Welcome back to our interview with Dr. Heidi Kasevich. Founder of Kase Leadership Method, Dr. Kasevich is a Leadership Educator and Coach. A national keynote speaker, she is passionate about helping adults and students alike use self-awareness to optimize their ability to lead in today’s world. Her work as Educational Director at Quiet Revolution has been featured on NPR and in numerous publications, including Huffington Post, New York Magazine, and Harvard Magazine.
Her proficiency is grounded in over 20 years of experience as a history and leadership educator, and leadership program designer and history chair at several secondary schools and universities in New York City. During this time, she authored various curricula, including Guide to Giving, a highly-acclaimed K-12 philanthropy curriculum, and Closing the Gap, an influential girls’ leadership curriculum.
She is the co-author of The Introverted Actor: Practical Approaches (July 2020), which provides educators and directors with methods to create inclusive acting environments where the strengths of the introverted actor are as valued as their extroverted counterparts. Heard: Understanding How Introverted Students Learn and Lead, a research-based, temperament-inclusivity book designed to provide actionable strategies for K-12 educators, is forthcoming in 2021.
A proud gcLi alumnus scholar, she received her B.A. from Haverford and Ph.D. from New York University.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length. What follows is our second installment. Please click here to read the first installment of our interview with Dr. Kasevich.
Character Strengths of the Introvert & The Role of Teachers
Kate Wade (Editor, gcLi Leadership Blog):
We’ve been talking about the importance of temperament-inclusivity education with students. How has the practice and research you’ve engaged in positively influenced teachers themselves?
Heidi Kasevich:
I think we’ve launched a “Quiet Revolution.” We’ve made strides over the past several years, and we still have a long way to go. I’m hoping Heard: Understanding How Introverted Students Learn and Lead will serve as a revolutionary pamphlet that has actionables to help educators ask quiet-friendly questions: how might this play out in the admissions process; how are you interviewing kids to come to your school? Are those processes introvert-friendly? How are letters of recommendation written? Is there a mold, or are we honoring the more innate introvert leadership strengths? I do want to emphasize that word, strengths. That is part of the work here, connecting quiet power and introversion with strength.
KW:
I love the idea that quiet leaders are an asset, not a deficit, and that we as educators can cultivate quiet leaders; in fact, that it’s essential that we do so. Talk to us more about that.
HK:
Yes, so one of my favorite studies was undertaken by Quiet Revolution and the Values In Action Institute. The study correlated, through all sorts of data gathering, introversion with three character strengths. Those are humility, prudence, and perspective. Humility, as a leadership trait, has gotten a lot more attention as a positive trait to be cultivated over the past couple of years. That makes me so excited.
A humble leader is mission-driven. I tell any introvert who is stretching to give a speech at a podium, “Mission first. Imagine if you didn’t get up on that podium, everyone in this school wouldn’t know about your fantastic project, or idea for your school and your community.” A quiet ego is an ego that puts team first, mission first, people first. I use the word ego there because kids, and there’s been studies that show this, often equate humility with weakness, but that’s not true. You really can have a very strong sense of self and be a server.
KW:
It connects to that idea of self-awareness that we talked about in the first installment of our interview. That if I know who I am, I know what risks I might be willing to take to offer my values, or to share who I am to my school, but that it’s going to take a certain amount of self-awareness to take those risks.
HK:
Yes, absolutely, and support. Some leadership work with students takes a lot of patience. Dr. Brian Little of Cambridge University is my guru in this arena. We are who we want to be, and his research is all about finding your passion. We talk a lot about this in schools, but I would say not so much in the context of stretching as an introvert or an extrovert. When you stretch in service, you step outside of your comfort zone in the service of a core personal project, a passion. You can experience great joy, right? And the scaffolding of the stretching is really important. This is where the patience needs to come in with the educators. As an example, “Well, if you want to run for that position, you are going to have to give a speech to the entire middle school student body, so let’s try and get you from point A to point B.” And that can take time, and patience, and support. And it can be beautiful!
The Stretch Toward Kase Leadership
KW:
Let’s talk about your big stretch and ask a little bit about your journey leaving the classroom. You were a classroom teacher and a professor for many years. You were the Education Director at Quiet Revolution. Now, you’ve written one book and are now writing another. How have you personally experienced this stretching yourself?
