For example, a teacher responsible for teaching The Great Gatsby must consider how the book will be taught, what she will focus on, and how she intends for students to develop and grow through the study. Each day, she walks into a room full of students in need of direction for approaching the text. This requires leadership.

In modern educational circles, we often speak, not of leadership, but of “classroom management.” Unfortunately, this phrase is embedded with faulty assumptions about who students are, what the purpose of learning is, and how we are to manage them toward some desirable end. As a result, classroom management techniques are problematic in two key ways.

First, classroom management techniques are often behavioristic. In other words, they seek to address the behavior of students through systems of external rewards and consequences, rather than aiming to form the whole person of the child, especially the heart. Strategies are deployed to artificially motivate behaviors of respect, obedience, service, and even kindness in a way disconnected from the child’s internal moral development. Is this child growing in a love and understanding of the idea of respect for authority? How is the child becoming more servant-hearted in her disposition? These questions are not usually asked in typical classroom management conversations.

Second, classroom management techniques are often task-oriented rather than people-oriented. This makes sense since the phrase emerged during the post-industrial revolution in which the effective and efficient completion of tasks was prized above all else. Now, at its best, modern business management theory is people-oriented, but most managers too easily slip into the mindset of “How do I get this employee to perform this task?” rather than “How do I lead this employee on a path toward growth and increasing expertise?” The latter focuses on the development of the talent and skill of people, not simply whether they are hitting the deadlines. 

To equip teachers to grow as true leaders of their students, in this article I will recommend three recently published leadership books that contain relevant ideas for classroom leadership. These resources will help teachers see their true leadership role and therefore embrace the responsibility for them to invest deeply in the lives of their students. While teachers will need to push through some of the business-focused examples of these resources, the underlying ideas are both relevant and applicable for classroom leadership today.

Multipliers by Liz Wiseman 

The first book I want to recommend is Multipliers (HarperCollins, 2017) by researcher Liz Wiseman. In this book, Wiseman sets out to show how leaders can make people under their supervision smarter, rather than targeting mere compliance. Early on, she differentiates between two managers, the Genius Maker and the Genius (9). The genius maker grows people’s intelligence by “extracting the smarts and maximum effort from each member on the team.” This type of leader talks only about 10% of the time, thereby making space for others to grow through active participation in coming up with solutions to a problem. 

In contrast, the genius is self-oriented. He is smart and successful, and everyone in the room knows who has the best ideas. He may facilitate “conversations” but soon these turn into opportunities for him to share his correct views with others. After all, he is the genius. Why not just listen to him? The result is that people do not have the permission to think for themselves or the legitimate responsibility to make decisions. It all goes back to what the genius thinks is right. 

For Wiseman, the genius maker is a multiplier of of intelligence while the genius is actually a diminisher. At heart, multipliers “invoke each person’s unique intelligence and create an atmosphere of genius–innovation, productive effort, and collective intelligence” (10). The upshot is that these leaders not only access people’s current capability, they stretch it. People actually report getting smarter under the supervision of multipliers. The fundamental assumption of a multiplier is “People are smart and will figure this out” whereas the assumption of the diminisher is “They will never figure this out without me” (20). 

Teachers can become multipliers of intelligence in their classrooms by resisting the urge to be the residential genius. Although they are older, smarter, and more experienced, these assets can be leveraged to empower their students toward growing their own abilities, rather than making it all about the teacher.

Diagnostic Questions for Teachers:

• Do you empower students in your classroom to make major contributions to class culture, discussions, learning, and skill demonstration? 
• Is there room in your classroom for students to make mistakes as you stretch them to attempt difficult assignments?
• Do you ask your students to explain complex concepts to their peers rather than yourself?
• Does your approach to grading grow student intellectual confidence or does it foster dependence on your own intelligence?

Boundaries for Leaders by Dr. Henry Cloud

Boundaries for Leaders (HarperCollins, 2013) is written by clinical psychologist Dr. Henry Cloud, an author recognized for his work on cultivating healthy relationships. In Chapter 1, he writes, “This book is about what leaders need to do in order for people to accomplish a vision” (2). The key word here for Cloud is people. He will go on to argue that people perform their best work in healthy work cultures that take into consideration the psychological well-being of both employer and employee. By setting good boundaries in place and leading in a way that people’s brains can follow, Cloud contends, good results will come. 

Cloud writes that boundaries are made up of two things: what you create and what you allow (15). A boundary is a property line, marking out who is responsible and for what. When someone is given real ownership of something, anything that happens under their supervision only happens because they created it or allowed it. 

In top-performing classrooms, teachers teach in a way that makes it possible for their students’ brains to function as they were designed (25). This happens through setting good boundaries. Cloud writes, “Show me a person, team, or a company that gets results, and I will show you the leadership boundaries that make it possible” (26).

As a psychologist, the author is aware of how the human brain works and what leaders can do to maximize brain health and productivity. In turn, teachers can use these insights as they seek to pass on knowledge, skills, and virtues to their students.

For example, it is helpful for a teacher to understand that the brain relies on three essential properties to achieve a particular task, be it the following of a classroom procedure or the completion of an assignment:

1. Attention: the ability to focus on relevant stimuli, and block out what is not relevant (“Do this”)
2. Inhibition: the ability to “not do” certain actions that could be distracting, irrelevant, or eve destructive (“Don’t do this”)
3. Working Memory: the ability to retain and access relevant information for reasoning, decision-making, and taking future actions (“Remember and build on this relevant information”)

As teachers design their lessons and think through what they want their students to accomplish for the day, it is beneficial to think through these three neurological elements for the completion of a task. When we ignore one or more of these elements, we risk short-circuiting our students optimal use of the way God designed their brains.

Diagnostic Questions for Teachers:

• What student behaviors in your classroom have you created or allowed?
• How do your lessons promote student attention on what is most important for the curricular objective?
• What procedures and expectations have you established and maintained to ensure that what is not important or destructive is not allowed in?
• How are you building your students’ working memory of key information to help them complete assignments with greater success? 

The Motive by Patrick Lencioni 

The Motive (Wiley, 2020), written especially for CEOs, explores the underlying motivation of a good leader. Author Patrick Lencioni, well-known for his book Five Dysfunctions of a Team, illustrates through a leadership parable that one’s motivation for leading will dictate what one prioritizes and how he or she spends her time.

In the parable, two types of leadership motivation are at play (135). Reward-centered leadership rests on the fundamental assumption that the leader, having been selected for the role, has arrived and therefore possesses the freedom to design her job around what she most enjoys. It is the belief that the leader’s work should be pleasant and enjoyable because the leadership position is the reward. She therefore has the freedom to avoid mundane, unpleasant, or uncomfortable work if she so pleases, which she does.

In contrast, responsibility-centered leadership assumes that leadership is all about responsibility and service. It is the belief that being a leader is responsible; therefore, the experience of leading should be difficult and challenging (though certainly not without elements of gratification). 

To be clear, Lencioni writes that no leader perfectly embodies one form of motivation or the other. But one of these motives will be predominant and leaders need to be self-aware of what drives them. Reward-centered leaders often resist and avoid doing the difficult things that only they can do for the team they are leading. As a result, the whole organization suffers.

When it comes to leading a classroom, there are all sorts of things that a teacher would prefer not to do: address difficult student behavior, call a parent with bad news to share, have “family talks” with the whole class about negative classroom culture issues, or give a low grade on an assignment. But to be the best leaders they can, teachers need to lean into these responsibilities and thereby discharge their role teacher well.

Diagnostic Questions for Teachers

• What is your motivation for becoming a teacher?
• What are the 3-5 things you can do for your class that no one else can do? 
• How are you caring for your class culture, especially rooting out dysfunctional behavior and forming healthy interpersonal dynamics?
• What kind of feedback do you give your students on their behavior and work? 
• When was the last time you had a difficult conversation with a student in which you addressed unhealthy behavior?
• When was the last time you complained about a student’s or parent’s behavior? What steps do you need to take to address it?
• How often are you reminding your students of the big picture of their education, your particular curriculum, and the core values of your classroom?

Conclusion

Teachers are the leaders of their classrooms, responsible for casting vision for their students, supporting them in their work, and cultivating healthy classroom cultures. Rather than deploying classroom management techniques which can be overly behavioristic and task-oriented, teachers should embrace their role as leaders and focus on developing their people. By helping teachers become better leaders, we will see dynamic classrooms, better learning results, and, most importantly, thriving students.

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• Unclogging toilets and mopping up sewage in the restrooms of your new facility
• Setting up hundreds of chairs for an event on your own because you know you can’t ask any more of your teachers or volunteers
• Subbing for Calculus one day and Kindergarten the next, outside of your comfort zone and with unclear lesson plans
• Kindly mediating an hour and a half long meeting with a teacher and an unhappy set of parents who will likely leave the school
• Trying to keep track of complicated budgets for various areas of the school, when you’ve got no background in accounting
• Picking up a screaming and flailing child from the hall and carrying him into your office, providing counseling to calm the child down, then calling the parents to follow up on a strategy for discipline
• Planning events and coordinating the speaking roles of many different parties: teachers, board members, parents and your own boss, the Head of School
• Calmly and gratefully receiving constant criticisms and proposed “solutions” from well-meaning teachers, parents, board members and colleagues, who only see part of the picture you see and who don’t understand the time and resource constraints the school is under
• Calling sets of parents who have applied to your school to navigate a tricky conversation sharing feedback from admission testing for their child who is not prepared to enter on grade level
• Feeling the need to innovate new programs even while you know you don’t have enough time to do everything you’ve already committed to doing well
• Experiencing the pressure to be an expert in 50 different areas of academics and the business of running a school, and knowing you actually have expertise in just a handful
• Dealing with the frustrations of people not following your rules or instructions, whether it’s students, parents, or even teachers, meaning you have to take time out of your schedule to tackle another potentially challenging interpersonal conversation
• Never knowing exactly what sort of crisis you’re headed for today when you turn the keys in the ignition and drive off to school in the morning, but knowing from experience that some sort of crisis is more than likely

Serving as a Principal at a classical Christian school is not for the faint of heart. 

