Chapter 1. SEL: It's About Time!

This inordinate emphasis on the results from a few hours of tests administered during one week in the spring caused me to question the validity of the tests. I wondered what score would be generated if an answer sheet were submitted with random responses. What if the multiple-choice response bubbles on the answer sheet were filled in to create a nice, wavy pattern, irrespective of the questions that were asked? Would that yield terrible results, or might the randomness lead to an average score? Could pure luck lead to an above-average score? What an interesting question! (I am sure that you can see where this is heading.)

I decided to find out by completing and submitting a random-response sheet, naively thinking, "What could go wrong?" Not wanting to penalize any of my students by submitting this answer sheet with their name, I created a new student, Sam Suedo (my not-so-clever way of writing pseudo, hoping it wouldn't be noticed), and included Sam's answer sheet in my class' packet when I submitted it to the main office. So far, so good.

What I didn't realize was that before submitting the completed tests to be scored, the principal perused each teacher's class packet of answer sheets. I figured that something was amiss the next day when I found a note from the principal in my office mailbox, requesting that I see him ASAP! The combination of ASAP and an exclamation mark was not good, I knew. So much for "What could go wrong?"

The principal told me that he was surprised to see that an answer sheet from a new student was included in my class' packet. "Who is this Sam Suedo?" he asked, raising his voice and waving Sam's sheet in front of me. He was quite unhappy when I told him that I had created a fictitious student to see what standardized test score could be obtained from random responses. He exhaled loudly, rolled his eyes, and talked at length about how important it was for our school's students to do well on the test and how Mr. Suedo's scores would lower our school's average. I left his office a bit chagrined after Sam's unsubmitted answer sheet was torn into pieces and put in the waste can.

This fixation on test scores was driven home even further when I became a principal. In fact, during my final interview for the position, a one-to-one session with the superintendent, she told me that my priority would be to increase my school's test scores, period—that was the only educational issue we discussed. There was no mention of creativity, responsibility, or empathy. As principal, I attended the district's twice-monthly Board of Education meetings and regularly heard community members rail about our district's low test scores during the public forum at the beginning of the agenda. In fact, occasionally there were so many parents and community members wanting to complain or express concerns that the 10-minute open-microphone period was extended to an hour or longer. That made for a long night.

Many of the educators with whom I have talked and worked were bothered by this test-score orientation but were given neither the voice nor the opportunity to view students more broadly. The test-score mantra of legislators, school board members, the local press (schools' test scores were often front-page news), and some parents has made it very difficult to go beyond percentiles and address the needs of the whole child. That's because in most cases test scores have been viewed as the barometer of a school's quality. Educators share some of the responsibility for this because we typically haven't promoted any other formal, official data on student progress. If we only give parents one tool for measuring, why should we be surprised when that is the tool they use?

The lemming-like pursuit of high standardized scores received a significant boost from the 1983 report commissioned by President Ronald Reagan's education secretary, Terrel H. Bell, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (National Commission on Excellence in Education). It ominously noted, "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." Nearly 20 years later, in 2002, the federal government's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation put even more emphasis on standardized tests. Educators' jobs were tied to students' test scores, as was the very continued existence of schools. (More than once I heard No Child Left Behind referred to as "No Teacher Left Standing.") In 2009, the Race to the Top program broadened the issues on which the government would focus but retained a strong emphasis on test scores.

In The Tyranny of Metrics (2018), Jerry Z. Muller says it well: "But what can be measured is not always worth measuring; what gets measured may have no relationship to what we really want to know" (p. 3). He goes on:

The unintended consequences of NCLB's testing-and-accountability regime are more tangible, and exemplify many of the characteristic pitfalls of metric fixation. Under NCLB, scores on standardized tests are the numerical metric by which success and failure are judged. And the stakes are high for teachers and principals, whose raises in salary and whose very jobs sometimes depend on this performance indicator. It is no wonder, then, that teachers (encouraged by their principals) divert class time toward the subjects tested—mathematics and English—and away from other subjects, such as history, social studies, art, music, and physical education. Instruction in math and English is narrowly focused on the sorts of skills required by the test, rather than broader cognitive processes: that is, students too often learn test-taking strategies rather than substantive knowledge. (p. 92)

Our battle for high test scores has caused us to lose the larger educational war. Children do need to learn to read, write, and calculate, but there is much more to consider in their education. We must also be focused on developing the kinds of people that these children will become. Will they be caring and productive, respectful and honest? Will they be good neighbors and understanding friends? Will they work to improve their communities? We need to prepare students to succeed in life, not just to do well in school, and for that we need to address their social-emotional learning (SEL).

Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (n.d.) describes SEL as "a framework that focuses on the core social and emotional skills necessary for students of all ages to be healthy and successful." Evidence is clear that an educational SEL focus helps students in many ways. According to the foundation (2018), "There is strong scientific evidence that social and emotional learning (SEL) programs improve children's well-being, behavior, and academic outcomes. Evidence-based SEL programs at all levels from preschool to high school have been shown to promote the development of social, emotional, and academic competencies." The foundation also notes that a "cost-benefit analysis of six SEL programs found that for every dollar spent on SEL programming, society reaps an average benefit of $11 (2018)."

In their 2018 Educational Leadership article "SEL: What the Research Says," Joseph L. Mahoney and Roger P. Weissberg point to a meta-analysis of SEL programs that showed student participants had improved in SEL skills, attitudes toward self and others, positive social behavior, conduct problems, emotional distress, and academic performance. Further, they note that "SEL programs enhance academic achievement" (p. 34).

In another 2018 article for Kappan Newsletter titled "An Update on Social and Emotional Learning Outcome Research," Mahoney, Durlak, and Weissberg conclude from a meta-analysis of more than 300 research studies that "SEL programs appear to have as great a long-term impact on academic growth as has been found for programs designed specifically to support academic learning." They continue: "SEL programs are both feasible and effective in a variety of educational contexts around the world. SEL is neither a fad nor a flash in the pan but represents a useful way to improve students' social and emotional skills, which are associated with several positive behavioral and academic outcomes."

Momentum for using SEL to see the whole child is gaining. An article by John Fensterwald in EdSource (2019) notes:

A national survey this year of 15,000 teachers and 3,500 principals by the RAND Corporation found that 72 percent of principals said that promoting social and emotional skills was their top or one of their top priorities, with more principals in high-poverty schools rating it as their top priority. More than 80 percent of teachers said that social and emotional learning programs can improve school climate and student behavior; 64 percent said school achievement can be improved as well.

In this book, I expand the definition of SEL to also include adults. Although SEL efforts are directed at students, the adults in schools—teachers, administrators, support staff—will also need to be engaged in furthering their SEL. Kimberly A. Schonert-Reichl makes this point in her 2017 article for The Future of Children titled "Social and Emotional Learning and Teachers":

Teachers are the engine that drives social and emotional learning (SEL) programs and practices in schools and classrooms, and their own social-emotional competence and wellbeing strongly influence their students. Classrooms with warm teacher-child relationships support deep learning and positive social and emotional development among students. … But when teachers poorly manage the social and emotional demands of teaching, students' academic achievement and behavior both suffer. If we don't accurately understand teachers' own social-emotional wellbeing and how teachers influence students' SEL … we can never fully know how to promote SEL in the classroom" (p. 137).

Simply put, we—the adults in schools, regardless of the professional roles we play or titles we hold—must also work on developing our SEL if we are to succeed in teaching these skills to our students. When we do this, everyone gains. (This topic is addressed more fully in Chapter 9, "Leadership Musings.")

What's in a Name?

One challenge administrators have faced in garnering support for SEL has been a lack of consensus on the terminology. Noncognitive skills is an oft-used term, but it isn't productive to define something by what it is not. (Further, I would argue that SEL has a strong cognitive component.) I've seen SEL skills referred to as 21st century skills; the second curriculum has been used, too. Sometimes I see soft skills, which makes me cringe. At one point, the most common way to describe SEL skills was emotional intelligence (popularized by Daniel Goleman's 1995 book of the same name). Sometimes the teaching of SEL skills is referred to as character education or social-emotional and character development, but I do not see the need to refer to character as a component separate from SEL. Fortunately, consensus has emerged that social-emotional learning—coined by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) in 1994 (Gresham, 2018)—is the best term to describe this key area of human growth. And often using or saying the letters SEL suffices.

