I took nearly a year break from my weekly blog, and I’m increasingly feeling the pull to get back after it.  My break wasn’t really about taking a pause in my daily writing practice.  I still try to put in 30 minutes of writing early each morning.  I finished a book manuscript (more on that in the next post) and started on my next book project, which in those 12 months is already nearly halfway to completion.  

I think my pause was more about the self-imposed deadline of getting something up each week.    I wanted to step back for at least a few months to see if things in my daily and weekly routines would change significantly if I wasn’t putting pressure on myself to share something each week.  I think it’s a good thing to know that the desire to write and share regularly is something authentic, and I’m definitely feeling that.  I am more convinced than ever that for me, an important part of my professional practice as a school leader is writing regularly about the work and what I am learning.  It is no coincidence that one of the major components of the National Board Certification process is promoting the “reflective practicioner.”  My blog has become one of my primary venues for processing and reflecting on my work as a school and systems leader.

I also felt that my blog posts were becoming increasingly formulaic, as if my writing was a performance.  I certainly understand why that might be the case, as there are very real pressures and forces at work when you are in a position of leadership and are trying to strengthen an organizational culture that is increasingly focused on consistent quality and realizing an ambitious vision of transformational learning and personal development for kids.  From my very first posts as an Executive Director with Santa Ana Unified, I knew that a public venue for my thinking would have implications for my leadership internally with the organization.  Almost always, those implications were positive ones as I felt I was sharing my genuine efforts to create game-changing schools and programs, but you can’t help but feel limited at times in what you can say.  

So, I’m hoping to keep things a bit more informal and open up to share a little bit more about what happens behind the scenes in my daily and weekly leadership practices that I perhaps didn’t write about as often as I would like.  I have to remember that my blog is primarily a tool for my reflective processing, and so I want to share more about my mistakes, failures, and consequent adjustments and adaptations to try to strengthen my contribution to the work.  I think writing more authentically could actually simplify and speed up my writing process and allow me to post with a bit more frequency.  

In any case, I’m excited to be back on the blog.  I’ve had more people than I would have expected comment about how they enjoyed my posts, and quite frankly I’ve missed it as well, so it is definitely time to relaunch.  I also have some very big news related to the writing projects that I have been working on, but again will save that for my next post.  Thanks for reading!  

Last week we held our annual General Assembly, where the parents (formally and legally known as “associates” of the school) come together to review the annual financial audit and elect new members to the Governing Board.  Membership in the assembly of associates of the school has one primary requirement – you must have a child attending the school.  Our board president, Marilis Pinto, who has served as a member of the governing board for nearly 16 years, would be leaving the institution as her youngest son recently graduated.

Marilis, like Lincoln itself, is an institution, someone who has defined the growth and trajectory of the school during this latest stage in the school’s evolution.  While the school has a long, rich history in Costa Rica and the region, it was also at a critical strategic crossroads back when Marilis joined the board in 2006.  The school had just moved to a new location and was seeking to solidify its identify as a top tier international school, with a relatively young International Baccalaureate program.  I believe that it was into that environment that Marilis brought three essential leadership attributes that have left a lasting impact.  I wanted to share a few thoughts about all three.  

Vision

Perhaps, along with humility, the most important characteristic of a leader, is that of vision.  To have vision is to see what can be possible, and then hold everyone in the hope and pursuit of that better future.  From the moment Marilis came to the school and to the board, she has exercised a palpable belief that Lincoln could and must set the standard for excellence in education in Costa Rica and beyond.  She held tenaciously to that vision regardless of the challenge or crisis of the day, from moving the entire school community to a new campus, to two General Director transitions, to navigating a global pandemic.  She constantly kept fellow board members and members of the executive administration team focused on the foundational mission and purpose of the school.  

Courage

It takes courage to preside over any institution, and particularly one where expectations are high and the consequences of poor performance can be swift and severe.  It also takes courage to make difficult decisions.  On a personal level, I believe it took quite a bit of courage for Marilis to recommend me as General Director.  She knew she was going to be phasing out of her role as board president, and hiring a new General Director on your way out is a heavy task.  I was not a traditional candidate.  While I was deeply familiar with the IB, my experience was largely within public school institutions in the United States.  My large family – 6 kids – also created very real logistical challenges for any potential employer.  The recruitment executive I was working with was honest about my chances, reminding me that many boards simply would not take the risk.  Yet he also expressed a belief that there would be a school that would recognize my leadership capacity and potential.  That was Marilis – and consequently the school board and community – and I will be forever indebted to her for her act of courage on my behalf.  