In the list above, I’ve tried to highlight some of the elements of a principal’s regular duties that are often left off of your typical job description. If you’re skeptical about the above list, I can assure you that these are all autobiographical to one extent or another, and that I could have gone on with other categories of tasks, equally as difficult, unexpected, stressful and emotionally fraught.

A few years into my tenure as a school administrator I remember attending a session at a private school conference where the presenter shared that the increase in salary and benefits accorded mid-level leaders at private schools often does not match up well with the increased stresses, challenges, time commitment and responsibilities. 

Now I’m not writing this article to dissuade aspiring academic leaders at classical Christian schools. We are in desperate need of more men and women who are competent and willing to embrace the role. Nor even am I writing for the indulgence of a good, old-fashioned pity party for us principals (as tempting as that is…). 

Instead, at the instigation of my current Head of School, I think it’s valuable to explore some of the costs of being a principal or other mid-level academic leader at a small to midsize classical Christian school (say, under 250 students), or else a Head of School at a small school (under 125). This role has a unique set of challenges, and just as Jesus warned of the costs of discipleship, it is my hope that by clarifying the costs of principal leadership at a classical Christian school, more aspiring leaders will be able to willingly take up this specific cross with eyes wide-open and the mental and emotional resources to do so successfully. 

Before we begin, I would note a caveat. Your mileage may vary: not all school situations are alike, and so some of the aspects I mentioned above might be successfully carried by someone else on staff. But at the same time there might be other job requirements I won’t mention. I have used specifics to paint a general picture, not to detail an actual job description. 

So, you think you want to be a principal… Have you considered that being a principal is…

1) a dirty, messy and physically exhausting job,

2) an emotionally draining job that requires you to maintain a relentless optimism and joyful mood in the midst of disheartening circumstances,

3) a multifaceted job requiring a range of competencies and a dizzying variety of challenges,

4) a leadership nightmare because you are always navigating several different audiences, and

5) an ideal job for a teacher and philosopher who can maintain equanimity in an active life? 

Let’s tackle each of these five aspects of the job of principal in term. Hopefully, this list will deter the faint of heart and those who are not suited to the demands of the position. But more than that, hopefully, it will help other aspiring principals prepare themselves for such a noble task. As Paul says of the role of overseer in 1 Timothy 3:1, so I say, “If anyone aspires to the office of principal, he desires a noble task. But not one for the faint of heart or unqualified. Let each one test himself to see whether he has what it takes.”

If you’re still reading this article and you are neither a principal nor an aspiring principal, I would encourage you to read on. Parents and teachers can benefit from understanding better the demands that are placed on those who are leading them. This can give them compassion when their administrator (inevitably) fails them in some way. I know that I have been helped and encouraged to shoulder the challenges of my role by kind and thoughtful teachers and parents who looked beyond their own concerns and showed appreciation for me and an understanding of my circumstances.

In a similar way, board members and heads of school might be sobered to recognize the complexities and day-to-day realities of the mid-level administrator. Inspired and multi-competent leadership at this level might not be the only inciting factor in a school’s improvement and growth to maturity, but it’s a major one. A principal who can successfully tackle the physical, emotional, many-hat-wearing, and philosophical leadership demands of the role can propel a school on to excellence. This implies that such persons should be appropriately trained, sought out, empowered and supported.

All of us at Educational Renaissance have served in mid-level principal or academic leadership roles at schools, so we have a special concern for how this role can function as a lever for genuine classical renewal and excellence at a school. Without further ado, we count the costs of principal leadership.

So, you think you want to be a principal…

1) Have you considered that being a principal is a dirty, messy and physically demanding job?

If you think going into school administration might release you from the demands of teaching and give you the luxury of a desk job, think again. 

While it may seem like teaching keeps you on your feet all day, and the principal can sit behind her desk for hours on end, this image doesn’t adequately reflect the role at a small classical Christian school. 

The fact is that many, if not most, classical Christian schools cannot afford the full custodial staff of established schools. This makes the principal’s job dirtier and messier than your typical office job. There may be exceptions where the church a school is renting from has a competent and well-run custodial and facilities staff. But in general, aspiring principals should expect that addressing toilet issues and vomit cleanup are part of the J-O-B. 

Event set up and tear-down also require moving chairs and tables, purchasing food and drinks, napkins and plasticware. Even if you engage other employees and volunteers, principals often have the privilege and the responsibility to lead the way in this sort of manual labor and cleanup. 

In addition, a principal’s day should be active if she is to be successful in her role of leading teachers, parents, students and staff. The sheer weight of meetings can take a physical toll, if you’re doing your job right. I schedule bi-weekly check in meetings with every teacher or staff member who reports to me, and I think this meeting cadence is necessary for keeping everyone engaged and coaching them to their full potential. Likewise, if your school is growing, you should be interviewing every set of new parents before you admit them to your school. You should also connect with every set of parents once a year before re-enrollment, either through in person meetings or on the phone if you want to proactively engage parents and solve issues before they become a family’s reason for leaving the school. 

Then consider all the ad hoc meetings, meetings with coaches, fine arts directors, club leaders, community leaders and vendors for various services the school needs. The principal needs physical stamina simply to keep up with the pace of meetings. 

In addition to these meetings, the principal should be regularly walking around the school and visiting the classrooms of teachers. A rigorous schedule of observing teachers is the quickest and most effective way to increase the quality of teaching and learning that I know of. I am regularly held accountable for a certain number of observations a week. This discipline more than any other contributes to classical Christian excellence in a school. 

The energy demands of this sort of role alone are considerable. If you are currently a principal or are considering becoming one in the near future, make it a priority to care for your physical wellbeing through a healthy diet, a full night’s sleep and regular exercise. And as you face the temptation to cave on any of these due to the pressures and stresses of the role, refuse to give in and play the long game on your effectiveness. 

2) Have you considered that being a principal is an emotionally draining job that requires you to maintain a relentless optimism and joyful mood in the midst of disheartening circumstances?

If your school is anything like the schools I have worked at, it is full of human beings. And the fact of the matter is that human beings sin. They talk behind one another’s backs. They grumble and complain. They don’t always live up the high ideals of classical virtue and communal cooperation. 

And many of these problems will come knocking on your door if you are the principal. Even if you don’t have to solve every issue that rears its ugly head, you will know about more problems in your school than you care to. You must bear the weight of disappointment and, to a certain extent, anxiety for the possible negative effects of these issues on the future of your school. You may not be suffering persecution like the apostle Paul, but sometimes being a principal makes me think of the end of Paul’s rant in 2nd Corinthians 11 about his sufferings, 

“And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant?” (2 Cor 11:28-29 ESV)

A mentor of mine once compared school leadership to the role of a priest in the Old Testament. You must be able to bear the sins and heartaches of the community and lift them up to God, not spit back at the community the hurt and pain and disappointment. You must find a way to be joyful and optimistic, even in those moments when it feels like the institution that you’ve been pouring out blood, sweat and tears to build is tearing itself apart. You need to be able to maintain your equilibrium with student discipline problems, teachers crying in your office, and background drama about this or that initiative or decision. 

A few tips for doing this well include having clear boundaries as a school leader. Have a regular practice of what Cal Newport calls Shutdown Complete. Close your laptop at the end of the day and stop responding to email unless there is a real emergency. And no, that issue that a parent emailed you about late at night is not a real emergency. Seriously consider not getting your work email on your phone, as I do. Don’t try to solve every issue or problem. Know what you can control and what you can’t. Have realistic expectations. 

Your classical Christian school is not going to be a utopia that brings Christ’s kingdom fully to earth before Jesus comes again. Don’t put all your hope in the institution. I believe in institution-building and the power of classical Christian schools, but we must remember that arguably no Christian institution has stayed faithful to its calling for more than several generations. Human institutions, no matter how fine, do not last forever. 

On the other hand, the human beings you work with each day, the students and parents, teachers and fellow staff, are eternal beings. C.S. Lewis’ description in “Weight of Glory” helps me keep my perspective in the midst of these emotional demands:

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

3) Have you considered that being a principal is a multifaceted job requiring a range of competencies and a dizzying variety of challenges?

The principal at a small classical Christian school must be a generalist. There are too many aspects of the business of running a school that will neglected, if you focus most of your attention on any one. Spend all your time on improving the curriculum, and you will blow out the budget AND your teachers will have problems with student discipline. Spend all your time on classroom discipline and order, and the lack of extracurriculars and sports will hamper your growth. Spend all your time on planning events for parents, and your teachers will be worn out and disengaged. Take my advice and spread your time wisely between the things I mentioned, and your school still may struggle because you have no marketing and admissions strategy.

In order to function well as a principal, you must be ready and willing to learn about aspects of the business of running a school. Whether it’s heading up the marketing and admissions of the school, as I do, or tackling budgeting and payroll, insurance, fundraising, or event planning, you’re likely going to have to figure out how to be competent at other major functions of the business of a modern school. It’s pointless to protest and say, “Medieval schoolmasters didn’t have to learn how to manage a website and run online ads for Open Houses.” We’re not in the Middle Ages anymore and running a school in our society is complex.

It may help to think of a flourishing classical Christian school on the analogy of a symphony rather than a solo performance. School communities have many aspects that must be in harmony and must grow and develop in harmony. The principal (and head of school) are not solo musicians who light up the stage in their area of competence and skill. They are more like conductors who keep time for everyone and bring different sections of instrument in at the right time for their special moment. Schools grow and improve because many things are going well in many different areas of the school. 

