I recently had the opportunity to speak to more than 100 administrative interns and their school or district mentors. To prepare, I had spent some time reflecting on my own experiences moving up the career ladder to school superintendent. That led me to share these four central ideas with the up-and-coming educational leaders: nurture relationships and support one another; identify your passion and use it to create your vision; invite others to share and grow that vision; and when confronted by professional opportunities and dilemmas, choose what matters.
- Nurture relationships and support one another. Each of us can attest that the connections we have made with our professional colleagues in education continue to surround us and grow stronger with time. We discover again and again just how small our education network is and how crucial it is for us to work collaboratively. Furthermore, school administrative positions are often thought to be among the loneliest of jobs, so it benefits each of us to reach out to colleagues within our districts and through our professional associations. By sharing ideas, concerns, and even personal issues with one another, we develop connections that not only sustain us but also enable us to grow and flourish in our roles. The late Fred Rogers, known to the world as television's Mister Rogers, said it best with his plainspoken wisdom: "As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has—or ever will—something inside that is unique to all time. It's our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression."
- Identify your passion and use it to create your vision. One of the most powerful experiences I had as a school administrator was attending a superintendents' summer institute at Harvard University. The institute challenged us repeatedly to determine what we stood for and then ask ourselves: Do others know what I believe in? We were encouraged to bring something we cared about into existence and then create a shared vision enabling others to personally connect with that vision. Most important, we were reminded that we had to live out our passion and vision—say it, do it, be it. After a week of extraordinary dialogue with some of the top gurus in education, I left with one powerful message: bring your own passion to education. Sometimes that means taking risks—sticking your neck out and articulating the unpopular but right position. It also means being passionate about what you believe in and always speaking out for kids.
- Invite others to share and grow the vision. I told the administrative interns that Dennis Littky summed up this idea well in his book The Big Picture: Education Is Everyone's Business. He stated that "a shared philosophy is the most important groundwork. Unless every person believes in the philosophy, we end up being inconsistent and working against each other. This doesn't mean that we are all the same—in fact, the more diverse we are, the better we'll be at meeting different kids' needs. But it does mean that we all need to be on the same page about why we are here." I suggested to the interns that they take some time out to reflect on Littky's probing questions: What is your vision of the perfect school? Of an effective teacher? An educated person? A lifelong learner? Who around you shares this vision? And what would it take to get you involved in making your vision a reality? In an April 2004 Educational Leadership article, Andy Hargreaves and Dean Fink point out that if leaders share a vision and distribute leadership, they "leave a lasting legacy."
- Choose what matters. All of this of course leads us to the ultimate question—what is it that we are willing to go to the mat for? Sue Monk Kidd's recent best-seller The Secret Life of Bees captures the difficulty of this challenge in an exchange between the teen protagonist Lily and her mother figure, August: "You know some things don't matter much, Lily. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart—now that matters. The whole problem with people is—" "They don't know what matters and what doesn't...." [Lily blurts this out with an air of self-satisfaction.] "I was gonna say, The problem is they know what matters but they don't choose it. You know how hard that is Lily? ... The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters." I reminded the interns that the only way to know if we have chosen what matters is to ask ourselves, "Is it good for our students?"
Once we have chosen what matters, we as ASCD members have a tremendous support system to enable us to move forward with our choices. Among all of the extraordinary ASCD resources, the adopted positions can serve us well as we speak on behalf of all our students. For example, this year's position on the whole child states that we believe in a comprehensive approach to learning that moves beyond the narrow emphasis on academic achievement and assessment. It represents a vision that I also hold dear and can ask others to share.
But sharing in a vision becomes much more compelling for others when, in the words of Mahatma Gandhi, we become "the change [we] wish to see in the world." That indeed is our challenge.
