STEPPING UP TO THE BALCONY: CONFESSIONS OF A QUAKER SCHOOL LEADER

Rasha El-Haggan

Background

I’m entering my frst year as Assistant Head of Academics at Friends School of Baltimore. Friends School is the oldest school in Baltimore, established in 1784. It has a strong culture steeped in Quaker values and practices. One of my very first tasks at the school is to work on aligning the school’s PK-12 curriculum while continuing to strengthen its teaching and learning program. Bringing change and impacting an entire school is not an easy feat, especially in a school with as much rich history as Friends School of Baltimore. Having experienced frst-hand how a leader can both negatively and positively impact culture, I want to ensure that whatever change or impact I have at my new school is one that keeps the positive elements of the school’s culture. Because of that, it is important that I immerse myself in both change management and leadership research. When leaders fail to begin with the 30-thousand-foot view, we miss opportunities to imagine all the possibilities. This can lead to teams working in isolation, miscommunicating, resulting in false starts and often great frustration.

Explorations

Following Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky’s book on Adaptive Leadership, leaders must leave the dance foor from time to time and step up to the balcony to gain a wider perspective. While we don’t want to stay too long on the balcony because the work is done on the dance foor, stepping up to the balcony is a necessary starting point in making lasting change. As part of my own research on leadership and change management, I studied various models that can support leaders as they start to paint their big picture.

Model 1: The Cynefn Framework

The frst model I studied helped me learn about the complex nature of change. David Snowden’s Cynefn Framework helps leaders understand the nature of complex change. It identifes situations and their solutions as complex, complicated, chaotic,

Friends School of Baltimore Baltimore, MD and obvious. One doesn’t move from quadrant to quadrant in a linear fashion. Rather, each quadrant explains a type of change and potential responses to that change. An example of an “obvious” change that a school might consider would be running a fre drill. There is a standard operating protocol that is mostly known to all entities. The procedure and roles are set and predictable. People just need to follow it. It’s obvious. On the other hand, a complex change requires constant probing, sensing, and responding. Bringing a new teaching and learning framework to a school would be a good example of a complex change. It requires constant iteration. The methodology, those involved, and the pathway are not clear and can change with each team. The change in this case is complex.

Model 2: The Knoster Model

As identifed in the previous model, curricular change is both complex and oftentimes challenging. The Knoster Model for Managing Complex Change provides a framework for understanding the elements of change and their potential results. The model identifes 5 essential elements of any change project: Vision, Skills, Motivation, Resources, and Action Plan. When all 5 parts are present, change is successful. When one or more of the parts are absent, the change can fail. For example, if a school is experiencing false starts and initiative fatigue, often that indicates that while the school might have vision, skills, motivation, and resources for that change, it lacks an action plan. If vision is missing, the change results in confusion. If resources are missing, the change results in frustration.

Model 3: Goleman’s Six Leadership Styles

We all know that a leader can make or break the success of a project. That’s why it’s important that anyone studying change management, must also study leadership. One of the books I studied is Daniel Goleman’s Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence. Goleman argues that a leader’s emotional intelligence capacity is more important than their technical expertise. The higher one gets in an organization, the less important their technical expertise and the more important their emotional intelligence. To that end, he identifes six leadership styles: Coercive, Authoritative, Affliative, Democratic, Pacesetting, and Coaching. For each style, he identifes the qualities of the style, its impact on culture and climate, and the emotional intelligence qualities a leader must have to either embrace or avoid the style. Two of the styles, coercive and pace setting, can have a dissonant impact on climate while the rest can have a resonant impact on climate.

Takeaways:

Leadership and change are complex. There is no step-by-step guide. But what I have gleaned has allowed me to step up on the balcony and see the whole picture before I step back down on the dance foor. Some key action items resulting from my research include:

• When I frst started working at schools aligning curriculum to a particular framework, I mistakenly thought that the project was going to follow a simple step-by-step process. In other words, I mistakenly identifed the change as “obvious” or at worst “complicated.” After several missteps, I realized that I needed frst to step back and see how the various teams at my schoolwork with one another. What might they already know about curriculum design? Who might be an early adopter? Who might resist the change? I quickly realized that this change was quite complex and needed an iterative process, not a linear one.

• As I studied the Knoster model, I documented a process for change that attempted to identify all 5 essential elements. The school had identifed the “vision” through a recent reaccreditation. What was left was for me to identify the “skill” level of those engaged in curriculum design. I quickly realized that our teachers had a high level of skill, but they all didn’t speak the same language. As a school, we lacked common understandings and language around the simplest curriculum design elements. This meant that as part of my “action plan” I would spend some time building common understandings and common language to ensure we have common targets across all 3 divisions PK - 12th grade.

• As I read Goleman’s Primal Leadership, I took note of my own leadership journey as well as of those I followed in years past and created a journal that traced the various styles I experienced and their potential impact on school culture. I realized that sometimes, I can tend to follow the “pace setting” leadership style which works in short bursts but when used in longer projects can have a negative impact on culture and climate. My refections on past leadership journeys coupled with both my 360 evaluation and Myers Briggs assessment from the Leadership Institute helped me identify my strengths and areas for improvement. This will allow me to tread purposefully and intentionally in my frst years at Friends.

Next Steps

As I continue to build relationships at Friends, it is important that I engage a larger team of willing participants who can help me navigate this complex and important project. As a school, we are currently working on building a common curricular language that will help us start having conversations on how we will bring about this change. And as I traverse this project, I must remember from time to time to step back up on the balcony so I can assess and readjust the big picture.

RASHA EL-HAGGAN

Assistant Head of Achool for Academics

My path to leadership has not been a traditional one. I have jumped around from middle school, to high school, to elementary school. I’ve gone from teacher to department chair, to curriculum director to head of school, back to curriculum director. My journey, while unconventional, has given me invaluable, diverse leadership experience. I’ve worked in single-language schools, dual-language schools, single-gender schools, public, private, and international schools. Additionally, I’ve had the privilege of leadership roles in two Quaker schools and have navigated programs such as the International Baccalaureate, Advanced Placement, and the UK National Curriculum. Witnessing varied leadership approaches to common challenges has proven there is no step-by-step process to leadership success. By observing leaders as they shape culture and navigate change, I’ve come to appreciate the multiple ways school leaders have been able to bring about successful change.