Figure 1.1 shows how CASEL's components of SEL align to the Formative Five success skills of empathy, self-control, integrity, embracing diversity, and grit. (See Figure 1.2 for a list of similar SEL components from a variety of organizations.) It's clear that each of the Formative Five skills has a unique identity, yet it's also clear, particularly as we think about implementation, that they often overlap. For example, there is a strong relationship between empathy and embracing diversity, which feed off one another: As our empathy increases, it becomes easier for us to embrace others who are different from us, and as we embrace those others, our empathy becomes stronger. Similarly, our self-control and grit build upon one another, with gains in one area resulting in an improvement in the other. And our integrity is very much relevant to both empathy and embracing diversity because there will invariably come times when we need to take a public stand that runs counter to the majority view.

Figure 1.1. CASEL's Components of SEL and Related Formative Five Skills

Figure 1.2. Other Approaches to Social-Emotional Growth

Moral vs. Performance Character and the Heart/Will/Intellect Model

One helpful way to view SEL skills is through a moral versus performance character perspective: Do the skills refer to an individual's moral character or performance character? Lickona and Davidson (2005) specify that moral character "consists of those qualities—such as integrity, justice, caring, and respect—needed for successful interpersonal relationships and ethical behavior," whereas performance character "consists of those qualities—such as effort, diligence, perseverance, a strong work ethic, a positive attitude, ingenuity, and self-discipline—needed to realize one's potential for excellence in academics, co-curricular activities, the workplace, or any other area of endeavor" (p. 18). Among the Formative Five skills, empathy, integrity, and embracing diversity address moral character, and self-control and grit address performance character.

In his 2017 article for Education Week, "The Dirt-Encrusted Roots of Social-Emotional Learning," Chester E. Finn Jr. writes: "Though its partisans will contest the point, social-emotional learning does not seem intended to build character in any traditional sense, nor is it aimed at citizenship. It's awash in the self, steeped in the ability to understand one's own emotions, thoughts, values, strengths, and limitations" (p. 22). To Finn's point, to the degree that schools have addressed character in the past, they have largely addressed performance character. Report cards and student assessments frequently focus on work habits and effort, and sometimes students are recognized for their industry and hard work. Unfortunately, developing children's moral character has been primarily delegated to home and religious institutions because pursuing value judgments can be more controversial. It's easy to agree that hard work and tenacity are positives, but it can be more difficult for empathy to be universally accepted because the "others" for whom empathy is being expressed may not be seen by some to be worthy of consideration. It is important to point out that the moral and performance orientations are not in conflict: In virtually every situation, we will draw from skills from both categories.

In "The Five Success Skills Every Student Should Master" I note, "When we think about the future and what skills and understandings our students will need to be successful, we must begin with the end in mind: We want to develop good people. By asking what kind of people we want on our team and in our neighborhood, we will appreciate the need to teach human literacy" (2018b).

In an article for Educational Leadership, Angela Duckworth divides SEL into three categories: "interpersonal character strengths of the heart (gratitude, empathy, honesty, social and emotional intelligence); intrapersonal character strengths of will (academic self-control, grit, growth mindset); and intellectual character strengths (curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, imagination, and creativity)" (McKibben, 2018, p. 47). In her opinion, the interpersonal character strengths are the most important.

Why the Resistance to SEL?

Three factors come together to make it difficult for educators to give sufficient attention to SEL. Our school systems were designed to develop workers and good citizens, so there has always been a natural focus on the three Rs. Indeed, until relatively recently, problems with solutions that required skill in reading, writing, or mathematics could only be done by people, so those skills were essential to success.

Second, endorsing many of the success skills is, by definition, a value judgment. It is hard to imagine a parent not wanting an offspring to express empathy, but what that means and to whom it is shown will vary considerably. Self-control and integrity seem like wonderful qualities (to me, anyway), and I cannot imagine a parent objecting to them being taught once the parents are comfortable with how they are presented. However, diversity is a topic that elicits less consensus, which is why I precede it with "embracing" in The Formative Five. Historically, noncognitive skills, or social-emotional learning, have been considered off-limits for public school educators. (This is far less the case in independent schools and, indeed, many of these promote their role in developing character and social skills as a strategy to attract families. That is much easier for them to do because families would not choose to enroll their child in a school unless they supported the values it was promoting.)

