Lisa Singleton, Teacher & Leadership Program Coordinator, Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, Washington, D.C.
Any gcLi alumnus will tell you leadership is a skill that can (and should) be learned and developed. We go into this work with the best intentions for our students, hoping to craft future leaders of America and beyond. What I’ve learned about leadership since graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education as a gcLi scholarship recipient is that ongoing leadership training for educators is just as important as what we share with our students.
Technology changes with every breath we take, and we’re trying to prepare our students for a world that will inevitably look different in the next five or ten years. Think about the changes we’ve had in the past 15 years alone: the first iPhone came out only 12 years ago. Now, educators face issues like screen-time addiction and cyber-bullying that didn’t have nearly the same prevalence before smartphones arrived on the scene. The challenges adolescents face are much more public, and failure is no longer an option many of them are willing to take. Nearly every school in the country is scrambling to find ways to combat stress and anxiety in their students, and oftentimes coming up against a brick wall.
The dichotomy is growing between the generation of teachers who grew up in a mostly analog world (and I include myself – my childhood was entirely analog), and many have an incredibly difficult time relating to the social media pressures students face today. Ask most young kids what they want to be when they grow up, and a common answer is a YouTube star. Just ask my 9-year-old son and his friends. How do you even begin to have a conversation with a child about that?
We could start by taking a lesson from Ronald Heifetz (and our good friend Mike Pardee) by utilizing that “balcony approach.” For those who have not read Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Change by Ronald Heifitz, I’ll explain. This book was first recommended at gcLi and then required reading for the Master of Education in School Leadership at Penn. The part of the book that kept coming up in both places was the idea of a “balcony approach.” Heifetz and Linsky use this metaphor to explain that in leadership one must be willing to see all points of view. It’s important to see how the overall “dance” is going from the balcony (Are people actually dancing? Do they look like they’re having fun?) but also be aware of what is happening among the party-goers down on the floor (Does the DJ stink? Are people crying in the bathroom?).
The visual of being overhead on a balcony observing or down in the throng of dancers is very clear and works well for my students. The ability to transition seamlessly between the balcony and dance floor is also a skill that we as educators must develop and continue to practice. Full disclosure: I just chaperoned prom. In a very literal sense, being in the middle of that dance floor was the last place I wanted to be. But as I learned so well at gcLi and heard again at Penn, leadership development is messy!
We can’t train our students as leaders if we don’t understand what they’re up against. By assuming we comprehend their problems or dismiss their issues as adolescent angst, we are limiting ourselves to the balcony instead of getting onto that messy dance floor (one of my Penn professors aptly referred to it as the swamp). When my principal visits our Student Government meetings, the questions she poses to them every time is, “What’s the buzz?” They know she wants to hear about current complaints being discussed in their common spaces among the other students. We have taken great care to create a space where the leaders know they can bring up any issue and it will be held in confidence and taken seriously. Honest discussion then follows; sometimes it’s offering a solution or compromise and sometimes it’s gentle push-back for the slightly more ridiculous complaints. But the student leaders know that pushing-back is not a dismissal; it’s trusting them with the information about why things are the way they are and sharing language they can take back to classmates to explain it. They have learned to utilize and appreciate the balcony/dance floor balance from our example.
I see this metaphor as it applies to the adult community as well. We all know educators can be passionate about what they do and can be even more passionate about confronting change, for better or for worse. There are some who can easily adapt with the flow and some who cannot. But being on that dance floor with them is once again critical. One example of where I’ve seen this in action goes back to the issue of technology.
We are a 1:1 iPad school, but the transition several years ago wasn’t exactly seamless. It was a difficult leap for faculty who were not familiar with the technology or who were fundamentally against using it in their classrooms, each with their own set of valid arguments. But this is the world we live in, and teaching students how to appropriately use technology in their lives is an important skill. Being a 1:1 school looks good on our website (balcony), but to have everyone on board in the way they felt comfortable and supported (dance floor) was a completely different matter. Compromises were made and everyone reached an understanding, but it took a great deal of communication between parties.
Like technology, leadership constantly changes. What works one day might not work the next. As leaders and trainers of leaders, we need to learn to adapt and model that for our students. Humility is huge when modeling these behaviors and skills, because if our students can see us recognize our own mistakes and move forward, they can learn to do the same. We don’t know what the world will look like in the next 15 years, but the more we can model for them how to adapt and hear all points of view, the better prepared they will be to handle it.
Lisa Singleton is in her twentieth year at Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School in Washington, D.C. Lisa started out teaching dance and choreography, which soon expanded to teaching public speaking. Over time, her passion to “be who you are and be that well” led to coordinating the co-curricular club program and encouraging girls to take on leadership positions by developing a leadership program and working with the Student Government Association. Lisa is a graduate of the 2013 gcLi Leadership Lab and is the 2016-2017 recipient