Principals can’t just play to their strengths. They must operate in their weaknesses until the school has grown to the point that they can raise up other leaders who will outshine them. When you don’t have a marketing director, you still have to do marketing. And in fact, you will never be able to afford a marketing director, until you have done improved your marketing to a certain point. It’s a painful but true irony that these core functions of the school need attention most, when you have the least resources to give them. 

The best analogy for this that I have treasured over the years is the plate spinning routine of Henrik Bothe. Watch the whole video if you are an administrator at a small school, and everything about the experience of the school year will suddenly make sense.

4) Have you considered that being a principal is a leadership nightmare because you are always navigating several different audiences?

Let me explain what I mean. In most businesses, it’s clear who the customer is and the product is fairly simple. In the business of private schools, the parent is the customer, but your chief relationship is with their child. The child’s education is the product but it’s a challenging project with a long time horizon and inevitable ups and downs that you can’t entirely control. This creates a unique communication dynamic to say the least. Add to this the ethos of a Christian school, and many of the leadership challenges that churches have suddenly enter into the mix. Add in the specifics of classical education with all the variety of expectations that parents will have of that term, and now most of the things you can say are liable to misunderstanding from a number of fronts. Lastly, consider that your customers are paying a price tag for their children’s education, when most parents pay nothing to send their kids to government schools. They are understandably going to be pickier and more demanding about all aspects of the school.

As my Head of School often says at prospective parent interviews, “We deal with people’s money, their religion and their kids.” If that isn’t a situation fraught with rhetorical peril, I don’t know what is. Emphasize too much a particular denominational distinctive at your Christian school and half your audience might grow concerned. Talk up the discipline and rigor of classical education, and some parents may ask where the joy and love of learning have gone. Tell them about the joy and play-learning, the discovery centers and discussions, and some will ask why their child’s test scores aren’t high enough and why they keep hearing about this other student misbehaving in class.

One of the main lessons I learned in my first few years as an administrator is the need to understand and sympathize with the parent’s perspective. When I was just a teacher, I was so focused on exploring the philosophy of classical education and on my own experiences of teaching that I couldn’t envision things through a parent’s eyes. A principal must be able to toggle back and forth between his teacher hat and his parent hat. 

I’ve also been really helped by the statement of Keith Nix, Head of School at Veritas in Richmond, that school leaders should emphasize more what they are for, rather than what they are against. Polemics have their place, but speaking in terms of what you are for enables you to strike the right note for multiple concerned parties. You can pair together seemingly contradictory goals like ‘joy’ in the classroom and ‘order’, high standards and high support, excellence and intentional care. It’s also important to remember that when you speak at events, you are being heard both by teachers and by parents, by board members and by fellow staff. In some ways the role of a principal is mediator in chief. In another sense you must have the conviction to stake out a direction and say hard truths that neither party may be particularly happy to hear. 

5) Lastly, have you considered that being a principal is an ideal job for a teacher and philosopher who can maintain equanimity in an active life? 

If you’ve read all that I’ve shared so far and are still undeterred, the role of a principal might just be the noble task for you. So, I want to end on a positive note. The particular beauty of a role like principal is how it combines several exciting and challenging tasks. The role begs for a leader with some level of philosophical bent, especially at a classical Christian school. If you are to stake out a direction for the academic programs of the whole school, you should ideally do so from a deep well. But you must also be conversant with practical concerns. You should be idealistic enough to challenge the status quo of modern education and realistic enough to work improvements out gradually with real people in real time. 

You should be a competent teacher, not only because you may need to substitute for kindergarten or seniors, but also because you must teach teachers the art of teaching, the art of resolving conflict well, the practical details of lunchroom expectations, and the grand philosophy of education.

The ideal principal has a hunger to learn and grow and half wishes for a life of contemplation and study but loves the activity of people and planning too much to fully embrace scholarship alone. For the principal the active life of school leadership is cast with a contemplative hue. Practical application and philosophical consideration must be blended well. The principal must love pedagogy and people, building programs and performance evaluations. 

So, you think you want to be a principal? It’s a noble task if you have what it takes!

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How can teachers approach this year in a way that is different from the past? Experienced teachers may have a good idea at this point what their growth goals are for the year. To be sure, taking inventory of one’s skill in the craft of teaching is important. However, sometimes as people we need more than a new goal to pursue. We need a spiritual and mental reset.

In this blog, I want to encourage teachers to consider ways they might approach this year with more self-awareness and an increasing sense of peace. So often the frantic nature of our modern world throws us off kilter. But classical educators, with our eyes fixed on the good, true, and beautiful, ought to be different. Let us explore, then, some practical ways we might begin to cultivate peacefulness within ourselves, ultimately looking to the Lord to fill us with the peace that can only come from Him.

The Value of Self-Reflection 

Self-reflection is a helpful exercise to both begin and end your day. If you already have a morning devotional routine, then you can probably just add this to the mix. During self-reflection, you want to think through the elements of your day that you expect to be the most rewarding and challenging. What are you most looking forward to? What are you dreading? How do you hope to act and react throughout the hard parts? These sorts of questions can begin to prepare you emotionally for what could happen and equip you to respond how you would like to in real time.

A question I have started asking myself in the morning is, “At the end of the day, what do I hope to be most proud of?” Almost always, my answer has been that “I would love and serve people well.” Admittedly, I am somewhat surprised by my answer. With a full day of work before me, coupled with my goal-oriented personality, you might think it would be some accomplishment that would bring me the most satisfaction. But when I answer the question, assuming I am being honest with myself, the answer has to do with how I relate to those around me.

Self-reflection is also a helpful practice for the end of the day. Questions like “What did I do well today? What am I most proud of? How did I respond in the scenario I knew would be challenging?” can help bring closure to what perhaps has been an otherwise challenging day. The reality we must come to embrace is that life is not perfect. There will always be situations we wish had gone differently. But by asking these sorts of questions and processing what did happen, we can grow in embracing reality and see that God’s gracious plan is sufficient for our needs.

Additionally, through self-reflection, we grow in awareness of ourselves, both our words and our deeds. To this point, leadership professor Harry Kramer writes,

Being self-reflective means that when you’re at the top of that sine curve, you already know what you’ll do when things do go so well. You will be alert, and prepared for those initial signs of disappointment or upset, and you’ll act on them quickly, without getting sidetracked, being surprised or losing precious energy to worry, fear, anxiety, pressure or stress. Without self-reflection, you have chosen to wait until a crisis hits to figure out what you’re going to do, and by then it’s too late.

Harry Kraemer., Becoming the Best: Build a World-Class Organization Through Values-Based Leadership (Wiley, 2015), p. 22

When teachers practice self-reflection, they grow prepared mentally and spiritually for what surprises might come that day. Whether it is a misbehaving student, an upset parent, or overbearing administrator, teachers can approach the day with an inner-sense of peace grounded in God’s grace for them.

Leaning into Leisure 

As Josef Pieper observed many years ago in Leisure: The Basis of Culture, we live in a world that has largely reduced humans to workers. Education, family, and society have all become servants of economic output. To his point, more and more Americans are putting in 50 or 60 hour work weeks, as the research shows, leaving little desire for meaningful rest when the work week ends, if it does at all.

The solution, according to Pieper, is leisure. He writes, “Leisure, it must be clearly understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude–it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend, or a vacation. It is in the first place an attitude of the mind, a condition of the soul, and as such utterly contrary to the ideal of ‘worker’…” (46).

What Pieper is getting at here is that leisure is not merely equivalent to non-work. It is not the default state of mind we find ourselves in when we are not on the clock. Rather, leisure is a contemplative state of being in which we grow as integrated selves and experience wholeness. It means not being busy, but letting things happen.

As Christians, we can introduce a spiritual layer to the conversation: leisure is the experience of connecting with God and growing in our reliance upon Him. To do this, we need time and space from activity. As we sit in silence, pondering the state of our being, our minds can further contemplate the nature of God and His eternal attributes: His holiness, eternality, and omniscience, for example. As we do so, we grow in acuity of our own finitude and the need to rest within the hands of God.

Reading to See

Finally, teachers can prepare for the upcoming school year by making time to read. In this way, they feed and nurture their own intellects even as they plan to nurture the intellects of their students. Admittedly, this way of thinking is quite counter-cultural. We have come to view education as a transaction of information that requires little intellectual depth for oneself. So long as the PowerPoints are made and lesson plans are full, preparation for the year is complete.

But what if real teaching is a meeting of the minds? If this is the case, then the teacher’s intellect is just as important for the learning that will take place as the students. Teachers can come to each lesson prepared to learn themselves, to change and be changed, by the knowledge they encounter.

In his latest book, Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state and Nobel Peace Prize winner, examines the lives of six great political leaders from the 20th century.

Adrian Woolrdridge, writing at Bloomberg on Kissinger’s work, observes, 

All six of Kissinger’s heroes were serious readers and writers. Sadat spent almost six years in solitary confinement with only books for comfort. In 1933, Adenauer retreated to a monastery to escape from the Nazis and spent his time studying two papal encyclicals, promulgated by Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, which applied Catholic teachings to socioeconomic conditions. Thatcher read her official briefs until early in the morning and drew attention to grammatical errors and stylistic blunders. De Gaulle wrote some immortal French. Deep literacy provided them with what Max Weber called “proportion” — “the ability to allow realities to impinge on you while maintaining an inner calm and composure.” It also provided them with a sense of perspective as they put daily events into the wider scheme of history or even God’s will.

