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Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership w/ Jennifer D. Klein
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In the opening pages of my guest’s book, she recounts a colleague's bumpy plane ride that provided the insight for the title of the book, Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership: “We are facing turmoil in education, and the job of good leaders is to 'tame the turbulence'...educators have been caught in this turbulence; it permeates our profession and we haven't been able to get above it. As a result, it is the role of leaders to help teachers see how even small, simple shifts can change a child’s experience of school.”
Rooted in real-world stories, Taming the Turbulence offers solidarity and actionable strategies to education leaders committed to centering the needs of all learners in increasingly polarized societies.
And the author, Jennifer D. Klein, is an experienced educator and advocate for student-centered, experiential learning as a catalyst for positive social change. With two-decades of classroom teaching across a number of diverse international settings, as a teacher in Costa Rica and a school leader in Colombia, she now focuses on inspiring and training educators worldwide, working with groups like What School Could Be, The Institution for International Education, and The Buck Institute. Her previous books include The Global Education Guidebook: Humanizing K–12 Classrooms Worldwide Through Equitable Partnerships and The Landscape Model of Learning: Designing Student-Centered Experiences for Cognitive and Cultural Inclusion, coauthored with Kapono Ciotti, who we spoke with about that work back in episode 159.
You can connect with Jennifer at principledlearning.org
Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership from Corwin
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Transcript
Introduction: Education's Potential for Peace
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the schoolhouse becomes the place for either building the future of peace and the present of peace or of building conflict. And my question that I'll continue to grapple with, and I'm sure we'll write about at some point um more deeply, is, you know, how do we get there? What does it look like to really move beyond conflict and be able to engage with the world because those students were demonstrating that the education that they'd had and the experiences they'd had in life had actually led them to think that war was a good thing.
00:00:30
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And we've got to figure out how to let that go and change that.
Podcast Welcome and Engagement
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Hello and welcome to the Human Restoration Project podcast. My name is Nick Covington. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Peter Kratz, Alexander Gruber, and Lisa Wenner.
00:00:53
Speaker
Thank you so much for your ongoing support. We're proud to have hosted hundreds of hours of incredible ad-free conversations over the years. If you haven't yet, consider liking and leaving a review in your podcast app to help us reach more listeners.
Taming the Turbulence: Book Overview
00:01:06
Speaker
And of course, you can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, and connect with us everywhere on social media.
00:01:16
Speaker
In the opening pages of my guest's book, she recounts a colleague's bumpy plane ride that provided the insight for the book's title, Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership. We are facing turmoil in education, and the job of good leaders is to tame the turbulence, she writes.
00:01:33
Speaker
Educators have been caught in this turbulence. It permeates our profession, and we haven't been able to get above it. As a result, it is the role of leaders to help teachers see how even small, simple shifts can change a child's experience of school.
00:01:47
Speaker
Rooted in real-world stories, Taming the Turbulence offers solidarity and actionable strategies to education leaders committed to centering the needs of all learners in increasingly polarized societies.
00:01:59
Speaker
And the author, Jennifer D. Klein, is an experienced educator and advocate for student-centered experiential learning as a catalyst for positive social change. With two decades of classroom teaching across a number of diverse international settings, as a teacher in Costa Rica and a school leader in Colombia, she now focuses on inspiring and training educators worldwide, working with groups like What School Could Be, the Institute for International Education, and the Buck Institute.
Current Educational Challenges and Trends
00:02:27
Speaker
Her previous books include The Global Education Guidebook, Humanizing K-12 Classrooms Worldwide Through Equitable Partnerships, and The Landscape Model of Learning, Designing Student-Centered Experiences for Cognitive and Cultural Inclusion, co-authored with Kapono Siati, who we spoke with about that work back in Episode 159. You can connect with Jennifer at principledlearning.org.
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On a lot of levels, the problems that we were facing before 2025 and before the new administration ah in the United States, were they were already festering. They were already arising. We were seeing this whole... anti-woke movement, particularly in states like Florida um and in other parts of the
Global Relevance and Strategies for Leaders
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South.
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um And so I think, ah you know, and we were even seeing some anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ plus legislation starting to appear, um pretty sexist legislation starting to appear as well.
00:03:29
Speaker
So I think in general, these trends were happening before. And I was actually one of the the people in my circles who was not surprised because by the Republican win in the White House um in 2024.
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ah I was kind of bracing for it, if that makes sense. So I think you know it would have been a timely book a year ago too. It would have certainly been an interesting and timely book a year ago, but I think it just becomes all the more urgent. And that's what I'm hearing from people really consistently who are ah you know helping me out with some endorsements and reading it early pre-publication is that they really they're they're really grateful to have this sense of solidarity and community and some strategies that they can try if they haven't already.
00:04:15
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and And even just that sense of connection to other leaders struggling with this, even in other parts of the world, this is not unique to the United States, although it certainly, it could be described as more extreme at the moment in the United States.
00:04:29
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um But yes, i I think it's really timely. I hope that that means that that people find value in it um And I hope that 10 years from now, we're still finding value, not because we're facing the same set of problems, but because the stories of real leaders trying to enact real change in resistant contexts, whatever that resistance comes from, is likely to be ongoing, unfortunately.
