NAIS - Member Voices: A Q&A with Rob Phillips

Rob Phillips
Head of School
Seattle Academy
Seattle, Washington
Photo by Alex Mulyarchuk

This is an excerpt from the NAIS Member Voices podcast.

Your school made the shift to online learning a couple weeks before many other schools. How did you decide that a 50/50 asynchronous and synchronous learning split was the best approach for your school?

There’s a lot of research that says relative to teaching and learning that asynchronous is the way to go. And that’s perfectly reasonable, just like it was perfectly reasonable for people to say that we should wait as long as possible before making the decision to physically close the campus and go online.

But I think it’s missing the component of community and connection. We know learning is mostly about relationship and connection for most kids most of the time, or that’s where it starts. And when that chain is broken, then there’s a whole lot of downstream problems. And if you’re 13 years old, you want to see your friends.

Our initial approach was to go entirely synchronous—we had the online platform to do it—and we felt that for most teachers transitioning to teaching online it was more similar to what they had been doing, so they could start from a position of strength instead of total uncertainty. And then we migrated from about 100% synchronous to 50/50 asynchronous and synchronous learning.

We got some pushback from faculty who said we should go to all asynchronous because they were trying to navigate their own kids’ school or had parents or grandparents they were caring for. That is why we went from heavily synchronous to a balance of the two.

What has been especially helpful in fostering community?

We built “We Wednesdays” into our schedule. In the spring, we had class on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; Wednesday was a community connection day. We did online talent shows. We brought in community guest speakers. Kids had extended advisories to talk about how they were doing at home. All the clubs and affinity groups moved online. We really put the priority on connection.

Have there been any sources or materials that have been especially helpful?

Our leadership team hosted national Zoom calls since we were probably a couple weeks ahead of most of schools and had a lot to share as we were figuring things out and adjusting. We typically did a couple calls a week, and we found that those conversations were more helpful than anything that we could have read. We were all being bombarded with emails and texts, and for us, those conversations were more meaningful than the research.

What did you learn from those conversations?

I think we all relearned what we already knew: Kids are far more adaptable than we give them credit for. The same for faculty, and I heard that across the board. We have to remember that teachers became first-year teachers again. For those of us who’ve been in that job, we remember how intense and exhausting it is to be a first-year teacher. So we saw that and tried to think about sustainability and longevity for faculty.

What changes did you make before the pandemic that you think are especially relevant now?

About three years ago, we made graduation requirements and academic departments for financial literacy, entrepreneurship and design, and computational thinking with an emphasis on artificial intelligence and the implications of machine learning. Those decisions are reinforced every day in terms of the skills and perspectives our students will need to have—not as cool electives but as foundational skills. We are going to face massive economic headwinds, I believe, for the next two to three years—best-case scenario—and producing a generation of students who are financially literate is going to be crucial. We’re going to need a generation of creative, collaborative problem-solvers.

Did you learn any other lessons that were especially powerful or enlightening?

We had a whole lot of assumptions about how to run a school, about how to deliver curriculum, and about what kids and teachers can or can’t do. And we had to be willing to reexamine some of our fundamental assumptions.

Also, there are some phenomenal thinkers outside of education who are much more familiar with dealing with crisis and thinking two to three steps ahead. Some of them are on our board and some aren’t. I think we need to actively seek out voices outside of academia to help us work our way through this.

At Seattle Academy, we hire people for their experiences outside of education more than for their credentials inside of education. We know that those life experiences are going to come into play, and we’re definitely seeing that now. If you only hire the people who like school so much that they stayed there, I think you’re going to struggle as an institution to connect with kids who at some point have days or weeks when they don’t love school. You need people in the building who get that and know how to connect with and leverage that.

How do you think you’ve approached all the changes differently than others?

I tend to communicate through stories and then talk about what we need to do. I think that’s been pretty effective. We had so much information that was just flying at us, so I think stories that reinforced our values and framed the tough decisions were helpful.

I’m incredibly fortunate to have a phenomenal leadership team. Part of it is hiring phenomenal, talented people who push you a lot. They argue a lot. But they have broad life experience to draw from, and I give them as much autonomy as possible. That said, I’m comfortable making decisions when there’s no consensus. And I think this was a moment that called for that. You can’t be risk-averse. My own personality and style are much more entrepreneurial than institutional. That’s also the culture of Seattle Academy, and I didn’t create that.

What’s your proudest moment from last spring?

A significant percentage of our families receive financial aid. And like a lot of schools, we provide subsidized lunch for kids. So one of the first things members from leadership and the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) group did was figure out what the impact was going to be on these kids when we shut down.

Early in the crisis, our chief operating officer and our DEI director drove to Safeway and put about $15,000 on their own personal credit cards to buy gift cards, which we then had to figure out how to get to all of those kids and families. It was all happening so fast that they just had to put it on their personal credit cards. Of course, we reimbursed them after we figured it all out, but they made it happen. I thought that was phenomenal foresight and dedication.

Have you been able to find time for yourself?

Not really. A bunch of us have found it helpful to check in by phone. Going for a walk and having a phone conversation is such a nice break from the Zoom call and the screen-based contact.

I’ve got two younger kids, and we play board games. My 10-year-old is much better at catching and throwing a football than he was before. Deepening connection within families is probably the most important thing for a lot of us right now.

Listen to the full interview with Rob Phillips on the NAIS Member Voices podcast. Download it now at iTunes, SoundCloud, TuneIn, Stitcher, or Google Play. Rate, review, and subscribe to hear a new episode each month.

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