When teachers read, especially when they read deep literature, their minds enter a state of deep contemplation and peace. After a busy school day, with the bustling of student activity, reading can be a strategic way to unwind. Of course, there are lots of other great ways to rest, but I would suggest that specifically for teachers, reading can be an exceptionally enriching activity. It feeds the intellect, plants new ideas in our minds, and, as Wooldridge mentions above, allows us to view daily events within a wider frame of history and, ultimately, God’s sovereign hand within it.

Conclusion

As teachers prepare for the start of the 2022-2023 school year, there is a lot they could and should do. But amidst their teacher checklists and marching orders from administration, my encouragement is to take some time to develop new habits. Self-reflection, intentional leisure, and reading to see are just three examples to help you begin.

Let me close with some encouragement from scripture. Towards the end of Colossians, Paul writes, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word and deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col. 3:15-17). More than anything else, may teachers at our schools this year be filled with the Word and Spirit of Christ, remembering that they are His hands and feet, equipped for every good work.

What ideas come to mind for you as you seek to start off the school year on a strong note? Comment below to share your thoughts with fellow teachers.

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The sole true end of education is to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

As educators, we get excited when classrooms come alive: Hands shoot up. Eyes brighten. And body language across the room broadcasts that discovery is underway. 

The other day I stepped in to sub for our science teacher and experienced a fresh taste of these kinds of moments. The class had been studying insects all semester and the topic of the day was beetles. Now, my background is in the humanities, not science, and my teaching experience is not in science instruction. As I studied the lesson plan and scanned the text, the wheels in my mind began to turn. On the one hand, I felt inadequate. What did I know about beetles and the broader field of entomology? How could I step in with minimal prep and pull off an excellent lesson? But on the other hand, all was well. Despite my lack of expertise, I knew what I needed to do: lean on the teaching techniques I had accumulated over the years.

Teaching is a craft. It requires a set of complex skills that, when carefully honed over time, come together with mastery to create something new. These skills in turn can be broken down into techniques. 

For example, cultivating a strong classroom culture is a skill. It takes thought, sustained effort, and experience to lead a group of students to interact, collaborate, study, and speak a certain way. It takes practice to learn the secret to holding students to high expectations while letting them never doubt for a second that you support and care for their well-being. If you were to ask a master teacher how she does it, she may not be able to tell you at first. She may even attribute the culture to great students or just getting lucky. But if you press her on specifics, or better, take the time to observe, you will learn that the specific things she does and says to make the culture come alive. In other words, techniques.

Another example: supporting each student to reach his or her full potential as a learner. We probably all have memories growing up of certain teachers who were “easier” than others. Perhaps they would not grade very rigorously or they would let you just get away with napping in the back. In these classrooms, only a small percentage of students actually cared, and an even small percentage applied themselves fully. Most students were not called up to reach their full potential. Sadly, this sort of classroom is probably more often the norm than the exception. But it does not have to be that way. Again, when teachers are equipped with the right techniques, they can pretty quickly make small adjustments and transform students from passive spectators to engaged learners.

Going back to my science class on beetles, I committed right away to using two techniques. First, I committed to a technique from Teach Like a Champion 2.0 called Cold-Call. Instead of calling only on students who raised their hands, I called on students at random. No student could hide. No student could take a pass. All students were invited into the learning experience.

Second, I committed to asking questions more often than providing answers. To some extent, of course, I did not have much of a choice. Having studied entomology all semester, these students knew much more about insects than I did. If I entered the classroom with the intent to wax eloquent, I would not last long. However, even if I did happen to be an amateur beetle expert, I would not have shown it. My strategy to facilitate strong engagement would be to spark student conversation around the topic. To do this, I would resist sharing what I knew and instead ask good questions. For example: “How do you know?” “How does this relate to other insects you have studied?” “Help my understand why…” Through this question-asking exercise, the class quickly ignited into a firework show of ideas, thoughts, and new thought-provoking questions.

Expand Your Tool Belt

If you are a teacher in need of some fresh techniques for your tool belt, I invite you to register for my live webinar on the topic in a couple weeks. I plan to walk through five top techniques that you can implement in your classrooms or homeschools immediately. These techniques will enhance your teaching ability and will do so in a distinctively classical way: getting to great ideas, pondering time-tested values, and honing skills in the liberal arts.

While the end of the year is winding down, now is a great time to receive some fresh inspiration to make it this last stretch of the year. Our students are worth it!

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Leadership has been studied from many angles in an attempt to delineate all the factors that make great leaders. While there are common threads among all the different schools of thought, a singular definition is elusive. It is easy to tell when leadership is being done well, but how do we replicate the traits, circumstances and contingent factors that went into making any given person an outstanding leader?

Defining leadership, though, isn’t all that hard. A leader brings a group from one place to another in a coordinated way. I like the simple definition of leadership in Rare Leadership, “leading is primarily about guiding the group that does the work” (32). A dear friend of mine, Tasha Chapman, who teaches leadership at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis, shared her image of a leader. She talks about a group needing to cross a river. Getting the whole group across takes leadership through planning, teamwork, vision, inspiration, motivation and timeliness. A leader cannot do all the work if everyone is going to get across the river. Effort must be distributed, yet coordinated. There must be direction (get to the other side) and yet flexibility to meet changing circumstances along the way. Applying this image to the classroom, we can think of a class making it from the first day of class to the last day of class as something like a river crossing. The teacher is the leader who can envision the destination and keeps the group together all along the way.

In this article, we’ll explore several principles of leadership drawing on a number of resources. Most principles of leadership at fairly simple in concept, and yet to apply them well takes practice and coaching. Whether you are a teacher or an administrator, hopefully an overview of these six leadership principles will enable you to grow the leadership quotient in your classroom or school.

1. Clear, Simple Communication

The first principle of leadership is effective communication. There are so many ways in which we mis-communicate, largely because we know what we mean and we assume everyone else knows what we mean, and yet something happens that interferes in the interchange. And yet, communication can be effective when we understand a few basic ideas.

I place clarity and simplicity on two ends of a continuum pertaining to the amount of words we communicate. Often times we attempt to clarify what we mean by throwing more and more words into the mix. So clarity represents one end of the spectrum. Simplicity, on the other hand, is about using a few words as possible. These concepts create a tension for the communicator. I need enough words to be clear to my listener, and yet not so elaborate that I lose simplicity.

This is something I reference in my work on habit training. The second step of habit training is describing the details of the habit. Here the teacher or parent needs to break down the habit into a very simple set of instructions so that the child is able to succeed. I find this principle to be transferrable to all situations, from classroom routines to emergency procedures. Clear, simple communication is the first task of leadership.

For a teacher, minute by minute of every day, communicating with students is job number one. Obviously there are other forms of communication that a teacher must engage in, with fellow teachers, with parents, with administration, etc. Applying the concept of simplicity and clarity works at all levels of communication. Keeping all these different parties in the know leads to the next principle of leadership.

2. Coordinate Your Team

The second principle is a cognate of the first. Keeping your team together and pulling in the same direction is at the heart of leadership. Effective communication only works within a community. This is an idea hinted at by Peter Drucker, who uses the word “communion” to describe a group of people pursuing a common purpose (The Essential Drucker 341). Notice the interesting cognate group: common, communion, community, communication.

This is a source of profound meaning for a teacher. Your class is your community for a year. Building a bond – a communion – with your students is a genuine treasure. Coordinating your team, your class or your school begins with a common purpose.

Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why, writes about the power of expressing your common purpose. He defines the why as “the purpose, cause or belief” that you pursue as an organization. (39) The why can be differentiated from the what and the how. What you do is usually pretty easy to identify. In the classroom, we read books, we solve problems, we take tests, etc. The how is likewise an easy proposition to express. “We use classroom discussions . . .” “We employ a mentorship model of instruction . . .” Both the what and the how, though, aren’t what build a common purpose. Sinek argues we need a why. Clarifying the why can be difficult, because it is often felt and sensed, but hard to articulate. He shares that clarity of the why “comes from absolute conviction in an ideal bigger than oneself.” (134) So what is it that is the highest ideal of your classroom? Finding the why of your classroom, your school, or your team is essential to keeping everyone moving in the same direction. This feeds back into your communication. Why are we preparing for the upcoming performance? Because we are on this mission to achieve our why.

3. Long-range Objectives

Lesson planning is all about connecting the day’s lesson to objectives. Often we are thinking in term of unit objectives, subject competencies and grade-level benchmarks. The teacher as a leader must consider a number of objectives on the horizon and lead the group toward those goals every day, each lesson.

Clarifying long-range objectives is the third principle of leadership. In order to clarify these long-range objectives, one must have perspective. David Allen in his book Getting Things Done describes perspective with the analogy of an airplane at different altitudes. He calls 50,000 feet the altitude of purpose. It considers the question, “Why am I on this planet?” and envisions what your life ought to look like. At 40,000 feet, the question becomes, “what is my vision for the next 5 years?” At 30,000 feet, you set goals that will help you achieve this vision. The first three altitudes envision long-range objectives. The next three levels bring planning closer to the “now.” At 20,000 feet, you identify areas of focus in life, considering your main areas of responsibility. At 10,000 feet, you choose the right projects that help leverage each area of focus. And at 0 feet, or the runway, you are “just doing,” or as Allen calls it, taking the “next action.” (51-53)

I find this framework really helpful for coordinating long-term and short-term objectives. You really don’t need to spend a lot of time at the 30,000 to 50,000 foot altitude. These are ideas that are best considered during a long break or a focused day-retreat. And while many of these are framed around the grownup who has a career and different spheres of responsibility, I think we can envision these things for our students. Why has God put these children on the planet? What will the next five years look like for this group of individuals? What goals in the near span will help them flourish?