HK:
There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t miss the classroom. I love teaching and what brought me to get in touch with my authentic core was, ironically, not staying at home writing books, but my first classroom experience. I was a French teacher, and I found it very freeing to come alive in a different language. I get a lot of energy from the classroom and from kids, so I need to be mindful of that now because I do have a proclivity to find plenitude in solitude, on the one hand.
But on the other hand, the danger is that I realize, “Wait a minute. I have been alone for too long,” and I really crave those social connections. It’s very important to manage my energy calendar and make sure to see people! I really do derive energy from that, and I make sure that I still have teaching opportunities in my life. That said, when I look back to my last role in the school, the only place I could recharge was the bathroom.
In terms of recharging, I always felt like there was something wrong with me, and this is where gcLi comes in. When I was back one summer as a Scholar, I was giving a talk about my Closing the Gap girls’ leadership program. At the end of that session, the author Jess Lahey, who wrote The Gift of Failure and who happened to be the keynote that year, came up and said, “Oh, my gosh. I think you’re the person Susan Cain’s been looking for to be educational director of Quiet Revolution.”
It was at gcLi, where, by the way, I completely caught the leadership bug, that I discovered I wanted to found a leadership program for girls. It was one of the greatest experiences of my educational career, to come back fired up about the Pedagogy of Leadership® and then make it come alive in the school setting. And then to think that I was back talking about that program, meeting this author, connecting me with another author, and sure enough I’m out of the classroom and working as Educational Director of Quiet Revolution. I always have the gcLi model of professional development in the back of my mind.
KW:
It’s incredible how your worlds have collided, and yet you have maintained that connection to your authentic self. This work is so personal, and your passion comes through so clearly. In fact, you’ve decided to take it beyond writing books; you’ve recently founded a mission-driven organization called Kase Leadership Method. I’d love to hear more.
HK:
The Kase Leadership Method offers professional development for educators, workshops for students, and seminars and presentations for parents. The method is called the Strength-Stretch-Restore method. It’s the core of Kase Leadership, and it is rooted in my mission to empower introverts and extroverts alike to leverage their natural, innate strengths. This won’t come as a surprise, but introverts can step outside of their comfort zones to stretch with authenticity, and then work together to, as I like to say, unleash the creative potential of everyone at the table.
I love to give talks but I also want to empower Quiet Ambassadors in the community so that they can take ownership of assessing their cultural belonging, working with their colleagues to re-craft the language around anecdotal comments to shift from – and this is huge in my mind – thinking more broadly about classroom engagement rather than classroom participation.
I work with fellow educators to develop classroom techniques to assess children on active listening, one-on-one conversations, teamwork. Teamwork is still incredibly important, but we also need to scaffold it, for ourselves and for our students. We’re hitting all different social modalities. Ultimately, a school that embraces classroom engagement has a balance between solitude and collaboration.
KW:
Engagement also looks and feels different in this era of COVID-19. As schools have adapted and integrated distance learning models, how has that impacted the introverted learner and introvert-inclusivity? We have a screen between us, and therefore maybe that increases a sense of safety but yet, also, the permission to lean back and disengage.
HK:
At the beginning of our distance learning, there was a sense of, “Well, this is the introverts’ moment now. Introverts just love to stay at home in their pajamas, and this is going to be fantastic.” Well, it hasn’t quite been like that for introverts, particularly as Zoom has really taken over. Zoom burnout is as real as what can happen person to person in schools. We need to be mindful of it, and we need to give our introverted learners the same tools to express themselves. We have opportunities like the chat room where you can gather information; inviting and sharing an agenda in advance; getting feedback afterwards; utilizing the smaller breakout rooms. The bottom line is, I actually think my daughter said it the best the other day. She said, “The computer is like a drug.” She continued, “I am so drugged out.” We need to build that language around what we can be doing, how stimulating screens are. Even before this all happened, I used to say, “Let’s get the screens and the phones out of those recharging spaces we’re trying so painstakingly to build.”
Prudence & The Introverted Actor
KW:
You have not just one but two books coming out in the next six months. The book that you co-authored was just released, The Introverted Actor: Practical Approaches. This is such a fascinating endeavor. Tell us more about it.
