School Leadership from A to Z: How to Lead Well Without Losing Your Way

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Randy Weiner and James Bailey, authors of The Daily SEL Leader, a guided journal.

[00:25] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:28] SPEAKER_02:

Randy and James, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much. Let's get into, if we could, a little bit of the origin story of the Daily SEL Leader. What work in your professional lives did this book come out of?

[00:41] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so my background, Justin, I've been an elementary, high school principal, central office, superintendent, charter school leader. all sorts of things. And certainly have always been interested in the SEL background. Long, long time ago when I started in the late 80s and 90s, it was called character education. And and ran an alternative school where we put a good focus on that. But as I saw that it started to become more pronounced over the last few years, one of my big worries, again, was that it was turning into a sort of typical change, a typical reform that schools would purchase a package, give it to teachers to do, and then boom, we're doing SEL.

[01:31]

And so as Randy and I started to introduce each other and get familiar with each other, we kind of had similar concerns and really thought that you know, one of the missing ingredients was the idea that, you know, principals didn't really understand themselves very well around the whole idea of social emotional learning. It would be very difficult for them to, you know, lead SEL to support others in their social emotional growth. So that's kind of the general genesis of where we started.

[02:01] SPEAKER_01:

I would just add that Right when James approached me about joining him on the project, I had come off, for me at least, a relatively deep dive into SEL. And I've always been interested in student agency and having conducted a number of rapid prototype design thinking influenced student agency prototypes with teachers and with school leaders. What I realized was adults don't necessarily have that agency themselves or understand the skills that combine. to create agency in the first place. And so as James was just alluding to, we felt like there's a huge disconnect between this idea of adults developing these skills in students when they're not supported to develop those skills themselves.

[02:48] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think almost all of the discussion I've heard over the past few years about social emotional learning has been exclusively about students. And then I would say more recently, we've started to pay attention to the needs of teachers, especially as teachers have been under a lot of stress, you know, in response to the pandemic and virtual learning and hybrid learning and not being able to do everything we want to for students. But you're drawing attention to SEL for leaders. What are some of the, as you said, kind of the missing understandings of SEL when it comes to our own self-awareness, our own identity as leaders who have these concerns, just like our students do and just like our teachers do?

[03:26] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so the book really is kind of predicated on Kenneth Leithwood's four frames of leadership, which I'm sure your audience is familiar with. But one of the big ones certainly is the emotional path. And I think that what we've seen is such a focus over the last couple decades on the rational path. You know, if we just get the, you know, the instruction right and the curriculum right and the testing right and all that, things will change. But we also know that the teaching is a very emotionally important laborious act that you pour yourself into it. And there's a lot of things that our teachers have to sort of put up with in a lot of different ways that causes some real emotional issues with our teaching staff.

[04:10]

And one of the things that we really notice, you know, probably in your principal training, my principal training, it was told to us, you know, it's all about relationships, relationships. And yet we are given policies to implement. We are told that you have to, you know, do things to people, not with people. And that a lot of our, a lot of our principal leaders are not well versed in a lot of the things that, as you mentioned, the idea about self-awareness. So how do they handle stress better? How do they handle, you know, emotional situation?

[04:46]

I sit on another broadcast I think last week that about 99.9% of a principal's job is dealing with people, whether you're dealing with kids or teachers or parents or central office leaders or whoever, but yet we don't really give very good training to them about communication, communication styles. Again, the whole self-awareness thing and self-management, I think are areas that all of us, you know, continually work on as leaders that just are not real supported. You either sort of have it naturally according to most people or, you know, you develop it. But, you know, our belief is that you can certainly understand yourself, practice it more deliberately and get better at these skills.

[05:32] SPEAKER_01:

And I think as James stated at the beginning, those relationships are absolutely foundational, but for some reason we don't treat them as such. And what I don't mean to suggest that school leaders don't care about them. I mean to say that the system isn't designed to support school leaders at scale, at least. to really focus on developing those skills. And so in an environment where you are bombarded with apparent priorities all day long, all of us are going to be challenged to make sense of that complexity. And yet we would submit if time were invested in developing these skills, the knock-on effect is disproportionately positive.

[06:22]

So that's where we're trying to help folks get to is to be able to make some small investments in ways that can actually fit into their schedule.

[06:30] SPEAKER_02:

Well, let's get into the framework a bit. You use the term CASEL skills, C-A-S-E-L. What does that mean? And how does that provide a bit of structure for our thinking about this set of skills?