Of course Marilis’ courage goes far beyond my hiring.  She has courageously been the face of the collective association at countless General Assemblies, bringing forward new ideas that would challenge the status quo.  When the pandemic struck in 2020, the school was ready with online resources and 1:1 iPads for students to nimbly adjust to virtual learning.  Just a few years earlier the iPad initiative had been an expensive and controversial proposition, and Marilis worked closely with the board and admin team to ensure it moved forward.  I have personally been witness to her courage to move forward in spite of uncertainty.  

Sensibility 

I struggled to figure out how to describe this last characteristic: Marilis’ tendency to be pragmatic, urgent, and patient all at the same time.  She expects results and improvement, but also finds ways to be gracious in giving the school administration the necessary space and time to bring about desired changes.  Her advocacy was always on behalf of the school as a whole, never seeking out personal advantage or favor on account of her very real position of influence.  I have a tremendous amount of respect for her in this regard.  Whenever a phone call came from Marilis, its purpose was always a matter of interest to the school as a whole.  

Over time, Marilis came to understand deeply the inner workings and unique characteristics of school management, and she was bordering on obsessive in her insistence that aspiring board members similarly commit themselves to learn about how schools work.  She often surfaced issues and concerns from fellow parents to me and the administrative team, but she also took the time to teach parents about how schools properly function, and coached them on ways to productively raise concerns.  As any General Director will tell you, having a board president with the sensibility to know when to push for change and when a request is either unreasonable or unfair, is tremendously helpful for healthy governance of the school.  

I’ll admit, there is not much that can happen in a classroom that puts a smile on my face faster than walking in to see students circled up having a discussion about a shared text.  To me, that is the essence of what a school should be.  

That is exactly what I saw earlier this week when I walked into one of our Spanish classrooms in the high school.  I settled in to listen.  This circle discussion was not necessarily what I would call a classic Socratic Seminar, as the teacher was still facilitating the discussion, but she was doing so with tremendous skill.  Students were universally engaged in the discussion, and I quickly noticed a number of other strategies being employed by the teacher to ensure a high quality, cognitively rigorous conversation.  First, each student had an iPad on their lap, open to the poem in question.  It was very clear that all of the students had spent some time reading and wrestling with the poem’s meaning, as each copy had annotations in the margins and highlighted sections.  Annotating text, talking to the text, or whatever you commonly call it, is an essential practice in a literacy classroom (hint: all classrooms are literacy classrooms).  The teacher was also strategically cold calling students.  Cold calling is a simple classroom management strategy, but it is a powerful one.  For those teachers who use it regularly, they quickly build an academic culture where all students know they are accountable for engaging with the lesson, as they could be called upon at any time to contribute.  Perhaps it is subtle classroom psychology, but when a student knows he or she might be called on anyway, they seem more willing to contribute willfully, without being called on.  That is what I was seeing.  Lots of spontaneous contributions and exchanges amongst students, with the teacher there to bring students on the fringes into the conversation.  

Honestly, seeing students in a circle in a classroom almost seems like an act of pedagogical defiance.  The square room, the square tables (especially in pandemic mode), and all those right angles sometimes scream for predictability and order.  But then you have students in a circle, engaging in spontaneous conversation around a shared text.  Instead of being oriented to the teacher, students are in communication with each other, with the physical cues that everyone in the space has something to contribute.  It’s Arthur’s Round Table in the learning context, where no opinion is inherently weightier than any other, perhaps only on the merits of the opinion and corresponding evidence itself.  

It probably would not be surprising that when given the chance to work with a team to design the high school of the future, we settled on the name “Circulos” (“Circles” in Spanish) for the school.  There is so much beauty and power when students are engaged in authentic conversation and discourse with each other, and we couldn’t resist making that the signature pedagogy of the school.  A multi-million dollar grant and lots of blood, sweat and tears later, and the design became a reality.  At Círculos, the idea of the circle discussion moved out more broadly to include the idea of expanding students’ social capital by enlarging their network or circle to include community organizers, working professionals, and other potential allies who could enrich the educational experience of each student.  

