Flaring the Flame

I am 20 years old. I am sitting in a grove of trees staring at a clump of trash. It is wet, ugly, covered with a film of mildew and dirt. I am at the Headlands Institute outside of San Francisco with a group of 50 other educators, attending a workshop on environmental stewardship by Joseph Cornell, a leader in the field. In the opening exercise, he speaks of the beauty of nature and the lessons it can inspire in love and responsibility. To piece experience to theory, he gives us each a folded note card with instructions to find a solitary place before opening and reading. Mine reads: Find something to stare at whose beauty inspires you. My eyes find the trash and cannot leave.

On the ride home, an older colleague asks about my experience. I tell him about the trash, my frustration and disgust. He smiles and replies, "Fantastic. Perhaps you will feel so disturbed that this experience becomes the moment you decide to pick up trash every time you see it spoiling nature."

I am eight years old, and ten, and fourteen. Every year, Mr. Finney, the headmaster of Gilman School (Maryland), gives a talk about citizenship. "There are three types of citizens," he tells us in the chapel. "First class, second class, and third class. The third-class citizen throws his garbage on the ground. The second-class citizen sees the other man's garbage and walks by but does not litter on his own. And the first-class citizen stops and cleans up the mess. Which kind of citizen are you?"

Later in the day, I see the tall, muscled form of Mr. Finney, dressed in his customary grey suit, bent over at the waist, retrieving litter from the walkways and lawns. I am not sure about the rest of the job description, but a headmaster for me is a man in love with his campus and his school, with grey suit pockets bulging in trash.

I am 37 years old. My wife and I have come to our rest point on the trail. To our left stretch the treetops on the Sangre de Christo Mountains; to the right the trail descends in the burnt red and green colors that distinguish the beauty of Santa Fe. As she talks, my eyes fall upon a cigarette protruding from the earth. Quickly, my fingers dart forward, placing it in my pocket.

It is perhaps the 5,000th piece of someone else's trash that I have retrieved since that moment at the Headlands. And it seems an ideal place to begin a discussion about the pedagogy of leadership.

By "pedagogy," of course, I mean the process of guiding another so that he or she may come to know. And by "leadership" I mean the capacity to take a step where others have stalled, to notice where others have missed, and to create a vanguard of possibility so others can join.

I am talking about ethical leadership, moral leadership, social leadership, and artistic leadership. I am talking about athletic leadership, economic leadership, ecological leadership, and scientific leadership. For leadership exists in every stream of human endeavor. Leadership is that which sustains, guides, and innovates so there can be new possibilities in life.

Certainly, we are living in a time when we need those possibilities.

Is leadership something that can be taught, developed, or, at the very least, nurtured? Or are people leaders or not leaders by virtue of their internal composition, their genetics, in the same way that we are tall or short, blue-eyed or brown?

The recent war in the Middle East, the melting of the polar icecaps, the mismanagement of global resources that produce famine, war, and disease — problems of a seriousness and scale that rival any our species has known — bear witness to an unsurpassed need for human courage and vision.

So it seems rational to query if schools — and, foremost among them, independent schools, which have the resources to innovate where others merely hope — need to increase their reflection about the processes by which young people can learn to lead. It seems rational to wonder if perhaps we are living in an era in which the fundamental priorities of schooling should be rearranged — with capacity for leadership at the top of the heap.

All of this presupposes a critical question: Is leadership something that can be taught, developed, or, at the very least, nurtured? Or are people leaders or not leaders by virtue of their internal composition, their genetics, in the same way that we are tall or short, blue-eyed or brown?

These are questions I have asked since I first joined the teaching profession, for they drive to the heart of what it means to teach and to learn. In the past year and a half, however, the asking has reached a fever pitch. Perhaps it is because I am 37, and the milestone of 40, along with its reckoning, looms near. But the fever draws as well from the impact of two experiences I have had in the past year that have shaken and reconstituted the foundations of what I believe. The one happened half the distance around the globe, at a conference promoted by an organization of Christian Brothers in Calcutta, Mother Theresa's city of anguish and joy. And the other unfolded much closer to home, on the campus of the Fountain Valley School of Colorado, where I was invited to observe and assess the first annual Leadership Lab of the Gardner Carney Leadership Institute.

If you have never been to Calcutta, it will be hard to imagine how a city can simultaneously exemplify, so viscerally that you feel the experience in your bones, two extremes of human emotion. But it is so. In the eyes of the street people — who make up half of the city's 13 million inhabitants — you will see spontaneous expressions of glee and joy that find their equal only in the eyes of the youngest children in America at play. And in the next moment, a hand is outstretched for money or food.

