Robert Franz, LL’08, gcLi Scholar, LL’11, Former gcLi Director of Social Media, US History Teacher, Berkeley Preparatory School (FL)
“The best journeys answer questions that in the beginning you didn’t even think to ask.” Jeff Johnson
Each day I enter the classroom and turn to the whiteboard to write down the dreaded rotating schedule that we all face. In this moment of stillness, my thoughts move to how I can best reach my students today. What is the “zinger” I can use to pull them in to understand negative and positive externalities? Are they really going to grasp the comparison between the confluence of modernity and traditionalism during the 1920’s? I smile and the first phrases written on top of everything else are Whitespace, Neurosculpting , Hugging the Monster.
My high school students always ask about these acronyms, particularly ‘hugging the monster.’ I try to explain but I just see Dr. Deak laughing at me in my thoughts. I had no intention of being back in the classroom at this point of my life. My trajectory was always about what’s next and how can I get there. Varsity Coach at 24, Department Chair at 25, Class Dean at 26, Assistant Head of School at 32, Director of Leadership Studies and Global Studies at 35, Middle School Head at 40. I was always looking to take this next step, collecting titles to prove to myself that I was succeeding. It became stuck in my head that the higher your title, the stronger your leadership role. Even when I drove into Fountain Valley School as a participant at gcLi in 2008, my thought was on how to create a new program that would not only help kids but prove my value as a leader. The Pedagogy of Leadership® shared at gcLi taught me how to facilitate others’ leadership but I still burned the candle at both ends, looking to help others while still helping myself.
Several years after that first gcLi summer – and married with two young boys – I became Head of Middle School, but in truth, I spent my time from 7 AM till 7:30 PM being a dean, counselor, secretary, history teacher, health teacher, and assistant lacrosse coach. I did a lot but really did not do anything well, particularly being a husband and father. Then I watched the documentary 180 Degrees South that centered on Jeff Johnson’s journey to Patagonia where he met Yvon Chounirad and Doug Tompkins. During one scene Yvon turns to Doug and says:
“The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life, it’s so easy to make it complex. What is important is to lead an examined life because most of the damage caused by humans is unintentional. I think in response to the people saying, ‘You can’t go back,’ and I say, ‘Well what happens when you get to the edge of the cliff, do you take one step forward or do a 180 degree turn and take one step forward?’ Which way are you going? Which way is progress? The solution to many of the world’s problems may be to turn around and take a forward step. You can’t just keep trying to make a flawed system work.”
It was that moment. Several slow rewinds later, the thought was stuck in my head. This endless cycle of moving forward, grasping at titles, always looking for the next step took me away from what I cared about the most: the education of children. The mission of gcLi is Educating Teachers to Teach Leadership to Students; where better to do this work and have the greatest impact but within the classroom? Where is it better to have those teachable leadership moments and understand that it’s okay to take a pause within the classroom to handle an unplanned event? Where is it better to teach methods in helping a student who is redlining, or planning each class with an I-P-O in mind or making the kids do the work in order to help them understand missteps?
I had forgotten these core tenets. Fortunately, my leadership journey of missteps led me to take that 180 degree turn forward into the classroom again. I hold the door and greet my students for their 8:00 AM class and wonder did they have breakfast, did they sleep enough, doesn’t the science state that classes should not start till after 9:00, where is their water bottle? I smile and think that twelve years ago, I thought leadership was about titles, accomplishments, and degrees but realize now that the heavy lifting of leadership that gcLi taught me is accomplished in those everyday, ordinary, lollipop moments found by taking a step forward back into the laboratory named the classroom.
Robert Franz believes that each student has the capacity to be more. “It is our responsibility as educators to stretch each student to understand their individual potential. We must allow students to learn how to fail and use these teachable moments as snapshots in teaching students how to grow both intellectually and emotionally from these teachable moments. In order to have these results, we as educators must create an environment that promotes the willingness to instill risk taking. To do this we must be confident as educators to take risks ourselves both in and outside the classroom in order to serve as models for our students.” He is currently inspiring his US history students at Berkeley Preparatory School in Tampa, FL.