by Jeremy LaCasse, Executive Director, gcLi; Assistant Head and Teacher of History, Taft School, Watertown, CT
Two equally powerful forces drive the creation of community and influence our teaching of leadership. The first is uncertainty and the second is belonging. Uncertainty is everywhere and omnipresent. Belonging, or at least the sense of belonging, is often elusive. Often, students, parents, and faculty want to remove uncertainty and correspondingly, think that belonging should be absolute at all times. The sentiment on both of these items is misguided, failing to see the need for uncertainty, in appropriate measures, for helping develop resilience and, similarly, that a lack of feeling of belonging is an important part of helping developing brains to understand what belonging actually is.
In a recent Bowdon College magazine article, Erika Nyhus wrote about why uncertainty is helpful. When we think about developing people, particularly adolescents, any certainty, absolute conviction, mitigates the possibility of learning and also, the perceived security from certainty – in school and in life – limits the resilience that comes from navigating the unknown. In a world where people want guaranteed outcomes, helping students develop the capacity to navigate – and lead in – uncertainty is essential to helping create the resilience necessary to be a successful person and leader.
Dr. Nyhus’s article considers students who have an absolute plan for traveling through their educational experience and the benefits of the surprises – literally things that could not have been known in advance – that significantly shape their experience. Having a plan and ambition is good, but, as the Yiddish proverb goes, if you want to make God laugh, have a plan. With this in mind, how do we approach helping our students both appreciate and navigate the inherent uncertainty of the world, now and in the future?
Jennifer B. Wallace talks about “mattering,” the idea that you both belong and are contributing to something greater than yourself, as a key part of helping people navigate the uncertainty of the world and life. Often, the spot where people want certainty is that they belong. Much of childhood is trying to determine whether a person belongs and what belonging means. In our schools, one of the challenges is that we focus on making sure everyone belongs, but we fail to understand the inherent testing of this sentiment and the second, and critical, step in the belonging process of mattering or contributing to something larger than oneself.
Given these two elements of certainty and belonging, what is a teacher of leadership to do to help students navigate uncertainty and contribute to the greater good? In simplest terms, teachers need to work to help each student to see how they belong so as to realize the next critical piece, contributing to a larger communal good. Given that people often prioritize their own need for certainty and guaranteed results, getting them to think about helping others feel they belong and work together for the greater good is a significant challenge.
A leadership teacher cultivates belonging by actively engaging with student feedback and understanding what impacts their feelings, thereby building the trust needed for students to accept the uncertainty of their position within the community. Judgment, the analysis and critique of a person’s contribution to the community and the perceived intention behind their actions, quickly erodes a person’s ability to feel supported and incorporate feedback into their practice. In other words, teachers need to focus first on their relationship with their students, helping to build the critical trust that helps students incorporate the feedback and learning.
Once students have that trust and feel that they belong, they have the supports, structures, and, hopefully, fortitude to deal with the uncertainty inherent in leading. As Ronald Heifetz notes, leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can absorb. Often, student leaders think leadership is exhilarating, making people happy, and only resulting in glorious success. They fail to understand the significant disquiet of leading a group from where they are to some place new, the new place requiring the group’s learning of new skills and practices to achieve that goal. Some teachers dislike the uncertainty inherent in teaching, preferring to tell students what they need to know, never challenging students to truly demonstrate the learning or engaging them to utilize their creative capacity to solve novel problems.
While leadership entails a person being aware of whatever is happening around them and choosing behaviors, from a place of empathy and courage, that help the group to achieve its goals, it is also working diligently to help each person feel they belong to the group and contribute to the shared effort and learning to achieve the group’s goal. Only when each member of the group feels they belong can they truly commit to a larger shared goal, a meaningful superordinate goal. Consider the student section at a collegiate sporting event. The students in that group feel like they belong as evidenced in their shared attire, facepaint, and actions and have the shared goal of supporting their team and school. As teachers of leadership, we need to help our students know they belong and actively work to make sure each other person in the group feels connected to the group and to the work of achieving the shared and uncertain goal.
Our world currently is filled with uncertainty and marginalization, alienation, and isolation. In the words of Mother Teresa, “if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” In the face of uncertainty, helping students learn to create communities of belonging and shared work is critical to helping students develop leadership skills, resilience, and, most critically, the sense of how important we all are to each other. In my experience, the greatest human achievements have come when we have been connected in shared effort, and teaching leadership enhances the likelihood students in your school community will better understand that concept and engage in positive and shared work. We can and must do this together!
Links:
“A Boost from Uncertainty” (Nyhus, Bowdoin Magazine)
Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Danger of Leading (Heifetz & Linsky)
Jeremy LaCasse, Executive Director, gcLi, is also currently Assistant Head of School for Student Life at the Taft School. LaCasse held the Shotwell Chair for Leadership and Character Development at Berkshire School. He also directed the Ritt Kellogg Mountain Program; served as Dean of the sixth and fourth forms; taught European history and Medieval history; and coached the ski and crew programs. Following his time at Berkshire, he served as the Dean of Students at Fountain Valley School of Colorado, and following FVS, he was the Head of senior school at Shady Side Academy in Pittsburgh, PA; the Head of Kents Hill School in Kents Hill, ME; and the Assistant Head of School at Cheshire Academy, in Cheshire, CT. He graduated with a B.A. in History from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine and earned an M.A. in private school leadership from the Klingenstein Center, Teachers College at Columbia University.