00:04:52
Speaker
And I think that's what I found so remarkable about the book and its structure. That interview focus does lend itself towards seeing so many different voices and perspectives in so many different contexts.
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And even within those contexts, different views and perspectives within those things, too. So you really do get that sense of solidarity to say, like oh, I've faced this problem now. where I've seen this problem in my own.
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And here's this person over here, ah who faced similar things. And here's how they worked in their context to do it. However, you know, the answers or solutions could be, you know, contextual as well. So might not be just as easy as porting over some things, we provide so many off ramps and on ramps towards those.
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And I think that was the other thing I appreciated was this ah aspect of showing versus telling. It wasn't just like a, here's what you need to do to, you know, fix and overcome all these problems. If you just follow this four step idea, it really was providing aspirational models, off ramps, on ramps to changing attitudes and actions.
Student-Centered Leadership
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And the structure of the book is also designed to outline each sort of issue, take them in turn and provide, you know, some kind of sustainable alternative. And I wonder for you amidst all of those different stories and perspectives, what's like an exemplar aspirational model that has stuck with you or like an off ramp from an unsustainable practice or an on ramp to something better that really stands out to you?
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Well, I think it's something that permeates throughout the book. And it's this idea that we center every decision we're making and every move that we're we're making, every committee we create with on so on learners, on children, on young people, right? That we're not um talking, I mean, in international and private schools, of course, there is a financial bottom line. But if our um our decisions don't start and end from what's good for learners, what ensures the well-being,
00:06:53
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and um success of every single learner in the in the classroom, in the schoolhouse. um I think that for me, that was the most resonant. And that was something that i learned, um I would say was a strength for me when I was a leader as well as a head of school in Colombia, was that willingness to to constantly center the thinking on students to try to find ways more and more consistently to bring their voices into the conversations we were having about policy development.
00:07:21
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um and process and governance and all of that. So for me, that's a big one. I mean, i I think that might not be as specific as some of the ah more particular on-ramps and off-ramps, as you said. you know I think there are lots and lots of practical issues like leader turnover, you know completely destroying something or board changes, ah could completely un-upending something really powerful that was going on.
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um What I tried to do throughout the book, and I appreciate your note about organization, because I'll tell you the organization itself of all these ideas was the six-month process that really put me behind and made me miss every single deadline.
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um And there's so much overlap that even but at even now, as I'm reading through my proofs, um I'm finding, you know, yeah, this could have gone in two places, but it needed to be said here. You know, I was constantly unraveling and removing and and moving things around.
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um So I think the organization was the most challenging. But one of the things that I knew from the very beginning was that I really wanted this book to feel practical for any reader.
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And by practical, I mean, i had some really interesting conversations at the beginning, you know, with some some leaders and people in my circles. you know, do I organize this around the person and the story, or do I organize it around the strategies? And lots of people came back and said, it's got to be organized around the strategies, because remember that every leader, you know, some leaders are going to be reading this when they have a fire to put out fast, and they need to find that information right now, because they're already in trouble.
00:08:56
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Some leaders, we hope, of course, most leaders, we hope, would be reading it before they're facing all of this turbulence. um and might want to read it, you know, from page one to page whatever, right, straight through in a linear fashion, and it reads well that way too.
00:09:13
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But the those those reflective questions, this you know, the the worksheets, the the try this opportunities, I was very conscious, and this is something that's been true of all of my writing, um I always want to make sure that the reader walks away not just with a set of new ideas, but but with actionable strategies they can try
Culturally Inclusive Success Metrics
00:09:33
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tomorrow. Because otherwise, it's just a book on theory.
00:09:36
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And that's actually one of the things that I think is challenging with change management. You know, I'm not espousing one change management theory or framework in this book. because I believe that your context determines what makes most sense to you and the challenge and the why behind the challenge and all of that.
00:09:53
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So I really hope that those tools help leaders to to discern what what the challenges really are, where to go, what the steps are that they can take, rather than just being a theoretical read where they you know they finish it, close the cover and say, well, that was interesting, and then go on without it actually impacting impacting practice.
00:10:13
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related to that is the idea of living in a, both a vision, right? An aspirational, uh, a future, and then understanding the limits and constraints of a practical reality. So working with them, them to stretch and grow and build capacity and do new and cool and better things. And,
00:10:32
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For better or worse, one of those realities is measures, metrics, data, accountability. You have this whole chapter in innovation in how schools define success.
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And so I wonder, given that we're speaking to all these different models, if I'm a school leader just saying, well, how do I know if that works? Or how do I support that, you know bring the data to the school board? Or how do i put this in a grant application so I can get funding to make it sustainable? How do we show what works if shifting value systems, value different things and measure them differently. What are some of the practices that the courageous leaders that you spoke with use to put their data where their mouth is, I suppose?
00:11:17
Speaker
I think a lot of it is about redefining success. I think that's the sort of the starting point. What do we really mean when we when we say that a student has been successful? And when we think about that through a cultural lens, um success means something different in every in every culture, right? um ah Obviously, colonization and expansion of of dominant Western ideas may have had an impact. And it yeah you know I'd say it we can certainly see that that's true. In cases like Hawaii, where and I've got lots of stories from Hawaiian educators, um in places where in like Hawaii where you've got an original culture that has then been colonized by an external culture,
00:11:56
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And now the educational system has left even all of the adults with a sort of colonized mindset, um stepping back and saying, no, actually, you know what? Oral traditions do connect to success. um No, you know what?