Third, even if there is widespread agreement on the merit of a category, (e.g., grit is desirable), some people feel that this is a skill or an attitude that should be taught at home or, possibly, through a religious institution, and not addressed in school.

Our reluctance to focus on nonscholastic areas is due, in large part, to the fact that they are more subjective than traditional subjects. But that should not deter us.

My Journey to SEL Advocacy

Though I am now a fierce proponent of SEL, my undergraduate education program focused solely on preparing me to teach traditional subject matter—basically, the three Rs. When I graduated, I was well prepared to teach these areas, but that was it. I don't recall any time being devoted to teaching children how to live and work with others. Of course, simply from working in classrooms, educators were aware of vast differences among children in terms of who would work well with others, who was caring, who could persevere, and so on, but we viewed these differences in the same way that we viewed height or weight: We assumed they were due to genetics and how kids were raised at home. We were trained to teach academics to students, and we didn't see ourselves as having much involvement with these other areas. Based on many conversations and e-mail exchanges I've had since, I suspect that quite a few readers have traveled a similar path.

That narrow focus on academics continued when I began teaching. I met with my first principal in August, a couple of weeks prior to the beginning of school, and he gave me the teachers' guides to all the textbooks I would be using in my 5th grade classroom. We did not discuss any other aspect of children's growth.

I knew that the school to which I was assigned was in a dangerous area—on the first day of class, I even had my car stolen. (On the plus side, I told myself, things could only get better from there.) Unsurprisingly, it was an underachieving school, and today it is clear to me that quite a few of my students would have had high Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) scores, indicating that they had experienced stressful or traumatic events that could lead to social and health problems (see Anda, n.d.). Students with higher ACE scores also often have difficulties in school. Of course, the ACE construct was not known at the time I started teaching. (You can learn more about ACE scores here: www.preventchildabuse.org/images/docs/anda_wht_ppr.pdf.)

Establishing and maintaining discipline was a major issue at the school because students' inattention and misbehaviors routinely interfered with their learning. Almost all our principal's and teachers' efforts went to establishing clear and strict consequences for misbehavior, with little or no attention given to teaching and developing nonacademic qualities in our students. When my principal talked about achievement and growth, it was always in terms of students' standardized test results—period. (Remember the fate of poor Sam Suedo?)

I saw many students at the school who struggled academically but who also displayed qualities that would make them ideal employees and neighbors. Many of the same 5th graders who found writing an essay or solving a complex math problem to be a challenge were also extraordinarily hard-working, caring, responsible, and honest. No doubt you have had students like this, too. I knew that their writing and math skills needed to improve, but I also knew that their strengths in these other areas should be developed and applauded, even if the district's report card gave me little opportunity to do that.

My experiences teaching at this school for a few years, teaching at another school in the suburbs, and leading two very different schools only confirmed for me the necessity of addressing these nonacademic skills. Every year, I was struck by the difference between the categories on students' report cards—what, by definition, we said was important in school and what I knew was important in life.

The need to focus on what is truly important has been reflected in many of the "Principal Connection" columns I've written for Educational Leadership. For example, my 2008/2009 column "Data That Count" begins with a comment that a parent said to me: "If you can't measure it, then it doesn't matter." He was arguing for the importance of standardized tests and expressing concern because his daughter had only done very well and not exceptionally well, as he had expected. In responding to him, I noted, "What standardized tests cannot do—indeed, what almost no test can do—is capture a child's essence. Tests don't speak to the internal factors that play a major role in life success: curiosity, effort, resilience, and compassion." (You can see the column here: www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec08/vol66/num04/Data-That-Count.aspx.) I specifically address additional aspects of SEL and the Formative Five success skills in the following other "Principal Connection" columns:

• "Got Grit?" (2012)—"As educators, part of our job is to ensure that every child finds success, and an important part of finding success is knowing how to respond to failure." (www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar12/vol69/num06/Got-Grit%C2%A2.aspx)
• "Why You Need a Diversity Champion" (2016)—"If you assume that everyone at your school realizes diversity is important, so it doesn't need a formal champion—you're wrong. It's precisely because affirming all the aspects of each child's identity is so important to growth and development that diversity needs a point person." (www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/apr16/vol73/num07/Why-You-Need-a-Diversity-Champion.aspx)
• "Building Empathy in Schools" (2018a)—"Too many people are quick to judge and even to call names. Our schools aren't immune to trends in society, and chances are that these rancorous attitudes have seeped into your school. It's probably obvious in both the student cafeteria and at faculty meetings." (www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/apr18/vol75/num07/Building-Empathy-in-Schools.aspx)