The beautiful thing is you don’t need a special school to harness one of the most powerful pedagogies available.  It only takes a few moments to circle up and be drawn in to deep, substantial conversations.  In a world where discussion is increasingly linear and uni-directional, we could all use a little more circle time.  

 

This week here at Lincoln we are celebrating Costa Rican Independence.  After navigating nearly 18 months in pandemic mode, seeing our preschool and elementary students parade around the school’s central plaza in their traditional Costa Rican clothes, carrying their lanterns (a Costa Rican tradition), it was hard not to get a little emotional.  Our Student Life team pulled out all the stops to put together a week of traditional dances, music, crafts, food, and celebration.  Our COVID restrictions don’t allow parents to participate on campus for many of these activties, so we have been live-streaming events to our community.  The energy and excitement has been palpable, and I’m very much looking forward to the festivities over the course of the week.

The activities got me thinking about the essential role that traditions, assemblies, and celebrations play in the life of a school.  These are the moments that make school truly memorable and meaningful.  My oldest two kids, now in middle school, attended an elementary school that was a full-fledged adherent to the “University Starts Now” program.  Each month, the school put on a college pep-rally.  Every class on campus had a different college “sponsor” and students all wore their college shirts to celebrate the pep-rally.  During the 5 years my kids attended, they cycled through the University of Washington, USC, Berkeley, and another half dozen college destinations.  Staff hung banners and college pennants from the second floor, and the party was on.  These were rocking celebrations that students came to adore, and it gave the school a strong college-going culture and identity.  The school, located in the heart of Santa Ana, CA, was one of the poorest in the district and in the state.  Yet my son’s best friend, who also lived close by the school in the neighborhood, had older siblings attending some of the best universities in the country.  I remarked to my wife that in the middle class neighborhood I lived in, I didn’t have any friends with siblings (or parents) who went to the Ivy League.  Simply stated, the school had built so much tradition and celebration around college, that students and families came to expect college at the conclusion of high school.  They’d been thinking about it and planning for it on a monthly basis since they started kindergarten.  

At the high school in San Francisco where I was principal, we had traditions that reinforced our aspirations to provide a truly student-centered and personalized experience to every one of our students.  Perhaps no moment better encapsulated this aspiration than our annual paper-plate awards.  Each year, our advisors finished the year with a simple ceremony.  Every student received an award.  This award was neither generic nor predictable.  Each student received an award based on their uniques contributions, personalities, challenges and triumphs.  Students might receive the “not going home until I finish” award for a student who always stayed after school until all his work was complete, or the “hot cheetos” award to the student most consistently caught trying to sneak a bag of the cheesy snacks into class.  We did the same thing amongst staff.  Those simple, hand-crafted paper plate awards are some of my most prized professional possessions.  They remind me of how I was valued for my unique contributions, and sometimes poked fun at my similarly unique quirks.  No surprise, perhaps, that our school was recognized by Stanford University as a national model for personalizing the learning experience for students.  

  School leaders and classroom teachers alike can and should thoughtfully consider how to take advantage of rituals and traditions that can reinforce shared values and help socialize newcomers into a greater awareness of what really matters on campus or in the classroom.  At Envision Education, the charter management organization where I worked while a high school principal, had a beautiful tradition they called “props.”  At the close of a meeting or even a hiring day with external candidates, we would inevitably circle up for a quick opportunity for people to express gratitude.  There was no individual requirement to say anything.  Usually, the short expressions mentioned contributions made by individuals, or perhaps a more general statement of appreciation for a shared experience or even a good meal.  Admittedly, there were a few occasions where it felt like we were perhaps going through the motions.  I wasn’t always an enthusiastic participant, especially if the discussion had been heated or difficult.  But we engaged in the ritual anyway, and I believe it really did have the impact of helping us all be more grateful – for the opportunity to work in education, to work with other committed people, and to work with young people during some of the most formative years of their lives.  

While we rightfully focus on high quality instruction, operational efficiency, and day to day excellence in our educational systems, we should never underestimate the power of traditions and rituals to shape the professional and student cultures on campus.  These moments can bring teams together and reinforce the values we hope to instill in students and staff alike in powerful ways.  