00:12:11
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um Acting from a place of ohana, of ohhanna family, it is ah ah an important value, even if the standards of the day that the Department of Education in Hawaii is established is insisting we reach feel like they're in contract but in conflict with that. right So, I mean, to be honest with you, I think one of the things that I talk about throughout the book is this idea of the middle path. right of And it's not that I want to sell out and let go of the more powerful path, right because i I believe in this you know the most extraordinary changes to education and I want to see it transform.
00:12:48
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But I also recognize we have systems in place that require um that we that we comply to some degree, at least, right? Even the best schools in the world have learners who are trying to get into universities or um are facing national exams. um And in the United States,
00:13:05
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ah You know, no child left behind, race to the top. All of that left us with these systems we have to contend with while we try to change them. Right. Because it would be irresponsible not to.
00:13:17
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um So I think, you know, a lot of it has to do with this. And several of the leaders really explored explored this perfectly um ah in their interviews with me.
00:13:28
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figuring I think that Denise Espana is the one I'm thinking of in in Hawaii, who really talked about how her kids have to be successful in traditional ways too, because that's the only way they're going to change the systems, right? So in her mind, if they can become articulate, if you will, and skilled in understanding that those expectations and have a deep understanding of their culture and their confident cultural identity, as she called it,
00:13:56
Speaker
then that's the ideal measure of success. It's this balance between the two, right? um And the other thing in terms of data, I mean, I think we've become and incredibly data-driven, but one of in schools and education in general, at least in the United States, one of the most important things that I'm seeing in that data idea is the asset lens, right? How often do we collect data to find out what's wrong, right?
00:14:21
Speaker
and what's not working as opposed to collecting data about what is working, right? And looking through that asset lens. That was so essential um to the ideas in street data, for example, um Safir and Dugan, right? This idea that we look through the asset lens at learners um so that we're...
00:14:42
Speaker
we're always elevating what's wonderful about them as opposed to constantly looking at what is somehow wrong with them or needs to be solved or needs to be fixed.
00:14:53
Speaker
This is something that came up a lot when Capono Siati and I were were working on the landscape model of learning as well, um how how easy it is to fall into an asset mindset about what kids don't know and don't do well, as opposed to focusing in on the successes. So um I think, you know, there are lots of pieces to my answer there, right? We need to redefine success. We need to think about the assets and and we need to also perhaps figure out how to turn, there's a whole section in the book, right, in that chapter on squishy data, right? So if I believe that empathy building is a success skill, right, if I think that seeing empathetic young people working with each other in the classroom is one of our
00:15:35
Speaker
goals as a school, as as connected to our values, how on earth do I measure empathy,
Klein's Educational Philosophy and Background
00:15:41
Speaker
right? And and there're you you know there are strategies in there for, in the book, for um turning that squishy sort of, I want it to feel like this into something that's much more concrete and and observable ah so that we can actually collect data on what we on what we mean and walk the walk um as well as talk the talk.
00:16:01
Speaker
Yeah, it seems like we have so much data around stuff that's frankly just easy to collect. And we sort of end up with this drunk under the streetlight effect. If you've ever heard that ah that story, right? Where it's like, you know you stumble across this guy and he's looking under the streetlight and you go like, what are you looking for? Oh, my keys.
00:16:21
Speaker
ah Did you drop them over here? No, I dropped him over here in the bushes, but this is where the light is. sort of thing. it seems like in education, we look for answers where the light is as opposed to like where the solutions might be. So yeah, building up ah better repertoire of tools and inventory and measures and metrics that don't have to be like intrusive.
00:16:42
Speaker
It doesn't have to be a like once a year for nine hours, we do standardized tests about empathy or something, you know, like there can be small ways to do that. And I so appreciated, you know, your inclusion and your reference to street data, because I think that In thinking of off ramps and on ramps, that provides a huge, you know, on ramp for educators looking to say, like, how do I incorporate that squishy stuff, the street data, right? The anecdotes, the qualitative that doesn't get captured in the hard metrics, but is just important in relational work like education. You got to listen to the kids and communities and parents and all of these things.
00:17:21
Speaker
One interesting thing, Jennifer, I think I'm so glad that you brought up the Hawaiian educators and like those non-Western perspectives. I think they have a lot to add. I think, too, it was really cool to see in the book your own childhood educational experiences, because I think those are a little bit off the beaten path and I think maybe have a an impact on the way that you view education. Can you just share with that ah with listeners real quick what your educational experiences are like and What ended up leading you to get into, you know, education and school leadership?
00:17:54
Speaker
Well, yes, it has everything to do with how I see the world. um I wondered, you know. It definitely does. um You know, my parents were, they definitely so swam against the tides or the currents in their choices. And I know that that was not an easy choice for them either.
00:18:12
Speaker
I think especially for my father, there was a sort of, you know, a constant gnawing fear that if I didn't get a traditional academic education, that I wasn't going to be successful. um But the Their recognition was that I was that kid who had 15 answers that weren't on the multiple choice test, right? That that I always, I have a a high IQ.
00:18:33
Speaker
um And when I look at a given question, um I see much more than what the test offers. I i always had, or I early on, you know, they they they feared for me. Let's put it that way. They were worried. My parents were worried.
