This article appeared as "Tuning In” in the Summer 2026 issue of Independent School.
Each January, when school leaders convene at the Klingenstein Center for the two-week Heads of School Program, I invite them to go on a listening walk. At the end of their first week, each fellow chooses a part of New York City to explore. They walk to listen, to get curious and reflective. They listen not to analyze but to attune.
At first, the assignment feels simple. Walk. Notice. Listen. But inevitably something shifts. One head notices the hum beneath the city—the subway vibrating below the pavement, overlapping conversations in a diversity of languages. Another becomes aware of how difficult it is to stay present, how quickly the mind rushes to interpret, categorize, solve. Another, a self-described native New Yorker, is startled not by what they notice but by what they realize they have never noticed before.
Walking while listening invites a larger question about leadership. In schools, we often describe leadership through the language of action—driving change, setting direction, moving the needle, getting buy-in, building consensus. These phrases are familiar and efficient. But they reveal how narrowly we tend to imagine leadership: as the exertion of force, producing outcomes, moving others from one place to another. In this model, listening is a precursor to action, a way to gather information before deciding what to do.
Yet the complex, multilayered, persistent, and accelerated challenges schools face today do not yield to force. They call for more dynamic leadership approaches. They invite, and necessitate, new ways of listening.
Prepositional Listening
In my research across literary studies, sound studies, and educational leadership, I have come to understand listening not as a soft skill but as a core and enduring leadership capacity—one that shapes how we make meaning, build trust, and create the conditions for professional and student learning.
Philosopher Gemma Fiumara reminds us that Western traditions have long privileged speaking over listening, positioning knowledge as something declared rather than something emerging. To become what she calls “apprentices of listening” is to recognize that understanding is cultivated through relationship. Listening, in this sense, is not about confirmation but adaptation. It is how leaders stay in relationship with what is emerging in classrooms, in faculty rooms, in hallways, in their institutional context, within the ecosystem of education, in the present moment, and within themselves.
To move from understanding listening as only a personal and interpersonal skill to listening as a systems practice central to effective leadership, we need more precise language. Building on my work in Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature, where I focus on the art of listening and why it matters, I developed Prepositional Listening, a method that treats listening as a repertoire of practices. It recognizes the multiplicity of all that school calls us to tune into.
Prepositions are small words, but they carry a strong architecture. In English, they encode relationships. Other languages build relationship differently; for example, with postpositions (Japanese and Hindi), case endings (Latin and Turkish), verb structures (Mandarin and Yoruba), or polysynthetically, by packing relationship into complex words (Inuktitut). But this holds true: Language places us. It arranges proximity and distance, belonging and separation, direction and drift. We do not simply speak ideas; we speak ourselves into relation. And listening, at its deepest, is a practice of noticing how those relationships are being made, the implications of that making, and how they might be remade.
Prepositional Listening insists that listening is never neutral; it always involves a choice about where to give our dynamic attention, to whom to give the dignity of our listening. Leaders listen to experiences, for patterns, with communities, across differences, beneath surface narratives, and after important moments or decisions in the life of a school. Each preposition invites a distinct, responsive way of listening, a small space for practicing myriad ways of listening.
Prepositional Listening can sharpen personal or interpersonal listening skills. Imagine listening for the question in a faculty or staff member’s assertion. Or listening beneath what a student says to attend to the lower frequencies, or understories, of their speech. Yet listening at its fullest is also understood and practiced as an organizational capacity. Given the continuous uncertainty of geopolitical, technological, and social-emotional pressures schools face, a school’s ability to sense what is emerging and respond with agility depends on how effectively listening is designed into its systems, structures, and teaching and leading practices. Listening, then, is not only something leaders do. It is a system of capacities that institutions must grow.
From Individual Skill to Organizational Infrastructure
As Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden argue in Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously, effective organizations build the capacity to sense and respond to lived experience. Transformative schools embody this same listening capacity, cultivating listening not only as an individual or interpersonal practice but also as organizational infrastructure. Such listening shows up in how meetings are designed, how feedback is revisited, how time is shaped and protected for reflection, how leadership is distributed, and how schools attend to both what is said and what remains unsaid. Extending Gothelf and Seiden’s work, Prepositional Listening recognizes that schools tune to their histories and futures alongside giving attention to the present. Every member of the community participates in this system.
Even well-designed systems can fail if the conditions for listening are not present. My experience in working with educators and school leaders on Prepositional Listening confirms time and again that presence, attunement, resonance, and trust—what neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel refers to in his PART framework—are vital conditions that allow people to genuinely and generatively join one another in a culture of listening. While Prepositional Listening names where our listening is positioned and directed, these conditions determine whether that listening takes hold:
Without presence, listening becomes distracted and transactional.
Without attunement, we hear words but miss meaning and power dynamics. We miss who or what fails to catch our attention.
Without resonance, understanding does not travel.
Without trust, we hear cautiously and listen skeptically.
Presence, attunement, resonance, and trust are not outcomes of leadership; they are the conditions that make listening—and therefore transformative leadership—possible.
What Leaders Learn When They Listen
Returning to the listening walk, participants often describe the experience as disorienting. It asks them to listen without responding, to notice without interpreting, and to remain open to what is not yet clear. This is what leadership increasingly requires. Listening is not about slowing down for its own sake. It is about becoming more precise in how we perceive and then respond. It involves sitting with uncertainty and ambiguity. It is how leaders detect weak signals before they become crises, tune in to understand the gaps between policy and lived experience, recognize belonging—or its absence—in real time, and adapt not from assumption but from awareness.
Leadership will always involve discernment, decision-making, action, risk-taking, and, yes, faltering and the need for grace. But what if we understood listening not as what precedes leadership, but as what fundamentally shapes it?
For nearly a decade since I joined as executive director, the Klingenstein Center has named listening as a core leadership competency for educators and leaders at every level in schools. This emphasis reflects the central role of relational and institutional trust in independent schools, where teaching, learning, communing, and leading are fundamentally relational acts. Each day, individuals arrive at school carrying, as Walt Whitman described, multitudes—and those multitudes come into relationship with the multitudes others hold and the multitudes the institution holds—presently, historically, and in future visioning. Consider how many interactions this creates and how much—and different—listening they require. There is no single way to listen. Instead, Prepositional Listening reminds us that encounters unfold in countless ways, requiring the capacity to listen in a myriad of ways.
Prepositional Listening invites us to get close and curious about the complexity we hold, individually and collectively. It is a constellation of practices that cultivates a culture of listening in which effective leadership, reciprocal community, enduring belonging, and grace can flourish.
Prepositional Listening in Action
Prepositional Listening becomes most powerful when it moves from theory to practice. Small shifts in where and how we listen can deepen understanding, surface insight, and strengthen leadership across a school community.
Listening TO the specifics of person and place: To listen to is to honor individual stories and deep, local knowledge.
Listening FOR: Tuning into subtle shifts in faculty morale or recurring questions may signal a gap between our stated values and lived reality.
Listening WITH: This shifts the power dynamic from the leader as “expert” to the leader as “host” of collective sensemaking.
Listening ACROSS multiple stakeholder groups: This aims to build authentic relationships, networks of trust, and mission-aligned resonances.
Listening BENEATH the surface: Every school has an understory—traditions, legacies, or unaddressed opportunities. To listen beneath is to allow more nuanced stories and understandings to emerge.
Listening AFTER: Listening after invites reflection on action to understand the impact of a decision, transforming friction or even consensus into institutional wisdom.