By Jaimi Boehm, LL’18, Assistant Director of Middle and Upper Schools, Wildwood School (CA)
As educators and school leaders, we rely on certain resources as trusted friends to help us navigate complicated experiences or to expose ourselves to new perspectives and approaches. We nod in solidarity when certain authors or approaches come up in conversation. “Yes!” we say in a moment of excitement. “Dweck’s work on growth mindset really changed my approach to engaging my reluctant learners.” Or, “I totally agree! Twitter has connected me to so many game-changing educators across the world.” Even when we don’t completely agree with the philosophies presented in a specific resource or are reluctant to subscribe completely to a certain platform, there are predictable places to find teaching and learning support.
Podcasts, though, have been an unexpected well of inspiration for me because the ones I have been turning to aren’t about education or leadership at all. And yet, they are so completely about education and leadership.
It’s the absence of the direct or literal connection to my practice as an educator and leader that makes the podcasts so engaging and impactful as I refine my educational philosophy. Podcasts that are decidedly not about education still expose me to current research about social dynamics and brain research, connect me to great thinkers who ask important questions, challenge my understanding of conventional wisdom, and prompt me to reflect on the systems that I can help to change.
This idea of connecting non-education-specific resources to education is a model that education conferences sometimes employ.
Take Daniel Pink. I first encountered his work when he was a keynote speaker at the 2014 ASCD Conference where he spoke about intrinsic motivation and his book Drive. The book isn’t explicitly about education, though he devotes a chapter at the end to making the connection. His talk, though, really highlighted some best practices of engaging people and getting buy-in. His advice at the conference was, “Each day, have two fewer conversations about ‘how’ and two more conversations about ‘why.’” The advice seemed so simple and so impactful. And it was something I could write on a Post-it Note and start doing right away.
1-3-20 with Daniel Pink
Now Pink has a podcast that I binge-listen to called 1-3-20. The premise is that during each episode, Pink discusses one book, asks its author three essential questions, and concludes the whole conversation in 20 minutes. He’s essentially distilling a stack of books I hope to one day read into a bunch of one-pagers. Some of my favorite standouts:
- Dan Heath writes in his new book, The Power of Moments, that new employees should start their jobs on a Friday and that first day should be entirely about building relationships. His logic is that people who are new to a workplace will feel more engaged in the workflow and the “what” of their job if they feel connected to the people with whom they’re doing that work.
My takeaway/wondering: What if new teachers at my school started on a Friday instead of on a Monday and didn’t start learning about the school philosophy until they had had a fun, memorable experience with their colleagues? Is there a way to do this for new students?
- Talking about her book Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke shared the observation that “A bad outcome doesn’t mean that the decision was bad.”
My takeaway/wondering: We do a lot of reflecting and debriefing at Wildwood, and often the outcome of an event or a decision determines how much time we spend debriefing. Good outcome? Quick debrief. Questionable outcome? Long debrief. How can we facilitate our debrief conversations with adults and with students so that they consider variables beyond just the outcome? How can we look at good outcomes and explore whether that exact outcome could be repeated?
Still Processing with Wesley Morris & Jenna Wertham
In my work at Wildwood, I’ve become increasingly engaged in our multicultural work around diversity, equity, and inclusion. As a white woman, I rely on resources that help me understand the complexities of racism and the day-to-day experiences of all historically oppressed people. The New York Times releases a podcast called Still Processing that I find myself eagerly awaiting each new episode. Hosts Jenna Wertham and Wesley Morris present not only their perspectives as people of color but also as members of the LGBTQ community.
They explore art, music, television, film, and every other nook and cranny of popular culture. Their podcast helps me engage with greater clarity and compassion with its nuanced and ongoing examination of topics that can sometimes feel uncomfortable to address explicitly in our schools. Though Wertham and Morris almost never talk about education or leadership as a topic on their podcast, I am a better educator and leader of adults and students after each episode.
How I Built This with Guy Raz
In his podcast, How I Built This, Guy Raz interviews entrepreneurs who seem to have a few important experiences in common:
- They had a vision for how to do something, and it was so groundbreaking or unexpected that everyone they encountered thought they were crazy.
- They had a critical moment when they lost nearly all of their momentum and buy-in from key stakeholders but turned things around thanks to know-how and good luck.
- They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
The stakes of my projects are different. I’m not working with millions of dollars, and my livelihood and personal finances aren’t on the line. But the stakes of my projects are high nonetheless. As change-makers in our schools, it’s easy to get discouraged or to conclude that the task is sisyphean and give up. But every time I listen to one of Raz’s episodes, I feel completely and totally reinvigorated about school change projects that feel insurmountable. I am reminded to trust my intuition, which has often served me well.
Because I’m listening to podcasts that are fundamentally about people out in the real world doing interesting things, I don’t feel like an education wonk when I bring up my podcast habit with non-educators or with students. Throughout the week, I find myself connecting with students and using podcasts as a point of shared interest. One 12th grader I work with is particularly interested in cultivating his own leadership skills, and I love talking to him about the fun and provocative bits of wisdom I encounter in other podcasts that I love, like Work Life by Adam Grant. When I’m stuck in Los Angeles traffic, I use the extra time to listen to a longer podcast (Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History is fabulous and has some powerful episodes about race in America). Then I walk into Wildwood eager to talk about the dilemmas and challenges and questions posed in an episode, and I find myself connecting with someone new about the ways that Wildwood’s approach to education and leadership already address some of those same concerns. These totally disparate podcasts and hosts coalesce for me in these profound and intriguing ways.
The transfer of knowledge is the gold standard in education. At Wildwood and at schools around the country, we emphasize the mastery of skills whose application is cross-disciplinary and relevant beyond a school context. Podcasts that are about anything BUT education give us that same opportunity for transference. They make our professional lives richer by virtue of the fact that they are not about our professional lives.[vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator border_style=”dashed”][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Jaimi Boehm is the Assistant Director of Middle and Upper Schools at Wildwood School in Los Angeles, CA. At Wildwood, Jaimi is one of the Global Citizenship initiative coordinators and a member of the Multicultural Leadership Team. Jaimi is also a school coach with Denise Pope’s Challenge Success. Prior to her administrative role, Jaimi was a teacher-leader engaged in various aspects of school life: teaching English, chairing the English department, supporting teaching and learning as Dean of Faculty Development, and facilitating student leadership as Director of Student Life. Jaimi is a 2018 graduate of the gcLi Leadership Lab.