The Storm

Several years ago, on a summer afternoon, I was following a school of fish through a marsh just behind a barrier island on the coast. My father-in-law and I had caught several, and we were as excited as little kids. I'd be lying if I said I did not notice storm clouds a few miles off from us. I think I even said out loud, "We might get a little wet in a few minutes." I generally don't play around with coastal storms when I'm on the water, but I was probably blinded by the thought of catching just one more. I didn't know that the storm that I was seeing was a water spout that was moving onshore and turning into a tornado. By the time I recognized the danger, the storm was on top of us. The wind and sideways rain made it almost impossible to see the front of my boat as I tried to navigate away from the storm. I remembered having to coach myself into breathing slower and not panicking as I inhaled water coming at my face. It was over in a few minutes of chaos, but it was as scared as I'd ever been on the water. 

On Wednesday, that memory came back to me as I joined several students and staff members before school at the Meet You at the Pole prayer. The event takes a few moments to rally students, staff, and community members to pray for schools and the people in them. It's another one of the post-COVID things that I was happy to see come back. One of the prayers quoted the book of Mathew and the storm that the disciplines found themselves in. Maybe it was the impending hurricane that I knew was coming later in the week or maybe it was experience talking in my head, but I knew, in more ways than one, a storm was coming. 

October is generally one of the more stressful months for educators and students. It is usually jam-packed with events and the newness of school has worn off a bit. Grades and expectations become real things rather than something said at a staff meeting or written on a syllabus. Things like homecoming week and field trips to the state fair compete with the end of the marking period and due dates for STEM grand challenges. And just like me following a school of fish for fun, we can all get distracted until it is too late to see that a storm is upon us. We talk a lot about self-care for teachers these days, but rather than finding reactive measures to destress, I'd like to propose a proactive one as we embark on a traditionally stormy month ahead. Carve out a few moments each day to look at the horizon and prepare. Make it a habit to know what is coming up and talk to your students and fellow department members about how to manage what needs to be done. Be strategic and be vocal about it. Don't wait until the storm hits you. 

Curiosity

A decade ago, NASA landed a robot on the surface of Mars. The 6-wheeled, 1900-pound device was named Curiosity and over the past ten years, it has been sending back pictures and information to us on Earth in its effort to determine if and when there may have been water on the surface of Mars and if there had been life there swimming in it. It continues to travel over mountains and through craters to collect data as we learn more about the planet closest to our own. 

I recently picked up a book about the engineering marvel that led to the Curiosity rover getting to Mars and found that our own story shared some parallels with the mission. While we don't have the need for rocket scientists and the development of a sky crane to get our jobs done, the level of teamwork, reliance on others and adjustment to meet our goals sounded very similar. Undoubtedly, over the years, I've approached many of you under the guise of my own curiosity about how we approach a problem or look for growth. I probably even used the word. But the thing that I love the most is that ten years later, Curiosity is still looking, still assessing data, and still searching for more. 

If there is one trait that I hope all leaders in a school have, it's curiosity. Students, teachers, counselors, principals, and district leaders all need to remain curious about what we can do next. Curiosity leads us to discover something we may never have found and those discoveries lead to more growth. And growth is what we are all about. So stay curious teacher leaders, but more importantly, follow your curiosity and inspire students to do the same. You never know what you might find.

What Does Leadership Look Like?

Over the summer I've been invited to speak with a lot of groups. Generally, they leave the content of the message up to me and when they do, I almost always choose to talk about leadership. As a principal, I am often looked to as the leader in the building and the majority of my talks have been with other building and district leaders, so they get the formality of that position. But this week, I was asked to speak with a different audience. My task was to speak to all undergraduates at the University of Mt. Olive in teaching majors. My first thought was to find a different topic, but I caught myself. This is exactly who needs to hear about leadership the most. Within a short time, each of those students will be in their first year as a classroom teacher and some administrator will walk into their room to do their very first observation. The very first standard on that observation covers leadership. 