00:18:48
Speaker
that I would end up in classrooms where I would offer an answer the teacher wasn't looking for, didn't expect, didn't see as right somehow, and that that was going to, um it was going end up quashing my my creativity, my creative mind, the way that I saw things.
00:19:08
Speaker
um And so they looked for schools that would hold it up, right? Where rather than saying not that that's not the answer I was looking for, The teachers would say, what an interesting way of seeing things, Jennifer. Tell me more. Right.
00:19:20
Speaker
And I think that's, you know, that's the power of what I got to experience. I went to the school in Rose Valley um for the first years of my life from preschool through second grade. That's a small independent school outside of of ah Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. Right.
00:19:35
Speaker
in a community called Rose Valley. um And that was a lovely student-centered, whole child model, founded in the 20s, very Deweyan. And frankly, the founder, Grace Ratzel, if she had been male, would probably be as famous as John Dewey is today because she espoused very, very similar ideas in her writing, but is not particularly well known.
00:19:55
Speaker
um When we moved to Colorado, i started fourth grade then here in Colorado, ah in the open living um alternative public school.
00:20:06
Speaker
um So open living was the name at the time of the the ah pre-K through middle school or junior high, I guess it was still, so through ninth grade. um And then there was a second school up in the mountains in Evergreen called Mountain Open.
00:20:21
Speaker
um or open high school. um So I attended, it's now all called the open school, the Jefferson County Open School. There's some wonderful writing out there about it. And I certainly recommend that.
00:20:31
Speaker
um In particular, a book called Lives of Passion, School of Hope um by Rick Posner, who is a former principal of the school and was actually my advisor when I was in high school.
00:20:42
Speaker
um And there's, of course, Arne Langberg's memoir, Touches on the Open School in major portions. um That book is entitled um To Create the World That Ought to Be, ah Memoirs of a Radical Educator. um And his his thinking is just extraordinary as well. This is why he remains such an important mentor and and has been really a ah touchstone for me throughout my career in education.
00:21:09
Speaker
um So, you know, getting that grounding, you know, just to give you an idea, Nick, the first time I received a letter or number grade was college, right? My transcripts, and I talk about this in the book, my transcripts were 50 pages of narrative that I wrote about my experiences and growth and challenges.
00:21:26
Speaker
um In 1986, when I graduated from high school, there were two universities in the country that would continue consider learners for admission who had no grade point average.
00:21:36
Speaker
And I was also refusing to take the SATs because I knew that they weren't going to show off what I knew or my my my skills, right, my talents, um because of the kind of education I'd had. So we had a lot more outdoor learning than indoor learning. You know, we had...
00:21:52
Speaker
Incredible wilderness experiences, incredible city experiences. I actually lived and worked in Israel-Palestine for six months, ah and the first half the summer before my senior year and the first half of my senior year of high school.
00:22:07
Speaker
and then also traveled ah through Europe for two months. And those experiences were three of my major passages or projects for graduation requirements.
00:22:18
Speaker
So i i i feel really blessed. I feel really fortunate to have had the experiences that I did. um The second part of your question was, why did I end up in
Education's Role in Social Change
00:22:29
Speaker
education? And it's that this is a slightly different story. I've shared this story actually as a chapter.
00:22:35
Speaker
in Barbara Bray's newest book, Grow Your Why. And it's all about how when I spent those months in Israel-Palestine, something in me broke.
00:22:47
Speaker
something in my sense of humanity and what we were capable of changed really drastically. um And it was because I saw so many different groups using the name of God as an excuse to hurt and kill each other um and as an excuse to steal land from each other. And I continue to struggle with that today.
00:23:07
Speaker
When I returned from the region, As a teenager, I turned away from Judaism completely because I couldn't figure out, even after being raised in a Jewish family, how to separate how I felt about Israel from my faith.
00:23:22
Speaker
um And so I just turned away from all of it, to be honest with you. um And I really went into a state of, you know, humans suck. right? We're capable of terrible, awful things. And I don't know what to do with that. And I was really stuck for a long time.
00:23:37
Speaker
When I um fit, I did my bachelor's and my master's in creative writing and literature, um started teaching at the university level when I was doing my master's, ah and then moved to Costa Rica at the end of my grad school time 1994 and started Shortly after that, started teaching high school.
00:23:57
Speaker
And my first high school teaching experience was in the Lincoln School in San Jose, Costa Rica. And one of the best international schools in the world, I would say, a really good one.
00:24:08
Speaker
um and And all of a sudden, I found myself seeing the impact that education could have education. society.
00:24:19
Speaker
Right. So I was so frustrated by the way society works and I was so heartbroken and so lost and stuck in how I saw a society and humanity.
00:24:30
Speaker
And, and I remember I was probably about three months into my first year teaching 10th grade English. at an international school when I realized I had the son of Oscar Arias in my classroom, the Nobel Prize-winning president's son, right, in my classroom.
00:24:44
Speaker
He wasn't the only one. I had young people in that space who who had grown up with privilege, who were going to go into leadership positions or or or were going to have these ample opportunities.
