New View EDU

Episode 65: Leadership and Design for the Future of Schools

Available October 22, 2024

Being a school leader is a complex job, and it has only grown in its scope and challenges in recent years. How can we develop our capacities as reflective changemakers, dynamic leaders, and future-focused thinkers in a culture that often demands we be reactive rather than proactive? Carla Silver, Executive Director of Leadership + Design, has been partnering with schools for over 15 years to help create cultures of learning and foster human-centered design thinking. She sits down with host Morva McDonald to discuss her views on leadership and where schools are headed.

Guest: Carla Silver

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Really since the internet, things are changing so rapidly. And teaching and learning is having to change to keep up with those technological changes. So change is just rapid. And so that means that school leaders have to be way more flexible. They have to be way more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. You throw in things like a global pandemic, and the second thing I think that's happening is that heads of schools, and school leaders in general, are being asked to respond to so many external events in ways that they hadn't in the past.” (9:21)
• “We don't necessarily define ‘leader’ as someone who necessarily has positional authority. I mean, obviously that's the most common definition. You think about someone who has a position or a title, but some of the most effective leaders that we work with... they're actually classroom teachers and they don't necessarily want to leave the classroom. They actually want to influence change from that position. And so I think it's really important to think about the fact that when we talk about leaders, we think about anyone who's really trying to mobilize other people to make change, to manage adaptive work, adaptive challenges.” (15:22)
• “One of the things we really try to help leaders of all different backgrounds and genders and race and ethnicities think about is, how do they lead with their own signature presence? Which is, what are the things that they, where they naturally feel really gifted and in the flow and how do they amplify those qualities and be attentive to them instead of trying to necessarily come from a deficit model of leadership, where I'm not good at this or I'm not good at that, but rather where are you naturally really gifted as a leader, and how do you build more of that in your life?” (22:25)

Related Episodes: 64, 56, 42, 38, 25, 20, 9, 5

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Episode 15: Inspiring Wonder and Community in Schools

After the many challenges of the past two years, how healthy are our school communities? How attuned are we to the lessons we can learn from the people and influences around us? How can we approach learning with gentleness, curiosity, care, and a sense of wonder? And what do mushrooms have to do with any of it?

Guest: Michelle King

Resources and Expanded Show Notes

Full Transcript

In This Episode:

• “Winter is the hardening of the ground. So this is a time of reflection. This is a time of restoration. This is the time of withdrawal. In our culture, we treat everything like spring, go, go, go, grow, grow, grow. But you don't get the incredible brilliance of the flowers of spring without the hardening of the ground in winter.“ (3:59)
• “And I think about students who taught me so many life lessons, who are, who also had a sense of wonder, but they, these things can not be quantified or contained on a standardized test, but that wasn't a standardized being. That was a very complex and beautiful being that showed me the world.” (14:38)
• “How many spaces do you walk in, and you're like, as you're more than enough as you are? You know, a lot of times we come into spaces and it's like, especially teacher PD, is oriented around the idea that you don't have enough. You're not enough.” (20:19)
• “I remember reading a piece years ago that said busy-ness is another form of laziness. And I was like, what? I'm American. Busy is a currency, you know? But what's called for is connection, real connection. And to have that kind of connection requires trust. Trust, community, all these things are living concepts. They are not like, okay, we got trust in, you know, on Wednesday. And we're good for the rest of our lives. It is a living entity, just like community is a living entity.” (23:50)
• “I think one of the things as humans that we really want to be is to be seen. And another way to say that is to be loved. Is to be seen in our full complexity. I think that's when we come alive, I think we can inspire and teach people from that place of being fully seen.” (28:17)
• “We all have a part of stardust. And you think like, look at that. That's amazing. That being over there, even as complicated and challenging as they might be in this moment, that's a wonder. And I think to have that kind of a delight, and if we can't find it, I feel like we are not doing right, what it means to be lovers of life.” (38:09)

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Episode 40: Student Voice and Agency in Education

In four seasons of New View EDU, we’ve talked a lot about what students need to thrive. In this episode, we’re going straight to the source. Host Tim Fish sits down with Ella Cornett and Mackenzie Link, high school students from One Stone School in Boise, Idaho, to get their real world perspectives on everything from classes and schedules to life lessons on failure, accountability, passion, purpose, and more.

