Journal Synthesis, Fall 2023

Change moves at the speed of trust.

– attributed to Stephen Covey, The Speed of Trust (2006)

I spent the majority of my career working in single-sex institutions—mainly religiously-affiliated private schools that emphasize the status quo. I was frustrated that these schools were not moving fast enough to support our minoritized students—members who identify with the BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA2S+ communities, especially. I would buck convention. For example, as a new member of the faculty, I would speak up in all-staff meetings, though I never learned that the right to speak is earned. As St. Albans teacher Jim Ehrenhaft notes, while a school like St. Albans is “not a rules-based culture, but there are expectations” that students and faculty alike must meet when representing it (qtd. in Money, 2020, p. 18). St. Albans School for Boys; all-girls School of the Holy Child in Rye, New York; and Saint Ignatius High School in Cleveland, Ohio share similar tenets with respect to school culture: “Know your place, and you will know peace. So ends a lesson from the school[s’] hidden curricul[a]” (Gonzalez, 2021, p. 11). To borrow language from an old metaphor, because I felt that my place was at the decision-makers’ table, yet they made no room for me, I decided to bring my own chair.

Now that I have the proverbial seat at Barrie’s table, I sought to change my approach to leadership by listening and learning rather than preaching and pontificating. Drawing upon the wisdom of Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick (2000), I have been focusing on “listening with understanding and empathy,” a habit of mind that allows me to build on my emotional intelligence (p. 23). In particular, I have focused on generative listening: “the art of developing deeper silences in yourself, so you can slow your mind's hearing to your ears’ natural speed and hear beneath the words to their meaning” (p. 24). This effort requires listening to both text and subtext when people speak (Costa and Kallick, 2000). By extension, this idea can apply to understanding the overt and covert curricula present within an institution. Therefore, over the past 16 months, I have learned about the institution through teaching electives, developing and leading an Extended Study Week, and attending as many events as I could at Barrie—academic and athletic, musical and cultural. In the process, I have realized that even progressive schools like Barrie fall prey to the same tendencies as traditional schools do; they are not exempt, much to their dismay, from this reality. According to long-time educational leader Robert Evans (1996), “No institution can readily abandon the deep structures on which its very coherence and significance depends” (p. 50). Put another way, to borrow from Audre Lorde (1984), the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Barrie is an independent school; as such, it perpetuates the inequities of the education system in the United States. For a school like Barrie to thrive, neighboring public schools need to fail. This duality persists in my mind, so much so that I asked the question of striking balance in my first journal entry: “How can we as independent school leaders champion equity, inclusion, and belonging when the mere existence of our institutions—both the schools themselves and the system at large—perpetuates the inequity, the injustice, that exists in this nation?” (Gonzalez, 2023, p. 3). Despite every inclination to be a progressive institution, Barrie still faces the same problems that a school like St. Albans does, if not more so. Certain individuals at the school, mainly within the Middle and Upper School, pressure themselves and others to make Barrie a forerunner, because, the way they see it, progressive is synonymous with pioneering. However, within the Lower School—who still call themselves the Montessori School despite Barrie’s rebranding several years ago to emphasize a one-school, multi-divisional ethos—adherence to the supposed beliefs of Dr. Maria Montessori remains a priority.

Earlier this month, I observed that “at Barrie, I am stuck in the middle [of the Lower and Middle & Upper Schools], oscillating between constructing and deconstructing systems, while some of my colleagues seem bent only on destruction” (2023, p. 34). This feeling has only grown in the past week, with heightened antisemitism and Islamophobia running rampant within the Middle and Upper School. I mentioned this to MUS Head Ah-Young Song in conversation on Wednesday, 11 October 2023, after a DEI committee meeting. She had asked why I took no stance on the practice of parading students in traditional cultural attire during International Children’s Day or on the attack in Gaza. In other words, why did I stay silent? I told her, “At Barrie, I have to be a centrist. Building coalitions takes trust and time. A lot of time.” Evans agrees with me: “[C]ulture change can occur, but it is a vastly more difficult, lengthy undertaking than most people imagine” (p. 49). Consternated, Ah-Young expressed, “Why can’t we acknowledge the importance of liberation?”—hinting at Barrie taking a stance on the Israel/Palestine conflict. My response? “Because that’s not how independent schools work.”