The curriculum often dictates the lower levels of planning. The areas of focus tend to be the academic subjects. The right projects might be a science lab or written essay. The next action is today’s assignment. But school is so much more than the domains of knowledge if we are committed to children as whole persons and to creating formational environments. Are there areas of focus, projects and next actions that help a child grow in personal responsibility or kindness toward others?

4. Prioritization

Hand in hand with long-range objectives is prioritization. The day-to-day life of a classroom can be chaotic. You’ve got a student absent one day, there’s a field trip another day, and a fire drill thrown in there during the week. As much as we plan, we can get thrown off that plan quite easily. So, to meet the shifts and changes that come our way, we need to learn how to prioritize based on a clear understanding of our objectives.

The person who has revolutionized my understanding of leadership is Jocko Willink. His book Extreme Ownership stands out as a one-of-a-kind manual of leadership principles. A former Navy Seal who served in the battle of Ramadi, Willink has had to reprioritize in the most extreme circumstances. He writes:

“Just as in combat, priorities can rapidly shift and change. When this happens, communication of that shift to the rest of the team, both up and down the chain of command, is critical. Teams must be careful to avoid target fixation on a single issue. They cannot fail to recognize when the highest priority task shifts to something else. The team must maintain the ability to quickly reprioritize efforts and rapidly adapt to a constantly changing battlefield.”

Extreme Ownership, 162

The battlefield is obviously different than a classroom, and yet target fixation can happen to us as teachers. It’s easy to get overly fixated on low test scores in math, or find yourself inundated with essays to grade. When these dynamics face us as teachers, we need to reconnect with our long-range objectives, communicate effectively and make a call about the most important next action. Your assessment of the situation might lead you to ask a fellow teacher to take your group to lunch so you can do a math workshop with some students. You might need to reconfigure your schedule slightly to make solid progress on grading. But, you might determine that despite low test scores and a backlog of essays to mark, we really need to do some teambuilding as a class to learn about kindness and care for each other. Prioritization comes from a well-considered perspective of long-range goals.

5. Empower Your People

This is a principle of leadership that operates at all levels of the school. The administration should empower the teachers to take initiative to achieve the mission of the school. Similarly, the teacher should empower the students to take hold of the tools that will enable them to achieve forward momentum on their own long-range objectives. This can sound scary, to entrust young ones with power. Aren’t they liable to fail, break something or take advantage of whatever freedoms they are given?

Yet, if we believe that children are born persons, then it is incumbent on us to empower our students. Educating young ones is simultaneously calling them to high standards and providing substantive support. I like the idea John Maxwell encapsulates in The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, when he explains his 20^th law, “Explosive Growth.” The central idea is that good leaders lead leaders. In other words, teachers are not leading followers, their students are actually leaders themselves. Listen to some of the phrases Maxwell uses in his description of “leaders who develop leaders:” “focus on strengths,” “give power away,” “invest time in others.” (210) Empowering your people means leaning into their strengths through the investment of time.

I really like how our third graders at school have been empowered by their teacher. They are responsible for caring for the plants in the school. Each of them learned about their plants – what it’s called, how much water it should have each week, removing dead leaves, etc. Every Thursday you can find these students roaming the school with their water to tend to the plants. They have the privilege to go into any classroom to tend to the plants. I’m fascinated by how little supervision is required of them. They politely ask to water their plant, the go about their business and then return to their teacher. The plants look great, and the students have a sense of pride in the work they’ve done. These students have been empowered to take genuine responsibility. They have been entrusted with something of significance. They are now looked upon as experts about the plant they care for. You can imagine how this empowerment might play out over the course of the next several years. They’ve build trust, responsibility, accomplishment and will be ready for the next level and the next level after that in years to come.

6. Cultivate Humility

Level-five leadership is a concept Jim Collins develops in Good to Great. The kind of leader he is referring to is both driven by the cause or purpose of the business (what Simon Sinek calls the “why”) but also humble. You would see in this kind of person a mix of ambition and quiet reserve. The difference between a level-five leader and other (perhaps more typical) leaders is that a level-five leader is driven by the cause, whereas other kinds of leaders might be driven by personal achievement, financial gain, or competition with others. Collins writes:

“Compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders seem to have come from Mars. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy – these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar.” (Good to Great, 12-13)

Good to Great, 12-13

A teacher can be a level-five leader, turning away from the pathway of the “sage on the stage” to a leader of students who are pursuing a cause and a purpose. I am reminded of the most powerful Jedi in the Star Wars universe, Yoda. When we first meet him, he is a humble, bumbling, old swamp dweller. We soon learn that he is powerful in the ways of the Force. He begins to train Luke Skywalker, who departs before his training is complete. Luke is the protagonist, the one who is on the hero’s journey. Yoda, the teacher, is the level-five leader who is driven by the cause of the good side of the force, who must protect and promote the values of the Jedi order. And yet chooses the path of humility to train the hero.

One of the most transformational moments in my career as a teacher came when I realized I was not the one on the hero’s journey. Instead, the hero’s journey is what my students are pursuing. I get to guide them, like Yoda – or Merlin, or Gandalf, or Dumbledore – for a short time along their journey. Cultivating your own humility is not about being pretending to be bashful (false humility) nor about beating yourself up (negative self-talk). Instead, cultivating humility comes through being captivated by a majestic vision or a compelling cause. Your will, your personality, your ambition are all directed not at your own advancement, but in promoting something higher than yourself.

Putting It All Together

Certainly there are more leadership principles than these six, but I find these to be fairly universal when reading books and manuals on leadership. The point is that effective leadership can be broken down into several component parts. And yet the all need to be operating together. The six principles combine into sets. The first two pertain to communication. The second two are about planning. And the final two are about managing. Yet in each of the six principles, something from the others is embedded within it. Take humility, the sixth principle. Notice how true humility comes from a commitment to a compelling vision, which we talked about in principle two with the “why.”

So breaking it down in this way means we have to put it all back together into a singular concept of leadership. The idea here is that a teacher is a leader. A teacher is constantly communicating to students, fellow teachers, administrators, and parents. A teacher is planning from lesson plans to scopes and sequence to curriculum maps, planning is what we do. And a teacher is managing students and projects. If you weren’t already convinced, hopefully this article has helped you to see how much of a leader a teacher actually is.

I close with a concept from Stephen Covey. The seventh habit in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is “sharpen the saw,” which is an analogy for continual improvement. As individuals, we need to take care of ourselves physically, spiritually, and emotionally. The work we do as leaders can dull the blade of the saw, and so we are wise to invest in ourselves for our long-term wellbeing and effectiveness as teachers. As a team of teachers, we need to support one another, offering advice and assisting one another in the accomplishment of our mission to make a lasting impact in the lives of the children given into our care.

If you are an administrator, understanding that your teachers are leaders creates a framework for professional development. The six principles laid out here can be used as training concepts. Your role as an administrator is key to enabling the teachers to be ever mindful of the mission, the cause, and the core values of the school. Utilize some of the training time during the year to promote continual improvement. A spiritual retreat, relational activities or workout sessions can emphasize your own commitment to supporting teachers’ efforts to “sharpen the saw.”

Now let us follow our true leader, the shepherd of our souls, who has purchased our redemption through his blood. As a teacher, he laid down his life for us that we might live. May we as teachers follow in his footsteps.

If you liked this article and want to “sharpen the saw” by learning new techniques for the classroom, check out Kolby’s eBook The Craft of Teaching which applies concepts from Teach Like a Champion 2.0 to the classical classroom.

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A few years later, Collins wrote Good to Great and the Social Sectors (2005). In this companion monograph, Collins draws out five key issues leaders face when applying the seven characteristics of great companies to nonprofit organizations like churches, hospitals, and schools. One issue, which I addressed in my first article, is that businesses and nonprofits evaluate success differently. Whereas businesses almost exclusively evaluate success by financial output, nonprofits measure success by how effectively they are achieving their mission. This sort of evaluation is admittedly more complex, Collins writes, but it is possible when leaders gain clarity on desired outcomes and establish metrics they can rigorously track. 

In this article, I will examine an additional issue nonprofit leaders face when applying Good to Great principles: getting the right people on the bus amidst social sector constraints. I can imagine school leaders nodding already. They know how difficult it is to recruit, hire, and retain faculty and staff, especially in light of tight budgets. Despite this challenge, I contend that it is possible to attract and retain great teachers through cultivating the right culture and selectively choosing the right people. For Christian educators, these people will be self-motivated, humble men and women who are devoted to Christ and love both children and learning.

First Who, Then What

Before I consider the unique constraints educational leaders are under when staffing their schools, I will first summarize what Collins means by “First Who…Then What.” Essentially, what he is getting at here is that before leaders settle on their final business model, or organizational strategy, they need to first get the right people on the bus. This may strike you as counterintuitive. While it is reasonable to expect that establishing the new vision would logically precede hiring the right people–indeed, attracting the right people through the vision–this is not what Collins and his team found. They discovered that with the right people onboard, the organization as a whole becomes stronger–more versatile and more driven to succeed–even before the new direction is set (41).

In fact, for Collins, it is precisely this ordering of “First Who, Then What,” that differentiates a “Level 5” from a “Level 4” leader. Whereas a Level 4 leader sets the vision and hires a crew to help make the vision happen, the Level 5 leader builds a superior executive team and together they figure out the best path to institutional excellence. The vision and people could be the same, but the emphasis is different. The Level 4 approach is leader-dependent, while the Level 5 approach is team-centered. For this reason, it is even more important to get the right people on board.