Guests: Ella Cornett and Mackenzie Link

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “To go back to the question of what should school be, I feel like learners and students should come out of school with that sense of purpose. And that's, that really resonates with me because I feel like that's what I want out of school. I wanna leave school and kind of know what I wanna do and who I wanna be in the world.” (21:39)
• “I would describe my stress...less so stress. I would call it ambition. Like, I think the weight of ambition sits heavy on my shoulders because I strive for the, like, the next best thing I wanna keep doing. I wanna keep going, I wanna keep pushing. And One Stone really allows me to do that and empowers me to do that.” (26:24)
• “It's that pushing students, the healthy balance of pushing students. And this is where great coaching comes in. And great mentorship is, you do have to find the thing that students care about and relate it, everything that you're doing, to that. And then we're in the home stretch.” (29:57)
• “It's easy if you let it be easy, in the sense that if you don't want to grow, if you don't try to grow, you won't. Just like a student in public school that doesn't try, they won't get a good GPA. But that's not the motivation here. The motivation here for us is to grow. So if a student doesn't want to grow, how can they?” (39:44)

Related Episodes: 36, 34, 27, 23, 18

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Episode 29: The Future of Higher Ed

Much of the work of K-12 schools is focused on getting students to the “next step,” which, for many of them, is college readiness. But increasingly, it feels like we’re not working on college readiness so much as we’re working on college admissions. Preparing kids to successfully apply to college, in the hyper-competitive admissions landscape, is almost a full-time job of its own. What should schools be doing to help students with college (and college application) readiness? When we focus on gaining admission to selective schools, what are we missing in the K-12 experience? And what do colleges actually want K-12 educators to know?

Guests: Jeff Selingo and Dr. Adam Weinberg

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “More selective institutions like Denison and others that are really trying to decide between applicants. They're looking for that difference. They're, they cherish what is rare. And increasingly, to be honest with you, what is rare are those students who are not over-curated, over-programmed. I feel like, especially because of social media now, we have to curate our lives to be perfect. And we see this manifest itself in applications.” (11:41)
• “I think there's so much about the college application process that... forces is too strong a word. That shapes the high school experience of too many students, where they're not able to do either one of those, right? They're not able to ask who they want to be because they're too busy asking, What do I need to be to get into the college of my choice? And the second is, we're so worried that if they experience any bit of failure, they won't get into good college, that we're not giving them the space to learn that actually failure's the only way to develop the kind of resiliency you're gonna need to be successful in life.” (17:41)
• “ I think this is where advising comes in and helping students understand-- and maybe this is where there's a role for K through 12, because I think every student should graduate from high school understanding what kind of learner they are. So that when they do go to college, they're making those better choices. You know, am I a better visual learner? You know, how do I read, you know, should I do online? Should I do hybrid, whatever it might be, so that when they get to college, they're making those choices in a better way.” (33:00)
• “I think one thing that we could be and should be doing with students during their junior, senior years, at least level setting expectations so they don't arrive at college assuming that everything's gonna be perfect and they're gonna be happy all the time...And don't make the mistake when you're, have that moment of unhappiness, that moment of not sure you can make it, of looking around and assuming that everybody else is doing great and you're not.” (35:28)
• “This may be our last chance, or one of our last chances, where we have a community of people, similar in age, together in one place. And we should be preparing them, K through 12 and higher ed, for that moment afterwards, where they are going to be in communities, at school board meetings, in in, in community associations, and volunteer organizations. And they're going to have to have these very tough debates and they're gonna have to do it in person using those facts.” (43:35)

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Episode 31: AI and the Future of Education

The hottest conversation in education right now revolves around ChatGPT. What is it, how is it being used, and what does it mean for our traditional systems of teaching and learning? Season Four of New View EDU begins with a discussion about the rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence and the impact ChatGPT and other AI innovations will have on the future of schools.

Guests: Christina Lewellen and Paul Turnbull

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Where does ChatGPT show up in this conversation? Where do I show up in the conversation and what's my voice? Because schools should be about voice, right? Especially student voice. So that's the thing I like the most, we're, we're sort of keeping that North star in place, you know, what's best for students and how do we help the helpers.” (18:23)
• “I understand that a lot of schools, as they're dealing with ChatGPT, are making sure that teachers are kind of coming at it and saying, this is a tool. I am not forcing you to use it. I'm not advocating that you use it, but if you do use it, you need to understand the implications of using it. Because at the end of the day, while that account can be deleted, sort of like we all had to teach our students about social media, you know, you can delete your account, but that doesn't mean the content that you put there is gone.” (23:47)
• “This is a big change agent in our schools. it is time to take a brief moment to reflect on what that means, because rather than being afraid of what it means, I think looking at the opportunities that it brings to really weave technology into how we accomplish our missions, there's some cool opportunity, especially for the schools that have been a little hesitant to, to, you know, bring that into their world. It's time. There's not, there's no ostrich situation, head in the sand situation that's gonna let us get out of this. We, we're gonna have to think about it and be proactive.” (41:42)

Related Episodes: #28, #26, #21, #12, #7

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