Math, Race, and Evolving Ideas on Leadership Dorothy Cary, Germantown Friends School Background In my interviews to become Dean of Faculty for the Middle School at Germantown Friends (GFS), the pointed questions were about math. What were my thoughts about how math should be taught? “Should we continue to track in math?” What would I do about staffing in math? As a Classics major with a masters in history, all I knew about math education was what I had picked up in conversations with colleagues and parents during my twenty years of teaching and advising in Middle Schools. Math and math placement had been critical issues for parents at both my previous schools, and clearly GFS was no different. I spent my first year in the job clerking meetings of math teachers, asking questions, and reading, hoping to find the answers. Math was still much on my mind when I met Lisa Darling, my mentor and head of Wilmington Friends School, in June of 2003, and we began discussing possible projects. Wilmington was then in the throes of a school-wide upheaval about teaching math. The issues initially seemed remarkably similar to the ones I’d been facing. It seemed I might be able to contribute to the discussions at Wilmington while gaining a new perspective for my work at GFS. Lisa welcomed my participation, and I jumped at the chance to share experiences and learn about math teaching and all of the issues through the eyes of another school. Exploration In the fall of 2003, I participated in a math “summit” at Wilmington Friends. Math teachers from all divisions, all the principals and Lisa and I met with Peter Kurlioff, a professor from Penn who specializes in organizational management, to discuss the direction for math at WFS. I played the role of an observer, and Lisa was able to use my collected observations as a starting point for administrative discussions about math. I used ideas from that meeting in discussions at GFS. Also as a result of this meeting, WFS developed a philosophy statement for math teaching. Lisa sent me a draft which I commented on. I forwarded the final version to our math specialist, then clerking a committee exploring math curricula for Lower School. I had become interested in patterns of success and failure of different math approaches since concern was growing at GFS about large numbers of children with private tutors. I had also been involved in many discussions about tracking and race, and we had looked at why the lowest track at GFS frequently contained more children of color than the other levels. I wondered how Wilmington handled math support and enrichment since I knew they had recently abandoned all ability grouping in math. Thus I met with Lear Pfeiffer, a lower school learning specialist at WFS, in the spring of 2004 to look at their experience. I observed Lower School math classes and we discussed how the tutoring and support systems worked there. Questions about race are complicated, and as part of my work I took on a small project for Lisa. I read and condensed articles about racial identity development and institutional change, hoping to learn more about how institutional racism contributes to lower performance by children of color. I presented a summary of my ideas to the administrative
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team at WFS in the fall of 2004. The information organized my thinking but provided no real answers. By the fall of this year, I realized that the moment for math collaboration had passed as the schools had moved in new directions. Learning Curriculum development and change is not an area that lends itself to a collaboration of the sort I had in mind. Schools change, hire new staff, and move in different directions too quickly for an episodic approach, and I could not be present at both schools at once. GFS benefited much more from my work than WFS did, and it was frustrating that I could not make a larger contribution to Wilmington Friends. Nevertheless, the project was extremely valuable for me. It allowed me to see success for different solutions to similar problems. Wilmington and Germantown made different choices, and the journey to those choices was fascinating to follow. The project also increased the depth of my understanding of two very different issues, math curriculum and racial issues at schools. The connection between race and school performance was obviously far too big a problem to tackle in this project, but the magnitude of the issue calls for continued reading and thought. My greatest satisfaction came from stepping outside the all-consuming environment of my own school to meet and talk with others in a similar school. I especially appreciated my time with Lisa where I could try out new ideas and talk about my frustrations. The Dean of Faculty position in the Middle School was created when I assumed the job, and it was not clear exactly what my role should or could be. My work on this project and in the leadership program has been extraordinarily helpful in clarifying my thinking and allowing me to step more fully into faculty and curriculum development, a positive step for both the school and me.