00:24:56
Speaker
I want to believe, obviously, as a product of public education, that any child can reach those opportunities, and I think that they should be able to. And I knew that this was going to be a fast route to social change. So when I look back, not that I was brainwashing my students ever in the course of my career, but I can, I mean, there are so many young people who pass through my classroom who I can now say, not just because of me, obviously, because of many factors, but who I can now say are creating, right, who I now can say are creating positive change in their communities and
00:25:32
Speaker
improving humanity and the human experience somehow, right? um In part, at least because of the ways that I chose to teach and the ways that I chose to um help them connect with perspectives other than their own and lean into discomfort and really explore who they were as well as who they wanted to be, the place they wanted to have in society the way that they wanted to enact change.
00:25:56
Speaker
um So that's a really long story. I apologize. But I think that was really, that was my turning point, right? In that moment when I realized what I can do through education, I stopped worrying about the dark, well, I don't stop entirely worrying about the dark side of humanity. It still drives most of the work that I do, but it It was a way of handling it. It was a way of channeling it into something positive and constructive rather than just sitting with it and letting it eat me up, if that makes sense.
00:26:27
Speaker
Gosh, totally. i just found your story as important a part, you know, in your perspective and approaching the conversations and all of this as important. um anyone else's. And so thank you so much for for sharing that and going into even more detail than you do in the book. I think that's a real treat.
00:26:44
Speaker
Shifting to the dark side a little bit and perhaps shifting more into like the real react the real and the reality of it, hearing you talk about, you know, the work that you did in your earliest teaching role in ah in Costa Rica with those students and seeing the way that they went on to, you know, shape the world later on, i think ours today, as you write about, like is an age of, you know, wedges false dichotomies and
Bridging Gaps in Polarized Societies
00:27:08
Speaker
polarization. and I think it's sort of undeniable that there's a pretty deliberate attempt to drive wedges between teachers and students, between schools and communities, you know, between teachers and parents, you know, there's good guys and bad guys and, you know, these
00:27:23
Speaker
all these dichotomies everywhere. But you write that building bridges in times of polarization isn't easy. And I'm thinking sort of like the lofty goals I think are great, right? That vision, you know, that humanizing vision, I'm all on board with that.
00:27:36
Speaker
But like getting into some more of the practical approaches, either from the people that you spoke with, from your own experiences, the things you're writing about in the book, what are the approaches or the ways of thinking that you found successful in helping build those important bridges?
00:27:51
Speaker
funny that you use that phrase. I'll just say first, before I answer your question, Mark Thomas, who I did years, of almost a decade of work with bringing Palestinian voices into U.S. s and Canadian classrooms, um used to ah we used to bemoan together the fact that there were so many NGOs with that same building bridges somewhere in their title. Yeah. And it started to feel a little old um because we weren't really sure whether they were actually building bridges or not.
00:28:16
Speaker
um So I come to this work with some really hard knocks in my past. And that's exactly where they happened, right? Was in trying to help teachers not ignore other voices, but bring in some of the unheard voices when they were trying to explore the Israel-Palestine situation, right? So um at the time you you could, and this was would have been, um
00:28:41
Speaker
2007-ish that we started the work. um At the time we were finding that teachers were really afraid to even bring those those you know perspectives in, right? So building bridges was really, really hard.
00:28:54
Speaker
um i think the I think when I think about building bridges, there were a few things that I'll be honest, were not necessarily in my my own practice that I learned from these conversations with leaders in other parts of the world. And one of them was this this approach of really leaning in with curiosity and empathy to understand why the people who resist are resisting.
00:29:21
Speaker
um I don't think that I did that very often because I knew that I was hired for a particular purpose. And so I felt right In my perspective, if that makes sense, right, because that was what I was hired to do as a leader in Colombia was to bring project based learning and student centered culture and design to this school.
00:29:40
Speaker
um So when parents pushed back or teachers pushed back or even students occasionally pushed back. I actually argued. I just needed to be right because that's what I'd been hired to do, right? or that's what I thought I'd been hired to do. And when I look back now, leaning in with a little more empathy, with a little more curiosity, with an actual interest in understanding why they were struggling with something would have been, that would have been wonderful. It would have gone a long, long way.
00:30:07
Speaker
And connected to that actually is this distinction that came up in the course of interviews between an evolution of education and a revolution in education.
00:30:19
Speaker
um And so the school where I was in Colombia, the Gimnazio Los Caobos, this revolution in education was the way that they framed it. And it came straight from Sir Ken Robinson's writings and speaking.
00:30:31
Speaker
um And, you know, the whole idea was we have to start over. We have to do something completely different. Right. um We have to fight for something different in a country with 50 years plus of civil war um and a long past history of war with the Spanish.
00:30:47
Speaker
You're talking about, you know, using a metaphor of war to move education forward. i you know i Even at the time, I wondered about the term, but I didn't necessarily critique it. And you know they know that I've struggled with this since, right? like Were we setting ourselves up for a fight when we said we were trying to create a revolution in education?
00:31:08
Speaker
One of the leaders I interviewed in Mexico, ah Adrian Lees, actually reframed it as an evolution in education. And he's working in Mexico in a community where even just the term evolution was a little problematic initially, um but because people thought that he was talking about science, right? and um And that caused some challenges in a very Catholic context.
Evolving Educational Language and Metaphors
00:31:30
Speaker
But he what his his point was that it evolved slowly, it evolves naturally. it it There's an organic process here that has to happen for it to occur, and we're all part of that growth.