Even for the most tech saavy amongst educators, the past 18 months have pushed all of us to broaden our technology skills.  While the initial need to integrate new technologies to facilitate virtual and hybrid learning may have been under force and duress, I think that enough time has gone by for us to be able to step back and more thoughtfully assess the platforms and programs that we want to integrate into our classrooms and instructional systems.  Developing a deeper understanding of how the technology we use actually works has become an essential skill.  I’m not necessarily saying that every teacher should know how to code or manage a network in order to use technology tools in the classroom, but I am saying that having true ownership of our instructional practice requires that we have more than a superficial handle of the technology that we are using.  There are three reaons why I think we have to push ourselves towards deeper understanding of our technology.  

First, there is a lot of unused functionality in the technology that we are bringing into our classrooms.  Of course, untapped functionality isn’t a problem per se if that potential isn’t useful.  But I would argue that sometimes the more sophisticated features unlock really important tools for the teacher.  For example, if you are using Zoom or Teams rooms for virtual or hybrid learning, and aren’t using the breakout rooms , your students are missing out.  Just like most whole group instruction could be enriched by some think pair shares or small group discussions, whole group Zoom meetings get old fast, and limit the amount of student discourse.  Even before Teams came out with better breakout room functionality, my most talented technology teachers were setting up channels in every session to allow students to talk to each other as seamlessly as possible.  It makes a big difference.  Similarly, some of my teachers discovered that they could easily sync their online notebooks in OneNote through their class rosters in Teams, making it easier for students (and themselves) to keep work up to date and organized.  It is very easy to get into a groove with the features we are most comfortable with, and lose interest in going deeper.  I’ve been in a lot of meetings where a school is looking for a new software solution, and it turns out that the software they already have has the capability to do precisely what they are looking for.  Schools can tap on the expertise of teacher leaders to share some of the most useful, albeit less commonly used tools.  

Second, tech solutions inevitably run into issues.  Even when you have the best equipment and most up-to-date software, there are likely going to unexpected problems when kids are coming in and out and moving from program to program.  Throughout the day, students struggle to log-in, updates come in the middle of a lesson, or a screen refuses to share itself where there had never been a problem before.  Sometimes it’s an underlying network issue.  Sometimes the computer just needs a restart.  These inevitable hiccups are certainly frustrating, but the most tech-savvy teachers find ways quickly to trouble-shoot, problem solve, or snap together a last minute work around.  If you can’t diagnose an issue on your own, you are likely in trouble.  Even in a school like mine where we have tech specialists and a robust IT team, the chance of getting help within 5 minutes is not high – and a 5 minute or more delay in a classroom can feel like an eternity.  It pays to have a deeper understanding of how the tech functions so that you can be more self-sufficient when things don’t go exactly according to plan.

Third and finally, we want to model for our students what it looks like to be responsible users of technology.  While I too share serious reservations about the impact of technology on mental health, adolescent development, and social-emotional well-being, schools can’t pretend that students won’t have to cope with these issues.  We have a responsibility to prepare students to navigate the wider world where technology is ubiquitous.  This includes engaging students in discussions about the appropriate and ethical uses of emerging technology, developing and practicing routines for limiting screen time, and avoiding the darker parts of the internet.  Students should understand how the algorithms behind social media like buttons and viral posts operate, so they can be more responsible consumers.  Students need to see adult teachers and mentors exercising agency and efficacy with technology, instead of seeing them throwing their hands up in frustration or as victims of the new tech paradigm we all seem to live in.

I was first introduced to the concept of structured recess back when we lived in San Francisco and my wife and I were trying to figure out where to send out oldest daughter for kindergarten.  As we toured some of the schools in San Francisco Unified, several locations mentioned a partnership they had with a non-profit organization, Playworks, to offer what they refered to as structured recess.  Recess is always supervised by adults, but in structured recess, the adults engage the students in games and other structured activities.  In a sense, the adults shift from being supervisory aides waiting and watching for errant or potentially disruptive behavior and become coaches, organizing activities and promoting movement and interaction.  Interestingly, my wife, who is not an educator by formal training, immediately seized on this idea as something that she really liked about the schools that offered it.

Admittedly, I was more skeptical.  I am always a little concerned about adults moving into the spaces where students previously exercised freedom and independence.  It seemed to me that kids need opportunities for autonomy and exploration without the immediate guidance of an adult.  I considered the playground as one of the last bastions of true student freedom on most school campuses.  I also worried about how play structured by adults might interrupt opportunities for more creative and imaginative play.  Children can and do often create imaginary worlds and adventures that I worried might be missed by the games being designed by adults.  