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Building Sustainability Among Quaker Elementary Schools David Eldridge, Friends School Mullica Hill Background I have developed a multi-faceted interest in Friends education over my many years in Friends schools as a student, teacher, director of development, head of school, and trustee. I have been intimately involved in three Quaker elementary schools and am as impressed by their economic vulnerability as I am their ability to transform lives. Recently, Friends elementary schools have begun to collaborate on marketing initiatives that have begun to build an economy of scale and to tap into collective creativity and energy. This process is helping to leverage the sustainability of the whole group and provides a healthy alternative to the insularity that tends to accompany financial instability. Exploration I first began my research at Friends School Haverford (FSH), a Pre-K through 6th grade program. Martha Bryans, head of school, and I struggled to match my very broad interest in Friends education with a specific project but could not come up with something that made sense. We decided, with the help of Irene McHenry, that it made the most sense to move my research to my current school, Friends School Mullica Hill (FSMH), a Pre-K through 8th grade program where I am the Director of Development. Drew Smith, the Head of School, became my research mentor and I also did some shadowing of Martha Bryans at FSH. The shadowing happened on a day on which there were several meetings relating to marketing, making a nice tie-in to my new research direction. My research question became, “How can Friends elementary schools collectively sustain their significant contribution to the American educational system?� Learning I found that Friends elementary schools are actively collaborating in ways that have the potential to build sustainability. FSH and FSMH have participated in at least five joint marketing efforts with other Friends schools, including a television advertising campaign organized with eleven other elementary schools. These efforts were decentralized enough that all the schools involved sometimes did not fully know what marketing was happening on their behalf. Also, many schools have extremely limited resources to spend on novel marketing efforts with unpredictable effects. These observations led me to think about a new organization, perhaps called the Center for Sustainable Quaker Elementary Schools. The Center could serve as a safety net for struggling Friends schools by distributing funds collected from member schools, from larger schools that depend upon elementary schools as feeder programs, and via external funders. The system would resemble an institutional form of financial aid, a kind of re-insurance program. Applications would require full financial and organizational disclosure, and adherence to recommended changes following assistance. The Center could also house a formal professional association and a publishing house devoted to Friends elementary schools’ particular needs and strengths. This, I think, is my most important finding: the idea that collective health among Friends elementary schools directly benefits individual Friends schools is gaining strength and could be expanded in novel ways to promote long-term sustainability.
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Counseling Out in Quaker Schools: Best Practices & Common Mistakes Wilson Felter, Sandy Spring Friends School Background A topic of particular interest to me since I became an administrator in a Quaker school is how Friends schools handle situations where students have clearly demonstrated that they are not a good match for the school. Schools, next to churches and families, are institutions that are extremely averse to change. One of the most volatile issues for administrators in schools is when a member of its community is asked to leave. In my experience, more often than not, this change is met with negative energy from families, students, and sometimes faculty. In this project, I sought to find out if there is a school that manages this separation with distinction or if I could collect a set of best practices that schools could draw upon to make these moments more tenable and less cumbersome. Additionally, I was curious to explore the different criteria that Quaker schools use for making such a weighty decision, while maintaining the Quaker beliefs of continuing revelation, that of God in everyone, and appreciating each child’s unique gifts. We have common purposes and common missions and I was interested in exploring how schools handle this potentially explosive issue with students and their families. Exploration I conducted my research in two schools primarily, Sandy Spring Friends School and Westtown School. I interviewed administrators in different divisions and asked a uniform set of questions. In designing the interview questions, I set out to focus on gathering information on how often counseling out occurs, factors that contribute to the counseling out process being a negative experience, and factors that contribute to the process being positive. I inquired whether or not the school provides formal, written criteria to parents and to what degree the school adheres to the criteria. In addition, I sought to uncover ways in which the Quaker philosophy of the school impacted the schools’ ability to communicate a clear message. Learning I found that counseling out was a fairly rare occurrence in the Quaker schools I researched. Middle and lower schools averaged less than one student per year and upper schools averaged slightly less than two per year. In fact, one administrator noted that he felt he needed more experience with counseling out in order to improve his approach. The most prevalent factor that administrators noted that made the experience a negative one was the pressure of litigious parents who can make it difficult for the school to be as frank as they would like to be. Other common challenging factors reported by the administrators included: the parents’ perception that it was the school’s fault; a sense of failure on the part of the faculty; if the students involved were Quaker, children of alumni, or students of color; and, if the parents were positive contributing members to the community. Even though many administrators found it difficult to come up with positive aspects of the counseling out process, I found a few common themes in the responses. A few found
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that, in the process of articulating the reasons for counseling out to the families, the school can re-affirm its mission and beliefs and become more resilient in carrying the mission forward. Furthermore, many administrators noted that the decision to counsel out could liberate a struggling student who needs a new start in a different environment. In cases where behavior was a concern, some leaders in Quakers schools asserted that when a student is counseled out it can send a positive message to the community about the school’s expectations. In most cases, the written policies connected to counseling out were linked directly to academic performance. The policies on counseling out for behavior were more vague and left up to the discretion of the division head or head of school. Administrators noted that meeting early and often with parents and documenting each meeting was essential in the counseling out process. Two leaders intimated that they would like to see their schools provide a more concrete time frame in writing to families. In their opinion, this would be more effective in managing parents’ expectations and relieve some of the burden from the administration. In one interview, an administrator happily reported that a family that had been counseled out of the school gave money to the annual fund the next year. In the best case scenario, families and students do not take it personally, but rather see the big picture and understand that independent schools cannot adequately serve the needs of each child. In navigating the tough business of counseling out in Quaker schools, I learned that administrators and schools need to be good listeners, stick to their principles, be compassionate and honest with students and families, and communicate early and often about what the school can offer.
