NAIS - Lead From Here: A School Adopts a Transformative Program to Reimagine Leadership

How do you prepare a child for a future few can envision? As independent school educators, we must wrestle with this unsettling question. At Ravenscroft School, a preK-12 school serving 1,100 students in Raleigh, North Carolina, we’ve traded anxiety about the future for inspiration to produce the transformative education model Lead From Here (LFH). (Hear more about this partnership in a podcast blog.)

Our school-wide initiative, which began taking shape five years ago, includes a preK-12 curriculum to cultivate the skills that business, government, nonprofit, and education leaders worldwide have identified as crucial — but that are rare in today’s workforce.* Lead From Here also involves faculty development and administrator training. In this endeavor, we work closely with the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), a leading provider of leadership education, and receive financial support from the E.E. Ford Foundation, which awards grants to independent secondary schools. (See a recent blog post about CCL’s leadership model.)

New Definition of Leadership

At Ravenscroft, we begin by defining what leadership is and is not. It is not an externally identified position description assigned to an individual. Rather, it is both a relational concept and a process that can be taught and learned from a very young age. To that end, we outline three interdependent spheres of leadership in our citizen leader framework. Within each are 15 competencies every student must develop. The three spheres are:

Leading Self by being self-aware, growth-minded, motivated, resilient, and accountable.
Leading With Others by being empathetic, ethical, culturally inclusive, collaborative, and communicative.
Changing Your World by being visionary, strategic, resourceful, reflective, and adaptive.

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Below I highlight four ways we’ve co-created Lead From Here and inspired our community to reimagine education.

Example One: Students

Many school leaders consider student health and well-being to be an integral part of their school’s mission. In the most recent NAIS student health and well-being survey, 85 percent of participants cited the topic as an essential or high priority.**

As a result of LFH, Ravenscroft outlines a more expansive notion of student health to include attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. We know students are more successful in school and daily life when they:

know themselves (are self-aware, lead self);
manage themselves (can self-regulate);
consider and relate to others’ perspectives (can lead with others); and
make sound personal and social choices (change their world).***

LFH promotes and develops these outcomes and competencies in several ways.

A three- to five-year strategic plan incorporates LFH into our preK-12 curriculum. Department chairs play a critical role in co-creating this alignment and facilitating implementation.
We offer a preK-12 LFH curriculum that is developmentally appropriate and is offered at least once in an eight-day academic cycle. This is equal to a minimum of 300 lessons per year taught across all divisions.
All preK-12 teacher comments and report cards include assessments of the 15 competencies.
Upper school department chairs and faculty have developed a tool for students to evaluate classes based on the competencies of the LFH initiative.
Students participate in experiential half-day retreats twice a year on citizenship and leadership concepts at the transition points between school divisions in grades 5 to 6 and grades 8 to 9.
The speech program and capstone project in senior year require demonstrating and assessing the competences in the LFH framework.

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Example Two: Teachers

We have taken several steps to ensure our teachers grow and develop based on our LFH framework.

We required all faculty, staff, and administrators to attend a one-day leadership essentials training by CCL faculty on our campus when we first implemented the program in 2011. This was the first time in the school’s history we shut down all operations for an in-service day.

Within three years of being hired, all faculty and administrators must attend a follow-up two-day training at CCL in Greensboro, North Carolina. Here faculty consider questions, including:

How can we strengthen accountability in our community by offering constructive feedback?
How can we improve our ability to receive such feedback?
What is a learning curve for a teacher?
How can teachers align their professional growth and development goals with the goals of their division?

Faculty can elect to participate in the Certified Lead Trainer (CLT) program on campus led by CCL faculty and then incorporate what they’ve learned in their teaching practices. These skills are observed informally by peers and assessed formally by division heads, assistants, and department chairs.

Ongoing coaching sessions with CCL leaders and our own CLT trainers are available for all faculty.

We enhance our faculty’s cultural competency skills through a twice-yearly, four-session course, “Lead From Here: Conversations and Learning About Difference.” Here faculty learn to facilitate conversations on culture, identity, communication styles, and privilege to build intercultural competence in all areas of school life.

Example Three: Administrators

Administrators have a central role to play in shaping Ravenscroft’s culture of leadership, and are involved in many activities.

More than 50 leaders, including all members of the board of trustees and the executive, senior leadership, and division teams participate in CCL-led trainings, where they learn to facilitate conversations with colleagues about management, coaching, and personnel performance issues.

Each administrator and board member participates in cultural competency trainings and workshops about why partnerships and relationships are critical to organizational success.

We interview candidates for teaching faculty and administrator positions differently now because we believe that successful hiring must include assessing non-cognitive, non-résumé factors to enhance our school culture.

We have developed a rubric and structured interview process that measures whether candidates possess and can demonstrate emotional intelligence with the help of Developmental Associates. We use this rubric rather than rely on a candidate's ability to talk about these skills in one-on-one interviews. For example, we ask candidates to role-play different scenarios, such as how they handle conflict, work on a team, and motivate students.

Finally, we will appoint a senior administrator to a newly endowed position. This person will assume the title of assistant head of school for student affairs effective July 1, 2016, and will coordinate all Lead From Here student services that had been operating independently.

This new administrator will partner with the assistant head of school for academic affairs to guide the head and the heart of Lead From Here. For starters, the two will work together on crafting and executing the vision for leadership. They will coordinate how we teach and learn about self, others, and changing our world; and what content we learn about the competencies in our framework and curriculum across the entire school.

Example Four: Parents

We consider parents partners in our leadership efforts. For instance, parents can take part in our leadership training workshops on leadership fundamentals each semester. Our most recent program last fall invited the more than 55 parents in attendance to consider the following questions:

What are values?
Why do values drift?
How do we ensure our values as a family remain at the forefront of our lives?

In the program, parents learn to:

Develop a growth mindset. With this mindset, they recognize that their children are continually developing intelligence, self-awareness, and social-emotional learning skills.
Practice the parenting model of “SBI” (situation, behavior, and impact). This three-step process helps parents identify their child’s poor behavior and encourage effective behavior.
Acknowledge that growth and development are on a learning curve.
Commit to practicing a cycle of assessment, challenge, and support. This begins by obtaining information from and about their child, moves to adopting new parenting skills or perspectives to help their child grow, and then employs new communication techniques to strengthen their relationship with their child.
Understand how the Center for Creative Leadership’s leadership model of direction, alignment, and commitment fosters relationships across an organization’s typical boundaries.
Recognize how a fixed mindset can limit interpersonal relationships and creativity.
Apply the above six concepts to the educational setting.

Unity of Science and Emotions

Lead From Here exemplifies a union between the science we know and the emotions we feel about teaching and learning. In essence, our academic and institutional excellence and our commitment to the future of our young people emanate from Lead From Here.

Notes

*This is drawn from a survey of 462 leaders worldwide conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership in 2012.

**Student health and well-being is a topic that many school leaders consider an integral part of their school’s mission.

See more at: www.nais.org/articles/pages/member/2015-nais-and-isha-health-and-well-being-in-independent-schools.aspx

*** Durlak, Joseph A., Roger P. Weissberg, Celene E. Domitrovich, and Thomas P. Gulotta. 2015. “Social and Emotional Learning Past Present and Future.” The Handbook of Social and Emotional Learning Research and Practice. New York: Guilford Press.