When we moved to Southern California and I began working on the executive team in Santa Ana Unified, I discovered that the movement for structured recess was also quickly taking hold.  This time I was not shopping for schools but leading them, and soon became much more familiar with the data behind the work.  For schools implementing structured recess, playground fights and other incidents of misbehavior plummeted.  Typically, the spaces became more inclusive as a higher percentage of students were actively engaged in the fun.  Suddenly, administrators had far less to worry about at recess time.  While the structured recess program was initially expensive, most of the elementary principals strategically considered the cost worth the benefits.  During my first 2 years in the district, the majority of schools had implemented structured recess.  Eventually, the district decided it could save money by taking on the program internally, hiring and training recess coordinators around the district.

Now in Costa Rica, at the international school where I serve as General Director, we have similarly adopted structured recess.  In our case, it was a suggestion that did not come from me, but as a result for the need to have a better strategy for maintaining social distancing during recess and lunch time.  In the US, many states have relaxed social distancing requirements when students are outside.  In Costa Rica the health protocols require social distancing at all times.  After the first week of school, simply trying to train and supervise students to independently maintain their distance just wasn’t working well enough.  So we hired coaches to design structured recess activities that incorporated the social distancing requirements.  It has worked wonderfully.  While I still am eager to protect spaces for genuine student-led play, my observational data suggests that kids are enjoying the structured recess activities as much or more than they were traditional recess time.    

Usually, when we use the term “student-centeredness” we are referring to schools and classrooms that orient themselves to the needs, ideas, interests, and preferences of students.  It may seem a bit strange for a school to have to state that it is focused on students.  The learning of students is, after all, the core and primary responsibility of educators and educational institutions.  Yet, there are other powerful forces at play in a school or district.  Often, students don’t have formal representation in the decision-making processes or governance structure of the school.  I remember one education consultant I worked with a few years ago somewhat cynically tell me that the real constituents of schools are the teachers union, the school board, and parents, in that order.  Admittedly, I’m an optimist who chooses to believe that all stakeholders have a role to play in the design and delivery of our education systems: teachers whose professional lives are dedicated to teaching young people, school boards with a fiduciary and governance duty to schools and who must allocate limited resources, and parents who rightfully advocate for the needs of their children.  

But this blog post is not about the politics of schooling.  It is also not a post about student voice and choice in the school process.  Rather, it is about the literal meaning of the phrase “student centeredness.”  To what degree are our students centered?  A few years ago, I was leading a school where we did some work with McKinsey & Company, looking at our systems of talent management and leadership development.  I was introduced to their concept of “centeredness” as the key leadership trait that predicts organizational health and that leads to what they claimed at  “extraordinary results.”  The idea is that organizational leaders who have a clear sense of purpose, cultivate self-awareness, manage energy and pace their work, and who employ effective strategies for engaging and communicating with their community and stakeholders, are those who have the capacity to transform work culture and get meaningful and measurable results.  

I think something similar could be said in cultivating centeredness in our students.  To what extent do our students have opportunities to explore who they are and what matters most to them, consider their purpose(s) in life, and discuss and practice strategies for managing their energy and organizing their life?  Of course we educate students whose developmental reality is much different from that of adults.  We have students who by biological and psychological definition are not yet fully developed or fully realized human beings.  To some degree, we can’t expect our students to be “centered” in ways we might aspire to for adults.  Yet, I still think there is utility in thinking about schools as spaces where we are cultivating an awareness in our students about their developmental trajectory.  We talk a lot in schools about student ownership of learning.  But how can students own their learning when they don’t necessarily understand the developmental context that they find themselves in?  

For me, student-centeredness would mean that the school has created a space where students situate their learning opportunities and educational programs within an emerging awareness of their developmental progress.  Concretely, it requires that students have an awarness of the stages of human development, the nature of cognition, and what it means to learn.  Student-centeredness, therefore, requires us to move away from traditional notions of “academics” versus “social-emotional learning” and see them as two sides of the same developmental coin that cannot be addressed separately or in isolation of one another.  We would include learning about “life skills,” “leadership skills” or “soft skills” as part of the explicit curriculum, just like we do with literacy, numeracy, or any other content-based curriculum topic.  We would have more class offerings, including core coursework, whose focus was more explicitly dedicated to these matters.  Who says that a course in biology is more important than a course in managing conflict, public speaking, or career planning (state legislatures and local school boards set graduation requirements, so admittedly this still is a post about the politics of schooling)?  We’re living in a moment when many of the settled assumptions about how we handle schooling are being both questioned and in some-cases, validated.  Thoughtfully reconsidering the core curriculum, and how we can enhance student-centeredness as a more deliberate outcome of the school experience, should be on the agenda.   

