we onboard? How might we induct? How might we assimilate? How might we survive? None of those verbs feels right to me. Survival is not good enough. I want our adults to thrive. Thriving involves being able to bring one's whole self to a profession that demands immense emotional labor. Getting on board insinuates you might fall off. Helping people to survive a first year implies survival is in question. Being inducted sounds a little painful and scary. I am still struggling with the various denotations and connotations of acculturate, enculturate, and assimilate.
Whatever the verbs, schools would do well to spend more time and energy welcoming and embracing faculty. Each adult--new and returning. Every school day--first to last. Welcoming faculty and embracing their individual awesomeness each day rather than insisting everyone get "on board" a predetermined path that will not be as meaningful as the path we could discover and build together. I wonder what would happen if we welcomed faculty each day and encouraged them to offer as much of their authentic self as possible in the name of helping students thrive.
There are benefits the community can only reap from a faculty member in their first year on campus. Equally, there are benefits the community can only reap from a faculty member in their 7th year. Their 27th year. Faculty can only offer their best stuff when they embrace the self-awareness necessary to know about their best stuff. Further, knowing what we have to offer is useless unless we commit to sharing our best. Faculty, like the world, change continuously. As such, there is a shelf-life on getting faculty to offer the best they have to offer this year because of the unique professional they happen to be right now. How might we enact the conditions necessary for each faculty member to offer the unique stuff we can only glean from them this year? In the end, we landed on "embrace." How might we embrace all faculty? An embrace takes at least two people and the freedom to connect. An embrace involves all parties sharing trust and rapport. An embrace enables mutual contribution and mutual benefit. We want to embrace faculty in ways that allow them to offer the best of themselves to the community while simultaneously encouraging them to avail themselves of the best our community has to offer.
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| | X = curiosity; Y = difficulty; Z = impact |
To that end, we have been working to embrace new ways of connecting new and returning faculty in mutually beneficial conversations about teaching and learning. We tried reimagining the ways we engage faculty in a growth mindset approach to developing as professional educators. We started with the same professional development standards we have used for some time (e.g. Create opportunities for students to bring their identities into the classroom). Previously, those standards were assessed with a familiar 1 to 5 Likert scale. With the exact same standards, we had faculty self-reflect and triangulate where they believed they were on each standard in terms of curiosity, difficulty, and impact. How curious are you about this standard? How difficult do you find this standard? How much impact do you imagine this standard will have for student learning and your professional practice? Our new faculty and their mentor cohorts have been using these axes to reflect on their practice and instigate conversations about teaching and learning. We want everyone to collaboratively embrace the curiosities and difficulties and impacts of teaching and learning. Further, we hope all faculty will embrace one another as we work to collectively pursue our curiosities, address our difficulties, and increase our impact on student learning.
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| Triangulating together
Photos courtesy of Derrick Willard |
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