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Parent Education at Sidwell Friends Upper School Bryan Garman, Sidwell Friends School Background The purpose of my project was to develop a Parent Education Program that would orient parents to the upper school and provide them with information and resources to help them help their children succeed. When I became upper school principal, I heard much from parents about what they described as a “communication problem” in the home-school relationship. In particular, they suggested that they could benefit from further information about such matters as the disciplinary process, the curriculum, the college process and the diversity program among other topics. Much of this information was available to parents in print form, so it seemed that in part they sought to have more contact with school administrators and teachers. In a variety of settings, parents expressed concern and consternation that the upper school did not hold regular parent-teacher conferences. We sought to address such concerns in a matter that was consistent with the pedagogical approach of the upper school; we wanted to respond to parents without compromising the ability of the faculty to teach our students to be independent learners, one of the traits our teachers are particularly adept at facilitating. Moreover, we wanted to design a response that would not place an undue burden on the time of faculty and staff. Exploration Rob Evans’s book, Family Matters: How Schools Can Cope with the Crisis in Childrearing, proved a helpful resource as I approached the project. Evans argues that schools must continually re-establish trust with their various constituencies, that schools must clarify their missions and be firm about expectations while at the same time engaging parents. A visit by Evans was particularly useful in helping the faculty and administration work together to address the importance of home-school communication. After several discussions with department heads, staff, and the full faculty, we launched two new initiatives that targeted ninth grade parents. The first was a breakfast series entitled “Introduction to Upper School Life,” a program that familiarized parents with various aspects of the school. In addition, our counselor established a series of breakfast meetings, two for each grade level, to discuss parent concern about the emotional and social development of their children. These programs augmented summer time orientation sessions with parents, regularly scheduled breakfast meetings with the principal, and Back to School Night. The second major program introduced parent-teacher conferences for ninth grade parents, an event that required significant work with the faculty and the Parents Association. Learning In the course of designing and implementing this project, I was reminded that change takes significant patience. Moreover, I learned about the importance of listening carefully to the rationale behind resistance and reservation, of being responsive to concerns while clearly defining how decisions will be made. I was also reminded of the power of an effective consultant to promote dialogue and benefited enormously from the sage advice and generous time commitment given by my mentor, Earl Ball, head of William Penn Charter School. At this point, the project has yielded some positive results and has, I think, generally improved home-school relationships. But there is always room for further adjustment—the project
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continues to be “action research.” The next steps: we are discussing how we might create a publication to delineate expectations for communication between the school and parents. In addition, the Board of Trustees’ Quaker Life Committee is exploring the school’s relationship with the parent body.
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Capital Campaigns in Small Schools Danny Karpf, Wilmington Friends School Background I spent ten years teaching in two Quaker schools in the U.S. and in an international and an American school overseas before becoming Assistant Head of Lower School at Wilmington Friends in 2002. Since my career so far was mostly in the classroom, I wanted my action learning project to focus on some aspect of school as a business. When talking with my mentor, Matt Bradley, head of West Chester Friends School, it became clear that a focus on development work made the most sense as a way to stretch my own learning in an area in which significant work was being undertaken at my mentor school. We decided together that I would look at how development offices in small schools were structured, particularly in those that were undertaking capital campaigns. Exploration I started by interviewing my own school’s development director, who was very helpful in giving me a sense of how campaigns are structured, what consultants do, and what resources are available in the field. The core part of my project ended up being gathering data from other schools. I contacted 33 small to midsize Quaker schools (55-330 students; most in the 110-200 range) as well as 25 other small independent schools (100-250 students) in the spring of 2004. I received 12 responses from the Friends schools and two responses from the other independent schools. The information shared by the 14 schools that responded gave me a sense of trends and collective insight regarding campaigns—and development work in general—as well as the variety of experiences different schools have had and the different approaches they have taken. Forcing myself to organize this data in a report to my mentor for one of our meetings was an important step for me. Below are some of my key findings from this report: • The median size of the development offices at these small schools was 1.5 staff members; the duties these staff have are quite varied. • During a capital campaign, responders recommended that schools - Keep the annual fund going through the campaign; - Keep the annual fund separate from the campaign; - Ask for both at once (in a single campaign), but allow donors to designate clearly which fund their donation is to go to; - Need to make clear to constituents the importance of the annual fund while focusing on the campaign; • Outside consultants were used by all schools, at least for a feasibility study; some schools were able to use consultants who worked for free. • Overall, levels of Board involvement in campaigns varied: - Most Boards gave donations themselves, often at strong leadership levels; - Most Boards had a range of levels of involvement within their membership, with
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• •
some individuals taking on committee roles in campaigns and feeling more comfortable soliciting or otherwise taking an active role; - Most schools indicated that they wanted their Boards to increase their level of involvement; - Schools noted that materials from FCE and NAIS, and training at Pendle Hill, were helpful in their Board’s learning process. All schools had new buildings or other capital projects as at least part of their campaigns; only two schools included money for endowment in their campaigns. In their comments, heads and development directors noted the importance of careful planning, use of outside support, tremendous time and energy made available by the head and the board, and good communication with all constituents.