[06:42] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So the CASEL is the national group that has developed these. And again, those emanated from A lot of work that came from research that Daniel Goleman and people did, you know, again, back in the early 90s around emotional intelligence and those, you know, those big areas of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making is kind of their framework, collaborative for academic, social, emotional learning. But yeah, they're the big group that does a lot of social emotional work, has put together this framework. It seems to be one of the most widely used. And again, these are the skills that a lot of districts and schools are trying to get their students to develop.

[07:26]

So we just thought, you know, again, if it's good enough for students, it's probably good enough for the adults that they have to learn and develop those also.

[07:32] SPEAKER_02:

So I think we've all experienced or at least heard secondhand what can happen when leaders don't take care of themselves, when we don't maintain an awareness of just kind of how we're doing and invest in that self-care. But in this book, you talk much more specifically about a set of skills, as we've alluded to. What can happen if we don't attend to that set of skills and that set of issues? And what need did you see within the profession that prompted you to write this book?

[08:01] SPEAKER_01:

I don't think anyone is surprised to hear us reiterate how stressful the teaching profession is and the teaching shortage that the country faces. And in large part, that is due to a fundamental lack of feeling supported. And I think what's important to point out here from a leadership perspective is that It's reasonable to think that you're supporting your staff, but if your staff is telling you they don't feel supported, that perception is reality. And so the book is trying to help leaders understand the very specific skills that they can seek to develop in a large part explicitly to be able to demonstrate to staff, students, and community

[08:55]

that they do know how to support a diverse and complex set of needs, no matter which school you're in and who you serve. And so I think at the highest level, that's what we're seeking to do is to stop making this warm and fuzzy, to try to put an end to the conversation around SEL being something extra or additional, And to suggest this is really core and fundamental to improving the overall quality of student experiences at the end of the day, but through improving the experiences that staff has and through improving leaders own sense of self-esteem, even when you continue to struggle through developing some of these skills, which we could call this life to a certain degree.

[09:52]

Knowing that you're putting in the work, knowing that you don't need to be perfect tomorrow, but that you're on a path to improving your practice in the name of meeting some of the most foundational needs of your community. That's inspiring and energizing, right? As opposed to feeling like I'm still trying to push a rock up the mountain and I don't feel like I'm going anywhere.

[10:13] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I would just add to that. I mean, the data are really clear around, you know, what's happening basically over the last 20 years. And really what has happened is, you know, if you put it in an economic term, the attrition rate of teachers across America costs $8 billion per year. $8 billion. That is a huge sum of that could be invested in a lot of different ways. We also see numbers like the number of teachers who are leaving before retirement has risen 8% since 2015.

[10:49]

There's a 35% reduction in young people going into the teaching profession. One survey we found from the Learning Policy Institute shows that only 50% of teachers thought that they had full support from their administrators. The Gallup poll showed that only 30% of teachers are fully engaged on a daily basis. And so I think, again, it's one of those, going back to Leithwood's frame, you know, I think we've done an amazing job looking at standards and assessment and instruction and really focusing there. But what we haven't done as good a job on is figuring out that emotional path. And how do you actually, you know, be a boss and a leader sort of simultaneously as a principal to know that you've got to move a school in a certain direction, but then again, give the right emotional support to your teachers as they struggle with not only the changes, but with changes in kids.

[11:45]

You see surveys across America. I saw one a couple of weeks ago from Colorado that 40%, 40%. Four out of 10 teachers are seriously consider leaving the profession. So how then do we keep them in a place that their heart really rests? But again, they're just not feeling supported. The data, again, are very extreme.

[12:08]

But again, I think we're starting to see a crisis. And again, without those skills, we're going to be in big trouble.

[12:15] SPEAKER_01:

I just want to reiterate that when we're citing the data and we're defining the problems, It's to call attention to the need to provide this, unfortunately, rare type of support for school leaders, right? It's not to say, school leaders, what in the world are you doing, right? It's to say, from our perspective, as we said at the top of the show, this kind of support, this kind of information seems to be missing. It's not widely available to you, and that feels like a miss. And so while, of course, there are other resources available that folks can turn to, we really tried to spend quite a lot of time understanding how do you develop a resource that might achieve that goal given all of the constraints that school leaders face.