I think we confuse leadership and authority too much, so I needed a way to explain how a first-year teacher can and should be a leader in their classroom and in their building. Being a leader does not mean being in charge. Instead, I focused on the traits of a leader that involve inspiring others, collaborating to remove barriers, and meeting expectations so that the people that they collaborate with can meet theirs. In reality, leadership is more about a dance with others than a set of directions to them.  So how do you break that down so that a 19-year-old pre-service teacher can understand it? You tell a story. And in my stories to them about teacher leaders throughout our building, I realized a common theme. Each of these stories involved leadership that became contagious. While the traits that were demonstrated were never taught in a classroom lesson or in a PLC, in every instance you can find a student or a colleague that saw leadership in action and copied it. Good leaders build more leaders. That's what leadership looks like. 

The Teacher Shortage

In case you've been hiding under a rock over the past few years, I'd like to point out that there is a teacher shortage in our state and across our nation. As a principal, I can tell you that it certainly has gotten more difficult to find candidates for teaching positions. A decade ago, I could scan through a list of recent graduates or select from a pool of people that applied online. Today, depending on the position, it's more like finding one candidate that you can work with and train to become a great teacher. It's a problem that isn't singular to teaching right now, as the job market has greatly expanded and left many industries searching for human capital to fill their needs. So why is a teacher shortage considered a crisis while others are not? The answer is simple: We don't have the time. A labor shortage in manufacturing means you have to wait for the products that you want a little longer. There's a similar wait for sectors of the service industry that annoys us when we want something now. But a teacher shortage doesn't get the benefit of waiting. When students don't have a teacher, that time is lost and will likely never come back. It's a huge opportunity cost that impacts every child in every room that is left without a qualified person to guide and instruct them. 

This crisis hasn't been ignored as education leaders and policymakers struggle to rework licensure pathways and fight for improved salaries to attract and retain people to education. And while making teaching an economically competitive occupation is necessary, if any of us is being honest, it's not why we chose the job. Most of us chose to be a teacher because we were inspired by other teachers. Maybe it was a family member or maybe it was someone that taught you. That inspiration sparked interest in something that we could see ourselves doing. And while lawmakers work to improve salaries and budgets to make schools run, it's that other part that I think we need to work on. That's the part that is in our control. 

So here's my big question: Do our students look at us and see the parts of our job that we enjoy? I'm sure they hear the news on teacher pay and undoubtedly they see frustration of the bad days, but hopefully they also see it when you enjoy what you do and feel effective in what you have accomplished. I strongly believe that you are what you pay attention to and if we are only focused on the negative parts of teaching, then no matter what pay scale gets adopted, we will miss out on a generation of potential educators because they never got to see the enjoyment of education. So while we push policymakers to improve the things within their control, I believe it is up to us to promote the things that we control. I sincerely want you to enjoy your job, but more importantly, I want your students to know that you do. The generation that follows them depends on it.

Metaphors

As we started back to school this week, I realized all too quickly how different this year was going to be for me being away from the building at times. I spent most of this week in Raleigh at the State Board meeting and workshop on strategic goal alignment. (I know, it sounds REALLY glamorous!) I tried hard to leave Dr. Willis, Mr. Jones and Mr. Simms alone, but inevitably I found myself texting them to ask about school and how things were going and even inserting myself to make decisions when I didn't really have to. It's a big adjustment for me to be away and still feel like I'm doing my job for the school. 

While I was at the State Board workshop, we started our work with a metaphor. The state committed itself to several goals and objectives not long before the pandemic changed everything and now the question was, where are we on this journey? Did the plane ever leave the airport? Did we take off and have to make an emergency landing? Did we finish a leg of our journey, but got delayed to our destination, or did we make it farther than we thought we would? As we discussed our status related to the goals, we continued to use the metaphor to express how we feel about school progress, the impact of the past two years, and where we ultimately want to be. It was a great exercise and somehow relating our progress to something very familiar made it easier to talk about and relate to. 

