Leading to Make It Safe for Creativity

"If we as leaders can talk about our mistakes and our part in them, then we make it safe for others." Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unknown Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

Leaders are sometimes very stubborn people. They make mistakes, but then they spend an inordinate amount of time trying to conceal those mistakes. To some school leaders, showing that you are capable of making mistakes is revealing weakness. But, if you want to foster a culture of creativity and exploration in your school or district, you have to embrace your mistakes and display them. We display them by being open with candor with those we lead. By that very action, we demonstrate that trying and failing isn't the "unpardonable sin." As authentic leaders we must strive to make our mistakes public. We admit them; we learn from them. Creativity thrives within a culture that embraces failure as a product of experimentation.

A few years ago, when teaching my students writing, I emphasized repeatedly to them, that writing is about experimenting. It is about trying new combinations of words and ideas. I told them that means sometimes we write "drivel" and sometimes we pen words that inspire. But then I told them that "drivel" is a necesary part of writing. Just the same, mistakes are a part of leadership, and the wise leaders make them public. Authentic leaders that strive for creativity accept, acknowledge, and use failure, not hide it. We should always strive to make our mistakes public to those we lead. By doing so, we make it safe for others to be creative. Do you want your staff to approach problems and come up with creative solutions? Then perhaps you need to celebrate mistakes and failure through disclosure to make it safe.

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What Can School Leaders Learn from Pixar? Inviting Candor and Criticism to Be Creative

What does it take to create a “sustainable creative culture,” in an institution like public schools? The fact that many public schools exist just as they did a hundred years ago is an indication that they are often more about self-preservation than engaging in innovation. In other words, school systems are more often interested in work that is derivative rather than innovative. Not much is new in education reform because of this. It is a monumental failure to create a "sustainable creative culture" that could tackle some of our most serious problems in education today.

The pendulum metaphor is very familiar to most seasoned educators because they have seen reforms come and go and come and go, and most often these "reforms" are simply old ideas dressed differently. This pendulum metaphor persists because there's not really anything new in today's reforms; they are simply the old reforms or derivatives of old reforms. As Michael Fullan points out,

“If you’re in education long enough, you’re likely to get hit by the same pendulum multiple times." 

No reforms ever stick because we keep doing the same old things such as revising standards, chasing more difficult tests, or revamping teacher evaluations among many others. While this work is important, it isn't really reform. We aren't innovating because public education, schools and districts, aren't structured to innovate. They do not have sustainable creative cultures that foster innovation. We begin embracing innovation by developing what Ed Catmull describes in his new book, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, this “sustainable creative culture.”

According to Catmull, a most important ingredient in this creative culture is fostering a place where “people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms.” To create that culture, school leaders need to embrace “candor.” Candor is defined as the “quality of being open and honest in expression; frankness.” Candor, in other words, is inviting others to be open about their opinions, criticisms, and ideas. Sadly, public education, for all its calling for stakeholder buy-in is often more about defending and marketing someone’s pet reform project or idea rather than honestly seeking other educators' input or opinions. This is why that education pendulum continues to hit us multiple times. Candor is not invited and is often not allowed. If we really want to move education initiatives beyond the derivative to the innovative, then education leaders need be courageous and invite candor into their schools and districts.

How can school leaders invite candor into their schools and districts? Catmull offers an easy way to do that: You “institutionalize candor” so that it is part of the ritual and practice of the school. You can begin this by engaging in three simple practices.

• Tear down the “top-down hierarchy” and top-down reform driven processes that currently exist, and stop trying to defend initiatives that, if they are so darn beneficial, they should stand up to criticism and candor on their own. Too often educational leadership is more about pushing and marketing ideas instead of approaching the problems we face in schools creatively. Instead, let’s subject all these educational initiatives to the full force of candor and criticism. If they survive intact, then they must be good. If not, then they weren't worth the paper on which they're written.
• Invite straight talk as a rule. Nothing is sacred and off limits. Too often, those sitting in meetings are afraid to speak their minds because of the political consequences. It’s true! In public education if you get the reputation of speaking your mind, you are often defined as “not a team player” or worse. You are cast aside as an outcast and troublemaker. Educational leaders like to talk big about buy-in, and that they sought feedback, but some of them politically destroy those who don’t agree with them. Candor means you have the guts to listen to criticism and recognize when it is valid.
• Bring people together often to discuss school or district initiatives for the purpose of straight talk. Educators, for the most part, are by nature passionate people who care a great deal about what they do. Encourage them to identify the problems they see and be entirely candid. School leaders must be willing to courageously listen and not resort to being defensive. Allow the discussion and criticism to happen instead of shutting it down. Be flexible and willing to revise accordingly, and possibly even let go. It should never be about ego; it should be about improving education for kids.