Yesterday I found myself walking around campus at lunchtime.  Specifically, it was our elementary school lunch, and I was enjoying talking to students and getting their perspectives on how school back on campus was going for them.  Our team has gone to incredible lengths to blend our efforts for normalcy with adherence to safety and health protocols.  This includes the elementary team dividing students into 13 different play areas around the campus, as well as hiring coaches to structure and supervise games and play.

At the center of the main courtyard, right in the middle of the campus, two coaches had organized a large group of 1^st graders into lines for relay races.  Each kid, in succession, ran their way through a simple obstacle course.  What had started as enthusiastic cheering had quickly built into absolute frenetic delight as the teams jumped and cheered and chanted and screamed to encourage their teammates.  I think the noise and energy from these little 1^st graders drowned out anything else happening, and I’m sure it was difficult for the nearby secondary classrooms to ignore the spectacle.  The kids were completely and totally lost in the fun of the moment.   

I had to pause a moment at the scene, myself a little overcome by such a beautiful moment.  Oh how we’ve missed being together on campus!  I’ve told my staff that young people are both remarkably resilient and simultaneously vulnerable.  We have asked so much of them this past year.  We’ve asked them to sit and concentrate and engage through a screen, without much of the physical and emotional interaction and play that is so critical to their development and well-being.  They have been remarkable.  They have done everything we have asked.  It was the best we could do as educators and the best we could offer given the circumstances.  

It’s clear that we are all still battling through a pandemic that doesn’t seem eager to slacken its grip on humanity.  There are still obstacles and we likely will have to learn to live with certain protocols and restrictions for much longer than we had ever thought possible.  But we are also finding ways to take back some of our humanity, and having students on campus for in-person learning certainly seems to qualify as a triumph for our community.  

A few months ago, I finished reading Emotional Agility by Susan David.  I’m a bit of a productivity/self-help nut, and the byline in the title caught my attention – “get unstuck, embrace change, and thrive in work and life.”  Generally speaking, I’m incredibly satistied in my work and profession, but I’m always trying to make sure that I don’t calcify when it comes to learning new things and embracing opportunities for reflection and growth.  Specifically, staying flexible is a real priority for me.  I don’t just want to endure or survive change, I want to embrace change, just like the title of the book says.  

So, I picked up the book and started reading.  The general framework for developing emotional agility, according to David, is comprised of four key elements: 1) show up, 2) step out, 3) walk your why, and 4) move on.  By showing up, we commit to honestly describe and confront our emotions and behaviors.  Then, when we commit to step out, we develop the ability to get outside of ourselves and try to look at our emotions and behaviors with a more detached, objective lens.  Walking your why means staying connected to core values and goals as we analyze our emotions, and then determine whether our daily choices are, in fact, aligned with those values.  Finally, we move on, or commit to keep moving forward.  This can take the form of continuous improvement, slowly tweaking and iterating our way towards better day by day and minute by minute decisions.  Or, sometimes we take a more risky crack at new behaviors, followed by time to allow ourselves to integrate our new actions and practices into our regular routines and ways of working.  

In other words, the book begins with a strong invitation to examine ourselves and our emotional routines.  But the main metaphor and contribution of the book, I believe, is what comes next.   David introduces us to the idea of “the hook.”  That’s not a new term.  As educators, many of us were trained in the Essential Elements of Instruction and the need to start off the daily lesson with a “hook” to get students’ attention and launch into the learning of the day.  In the case of Emotional Agility, “the hook” has a more sinister connotation.  “The hook” here refers to “a self-defeating emotion, thought, or behavior.”  These hooks are thoughts or reactions that drag us down, and are embedded within the scripts that are running in our heads; scripts that predictably take us to emotional places that we don’t necessarily want to be.  The agility part comes when we learn to unhook ourselves and engage in the 4 practices described earlier – to show up, step out, walk your why, and then move on.  Instead of running our scripts on autopilot, we interrupt the emotional algorythym to give ourselves time to objectively analyze our emotional reaction and then deliberately make adjustments that reflect our values and bigger purposes.  It sounds like a straightforward recipe, and would be, if we weren’t talking about emotions.  