Social-Emotional Coaches

Perhaps the best evidence that SEL is becoming recognized as an essential aspect of education is that schools and school districts are beginning to employ SEL coaches. I first heard about these positions at a recent ASCD conference, tweeted a request for more information, and received many responses. It was encouraging to hear that so many schools and districts are creating positions designed to support students' SEL. The kinds of schools and where these positions are lodged in the districts' hierarchies vary, but in every situation, the SEL coach is designed to be a support for teachers. Dana Januszka, who worked with school districts in her role as an SEL coach for the University of Delaware, puts it simply: The role of the SEL coach, she says, is to "teach people how to build relationships and talk to kids." Lisa Maher, SEL support specialist at Parker Elementary School in Billerica, Massachusetts, notes: "My goal was for the teachers to see me as a partner, someone who could support them and help them to be more effective in reaching their students' SEL needs."

Building a trusting relationship with staff is an essential part of being an SEL coach. Although the interactions of SEL coaches with classroom teachers are similar to those of literacy and mathematics coaches, the nature of SEL requires an even deeper and more trusting relationship. "These relationships are far more personal," says Krista Leh of Resonance Educational Consulting. "In order to most effectively foster SEL growth in students, educators need to be able to look inward to assess their own SEL development and competencies." Emmie Pawlak, director of teaching and learning for the Keeneyville (Illinois) Schools, where a SEL Curriculum Committee meets every four or five weeks, agrees: "SEL is a curriculum, and the coaches' relationships with teachers requires vulnerability by everyone. Our coaches don't evaluate, but work with teachers as colleagues."

SEL coaches collaborate with classroom teachers to plan lessons, brainstorm strategies for students (and their parents), provide feedback, and review classroom and schoolwide procedures. It's important to consider, for example, "Do our disciplinary structures support SEL?" asks Rachelle Finck, the Coordinator of SEL for the Round Rock ISD in Texas. Reviewing both formal and informal curriculum is vital for the implementation of any successful SEL program.

At the Michael R. Hollis Innovation Academy in Atlanta, Georgia, teachers celebrate SEL skills by addressing them through memorable schoolwide events. The SEL coach position at the academy, a K−7 school of 700 students, is held by Dennis Toliver. In addition to working with new-to-the-school teachers before the start of school and all teachers throughout the year, he is responsible for Hollis's monthly schoolwide community meetings. "These are positively-oriented sessions designed to talk about the habits we want students to develop," he says. Each month, a student from every grade is celebrated as a "Hollis Hero" for embodying one of the school's SEL habits: self-discipline, collaboration, creativity, communication, empathy, and perseverance. Rubrics have been created for each grade to help students understand what each habit entails. Toliver says that he works with the teachers to try to ensure that as many different students as possible can be recognized. Occasionally, students from Spelman and Morehouse Colleges join the meeting to speak and perform a step-show.

Erin Schulte, the coordinator of curriculum, counseling, and character education for the Parkway (Missouri) School District, emphasizes the following SEL skills in schools: noble purpose/love, humility, courage, gratitude, forgiveness, empowerment, foresight, and stewardship (Berkowitz, Bier, & McCauley, 2016). Her district has a Character Education Action Team that focuses on promoting values. Michael Barolak, director of social emotional support services for the district, supervises four social-emotional behavior specialists (SEBs) and defines their mission as changing mindsets by examining problems through an SEL lens. Effectively working with teachers is integral to the position, so his advice to the SEBs is to "find the allies in your building."