00:31:42
Speaker
And, and we, and he even said at one point, we can't become bloody minded as a, he's a Brit, right? So we can't become bloody minded in how we approach the things that we're working on.
00:31:53
Speaker
um And I, I found that really powerful. He's been a very successful leader. And I think his point is a ah really interesting one, right? How do we, and there's a whole section on language, right? That's another, i mean, connected to this, there are so many strategies that have to do with recognizing what are the what are the trigger terms, what are the thing you know the words that trigger us, what are the words that are going to trigger our constituents, how do we frame the work we're doing in a way that other people will find acceptable and will be able to hear. My my favorite example of that was from Caroline Danvers, the leader we are calling Caroline Danvers, an anonymous leader in the American Southwest, who
00:32:36
Speaker
who never referred to the bathrooms that she had put into all of her schools, ah her district schools, as she's a superintendent, um she never referred to them as gender neutral, always referred to them as universal.
00:32:49
Speaker
And as a result, in a highly conservative region, she experienced zero pushback. right? Because universal was a term that everyone could get on board with, whereas gender neutral brought up all sorts of anti-LGBTQ plus stuff.
00:33:07
Speaker
um And, you know, so I think those are really important distinctions as well, right? The language we use. There are plenty of other more practical strategies in there, of course, how we communicate, how clear we are, how well we set our teachers up for success.
00:33:20
Speaker
And man, one of the most important sections of this book is how we protect our teachers also, because we should not be putting our teachers on the front line.
00:33:31
Speaker
um And there there you go. There's another war metaphor, right? We shouldn't be putting our teachers on the front lines with parents um and set them up for a fight. And we sure certainly should never put students into a dangerous position.
00:33:44
Speaker
um but How do we then um make sure that parents understand that teachers are feel protected enough that they can try to do the work? um In the United States right now, don't I'm not even sure how to frame that, to be honest with you. What does it look like to protect teachers, given that you know leaders themselves are losing jobs over so much of this work?
00:34:08
Speaker
um But I do think that if we know what hill we're willing to die on, if we know, and again, that's another war metaphor, right? They're all over the place. um But if we know if we know what we stand for, if we know what that North Star is for us as educators, I think we have to be willing to say, you know what, the job itself is less important than um than what I'm trying to do for young people here in this community.
00:34:38
Speaker
and And I would rather walk away um or lose this job knowing I stood up for the right thing and was on the right side of history than to um to protect my job and not do right by kids.
00:34:52
Speaker
I mean, as a former high school educator for a decade, I am as grateful for courageous leadership and the courageous models of leadership that I had as I am disdainful of the cowardly ones and the the ones who folded and and went along with things and protected themselves over protecting you know their staff and everyone else. And I learned a lot from both of those models, right? You learn about what kind of teacher and what kind of leader and what kind of I'm human to be. and Gosh, um I'm thinking so much about that evolution and revolution that you'd mentioned at the start of your previous answer, because I think so often that language of revolution from, you know, privileged ah people like myself, maybe like yourself too, Jennifer, like comes so casual, right? But like revolution is a real thing that people in our lifetimes have experienced. And I appreciate your conscientiousness towards that use of language.
00:35:48
Speaker
Once you shine a light on that, it's hard not to, as we've been doing this conversation, pick out those like ah those war metaphors, you know, um as we just go through our language. So, you know, step one of this sort of reframing, perhaps, is just like, oh, shifting our metaphors and our language. And then we're thinking about relationships and community um away from war or fighting or us versus them or, you know, winners and losers towards, I don't know, more holistic ones. I don't, I don't know a right way to do that, but it sounds perhaps like that's a step in the right direction.
00:36:24
Speaker
what you're saying is really important. And i this is not necessarily connected to the new book, but it is something that I find myself exploring an awful lot right now. And throughout my life is I have this driving urge to understand whether it's actually possible to get to a point of post-conflict education.
00:36:44
Speaker
And this is connected to the work that I've done in Israel-Palestine, but also work in Sierra Leone, what I saw happening in Colombia. um i had, a I mean, the majority of teachers and leaders that I was working with in Colombia um had experiences in their own families of kidnappings and of of extraordinarily violent things happening to them or around them or being moved out of the country entirely to keep them safe.
00:37:09
Speaker
um i so you know I saw this obviously in in places like Palestine and and Israel where the the history of conflict has now permeated everything, every aspect of life.
00:37:21
Speaker
um And in Sierra Leone as well, even though that war was only 11 years long. The impact that I saw when I was there on the teachers, that's where the question started for me, right? I was talking to teachers who had been, who'd seen their families slaughtered in front of them, right? Who had been an extraordinarily awful, awful situations and were carrying that trauma in their in their souls and they were carrying it into the classroom.
00:37:50
Speaker
No matter how hard we try, no matter how intentional we are, if our experience is one of conflict, then how do we get to a point of post-conflict? And one of the, the you know, like generations later, right? What does it look like?
00:38:07
Speaker
Because we're probably just transferring our own ideas that are ingrained in that trauma um into the learners that we're working with. And if the war hasn't even ended yet, well, then there's no such thing as post-conflict anyway, right?