I wish that I could be as optimistic about the education reforms swirling about---Common Core, Technology, Testing, Accountability, etc. Sadly, I am not. Fundamentally, public education is still more about institutional self-preservation than engaging in creative approaches to the problems the system faces. If we’re going to move to sustaining a creative culture that can tackle 21st century issues, then we have to become courageous school leaders and invite candor into our schools and districts.

3 Ways to Know If Your School or District Engages in Bullying Behavior

"Systems can bully as much as individuals." Sharon Salzberg & Robert Thurman, Love Your Enemies: How to Break the Anger Habit & Be a Whole Lot Happier

I began reading Love Your Enemies: How to Break the Anger Habit & Be a Whole Lot Happier by Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman today, and I stumbled on a section that focuses on bullying and dealing with those who bully. In that reading, Salzberg and Thurman mention that systems and social institutions can bully people as much as individuals. While I have understood and believed that the "culture" of a school can facilitate bullying and make it easier to happen, I had not ever fully made the leap to the idea of a school being a bully. The truth is, schools can be bullies in an even more insidious way: they can belittle students and staff in ways that are more covert than overt. 

How do we know when a school or school system is engaging in bullying behavior? According to Salzberg and Thurman, institutions bully through their social structures such as stereotyping, hierarchy and through thought control. It is rather obvious that schools can promote stereotyping through its school rituals, rules, and in its ways of dealing with students.

• They can also clearly promote stereotyping by fostering false hierarchies of students through its clubs, sports, and other student organizations. 
• They can really be guilty of bullying students and staff through methods of trying to control students' thoughts and by being intolerant of diversity of thought and beliefs. 

In a word, schools can be one of the most powerful bullying factors in a student's life.

How then do we know a bullying school when we see it? How can I tell if my school engages in bullying students? Here's some ideas of where to begin your examination of your school.

1. Does your school promote stereotyping through its academic, social, and other rituals and practices? For example, does your school have a habit of valuing one group of students over another? Does it through its practices place students in stereotypical groups? Does it, for example, make a big deal about being on the football team, but ignore those students who are band students or who are in the art club? You can probably know whether your school promotes stereotyping by looking at its values. What it values, it promotes the most. All school rituals and practices are based on these, so if your school values one group much more than another, you can be sure it might be covertly bullying those groups it values less by neglect and by default. Take time today with your staff and examine all those rituals, practices, processes, and values your school uses and has. Look at them carefully to determine whether they are creating bully victims. Then change them.

2. Does your school have staff who are bullies?  For example, in many schools where I have worked as an administrator, there are often staff members who bully students with put-downs, mistreatment, and ridicule. Often, these are the same individuals who refer kids to the office the most, and just can't figure out why they have so many behavior problems in their classrooms. By not dealing directly with these bullying staff members, schools become bullies by default. Be aware of how your staff, and yourself, treats others in the building and deal with bullying behavior directly and decisively.

3. Is your school more about controlling students rather than allowing students to grow and explore? Some of the worst bully offenders are schools that are more about controlling students than about teaching them. For example, while rules and procedures are necessary to protect students, they can be coercive and controlling when their goal is to try to tell students what they should think, believe, feel, etc. That's why values education programs can sometimes be dangerous waters to wade into. That's also why some schools are struggling with tolerance and acceptance of diversity. Schools that strive too hard to standardize its students often engage in mind control and bullying too. In their efforts to be "fair" to all students, they do not engage in "just" behavior, which is especially true of things like dress codes and efforts to control what students read. It is important to reflect and examine whether your school is more about "control" or "teaching." If it more about the former, it might be engaging in bullying behaviors.

In all our talk about dealing with bullying, we seldom talk about schools being bullies, but as Salzberg and Thurman point out, they can be. Schools that bully turn students off to learning and life. We as school leaders have a responsibility to perpetually reflect and examine our schools to make sure they do not engage in bullying their students.