Later in the week, school performance grades and growth scores were officially released and the statistical realities of the impact on schools were made public. In many ways, it is what we expected, but still, a tough pill to swallow compared to the progress we were making before. Any move backward in the land of student growth isn't what you want to see. So where are we? I believe that the first leg of our journey was rerouted and over the past two years, we fought the turbulence of the flight and looked for a place to land. We were delayed and missed our intended connection. (If this has ever happened to you, you are well aware of the feeling.) But the trip wasn't canceled and on Monday, we took off on the next leg of our journey. We are ascending and on our way to the next destination. I'm happy to be flying with you and I can't wait to make it to where we are going together. Just hold on, because it is going to be a heck of a ride. We have somewhere to be!

Ben

 As the week of our Summer Enrichment Camp concludes, I have to share a great story. One of our students, Ben, almost didn’t get to go. Ben is in a wheelchair and just two weeks ago, had another brain surgery. His stitches were removed the day before we left, but his doctors cleared him because of how excited he was to see the nation’s capital. On Wednesday morning, as we prepared to leave Greene Central, the bus company notified us that the wheelchair lift did not work. Ben was devastated. After a few minutes of frustration and tears, two of our teachers decided that they would take Ben’s family SUV with the wheelchair carrier and follow the bus to DC in hopes that there would be a solution when we arrived. Several phone calls later, we had a second bus waiting for us when we arrived. However, that bus had a wheelchair lift that only worked temporarily and we waited for over an hour on the side of the road for a solution. You could see the pain in Ben’s eyes as he felt that everyone was waiting because of him. Overnight, our driver went to Maryland and swapped the bus again for one with a working lift and arrived back at the hotel at 1:30am. The next two days were much better for everyone and we all had a great time. 

Our Summer Enrichment students had opportunities to learn a lot about biodiversity, government, art and literary elements throughout the week. But I believe we all also learned how difficult life can be for a disabled person and how easy it is to take that for granted. I also have to commend our students and teachers that never once complained or made Ben feel different. They did everything they could do to be inclusive and to make sure that Ben was able to see and experience everything that they could do. We teach students a lot of things in school, but perhaps the most important thing we can ever teach them is empathy. Because of a little patience, a lot of persistence and some empathy, Ben got to take a picture next to FDR, both in their wheelchairs. 

The News

I've had a lot of opportunities to speak with the media over the past week. Most interviews have inquired about our school, my past, and my beliefs about education or leadership. Most have done an excellent job in trying to portray the special parts of our school. Even a few of the kids that we struggle with managed to make their way into a local news segment, and it made me chuckle to know that even the difficult ones seem to know what we are striving for if you make them answer the question. The news this week made me swell with pride and several times I found myself going back to see just how many people had viewed the articles or interviews. It's captivating and maybe even a little narcissistic, but I'm not too proud to admit that I started to enjoy the attention. It's great being on the right side of a news story.

Then I heard about the news of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Another school shooting. Children and teachers dead. The news erupted with the story and the all-too-typical debates over gun laws, mental health, and school security measures. After reading the events of that afternoon, my instinct was to turn off the news. I didn't want to hear it anymore. I'm sick of it. The same news that I had loved hours before, was now giving me the horrific details of yet another tragic incident. 

I'm not writing this to debate politics or gun laws. I'm not telling anyone that I know the answer. But I can tell you that my children, your children, and all children deserve to go to schools like the ones that were in the news earlier this week. They deserve to feel safe and protected without feeling like they are in a prison. They deserve to thrive, and when given the option between this week's news stories, there isn't anything I wouldn't give to provide them all with the happier of the two. 

Our jobs as educators have changed a lot over the past few years. Not just due to COVID and learning loss, but, also as a response to a changing society. Like so many times before, the role has been given to educators to keep children safe. But there is something that we can all do every day in preparation and prevention of the events like the one at Robb Elementary School. It is written all over our school. 

Choose Love

Choose Hope

Choose Joy

Choose Peace

And while it could be debated that teaching these ideals cannot stop a madman from choosing to target students, I believe that these values are contagious. They grow in a community and they begin to change the hearts and minds. So in a week full of news, some great and some awful, thank you for continuing to teach love, hope, joy, and peace to students. Thank you for caring for them. Thank you for giving your time, your food, and your money to them. Thank you for loving them in what has been a very tough year to be an educator. I promise you are winning and if you keep it up, there will be more good news to come.