00:38:21
Speaker
So, you know, when I think about peace building, because this really does connect for me to education and all the work that you all are doing and and the work that I strive to do. When I think about peace building, there has to be some kind of a way to answer that question and then address it more effectively so that we can make sure that that educators can get past the conflict metaphors, can get past the war orientation, and can get to language and action and behavior that's much more peaceful in its orientation. um
00:38:55
Speaker
And one last piece connected to this, I have worked for years with a young leader in Sierra Leone who I met ah you know over a decade ago. And he came to Colombia, actually. He's a community leader in a rural region of Sierra Leone. And he came to Colombia for a conference um that we were running, Revolution ended in Education Conference. There you go. Right. There's that title again.
00:39:17
Speaker
um And he came and he was talking to student groups before the ah conference started, um different grade levels. And he came back, he was staying with me, he came back with me one day really alarmed and I could see that his mood had shifted completely.
00:39:33
Speaker
And what he said was, okay, I've now worked with elementary students, middle school students and high school students at your school. And your elementary and middle school students believe that peace is possible and believe that peace should be a goal.
00:39:47
Speaker
But I need to warn you, Jennifer, that your high school students do not. Your high school students actually asked me why do you think peace is better than war?
00:39:59
Speaker
What would we benefit from if we were in peace rather than war? War is the only way that we get what we need. So when I...
00:40:11
Speaker
What an awful thing, right? What an awful, awful thing to hear from students. So anyway, it connects, obviously, to this bigger picture of how the schoolhouse becomes the place for either building the future of peace and the present of peace or of building conflict.
00:40:27
Speaker
And my question that I'll continue to grapple with, and I'm sure we'll write about at some point um more deeply, is, you know, how do we get there? What does it look like to really move beyond conflict and be able to engage with the world because those students were were demonstrating that the education that they'd had and the experiences they'd had in life had actually led them to think that war was a good thing.
00:40:51
Speaker
And we've got to figure out how to let that go and change that. It sounds so amorphous or it sounds so vague to say like, truly to fix our actions, we need to fix our metaphors and like the way we think about interactions.
00:41:06
Speaker
Because if all you know are, you know, bellicose metaphors and, you know, all of these ways of thinking in terms of conflict, your actions are going to be expressions of those, right? Like we need expand our imagination for metaphor to be more inclusive of community and relationships and different ways of thinking so that way we can carve a better you know path towards action through increased imagination so resolving both sides of that i'm fascinated and eager to see what comes from from that project i think that'll be necessary it's it's interesting then to think about on the flip side of that um
00:41:46
Speaker
You know, in that example you gave of universal versus gender neutral bathrooms, I think there's been such a ah propaganda campaign, really, um to get people...
00:41:58
Speaker
to have a reaction and a response to certain words and to certain things. Um, that is, you know, they hear gender neutral or even the term gender anymore, I think is intended, ah to circumvent, you know, the prefrontal cortex and go right to that lizard brain and have an instinctual reaction, right? Like you just, uh, bit into a rotten apple or something, right? Oh, gender gross, right. To make those associations. Um,
00:42:26
Speaker
So I think it's really interesting that at the start of the last chapter, you start with this quote from Margaret Wheatley, which I pulled because I thought it was it was so great. But she wrote, threatened people can't help but retreat into the reptilian brain, desperate to protect themselves to survive.
00:42:42
Speaker
With the right processes, people can experience their full human qualities and find true pleasure in working well together. And I think there's not just... on that that kind of propaganda side, like how do we bring ah the rept from the reptile to the prefrontal by changing framing and language, but also I think just like scarcity and an emphasis on day-to-day survival, precarity have a real impact on our ability to think and plan for the
Leadership Values and Planning for Change
00:43:10
Speaker
future. And I worry that like an intentional program of scarcity and survival and propaganda, kind of like what we're seeing now, right? We're fighting day-to-day. We're not...
00:43:20
Speaker
especially in schools, thinking about the future. If we're just thinking about what each day, you know, will bring, it seems like a system that's constantly designed to keep us on the back foot.
00:43:31
Speaker
And I wonder, you know, in framing it in the context of taming the turbulence, that if that's the world that we live in, considering the scope of this conversation and the work that went into the book, what, what do you think is like the key takeaway for school leaders amidst all of this?
00:43:47
Speaker
I'm not sure there's one key takeaway, but I'll try, certainly. i Because what you're bringing up is so it's so salient, especially you know the terms like critical race theory, um ah diversity, equity, and inclusion. a lot of people don't even know what DEI stands for.
00:44:02
Speaker
um They just know that it's supposed to be bad somehow, um which obviously I disagree with. I think Margaret Wheatley is right. And i certainly know that I have experienced that ah this. I think you've probably experienced it as well, that when we feel threatened, we do react more reactively. Sorry, that's a pardon the redundancy. But we our response is very reactive either as opposed to proactive or it's defensive as opposed to empathetic and leaning in with curiosity.
00:44:32
Speaker
um You know, there's an earlier chapter where um several of the interviewees talked about the value of dissonance, the value of disagreement, and even inviting disagreement. And as an outward bound, you know, celebrating when somebody feels uncomfortable rather than, ah you know, going, well, that's great.
00:44:52
Speaker
Somebody is feeling uncomfortable rather than um shying away from it, you know? So I think I really feel for leaders in schools right now. There's no question. I have a deep, deep empathy for what they're facing.
