Educational Leaders Must Create a New Reality

We are busy as educational leaders and the logistics of the schoolhouse often trump any focus on human interaction and understanding.  After all, there are tests to be given, classes to schedule, parents to call, lunches to supervise, bathrooms to inspect, hallways to monitor, curriculum to manage, and teachers to evaluate.  And don’t even get me started on transportation.

What is it all for?  What most people want and crave is more time to engage with one another.  Teachers wait outside our doors for a minute of our time.  Students come by hoping we are in our offices to have a chat about a problem.  Most of the time we don’t have even a minute to sit and have a human moment with each other.

The machine we are operating in does not calculate the human element in a school.  The machine is only concerned with inputs and outputs.  The machine doesn’t understand the most important aspect of school and society is our relationship with others. As educators we live in a world completely obsessed with scores and outcomes.  It’s all we talk about!  However, as educational leaders there are important changes we can make to foster a human element in our schools.

1. Provide time.  Perhaps instead of another faculty meeting we could allow our teachers to hold office hours where students know they can come and see a teacher and work out their problems.  Forgo the meeting about mandatory ice machine training (yes this training is actually mandated in many districts) and let teachers be in their rooms so kids can come by and chat.
2. Provide space.  A space where students could come and meet with several teachers at once would bring a human element to our busy educational lives.  Maybe every Tuesday and Thursday after school the media center is open with snacks and water.  While teachers are hanging out chatting with each other, students can come buy to talk about their day and their concerns.  Yes I know there is no time, but as educational leaders we can make time.  Say no to the bureaucratic nonsense that never ends up helping anyone and say yes to human interaction, unscripted and unique.  An enormous amount of insight is reveled in this type of interaction.
3. Allow our counselors to be counselors. Being an effective leader is positioning people where their strengths lay.  So why are we using some of our most valuable resources, school counselors, as test administrators?  That is not what they are good at!  I can assure you, a counselor is better at helping students through conversation than he or she is at administrating a test or scheduling classes.  Let school counselors do their job by getting them out and talking with students.  Students want to talk to their counselors about life, not about test scores.
4. Forget about the rules and regulations.  This is the most difficult change because most of us are slaves to the paycheck or position being controlled by the machine.  We allow the state, district and the federal government to put us in a state of fear.  If we don’t engage in the bureaucratic BS we will lose our funding.  If we don’t focus on outcomes and get more kids to pass the state tests we will not get the school grade we desire.  We are always in a state of panic. Students don’t even have names; they are just percentages.  And the teacher doesn’t want it to be this way.  But what else can she do; leadership is driving the bus, she is just a passenger.  We must begin to say, “No I will not have my staff spending time on initiatives that only benefit testing companies and policy makers. As a leader I will focus more of my efforts on practices that help sustain the relationships among my teachers, students and staff.”

These unsustainable initiatives and mandates are only a reality because someone made them a reality.  A testing company lobbied a senator so the testing company could make money.  In exchange the senator pushed a bill through requiring us to be a slave to the machine.  Leadership can make a new reality and shift to one that is student centered not outcome centered.

I understand this is a bold approach, but true leaders put themselves in the line of fire to stand up for those they serve.  It’s not about guts; it’s about human decency and leadership abilities necessary to dismantle a system, which is counterproductive to our teachers and students.  As leaders, we need to start thinking of the human beings involved in our days and our lives and less about the system powering the machine.