My favorite chapter comes towards the end of the book, when David talks at length about how you can teach your children to develop their emotional agility.  As a father of six, I found tips for raising emotionally agile kids to be one of the book’s most practical contributions.   She uses ideas like “fear-walking” and “taking the plunge” to reinforce the idea that parents should help kids acknowledge their fears and identify their emotions, but then to also be skeptical and interrogate those emotions.  She encourages parents to lead by example by articulating the thought routines they use to question their emotional reactions and to craft productive responses.  She also cautions about the overuse of external rewards and stimuli in shaping the behavior of children, worrying that such mechanisms can sometimes bring about the desired behaviors but not the corresponding thought processes that will lead to more productive responses in the future.  

Overall, the book is a strong invitation towards greater self-awareness, and then, self-mastery.  Rather than allowing our emotions and fears to drive our reactions on auto-pilot, our emotional agility is measured by our ability to interrupt our natural reactions and more deliberately and productively rewire ourselves to act in accordance with our values and goals.  

I’ve worked in a lot of school innovation and school redesign spaces over the years, where there always seems to be a strong push for greater integration of technology into the learning experience of young people.  In some camps, the call has been to allow technology to provide students with a completely student adaptive experience, often through a strong component of virtual or hybrid learning.  Even 10 years ago, the push from the education innovation community to get students more personalized online learning was very strong.  I’ve always been a proponent of integrating technology in ways that provide students with greater access to learning opportunities, and where appropriate, as a tool to deepen student engagement and ownership of learning in the classroom.  

Then the pandemic hit, and all of sudden we were forced into a great experiment.  Virtual education for all, and then hybrid education for all.  Of course you could argue that forcing teachers and students into modes of learning that they weren’t exactly prepared for was not a great experimental design.  Certainly the motivation levels of students and staff alike to engage virtually was extremely variable.  I have enough anecdotal experience myself to know that some very strong classroom teachers really struggled with the motivation and ability to transfer their instructional practice to virtual settings, perhaps hoping that they could get back to their classrooms quickly (and the classroom practices they had developed over years).  Things obviously did not turn out exactly that way.  

What is so interesting to me is that after a year of virtual and hybrid learning, when we gave our families the opportunity to choose virtual modalities or to come back in-person full time, the result was near 100% in favor of in-person learning.  In other words, after testing what virtual learning might be, almost everyone opted for something that resembled a more traditional in-person school day.  People protested in the streets to open schools.  In a world where many industries really have been transforming in significant ways, K-12 education again seems less apt to move.    

Certainly, there are shifts that I believe will be permanent.  Many families do prefer the added flexibility of both hybrid and virtual options.  Some families have left their schools on a permanent basis to explore possibilities in online and home school settings.  I don’t have the data in front of me to measure well the size of the market shift, and I imagine that the next few years will see the ongoing fallout and adjustment in the education sector.  But in my own school, the data is pretty clear.  Parents and students mostly want in-person learning.

The other more permanent shift will be stronger integration of technology in our in-person learning settings.  I can say confidently that my staff is much more skilled in their ability to navigate the different systems that make up our virtual suite of programs, including content focused software and the tech platforms that facilitate communication and collaboration.  Before the pandemic, it seemed that many teachers could passively opt-out of some, if not most, tech integrations, with perhaps the acception of attendance and grading software which were typically mandated and enforced.  I believe teachers will more universally be expected to integrate digital tools and communication channels into their regular routines and instructional repertoire.  

Yet despite these shifts, the traditional model of K-12 education seems to be remarkably persistent.  The pandemic gave us a glimpse of what virtual learning and hybrid learning might look like when adopted by a large portion of the education sector.  In my experience at least, that type of adoption is not what families wanted.  It seems the pandemic has validated the core value proposition of teachers and schools – as physical places where students can access structured learning, quality instruction, social interaction and friendships, and safe places for student growth while parents are largely at work.  There will be more opportunities for alternative programs for students and families who don’t want the traditional school experience, and only time will tell how deep the shifts away from traditional school will be.  But from my vantage point, it doesn’t look like computer screens will be replacing our brick and mortar school experience.