Top 5 Blog Posts of the Week on The 21st Century Principal

What is everyone reading this week? Here’s the most often visited blog posts on the 21st Century Principal this week.

1. “Evernote Journal App for the iPad: Excellent Way to Take Meeting Notes and Keep Logs” Review of a free app for your iPad that allows you to take journal-like notes and sync them to your Evernote account.

2. “Establishing a Culture of Creativity by Paying Attention to Failure” We spend a great of time paying attention to success and winning. Perhaps we need to spend some time in our schools looking at the language we use to talk about failure if we truly want schools with creative cultures.

3. “Why Wouldn’t We Let Students Blog? Reasons to Get Students Blogging” Why would we keep students from blogging? It is the English teacher’s dream. Blogs are the avenue to authentic audiences and authentic writing.

4. “Data-Driven Decision Making Usually Means ‘Test-Score Driven Decision Making” When policymakers use the term “Date-Driven Decision Making,” let’s face it. They mean “Test-Score Driven Decision Making. But if we use just test scores to guide what we do in schools, we ignore much of the most important data.

5. “5 Free Summer Professional Development Resources from ASCD” Complements of ASCD, here’s some great summer professional development resources you can access online. Best of all? They’re free!

Thanks everyone for reading!

Establishing a Culture of Creativity by Paying Attention to Failure

“An organization’s language in relation to ‘failure’ is crucially important to creativity.” Andrew Grant & Gaia Grant, Who Killed Creativity?…And How Can We Get It Back

Those with great accomplishments started out at a stage of zero recognition. They began with little, but they reached the pinnacle of accomplishment only after facing rejection and failure. Those who we think have accomplished much, such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did so, in part, because of resiliency and creativity. It is this same resiliency and creativity that many of us would like to instill within our students. But while our schools often talk boldly about fostering a sense of resiliency and creativity in our students, our will often does not match our language nor our actions.

As Grant & Grant point out, an “organization’s language in relation to ‘failure’ is crucially important to creativity." I would that our actions toward failure matter as well. Our schools have become (perhaps they've always been) places that dislike creativity because they value standardization and conformity more. Those who fail to conform are shamed for their failure and prodded to get back in line. Those who fail to live up to “standards” are labeled as “failures.” In this, our schools engage in “language” and "actions" that reveal where the heart truly is in relation to creativity. We use words like “standards,” “grades,” “assessments,” and “tests” as tools to identify and label failure. Then we often leave students to their own devices instead of fostering the idea that failure is a learning opportunity.

When it comes to our actions, our schools celebrate the victories, and not the struggles. We make the most noise about the wins, and often ignore or minimize the losses. State championships in athletics, scholarships awarded, and spelling bee wins are celebrated loudly and continuously. In doing this though, are we not teaching our students that only “winning” matters because that is what we make the most fuss about? Then, we wonder why our students aren't more creative, and why they fail to demonstrate resiliency in the face of failure.

Let me be clear. I am certainly not advocating the celebration of mediocrity and non-accomplishment, or even celebrating failure. We need to celebrate the wins, the accomplishments and the successes. But we need to pay closer attention to how we treat "failure," with our words and our actions, if we want a culture of creativity and schools where students are willing to take risks. 

As Grant and Grant point out:

“Creative individuals have to be resilient in the face of rejection, self-sustaining, and self-reinforcing.”

Perhaps we can begin to establish a culture of creativity when we begin to pay closer attention to the language we use in relation to failure. But more than that, we can begin to pay attention to how we view and react to both succeeding and failing, winning and losing. It’s how we speak of and react to these that teach our students resiliency, and ultimately foster a culture of creativity we seek.

5 Steps for Dealing with the Emotionally Charged Situation in Your Classrooms, Schools or Offices

Name one person who always “triggers” strong emotion and anger in your life. If you are a district level leader, that person might be a board member or local politician. Or if you are a principal, it might be a parent, student, or even a teacher. If you’re a teacher, it might be one particular student or a colleague. In each of these cases, this individual usually knows and is highly skilled in knowing how to push your buttons and make you lose your cool. If relationships are truly important to us, we must learn how to effectively cope in these situations. Learning how to deal with these triggers is a powerful exercise in emotional intelligence, a test of character, and in being an effective educator.