On the sensitive topic of people decisions, Collins is careful to point out that the “great” companies made efforts to be rigorous in cultivating a culture of discipline, but they were not ruthless in how they treated people (52). They consistently applied exacting standards at all times and at all levels, to be sure, but not in a capricious sort of way. These companies were clear and predictable in their expectations as well as thoughtful in performance evaluations. Employees, therefore, could trust their supervisors and need not worry about their positions when the going got tough. In fact, six of the eleven good-to-great companies recorded zero layoffs, and four recorded one or two layoffs, for years on end. Conversely, the comparison companies suffered innumerable layoffs and incessant restructuring over time (54). The path to greatness, it turns out, is not by the swing of the ax, but the careful use of the pruner.

The Question of Compensation

So how can school leaders get the right people on the bus? It is time to address the question of compensation. Certainly, compensation plays a role in attracting talent. Teachers, like all humans, need to provide for their families and livelihood. They ought to be compensated reasonably for their work. All too often, unfortunately, private Christian schools are known for low compensation and meager benefits. While it is outside the purview of this article to address a solution in depth, I do want to assure readers that it is possible to compensate teachers well and enable the institution to be profitable when the right financial structure is put in place.

However, even if schools can offer reasonable compensation packages, it is simply the case that compensation is not going to be the primary driver for attracting great teachers. The best teachers are not in it to make a competitive salary, but to make a difference. Thus, the key advantage schools have in attracting talent, over and against the business world, is the invitation to join a mission infused with meaning. The mission for Christian, classical educators is to impact the lives of young people, helping them thrive as image-bearers and equipping them with the knowledge, virtues, and skills to serve society and Christ’s kingdom. It is ultimately the distinctiveness of this kind of mission that is going to attract great teachers.

Compensation is not only used to attract talent, of course. It is also used in many industries to incentivize good performance. This is growing more and more common, not only in the business world, but in schools. However, Collins and his team discovered some good news for organizations with tight budgets: compensation is not an effective motivator for producing long-term excellent results. Collins writes,

The comparison companies in our research–those that failed to become great–placed greater emphasis on using incentives to “motivate” otherwise unmotivated or undisciplined people. The great companies, in contrast, focused on getting and hanging on to the right people in the first place–those who are productively neurotic, those who are self-motivated and self-disciplined, those who wake up every day, compulsively driven to do the best they can because it is simply part of their DNA. (Social Sectors, 15 ).

As school leaders consider how compensation impacts attracting, retaining, and motivating great teachers, Collins’ research offers both encouragement and a subtle challenge. The encouragement is that schools can attract great teachers apart from extravagant compensation packages. They offer a truly unique benefit: the opportunity to invest in a life of meaning and purpose by helping young people and serving Christ’s kingdom. The subtle challenge, nonetheless, is to practice rigorous financial prudence, taking advantage of the best budgetary practices in independent school management, in order to compensate teachers fairly so they serve at their schools with a general sense of financial peace.

Attracting and Retaining the Best 

If compensation is not going to be the primary attraction for great teachers, how can schools attract the sort of self-disciplined and self-motivated people that Collins describes? How can school leaders effectively draw the right men and women to join the mission?

First, Collins advises a rigorous and selective hiring process. If school leaders are going to find the very best, they need to develop a way to evaluate what they mean by “best.” Once this process is created, they need not fear deterring top candidates from too rigorous of a process. In actuality, the sort of candidates schools should be after will be drawn to the challenge. These exceptional men and women will be interested in working somewhere that shares their values for excellence and hard work. A rigorous selection process sets the tone for what sort of culture the school maintains. Top candidates will pick up on this immediately.

Second, Collins recommends early assessment mechanisms. These mechanisms will enable school leaders early on to determine whether the faculty member is a long-term fit. In this approach, the first six-twelve months function like an extended interview. As Collins writes, “You don’t know a person until you work with them” (15). In this way, early assessment mechanisms will avoid delaying the determination of a bad fit. Unlike companies, which typically follow strict evaluative processes for determining the retention of an employee, schools can struggle to let people go. After all, schools, unlike businesses, are communities united around a greater purpose. Members of these educational communities share core values that bond them together in a unique and transformative way. Consequently, it can be very difficult to part ways with teachers after years of serving in the trenches together. By implementing clear and objective assessment mechanisms early in the teacher’s employment, there will be immediate clarity on how things are going. Moreover, these assessments will communicate the culture of support and discipline the school seeks to maintain. As teachers who are not good fits experience this culture, they will often self-select out (14). 

With all this talk of rigorous selectivity, assessment mechanisms, and the desire for institutional excellence, it is important as Christian educators to remember an important truth. While school leaders are ultimately responsible for creating a strong faculty plan and culture, in no way is this license to discourage or objectify members of faculty and staff. Regardless of abilities and outcomes, practices pertaining to attracting, assessing, and retaining teachers must align with the broader educational philosophy of our Christian commitments. This includes treating teachers as persons and mentoring them to pursue wholeheartedly God’s will for their lives.

Sample Interview Questions

If recruiting the right people is a top priority for schools, then it becomes crucial to discern who these people are during the hiring process. In The Ideal Team Player, author Patrick Lencioni identifies three core traits that ideal team members possess: humility, hunger to do one’s very best, and smartness as it pertains to connecting with people (think EQ). To this end, here are some sample interview questions Christian school leaders might ask to discern whether the candidates possess these traits.

1. What motivates you as a person? Would you consider yourself self-motivated? Why or why not?
2. Describe how your faith in Christ impacts your daily life. What role does the local church play?
3. Share an example in which you actively sought to help or serve someone. What motivated you to step in and help?
4. Share an example in which a student encountered struggle in your classroom. How did you respond? What was the result? How did you include the student’s parents in the process?
5. Have you ever worked with a difficult colleague or boss? How did you handle that situation? 
6. What is the hardest you have ever worked on something in your life?
7. Provide two examples of colleagues you enjoyed working with. What did you appreciate about them? What did they contribute to the team? 

Of course, a rigorous and selective hiring process for schools is going to include more than an interview or two. It could also include lesson demonstrations, meetings with potential colleagues, essay responses, and the like. Whatever a school decides, the point is to not shy away from taking the time to find the right people. For, according to Collins, getting the right people on the bus makes all the difference.

Conclusion

There is much more that could be said in this article on the topic of attracting, hiring, and retaining the right teachers. We must remember in this discussion that people who go through the life cycle of being an employee at a school are not objects, but men and women made in God’s image. They are not mere human resources to be manipulated or discarded at the school’s will. Whether a teacher becomes a long-term member of the school community or not, school leaders would do well to treat each teacher with dignity and respect. The lure of institutional excellence is enticing. Noble is the aspiration to advance the kingdom of God through classical, Christian education. But only when core values are upheld, especially a firm commitment to treat all members of the school community as persons, will an institution thrive for the good of society and the glory of God.

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Of these groups, which is most critical for the success of the school? While a compelling case could be made for each one of them, I have come to believe that the answer is faculty. Faculty are the front line workers and first responders of the school. They are not only expected to interface with school customers (parents) on a regular basis. They are responsible for facilitating the day-to-day service (curriculum and instruction) of the organization. In short, their role is indispensable for the success of the school. 

For this reason, it is crucial for school leaders to recruit, retain, and professionally develop their teachers. And while factors like compensation, workload, and administrative support are important, I contend that it is the faculty culture that is most pivotal for the overall flourishing of individual faculty members. In this blog, I will offer some ideas regarding what makes for a strong faculty culture and conclude with questions administrators can ask themselves as they seek to lead the faculty culture in the right direction.

A Positive Work Culture

Recently I was speaking with a friend of mine who works for a financial services company. His job is to help people manage their money prudently and effectively. In our conversation, he shared that his company consistently ranks nationally as a place where employees love to work. Having now worked for the company himself for about a year, he could confirm the positive report personally. 

I pressed my friend on the secret to his employer’s success in this area, and his response was simple: culture. The culture of the company, he observed, was supportive, encouraging, and full of integrity. It therefore provided a place where employees loved to work. When describing the company, my friend shared that the financial advisors are trained to always do what is in the best interest of the client. Additionally, each advisor is valued and therefore equipped and empowered to excel at their jobs. Leadership ensures that each employee is reaching their full potential. These factors combined contributed to a strong work culture in which employees were happy, fulfilled, and committed to doing as best they could for the company.

The Wells Fargo Scandal

What my friend shared may sound like common sense when it comes to company culture, but it is rarer and harder to achieve than it sounds. Consider what happened with the Wells Fargo account fraud scandal in 2018 as a counter-example. The New York Times reports:

“From 2002 to 2016, employees used fraud to meet impossible sales goals. They opened millions of accounts in customers’ names without their knowledge, signed unwitting account holders up for credit cards and bill payment programs, created fake personal identification numbers, forged signatures and even secretly transferred customers’ money.

In court papers, prosecutors described a pressure-cooker environment at the bank, where low-level employees were squeezed tighter and tighter each year by sales goals that senior executives methodically raised, ignoring signs that they were unrealistic. The few employees and managers who did meet sales goals — by any means — were held up as examples for the rest of the work force to follow.”

Can you hear the difference? At my friend’s company, the needs of the customer are always put first. At Wells Fargo, serving customers became a means to an end. As a result, employees began to cut corners, going so far as to create fraudulent accounts in order to make more money. But it was not even merely about the money. The management of the company became so constrictive that employees felt that the only way to meet their sales goals, and keep their jobs, was to lie, cheat, and steal. 

In contrast to a culture marked by support, encouragement, and integrity, this culture had become toxic. It became marked by high demands, no support, unrealistic expectations, and a vacuum of values.

School as a Service Industry

While schools and financial service companies are very different industries (to state the obvious), I do think there are insights here we can glean as we seek to build a strong faculty culture.

For example, it can be helpful as a thought exercise to think about school as a service industry. Classical schools exist to shape and develop students into particular types of people. This service is performed at a price agreed upon between school and family called tuition. At the end of the day, parents with children enrolled at our schools are looking to see evidence that their children are growing. 