Devin Quinlan, the behavior and wellness coach at Missisquoi Valley High School in Swanton, Vermont, says that most of his work with teachers and students takes place outside classrooms. The school has a monthly meeting focused on SEL in which faculty members are divided into groups of 10, each with 2 facilitators. Quinlan provides leadership by suggesting and summarizing articles on SEL best practices and leading an effort to create case studies based on actual students so that faculty members can create sound SEL guidelines. Because it is a new role, Quinlan is working to develop a culture in which teachers are open to going to him for ideas and support. He shares that he often plays the role of mediator, following up with students on their efforts to improve their SEL. Occasionally he also plays the role of disciplinarian, but he always ensures that students understand that their consequences stem from a behavior, not from anything inherent—and strives always to do so with dignity.

What's Ahead?

I believe that as important as the Formative Five skills have been in the past, they will be even more essential in the future. "What seems increasingly evident is that the primary condition of the network era is not just rapid change, but constant change," write Ito and Howe in Whiplash (2016). How much time do you spend on e-mail each day? How often do you check Google, for example? (I suspect a quick and valid response to both questions is "too much.") Through the internet and especially social media, we are routinely connected with hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of people we have never met in person.

Already, this has created shifts in how relationships are formed and maintained. In his book The Complacent Class (2017), Tyler Cowen notes that more than a third of couples married between 2005 and 2012 met online—and this was the case for almost 70 percent of same-sex couples. According to Common Sense Media, teenagers average nine hours a day online (2015). As people become increasingly adept at interacting with others in virtual reality, we must ensure that the skills required to build relationships with people in the same room don't fall by the wayside. In his article "What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team," Charles Duhigg notes that "effective teams are characterized by equal participation among the group members and a sensitivity to one another's words and actions"—practices for which SEL skills are paramount. He goes on to say that the effective teams he studied "all had high 'average social sensitivity'—a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions, and other nonverbal cues" (2016). (Other studies have noted that this empathic interpersonal sensitivity—the ability to read and understand others—is relevant when collaborating online, too!)

Technology is also leading to a huge shift in the kinds of jobs for which we need to prepare students. For example, Walmart has automated such tasks as scrubbing floors, unloading trucks, and monitoring inventory—all tasks that were once the full-time domain of human beings. Jobs that require training and certification will also change: According to Business Insider, self-driving trucks will be the norm within the next decade, putting at risk an estimated 3 million truck driving jobs (Premack, 2018). What will happen to them as well as to the thousands of people who work in truck stops and roadside motels? Technological advances will affect every sector of life and work. In the 2018 New York Times article "Meet Zora, The Robot Caregiver," authors Satariano, Peltier, and Kostyukov (2018) introduce us to a robot named Zora that is being used in France as a companion for people living in senior facilities. "Many patients developed an emotional attachment, treating it like a baby, holding and cooing, giving it kisses on the head," they write (p. B1). "Giving robots more responsibility to care for people in the twilight of their life may seem like a dystopian prospect, but many see it as an inevitability" (p. B4).

"[T]he highest-paying jobs in the future will be stempathy jobs," writes Thomas Friedman in Thank You for Being Late (2016)—"jobs that combine strong science and technological skills with the ability to empathize with another human being" (p. 450). The process is already underway in the medical industry: Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (2019) have found that "virtual video visits … can successfully replace office visits for many patients without compromising the quality of care and communication." I wonder how long it will be until we describe a doctor's SEL by referring to his or her screenside manner!

Perhaps the simplest way to phrase the importance of SEL to the future of our students comes from Ingeborg Van Teeseling in her 2019 article "How Are We Going to Teach Our Kids to Be Balanced People If We Aren't?" She writes, "Jobs then will not just be focused on technology, but on a blend of technology and AI, robotics and a whole lot of other things that we can only dream of now. The key to this brave new world is communication, and people who can make connections to other people will be the masters of the universe."

About This Book

This book shows how educators can leverage school culture to implement social-emotional learning, develop student character, and cultivate the Formative Five success skills in the classroom. Chapter 2 describes the Formative Five success skills in action. Chapter 3 discusses what culture is, followed by chapters on the five essential components of school culture: Vision, Mission, Values (Chapter 4), Practices (Chapter 5), People (Chapter 6), Narrative (Chapter 7), and Place (Chapter 8). Leadership—by people in all roles—is discussed in Chapter 9, and Chapter 10 offers my conclusions and suggestions.

In the pages that follow you'll find many examples from educators and schools as well as suggestions of my own drawn from personal experiences. I am confident that this book will be a valuable resource to many people. I know that I learned a great deal from writing it.