This conversation reinforced for me how Ah-Young and I see leadership differently. Ah-Young sees every issue at Barrie—and within independent schools in general—as what Ronald Heifetz, et al. (2009), term a “technical challenge”: problems with “known solutions that can be implemented by current know-how. They can be resolved through the application of authoritative expertise and through the organization's current structures, procedures, and ways of doing things” (p. 7, emphasis added). Within her division, faculty and staff must cite current research in education before introducing new initiatives, ensuring that the work is rooted in both best and equitable practice. Head of School Jon Kidder describes Ah-Young’s so-called “love language” as organization: finding and addressing as many systemic issues as possible, and finding ways to address them, both systemically and systematically. However, what I have learned in my career is that “the most common cause of failure in leadership is produced by treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems” (Heifetz, et al., 2009, p. 7). Barrie’s challenges are both technical and adaptive; in fact, I reflect on this reality in my first journal entry of the term. I write, “My work at Barrie seems to strike a delicate balance between technical and adaptive challenges. More important still is that my work as both Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and member of the senior leadership … team identifies and tackles the latter most of the time, but is simultaneously perceived, even understood, as solely the former” (Gonzalez, 2023, p. 4). This gross misunderstanding of my role and my work—a trend for DEI Directors nationwide—contributes to the stress I experience routinely in trying to effect change at the school. As I mentioned to my colleague, Director of Admission John Wilson, “It’s hard being a both/and thinker in an age of ‘either/or.’”

Meanwhile, in my interactions with and in my listening to the Lower School, I find myself facing different challenges, mainly hesitation if not full resistance to change. Because Montessori schools tend to rest upon their laurels, they see change as problematic. In thinking of International Children’s Day, which is fast approaching, I recall my conversation with Sarah Hill in late August, in which she argued that the 5 Fs of culture “are the only concepts … developmentally appropriate for our youngest learners” and that the only ways that the students can learn is through hands-on instruction; in other words, “dress[ing] up in…‘traditional wear from their culture’” (Gonzalez, 2023, pp. 10, 7). Obviously, this is not true; however, the Montessorians believe this fervently. Costa and Kallick (2000) observe that “[g]ood listeners try to understand what other people are saying. In the end, they may disagree sharply, but because they have truly listened, they know exactly the nature of the disagreement” (p. 24). With International Children’s Day, I know that the day matters to the Lower School because it is a tradition, which, to cite ABAR Montessorian Britt Hawthorne, is developed meticulously (qtd. in Gonzalez, 2023, p. 10): “[W]e hang onto [tradition], so it does take us some time to unpack it and let it go. And so before engaging with the children, I do definitely think [that it is important to have] some honest conversations with the adults—which will take some time” (qtd. in Gonzalez, 2023, p. 10). Hawthorne herself, a staunch advocate for progressive values and change, acknowledges the reality that change takes time. She emphasizes the importance of asking questions—another important habit of mind—to gain a deeper understanding of an organization (Costa and Kallick, 2000). Therefore, I will continue to listen to my colleagues in the Lower School, while finding opportunities to move the needle forward in rethinking a tradition that has overwhelmingly and disproportionately hurt our minoritized students.

This work requires trust. Megan Tschannen-Moran (2004)’s research on trust has been helpful in helping me gauge where Barrie is as an institution with respect to this important quality—which in itself requires benevolence, honesty, openness, reliability, and competence (p. 17). Faculty and staff at Barrie do not trust one another. Gossip abounds at the school: Colleagues have expressed to me that they cannot be honest with their counterparts up or down the hill, depending on the person. Therefore, Barrie is not one school but two, for it has no shared identity as a single institution, despite all the best intentions. This lack of unity can be devastating to an institution, because if an “organization’s purpose, values, and vision are not shared and internalized by all members, ‘mini[-]organizations’ that do not add up to a system result” (Costa and Kallick, 2000, pp. 83–84). We have two mini-organizations at Barrie, each running with different principals and principles. To heal this massive chasm between the Lower and Middle & Upper Schools, I must use the habits of mind to create a shared identity and, in turn, “promote common communication behaviors. This promotion is important because people behave similarly in school communities” when they feel like the school is moving in a positive direction (p. 85). By gaining trust, I can “weave the habits of mind into visions, values, and purposes [into] the very fiber of the organization” and begin to move Barrie from being a middling institution to an eminent one (p. 85). However, this herculean effort, despite the best of intentions, requires support from my peers on the senior leadership team, and if we cannot come together and realize that change begins with us, then Barrie will fail.

References

• Costa, A. L., & Kallick, B. (Eds.). (2000). Discovering and Exploring Habits of Mind. ASCD.

• Covey, S. (2006). The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything. Free Press.

• Evans, R. (2001). The Human Side of School Change: Reform, Resistance, and the Real-Life Problems of Innovation. Jossey-Bass.

• Gonzalez, D. (2021). “When Might Makes Write: Unpacking Writing Assessment Ecologies at St. Albans School” [Unpublished master’s thesis]. Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English.

• —————. (2023). “Lessons in Leadership: A Journal” [Unpublished essay]. University of Pennsylvania.

• Heifetz, R. A., Linsky, M., & Grashow, A. (2009). “The Theory Behind the Practice. In The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World (pp. 1-28). Harvard Business Review Press.

• Lorde, A. (2020). “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.” In  Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (pp. 100-103). Penguin. (Original work published 1984)

• Money, K. S. (2021). “Food for Thought: Connecting the Past, Present, and Future in the St. Albans Refectory” [Unpublished master's thesis]. University of Pennsylvania.

• Tschannen-Moran, M. (2004). Trust Matters: Leadership for Successful Schools. Jossey-Bass.