00:45:05
Speaker
i do think, I think one of the key takeaways, of course, is you have to know what you stand for. You have to know what your North Star is to use Carmen Coleman's. ah language from Kentucky.
00:45:17
Speaker
um You have to really stand firm. um And I think you're right that that that culture of scarcity and all of those other things that are designed intentionally, I think, to to create fear, i' they're certainly affecting me, right? I mean, I know that I'm nervous about this book coming out. I'm nervous about the safety of the people I interviewed. I'm nervous about my safety. I'm i'm nervous.
00:45:40
Speaker
I'm excited about the potential for and influence and impact at the same time. that I'm kind of preparing myself for the haters, you know? um So I think, but I do think that there's a key in there and that's about trying to find a variety of to,
00:45:55
Speaker
to plan ahead, to not be reactive, to, um you know, Jennifer Abrams said, don't get angry, just get ready, um which I thought was a really beautiful phrase.
00:46:09
Speaker
So if we're ready for the fact that pushback will happen and we've prepared ourselves for it and we know what we're going to try to enact and why it matters,
00:46:21
Speaker
then maybe we managed to keep from feeling threatened or we at least keep from responding with defensiveness and reactivity. And I know that this is something, I mean, i I feel like I'm the worst person in the world to ask this question of because, you know, as you know, the book is filled with my own vulnerability around my leadership journey. It was the hardest thing about about writing this book um was that feeling that You know, I didn't know what I was doing. I somehow made all these mistakes.
00:46:49
Speaker
I think that's one of the mistakes I made. I i thought that people would come along if they if I explained why. um And I never really planned in an intentional way for negative reactions.
00:47:01
Speaker
um And so I think... I think that's a big, big part of it, right, is preparing for it in those kinds of ways that that ensure that we as leaders don't react poorly. And then, of course, the other piece is you know, we've got to make sure that we're setting up the conditions for our teachers to be successful with this as well. Whatever the initiative is, um yeah I mentioned already protecting our teachers, but it's also about shifting systems.
00:47:25
Speaker
right So if there are systems in place that work against what we're trying to do, we need to shift those systems, um and whether that's something as simple as how we use time and our schedule or something much more um complex, ah like the culture ah of the school that we're trying to build and and how we ensure that that culture permeates all of our processes um or our policies and all of those kinds of things. so um I wish there were one you know simple answer. When I was sick as a child, my mom always used the metaphor of a magic wand that would take the fever away. like a magic ah It was actually a magnet, like a fever magnet right that I was supposed to imagine.
00:48:07
Speaker
And she would be like, I wish I had a fever magnet and I could just pull all that fever out of your body. um When I was a kid, I loved that image, even though it didn't help at all. It didn't get take that it didn't take the fever away.
00:48:17
Speaker
um But I, you know, I wish there were a magic wand or a fever magnet for this work and this moment in history. i just have to, i guess I have to rely, as I talk about in the last chapter, I really have to rely on that idea that even if we don't see the successes ourselves, even if we um are fired before all of it happens, even if we have to walk away at some point um because of um the challenges against what we believe to be true, that we are planting seeds.
00:48:52
Speaker
um And that even if not all of those seeds bear fruit, or if we don't get to see the fruit that they bear, um that it matters. and And Ken Robinson said this many times to his daughter. She shared this in ah and a big think we did for What School Could Be, um where she talked about how he...
00:49:11
Speaker
He would say he was frustrated by the fact that big changes hadn't happened, but he also knew very clearly that the teacher who walks into their classroom and does things differently, even if they're the only teacher in the building doing that, it matters to the kids in that classroom.
00:49:26
Speaker
right? um And so we have to, I think we have to remain focused on even if they're small wins, even if we're not always managing to impact whole systems, even if we have to comply with standards and accountability systems we completely disagree with while we try to do this transformational work, we got to start somewhere. We got to start somewhere. where We got to try. We've got to do our best. We've got to bring our our hearts to the work because we're educators. This is, we're not in this to police. We're not in this to, um to control and censor, right? We're not, I mean, I didn't become a literature teacher to censor lead reading books, you know, and decide for my kids what they had access to knowing and learning about themselves in the world.
00:50:10
Speaker
um I became a literature teacher because I wanted them to explore and reflect and understand themselves in lots of different ways. through many different lenses. And I really, i hinge in on that, right? Our love for shoot for children.
00:50:24
Speaker
um We don't go into this work because we're going to make a lot of money, ah right? um Educators don't go into this work for financial reasons. We go into it, generally speaking,
00:50:34
Speaker
because we feel called to support the growth of young people. And I think, and that brings me back to where I started, right? Which is if we center students, if we center our learners, if we ask first and foremost, what is good for them?
00:50:51
Speaker
I think we can see a clear path. I can i think we can clear the path. um And yes, we're still going to face resistance, especially if that path is controversial in some way in our context.
00:51:03
Speaker
But we shouldn't just sit back and not try it just because we we know we're going to get negative reactions. That sounds like an awesome place to end it, Jennifer. The book is Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership, Doing Right by Learners Without Losing Your Job.
00:51:20
Speaker
Thanks, Jennifer, for joining me today. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
00:51:28
Speaker
Thank you again and for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
00:51:39
Speaker
Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free at on our website, humanrestorationproject.org. Thank you. um