There is something about the spirit of the people that has enabled them to endure cruel shifts of fate and continue, not unlike the wrestler who manages to rise beyond the threshold of what he and all his teammates could rightfully expect, to win a match after injury, or the student who overcomes a history of failures to score an A on an exam — only in the case of the Calcutta poor, this is the test that goes on every day. And the prize is neither the exultation of the team or the congratulations of a teacher, but simply the right to continue. The prize is the suffering of life.

I paint the picture in such detail, because it is the city as much as the conference that sets something moving within me. This is precisely the intent of the organizers, for the theme of the gathering was "social justice and education," an idea brought all too vividly into form in this city.

When you see something so wrong it hurts, what will you do? Will you turn your head and walk away? Will you wait for someone else to come along, or will you, like Mr. Finney, bend over at the waist to clean up the mess?

The people I meet at the conference took the path of my headmaster. There is the man, tired of the atrocities committed by roving warlords in Sierra Leone, who headed to the frontlines to bring teenage soldiers back to their families. There is the principal in Delhi, who opened the gates of his school to give swim lessons to the Untouchables, an act that spawned a literacy effort staffed by the teachers. One by one, I hear their stories — flawed, ordinary men and women who received the call to act. Again, those resonant words: what kind of citizen are you?

I am a long way from Calcutta. Instead of the huddled bodies and the haze of petrol fumes, I am surrounded by 1,200 majestic acres tucked at the feet of Pike's Peak in Colorado. It is a setting of serenity and inspiration, an ideal location for an institute that seeks to make groundbreaking practice and research in the context of leadership in K-12 schools.

I have come to the Leadership Lab of the Gardner Carney Leadership Institute (GCLI) at Fountain Valley School, and I am neither participant nor staff. I am an independent researcher charged with determining how well the Lab's learning goals are met. Will these teachers and administrators experience something that can fundamentally change their approach to developing leadership in students? And is it even possible? For what the organizers of the conference are after is something nebulous and encompassing. They are after a pedagogy of leadership — an awareness and know-how that can be applied by any teacher anywhere — a set of principles that instructs the moment when the flame to lead is ignited.

Their instruction centers on something called the teachable moment. At the core of GCLI pedagogy — along with an atmosphere that honors, supports, and inspires — is the idea that, every day, character can be etched, leadership formed, inside of special moments that often go unrecognized within schools.

Leadership is not an easy topic to evoke. It is a foray down an open path with many branches and unknown hopes.

These are the moments when a doorway suddenly opens, when the frame changes from teaching English or physics, or playing soccer or being with friends, and a child can understand something about ethics or kindness, about emotional awareness or inspiring others. These are the moments when a team captain offers a hand-up to a player who has accidentally scored a goal on his own team in soccer, when a teacher suggests a shy child take the lead on a group project, when a club advisor instructs the club president how to delegate responsibility and speak the truth.

These are the moments outside of the curriculum where an adult makes a deep and potent connection with a child and guides him or her outside of himself or herself to become something more. As teachers, parents, and deans, we all know this happens, but the question is: can the dynamics that create and unfold inside that moment be made explicit, so that our pedagogy is sharper and nets a higher yield? And can teachers from a range of backgrounds, school settings, and understanding of human dynamics be effectively instructed in just five days?

Researcher conservatism aside, I find that they can. During the conference, I see faces light up, eyes water, inspiration leap. People plan to return to their campuses and classrooms, teach with a different eye, connect deeply with students, help them craft the skills and the will to lead. And they do.

Four months later, and nine months later, the junctures I have set for survey intakes and interviews, I find that a significant statistical percentage have reshaped and reformulated their pedagogy of leadership. They are looking for the teachable moment, they are plunging in when it arises, and, consequently, their students are doing great things — creating a recreation center for underprivileged teens in their city; feeding poor children whose federal lunch subsidies run out on the weekend; and small moments of kindness that set a tone and model leadership every day within their schools. In the context of the study, it appears that the fire took.

I am sitting at my desk, penning words to page, in search of closing thoughts to an article I have struggled to write. Perhaps that is the point. Leadership is not an easy topic to evoke. It is a foray down an open path with many branches and unknown hopes. It is a pathway into tension, possibility, and disillusionment. It is a journey that will elicit our best and our worst, the limits of our compassion and our morality, for it is only when we come to the ends of our boundaries that the walls can be torn down and built again.

Ted Fish works with teachers, schools, and districts to galvanize achievement in writing, reading, and critical thinking. He is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He welcomes comments at tedfish@philosinstitute.org.