[13:08] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate the points that we may feel like we're doing everything we possibly could to support teachers and to help them feel supported, but if they don't feel supported, Clearly there is a disconnect and there are some dimensions to that disconnect that you identify in the book. Yeah, so a couple that I wanted to ask about, you talk in module three of the book about social awareness in terms of empathy, perspective taking, appreciating diversity, respect for others. What's happening when people feel the absence of those skills or those aspects of SEL for leaders?

[13:42] SPEAKER_01:

I think that's a great question because I think that in my limited experience of And by limited, I mean recognizing that there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of school leaders in the country. I've personally worked with hundreds of them, but recognize there's a diversity of experience out there. I think folks miss the cues that are implicit in the answer to your question because they don't have the skills in the first place. And so what that conversation might look like when there's a lack of empathy or perspective taking is, If I'm the school leader who's lacking those skills, I just had a great conversation with this other person. And the other person walks away saying, I don't think I was heard at all, right? The school leader demonstrated no understanding of my perspective, no ability to switch roles and sit in my shoes and even entertain my perspective.

[14:34]

And it's one thing if that happens at an individual level. And again, depending upon who the school leader is and who the individual is, I think the impact of that lack of skills varies. To be explicit, it's one thing if two white folks have that kind of exchange, it's another thing if a white leader in power working across difference leaves a person of color feeling that way. So it's one thing at the individual level. It's a whole other thing, I think, at the systems level where an entire community or an entire staff bears the burden of a leader's not yet developed social awareness skills. And I think one of the things that keeps coming out to us as we think through how to more clearly and concisely articulate this, other ways in which to try to spread the word is that

[15:27]

social awareness is a pretty complicated set of skills. And it's important to make sure that you feel like you're really solid on self-awareness first. Because if you come to social awareness without at least being on the path to developing your self-awareness skills, that social awareness payoff is likely to be less than it otherwise would be.

[15:50] SPEAKER_00:

And I would add to that, I think one of the things I think principals really need to recognize is is this concept of, it's just called emotional labor. And really what that means is that basically teachers put on a good face all the time, right? They could have a rotten day. They could have had a battle with a parent or a student. But you know what? That next hour, that next class, man, they've got that smile on.

[16:19]

And what that causes is is a lot of internal stress and a lot of internal health problems, a lot of things like that. And where I see principles, the idea of empathy, what principles really need to do with empathy is again, they need to put themselves in that perspective for a while and say, how would I feel if I just had that, you know, that issue with that parent or that kid or whatever, and then to help them recover. There's, again, a lot of research that's going to point to this idea of recovery. And the quicker that people can recover, they develop more resilience, the more that they can handle those particular things. And so part of, I think, the principal's role, again, is to recognize that, right? We always hear this, you know, when I was a young leader, my least favorite word in the

[17:11]

Morale, right? Oh, morale's low. Morale's low. Because I didn't know what that meant, right? I didn't know what to do with that. And I was just like, well, you know, people just need to get over and get through it.

[17:22]

Yeah. What does that mean?

[17:23] SPEAKER_02:

Like, are you saying you're mad at me? Is that what you mean by morale is low? Is somebody else mad? Just tell me. Yeah, exactly.

[17:29] SPEAKER_00:

It's like, well, what's causing this? And so the more that you can actually begin to step in their shoes and say, oh, okay, so you know what, 90% of my teachers had a rotten day. We're coming up on the end of the, you know, the grading period, state testing. Okay, I can now understand that. from their perspective why they may be feeling like this and figure out ways to help them get through it.

[17:52] SPEAKER_02:

What strikes me as a through line running through this entire discussion and through the book is just the basic idea that as much as we might be task-oriented, that we might be data-driven, that we might be evidence-based, that we have all this technical and professionalized knowledge and work in front of us, What strikes me as the through line here is that we're all human beings doing this work. And when we forget that, when I forget that I'm a human being who has emotions and energy and other people are human beings and they might've had a bad day, like when we lose that human piece, everything else can kind of grind to a halt or go bad quickly, right?

[18:33] SPEAKER_01:

Justin, I appreciate that. And it makes me think of another dimension of the same problem, which is I think educators are themselves, often trying to be superhuman. And I would submit the system is set up to require, again, at scale, superhumans. And we don't exist. And so if we could let go of this notion that it is possible to achieve these aspirations at scale, again, we can, I've said this before, we'll always be able to find rock stars, right? We'll always be able to find exceptions to the rule.