HK:
I had the great fortune to be invited to be a scholar in residence at Michigan State University by the professor and director of theater and acting. My charge was to watch classes and give feedback. “How are we doing? Are our classroom practices really more geared towards extroverted learners?” I was watching a couple of improv classes and one might think, a nightmare for introverts; some tend not to want to think quickly or have that “just do it” approach to risk. Earlier we spoke about character strengths of introverts. But let’s revisit prudence, like humility, which often gets a bad rap in our society today. “You’re not moving fast enough, what’s wrong with you?”
Warren Buffett is a famously prudent individual. He takes time to make decisions, carefully, deliberately, after weighing options and pros and cons. That’s his style of decision-making. I witnessed this one improv teacher, and she was brilliant with how she was giving students a long runway to actually engage in improv. There was clear scaffolding so introverts knew what to expect with the next improv game.
There was already a culture of inclusivity within the teams, and I saw what can happen when you have a classroom culture that is fundamentally rooted in introvert/extrovert self-awareness. Again, this was an improv class and I saw risk-taking galore. It was really remarkable. One thing led to another, and I joined Rob Roznowski and Carolyn Conover, and we teamed up to write The Introverted Actor. It’s a more pointed topic, but it’s in the end very similar to Heard.
Our audience is actors, and particularly introverted actors who are often asked in their profession and in their training to behave like extroverts. If you think about auditioning and networking and the rehearsal hall, there’s a lot of pressure to be that spotlight-loving, gregarious, talkative risk-taker. When we were talking about this work at MSU, it became glaringly apparent that introverts are drawn to teaching. They’re drawn to acting. I think teachers are actors, and yet they need to have that self-awareness, that confidence, so that they will stay in the profession and give of themselves to the craft and to their audiences.
I also witnessed this incredible ability that I think all successful actors have: a high empathy quotient, an ability to get into the character. I wanted to support those introverted actors who have that. They’re in this less to be in front of the audience but more to get into that character. It’s very much like what happens to me when I’m a classroom teacher. Suddenly, I’m just teaching. I’m just excited to get the word out, and there’s really nothing like it in the field of theater and the field of acting. Our book can be very useful for any director or actor educator in schools. It’s a very practical guide, too.
Perspective
KW:
There’s such a drive to help introverts grow their awareness and see their own value. And then for the rest of us to, on a larger scale, see what would happen to our world and our society if we could just pause and offer that value and that validation in that space. So yes, we’re talking about actors and we’re talking about students and we’re talking about schools, but it really feels like there’s a bigger effort at play here. It really feels like it’s important, and it’s happening.
HK:
Yes. I was very moved by what you just said, and it is ultimately about setting one’s self and others free to be their truest and best selves. Continuing to reflect on introverts’ traits, the third character strength is perspective, or the ability to listen. By nature introverts are listeners and observers, and that’s also why I go back to that word engagement. This is about belonging. We know how important it is for community members to feel engaged, to feel valued. I used the term “culture of kindness” earlier, and that’s definitely part of it. It’s respecting one another. My mission is to add temperament and particularly this lens as a marker of identity. We’ve done amazing DEI work in our schools, and I want to keep the conversation going and push it forward about the Introvert/Extrovert spectrum.
We would never want anyone to feel as though they’re not normal. And yet, it can happen unconsciously. We might not even know where we might be favoring a talker over a listener. We can certainly use the techniques and strategies I share in the Kase Leadership Method to create a more inclusive environment for everyone.
KW:
And that inclusivity, I hope and I believe, will lead to greater understanding of each other, which then leads to a community that values all voices. I think ultimately if we’re going to have change in our world, if we’re going to become the society that we aspire to be, every voice has to matter and every voice has to have a place at the table. Maybe there needs to be a longer pause for those voices to come in. I cannot wait to read these books. I can’t wait to bring it into my own personal practice. The value that you’re bringing to the classroom, to educators, to the students, it’s just phenomenal. I’m imagining that right now both of us, after this conversation, need to do some recharging pretty soon.
HK:
Absolutely! And that’s okay.
KW:
Thank you so much for your time, and for all of the work that you’re doing to promote this incredibly important mission, and to share your purposeful work with the gcLi audience and beyond.