Google engineer, Chade-Meng Tan, offers a simple technique, based Buddhist mindfulness meditation principles, that provides a way to effectively respond to these “triggers” rather than react to them. In his book, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (And World Peace), Meng offers a practice he calls the “Siberian North Railroad.” This practice, according to Meng, “is useful for dealing with triggers, but also for other situations in which we need to deal with negative or distressing emotions.” The practice has five steps:

1. Stop
2. Breathe
3. Notice
4. Reflect
5. Respond

Notice that the title “Siberian North Railroad” is a mnemonic device to remember the first letter of the words in each of the five steps (SBNRR). Here's how each of these 5 steps work:

Stop: According to Meng, when you “feel triggered” you just stop. You pause without doing anything. This is the most important step because it allows you to engage in the other steps. As Meng points out, in Buddhism, this is called the “sacred pause."

Breathe: In this step, focus the mind on the breath for a few minutes. Take several deep, conscious breaths, calming yourself. When your mind tries to slip back to the anger or strong emotion,  redirect it back toward your breath.

Notice: After focusing on the breath, then “notice” by closely examining the emotion. Look at what it feels like in your whole body. Notice how the emotion is affecting all parts of your body. The goal is to experience the emotion physiologically and not as something separate from your body. For example, as Meng suggests, your observation is not “I am angry” but “I experience anger in my body.” This is where you try to experience what the emotion is doing to you inside and out.

Reflect: In this step, Meng says to ask the question, “Where is this emotion coming from?”  Is it due something in my personal history? Is it due to some perceived personal inadequacy? This step is all about gaining a perspective of the emotion objectively from the outside. You put yourself in the other person’s shoes. You also remind yourself that all people just want to be happy and that this person is only acting this way because they perceive it will make them happy. This is important: bring perspective to your emotion without judging it right or wrong.

Respond: In this step, you finally respond. As Meng points out, you first bring to mind ways in which you could respond that bring about a positive outcome in the situation. Imagine what a positive response would look like. You may or may not actually have to carry out that response. Just remember, the goal here is to defuse the trigger before you make a bad situation worse.

SBNRR is a strategy, if practiced over time, breaks down our learned pattern of reacting to those strong emotional triggers, and installs a new, more effective way of responding. As we repeat this practice even with those strong emotional events that have occurred in the past, we begin to see that we can relearn how we respond to others in the most trying situations.

What I personally like about the Siberian North Railroad Strategy is that it actually provides a specific way to respond in those situations when someone has triggered strong emotions. It is a powerful exercise in emotional intelligence that can give schools leaders, teachers, and even students a tool to use in the sometimes highly-charged emotional environment we call school. Leadership is very much about being able to deal with our own emotional triggers effectively, and this strategy gives us the means to do just that.



Note: Chade-Meng Tan's book Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (And World Peace) is based on a course in emotional intelligence taught at Google. You will find countless other strategies in this book for dealing with interpersonal and intrapersonal issues. Meng's straightforward, humorous style makes the book a pleasant read too.

4 Ways to Bring Our Students to Excellence

David Shenk entitled Chapter 8 of his best-selling book, The Genius in All of Us, "How to Ruin (Or Inspire) a Kid."  In that chapter, Shenk offers advice to parents for fostering and guiding excellence in their children. He argues that the potential for creativity is "built into our brains" and that excellence is not something you either have or don't have. It is rather something within that awaits development.

In his book, Shenk offers parents a concise list things to do to foster and guide excellence in their children. While this list is addressed to parents, I can't help but believe teachers would find it useful too.

1. Believe: We have to have faith in what Shenk calls "the enormous potential of a child." It is up to us to marshal the resources necessary to bring them to excellence. We have to believe in the extraordinary potential of every child.
2. Support, don't smother: Setting high expectations and allowing students to demonstrate resilience in the face of challenges is important. Trying to protect them to the point of "smothering them" does not allow a student to grow in excellence. Give them support as they strive to achieve.
3. Pace and Persist: As Shenk points out, "In the end, persistence is the difference between mediocrity and enormous success." Teaching students the ability to delay gratification is key. Demonstrate and be a model of self-control for students at all times. Allow students opportunities to demonstrate self-control.
4. Embrace Failure: Weaknesses are opportunities. Failures open doors wide. Be careful to not give up on students who have failed. With them, turn failure into an opportunity.

If we want to foster a culture where excellence is the norm, we need to strive to foster values that bring out the best in our students and ourselves.