One important way schools can increase the quality of this service is by being very specific about the ways in which our school programs are helping students grow. At Christian, classical schools, growth is not only measured by academic output. There is more to being human than cognitive firepower. Teachers at our schools are helping students grow holistically–in mind, yes, but also in virtue and wisdom, in body and soul. We need to keep putting this vision before teachers and parents, educating them in the “service” we provide. To do so most effectively, I have learned, requires a robust philosophy of our students, viewing them as persons made in God’s image.

It is also important to let core values guide the school’s approach to instruction. In the Wells Fargo example, the work culture’s decline merely followed the path of its lack of values. Employes were given unrealistic goals and harsh threats, prompting many of them to cut corners by creating artificial accounts to meet deadlines. Values of honesty, integrity, and humility were replaced by a Darwinian survival of the fittest mentality. It was only a matter of time before a collapse would occur. 

At our schools, we need to lead with our core values. What do we care most about? What are we measuring? Regardless of outcomes, what approach to work are we committed to? These are the questions school leaders need to ask in order to build a strong and healthy faculty culture.

Reforming the Formers

Of course, there are limitations to thinking about school as a service industry or as a company. The purpose of a school, after all, is not to maximize profit, but to achieve the mission of the school. And in order to achieve an organizational mission, we need to help teachers understand the role they play in this mission.

In You Are What You Love (Brazos Press, 2016), James K.A. Smith proposes that teachers should be thought of as “formers.” His general thesis of the book is that humans are, in essence, embodied affective creatures. That is, we are lovers who are shaped over time by what we do. 

Education, in light of this view of humans, is not primarily a project of knowledge-transfer, but in love formation. Teachers are not primarily instructors, lecturers, or information disseminators. They are formers and shapers, leading students in a process to become particular types of people. In the classical tradition, this vision is rooted in virtue. We seek to grow and help our students grow in virtues, that is, the objective moral ideals that God has woven into the very fabric of the universe.

Smith writes,

“Since education is a formative project, aimed at the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, then the teacher is a steward of transcendence who needs to not only know the Good but also to teach from that conviction. The teacher of virtue will not apologize for seeking to apprentice students to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. But she will also run up against the scariest aspect of this: that virtue is often absorbed from exemplars” (159). 

Smith goes on to offer four communal practices for reforming the formers at our schools: eating, praying, singing, and thinking and reading together. While these practices are not directly related to teaching per se, they are doing something even more important: creating a culture. By taking time to eat together, worship the Lord, and grow in understanding, schools communicate to teachers that they care more about bottom-line outcomes. They care about all constituents of the school growing as persons, including faculty. This emphasis, more than anything else, is what is going to shape a strong faculty culture for years to come.

Questions for Continuing the Conversation

As school leaders seek to build a strong faculty culture in their schools, they need to consider how they can best shape, support, and encourage each faculty member. Instead of pressuring teachers with unrealistic goals guided by a “win-at-all-costs” mentality, school leaders need to lead with core values, provide strong support, and make time for practices oriented toward helping teachers grow themselves as humans in wisdom and virtue.

To this end, here are some closing questions I pose to school leaders as they think about faculty culture:

1. Are the goals and benchmarks we set for teachers specific and realistic?
2. Are we providing appropriate support for them to reach these goals?
3. Are we taking time to celebrate victories as a faculty? 
4. How are we showing that each employee at the school is valued? 
5. Are we cultivating a faculty culture in which every decision is made in the best interest of the student (without being child-centered)? 
6. How are we appropriately (and inappropriately) incentivizing faculty members?

May God guide and strengthen you as an educator as you seek to not only achieve particular organizational outcomes, but contribute to a culture that is growth-oriented, teacher-supportive, and ultimately, a small taste of the coming kingdom of God.

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The notable weakness of the supervisor-driven approach is that it is…supervisor-driven. Growing as a professional entails two crucial components: increasing in one’s knowledge of the particular field and increasing in self-awareness of one’s performance in that field. As long as the principal is setting the goals, observing teachers in their classrooms, and giving feedback, the teacher remains a largely passive rather than active participant in her professional development. 

In this blog series, I am exploring insights from Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 2.0 for the classical classroom. Lemov is a field expert in the charter school movement and has worked tirelessly over the years to bridge the achievement gap in inner-city schools. While he may not be operating with a classical education framework in mind, at EdRen we have found many of his techniques to be beneficial for the classical classroom all the same. In this blog, I will examine Lemov’s insights on professional development, especially the importance of a teacher and data-driven approach that allows teachers to own their own development.

The Desire to Grow

In Part 1: An Introduction of this blog series, I began by clarifying some key concepts. I explained that classical education is intent on making better humans; it is, therefore, a humanizing education, one that views students as persons and not merely economic producers. Humans have minds, hearts, souls, and bodies, and each of these components need educating. As important as job training is, it does not sufficiently prepare someone to live a deep and meaningful life. Students need significant servings of truth, goodness, and beauty to feed their hungry minds, nourish their souls, and guide their decision-making. Kevin Clark, a thought leader in the movement, goes so far as to say that he views his chief job as “to lead souls with words.”

If classical schools are going to strive for such a laudable aim, then professional development is crucial. The heartbeat of any school is its faculty and, in particular, the ability of the faculty to teach. By “teach,” of course, I don’t mean merely the dissemination of information. I mean the conscious act of leading students to pursue wisdom through cultivating virtue and engaging in disciplined mental and physical training. This is no easy task; it requires a unique combination of tact, resolve, confidence, empathy, and, perhaps most importantly, a desire to grow personally. 

You see, a teacher won’t get very far in leading his students to pursue wisdom if he himself hasn’t set off on the journey. Like Frodo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring, students need a mentor to imitate. Someone older and wiser. For Frodo, of course, it was his Uncle Bilbo. When Frodo was twelve-years old, he went to live in Bag End with his uncle, following an unexpected family tragedy. During those formative years, Bilbo taught Frodo the Elvish language and much of the lore of the Middle-Earth. But most importantly, Bilbo and Frodo lived together, giving Frodo the rare opportunity, especially for a hobbit, of doing life with someone who had been on an adventure. When the time came for Frodo to set out on an adventure of his own, Frodo already had an image in his mind of the way forward. Although neither Bilbo nor Frodo realized it at the time, their many years together forged the very path on which Frodo would one day tread. 

Like Frodo, students need to experience life with older and wiser men and women who are on the pathway of virtue. These mentors, called teachers in school parlance, embody the growth mindset and desire to grow personally even as they help their pupils grow.

Field Experts and Master Craftsmen

But in order for teachers to embody this growth mindset and truly desire to grow personally, they need to be supported to drive their own development. The supervisor-approach is insufficient for this aim. I am not suggesting, of course, that teachers should operate autonomously. They need mentors themselves to lend support, provide feedback, and formally evaluate progress gained. But the administrator-teacher dynamic should always be oriented toward empowering the teacher to drive her own development.

When it comes to developing classroom instruction in particular, Doug Lemov demonstrates in Teach Like a Champion 2.0 that the data-driven approach, culled by the teacher, is superior. He argues that this approach, “…considers teachers not just as recipients and implementers of the field knowledge, but as creators of it–problem-solvers, entrepreneurs, generators of the professional insight. It makes teachers intellectuals” (8). Imagine with Lemov if teachers viewed themselves as field experts in the craft of teaching. This self-understanding would lead to all sorts of exciting possibilities for driving one’s personal growth.

Another analogy that is helpful here is that of craftsmanship. In Cal Newport’s book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Newport argues that in a knowledge economy, a successful professional must adopt the mindset of a craftsman. Rather than subscribing to the modern myth of “follow your passion,” knowledge workers should focus their time and attention on cultivating rare and valuable skills. They should obsess over how they can add value in a particular industry. Imagine again if teachers took on this mindset. They wouldn’t feel comfortable passively waiting for the next classroom observation. They would constantly be on the hunt, looking for the next best resource or technique that will enhance their effectiveness as teachers.

Ideology-Driven Guidance

As I mentioned in my first article, Lemov suggests that there are generally three drivers of advice that administrators give to teachers. The first form is ideology-driven. This advice tends to focus on some predetermined vision of what a classroom should look like and is often manifested by a checklist for teachers to follow. While this approach to coaching teachers can be helpful, ultimately, we must acknowledge that it is supervisor-driven. Too quickly, the teacher can become overly focused on teaching to please an administrator, rather than teaching for the growth of her students.

In the classical school movement, we can too easily settle for this kind of advice. We articulate our vision for a classical education, distill it into a checklist, and visit different classrooms to cross the items off. “Teaches Latin for forty minutes. Check. Leads a discussion on C.S. Lewis. Check. Asks questions rather than dominates through lecture. Check.”

The problem with this approach to teacher guidance, Lemov points out, is twofold. First, it puts the supervisor in the driver seat. The checklist is a thought product created and implemented by administration with no meaningful contribution offered by the teacher. Second, it unnecessarily privileges ideology over outcomes. To be clear, both our necessary, and ideology-driven guidance unduly neglects the latter.

Research-Driven Guidance

The second driver of advice tends to be research. Lemov ranks this approach higher than ideology-driven, but acknowledges that it, too, is not without its problems. He provides a litany of concerns about blindly following research:

“If research supports a particular action, does that mean you should always perform that action, to the exclusion of everything else, or should you combine it with other things? How often, in what settings, and with what other actions? And how do you meld them?…There’s a lot of research out there of varying quality, and even useful parts are interpreted with a mix of good sense, cautious fidelity, outright distortion, and blind orthodoxy. This can result in ‘research’ justifying poor teaching as easily as good.” (7)

Research is helpful, but only when it is analyzed and adapted by professionals to achieve a specific goal. All too often we hear “Research states…” and we are expected to blindly assent, especially in light of the scientistic world we live in. The reality is that research is conducted in a particular time and place, and therefore any principles gleaned must be implemented and studied in its future applied context. Like ideology, research can be disconnected from outcomes, and lead to ineffective results.