[19:13]

But I think at scale, the position that principals are put in, the position that most teachers are put in, is simply not one that is set up to drive success. And if we could embrace that as a form of creative constraint and say, leaders, your job is not to be the expert in the room. Your job is to facilitate the development of collective expertise. I think the odds go up That everyone has a better experience and the stress can come down by letting go of feeling like you need to occupy the spotlight, that you always need to be the smartest, most authoritative person. Otherwise, there's some sense of weakness that someone's going to attribute to you. I think James and I would both submit it's probably exactly the opposite.

[20:05]

Strength will be derived from a demonstration of humility and inclusivity.

[20:11] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, there's, again, a really interesting line of research from neuroscience, which basically says that it doesn't matter how nice of a person you are, when you step into that room, people's anxiety and stress will ratchet up, right? And what leaders have to really think about is how do they minimize that hierarchy and that power so that teachers can have that conversation, right? I think we're all really good at like taking over conversations and saying, well, here's how I would do it. But we have to really be, again, self-aware. of ourselves and our role within these systems that, again, they can't always look to us because we're not always going to be available. And so how do you minimize that anxiety, that stress so that people can have those really effective conversations?

[21:03] SPEAKER_02:

So the Daily SEL Leader is set up as, you call it a guided journal. What does that mean? And how do you envision leaders using the book?

[21:11] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So one of the things when we first started writing this book, we just looked to our friends, to our colleagues, to our networks and just said, you know, what's the typical amount of time that you have in a day to do something like this? And as you can suspect, it's pretty minimal, right? They're not going to read a full chapter at a time. They're not going to read you know, a whole section at a time. And so what we wanted to do would be to set it up as almost like a self-guided path, right?

[21:41]

So there is a diagnostic in it that talks about all these skills. So if you diagnose yourself and you see, you know, I'm not very good at self-awareness or self-management, you can actually start on that section. And each particular skill basically takes a week. And the weekly format basically is to give just a basic quote about that particular skill. They can reflect on that, write some things. We try to help them develop this habit of something that they're grateful for, because again, we know that that is a way for people to, you know, develop a kind of an inner, an inner worth and inner self-awareness of things.

[22:24]

We also have an emotional feeling wheel and the inside cover. So we ask him, you know, what, what are you feeling at this particular moment? Because again, we know that people who are more prone to label those emotions tend to understand them a lot better. So our, our sense is again, that this would only take probably, you know, five minutes. The little short reading that we have to start is less than 400 words. So again, it's very quick.

[22:51]

And again, there are multiple paths through the book. Again, you could start with the diagnostic. You could start from front cover to back cover. We have particular patterns. So again, if you're dealing with communication issues in your building or diversity issues, there's a set of skills that we lay out that we think would really matter. So Again, it's pretty much a kind of, you know, choose your own adventure type of book, which is, you know, was our intent from the start.

[23:17] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, we wanted to... to achieve a couple of things. One, we wanted to reflect and respect the fact that this work is so personal, right? There is no one singular SEL skills development path that will apply for all leaders.

[23:33]

And so the choose your own adventure approach is meant to reflect that, right? So that folks can jump right in the moment they pick up the book, which points to the second goal, which I think was ease of immediate use, right? That the consistency and engagement on a regular basis is more important than occasionally maybe possibly doing a deeper dot, right? Especially when we know that, and you know, James and I started this whole project uh off sort of as research nerds really wanting to to solve the problem of okay we're going to be the ones who get school leaders and and and others to finally engage with research right well the reality is of course it's not that school leaders don't want to engage with research it's that they don't have time to read research journals right so if that's the case then how might we design a a resource that is actually usable and that that 400 words per day

[24:30]

data point that James mentioned, that came out of prototyping before we even submitted the book proposal. So that wasn't a random selection. That was a result of prototyping that allowed us to say, okay, look, if that's all we have to work with, while I don't think we would stand up on a stage and say 400 words a day is going to fundamentally transform your practice overnight, I think what we would say is it should be a lot harder to not engage with this resource and given how we're trying to set it up and given that we're trying to put you in a position to make use of it immediately and easily and consistently.

[25:05] SPEAKER_02:

And it's a beautifully put together book just in terms of design and format and certainly could be habit forming in terms of just being able to pick that up every day, do that reading and that reflection. So the book is The Daily SEL Leader, A Guided Journal. Randy Weiner and James Bailey, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[25:26] SPEAKER_00:

It's been our pleasure. Thank you so much, Justin. Much appreciated.

[25:30] Announcer:

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