Data-Driven Guidance

The third driver of advice for teachers and the one Lemov ultimately endorses is data-driven guidance. This approach is based “…not on what should happen but on what did happen when success was achieved” (7). For Lemov, success is determined by state test scores controlled for poverty (14). After identifying the schools who performed exceptionally well on these exams, Lemov and his team visited these schools to study how those teachers approached teaching, relationships, lesson-planning, and so on.

Now, as classical educators, we are right to bristle at this notion of success. We understand that success isn’t reducible to a state test score. To a certain extent, even Lemov agrees with this, which is partially why I find his writing so refreshing. Lemov’s point isn’t state test scores. It is data. Lemov writes,

“Even if you disagree with my conclusions, whether you are a teacher or a leader in charge of a school, a school district, a state, or a nation, you can use a data-driven approach to take your best shot at measuring the outcome you think is most valuable, finding its best practitioners, and inferring guidance from their work” (8). 

As classical educators, we need to hone in on the outcomes we think are most valuable and then follow Lemov’s advice to identify and study the master craftsmen in achieving those outcomes. We did this a few years ago at the school I work at. We noticed that year after year one particular teacher helped her class perform excellent poetry and scripture recitations, regardless of the perceived strength or weakness of a particular class. We studied her technique and asked her to catalogue what she believed contributed most towards the excellent result.

The final product was a training document full of techniques that we now use year after year. And as a side benefit, the process of analyzing and discussing what made for a strong recitation coaching lesson led to a unique spirit of camaraderie amongst the faculty. Lemov himself confirms this benefit, writing, “Teaching, as it turns out, is a team sport, where teachers make each other better fastest by building robust cultures where they study and share insights about their work” (14).

Conclusion

In my next installment in this series, I’ll begin to examine the various techniques revealed through Lemov’s data-driven approach. Interestingly, one of the fascinating observations about many of the techniques is how simple they are to implement. To this point, Lemov offers this caution:

“Many of the techniques you will read about in this book may at first seem mundane, unremarkable, and even disappointing. They are not always especially innovative. They are not always intellectually startling. They sometimes fail to march in step with educational theory. But they work. As a result, they yield an outcome that more than compensates for their occasionally humble appearance.” (10)

By “educational theory,” of course, he means modern educational theory. He has in mind the sorts of theories dependent on the premise that education practices must be hip, innovative, quantifiable, or techy for them to be effective. But as Lemov himself pointed out, that’s not the direction the data points. Instead, often the data pointed toward practices of simplicity, ones that simply call on students to do the work of learning. These practices include forms of retrieval practice, akin to narration, as well as instilling finely tuned classroom routines, akin to elements of habit training.

At the end of the day, as teachers set out on the path of owning their own growth, may they be driven, not by test scores, hip techniques, or even simplicity, but Lady Wisdom herself.

Questions for Classical Educators 

Doug Lemov has given us a lot to think about. I would love to hear responses from readers and even invite you to brainstorm with me some answers to the following questions:

• How should classical educators measure success and successful teaching?
• What practices are consistently present in successful teaching?
• How do we equip teachers to be field experts, the generators of knowledge and professional insight on successful teaching?

Thanks for reading! Please respond in the comment section below! 

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One of the biggest lessons I learned from my coach was his frequent saying, which became almost a mantra that he would expect us to repeat: “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” For us this meant, at least, that we should make sure to point our toes in every exercise. If we didn’t practice all our exercises and routines with the fundamentals of form and technique, we wouldn’t progress, and we’d certainly get docked for improper form at the next meet.

These early lessons stuck with me and I think that’s part of why I was so attracted to a book I picked up this last summer, entitled Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better. Written by Doug Lemov, the author of Teach Like a Champion and leader of Uncommon Schools, along with two of his colleagues, Erica Woolway and Katie Yezzi, the book challenges us as educators to improve the quality of our practice of education. Actually, the book addresses the use of practice to improve effectiveness in any sphere of business, industry or life. But the authors’ own experience in the field of education shines through many of their examples and challenged my thinking most of all.

In his previous work Doug Lemov had isolated a set of techniques or strategies that effective teachers employed to deal with various challenging situations in the classroom. In workshops where his organization endeavored to teach these techniques, they noticed what they call the “get it/do it gap” where teachers come to understand a technique’s effectiveness, but are unable to reproduce it themselves:

We would analyze and discuss, and then, once our audience understood the technique in all of its nuance and variation, we went on to the next technique. Evaluations were outstanding. Participants told us they had learned useful and valuable methods to apply. But then we noticed something alarming. If we surveyed the same participants three months later, they were not quite as upbeat. They still knew what they wanted their classes to be like, but they were unable to reliably do what it took to get there. When they tried to fix one thing, something else went wrong. It was difficult to concentrate on a technique with so much else going on. Just knowing what they should be doing was not enough to make them successful. (6)

This caused a realization for them that training master teachers would involve more than just passing on information about the right way to teach. It had to involve practice. And just like master tennis players or gymnasts are made not through just any type of practice, in the same way master teachers will be made through perfect practice: high quality practice of exactly the right skills in just the right way.

In the world of education this thought is revolutionary because so much of our professional development for teachers is in direct contradiction to it. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi cite a policy brief by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education to the effective that between $20 and $30 billion are spent per year on professional development and the upshot is that

Teachers typically spend a few hours listening and, at best, leave with some practical tips or some useful materials. There is seldom any follow-up to the experience and subsequent in-services may address entirely different sets of topics…. On the whole, most researchers agree that local professional development programs typically have weak effects on practice because they lack focus, intensity, follow-up, and continuity. (As quoted in Practice Perfect 8)

There’s probably no stronger indictment of the lack of any unified philosophy of education or methodology than this. Because there is no clear definition of the proper practice of education, there can be no quality practice. Teachers cannot be developed, coached and held to a high standard, where there is no accepted standard to develop them against.

Instead, teachers are given a dizzying array of new and often contradictory ideas without the quality practice necessary to master any particular method or technique. Professional development becomes simply a continuous exposure to new methods without effective implementation or accountability. It’s no wonder that the educational establishment is in a state of crisis. In such an educational milieu, perhaps we need a renaissance or re-birth of a traditional simplicity, embodied in the classical saying multum nōn multa (“much not many things” or as we might say, “less is more”). The dizzying array of educational methods is part of the problem because, when pulled in so many directions, teachers can have trouble attaining mastery at anything.

This call for simplicity reminds me of the legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, who “led his teams to ten national championships in 12 years, won 88 consecutive games, and achieved the highest winning percentage (.813) of any coach in NCAA basketball history” (Practice Perfect 1). What is so surprising about Wooden’s method is his relentless focus on high quality practice: “old-fashioned practice, efficiently run, well-planned, and intentionally executed” (2). Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi describe it this way:

John Wooden doted on practice to a degree that was legendary. He began—surely to much eye rolling—by practicing things that every other coach would have considered unworthy, if they’d have considered them at all: how to put on socks and sneakers, for example. He timed his practices to the minute, husbanding every second to ensure its precise and careful allocation. He kept a record of every practice on note cards, which he filed away for future reference: what worked; what didn’t; how to do it better next time. Unlike many coaches, he focused not on scrimmaging—playing in a way that replicated the game—but on drilling, that is playing in ways that intentionally distorted the game to emphasize and isolate specific concepts and skills…. He repeated drills until his players achieved mastery and then automaticity, even if it meant not drilling on more sophisticated topics. (2)

Wooden’s example challenges my leadership as an administrator. How should I incorporate quality practice into my endeavors to lead teachers to mastery? What are the fundamental skills and strategies that teachers need to practice to perfection? What would it look like to design professional development opportunities for teachers that included high quality practice as a main feature?

These are questions that I’m still struggling with in response to this book. I’ve embraced modelling of our school’s philosophy and core practices in how I and our other administrators lead teacher training sessions. And this has had a profound impact on our culture and practice. However, one of the main challenges that this book leaves me with is what a practice regimen for teachers should look like. Basketball players practice for hours on a regular basis, and then they play games every once in a while. The average teacher teaches several hours a day, every day. It’s hard to see how a practice session once in a blue moon on a particular skill that’s used occasionally in the classroom in some unique situation is going to transfer with a high degree of value.

But that doesn’t mean I question the importance of the ideas posed by this book. It’s just that part of what teachers need to develop is the wisdom and discernment for how to interact with the human beings they are teaching in all their complexity. It’s worth asking how the value of practice trades off with the development of practical wisdom or the cultivation of a growth mindset, which are more likely attained through extensive reading and discussion of important ideas than isolated practice exercises.

In part, it makes me wonder whether taking on the challenge of practicing education involves simplifying a set of core classroom practices (like applying the trivium arts or deep reading for instance) for teachers to follow and then inspiring and empowering teachers to turn their daily teaching regimen into intentional or deliberate practice. It seems a shame to limit teachers’ practice opportunities to institute days outside of the classroom, if by simplifying a set of practices to follow in the classroom, teachers could amass their 10,000 hours of practice on those core essentials, while actually teaching real students. Feedback from an experienced administrator or fellow teacher is an important part of this process, no doubt. But my hunch is that the average teacher could get better at getting better much more quickly, if she simply reframed her experiences in the classroom as opportunities to practice, learn and improve. Teaching to get through the day is wholly different from teaching to improve one’s teaching.

What do you think? How have you seen practice work effectively both for students and teachers? Do you have any ideas for effective professional development involving practice?

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