I felt a little stalled after this major “action,” not being sure where to go next. I later had the privilege to see how some of this work played out at my mentor’s school by attending board committee meetings, including those in which they met with campaign consultants. My mentor also gave me continual updates about how his school was proceeding with this work. In conferences I attended for other purposes, I found myself choosing sessions that related to this work in some way. Similarly, some of the consultants brought in by Irene McHenry and Harry Hammond for the Leadership Institute retreats related to my project, in addition to one of the head-of-school panels. This augmented my learning nicely. I also consulted websites and other resources suggested to me by different people along the way. Learning Overall, although I never knew exactly where I was heading or whether my work was contributing to my mentor school (my mentor assures me it was indeed helpful to him!) or that I took my learning as far as I could have, I do feel that my understanding of development work, the structure of development offices, and how capital campaigns work increased dramatically. My project demystified for me what development is all about. I was probably led to this project partly because one of my fears in moving forward in administration was that I might not be good at or excited by development work. That fear is gone, largely due to my work in this Institute and, particularly, in this project. A few other salient points for me in reflecting on this project: • There is often much information right under one’s nose; it is important to find ways to tap the information in one’s own school through shadowing people with jobs different than one’s own, talking with them about their work, and simply considering the work at one’s school from new perspectives. • Checkpoints and other external forces that lead one to reflect and move forward are crucial in this kind of action learning. We all have too many things taking up our time, so it doesn’t get done unless it has to. • Any dissatisfaction I had through this project mostly centered around my not being able to devote enough time to pursue every avenue suggested for my research. • I am most grateful for the opportunities I have had through this Institute!
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Maintaining The Friendliness of a Quaker School in Today’s World Terry Kessel, Friends Select School Background I have been working for Quaker and/or peace organizations since 1988. There are undeniable tensions between the ideals set forth by the groups and the “real” world in which those groups are set. My interest in navigating those tensions led me to an examination of the governance of these organizations, and specifically, of the strengths and challenges of a Quaker governing board. I began my investigation with a call to my mentor, Bruce Stewart, Head of Sidwell Friends School, and two queries that emerged: 1) What about being a Quaker school is helpful to the functioning of a board? 2) What about being a Quaker school presents challenges to an organization’s functioning? Exploration I started by reading publications by Richard Chait, the Friends Council on Education (FCE), and the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS). Early in the process, I attended an Association of Delaware Valley Independent Schools (ADVIS) program for trustees and heads of schools, “Perspectives on Independence School Governance,” featuring Chait. This was an exciting start that allowed me to watch some of Chait’s suggested process as my own school was experimenting with it. I interviewed a number of people, including those suggested by Bruce Stewart: Earl Ball, Head of William Penn Charter School; Rose Hagan, Head of Friends Select School; Arthur Larrabee, Clerk of the Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting; Irene McHenry and Harry Hammond of FCE; various board members from Westtown School, Sidwell Friends School, and Friends Select; and a number of staff at Sidwell Friends School. Through the generous access offered to me by Bruce Stewart during two visits to Sidwell, I observed governance in action in almost all areas of the school. I attended the ADVIS trustee and head program called “Good to Great: Strategic Thinking” with Pat Bassett of NAIS and Bob Hallett of E.E. Ford Foundation. And thanks to Irene McHenry, I was able to sit in on a portion of the FCE’s 2004 workshop for trustees and heads of Friends schools, in addition to the series of leadership seminars that she and Harry Hammond arranged for Leadership Institute participants. Learning Richard Chait suggests that one building block necessary for independent school boards to move towards a new dynamic level of performance is for members to be chosen based on the strategic needs of the organization. A member should be a strategic asset whether in the area of finance, reputation, politics, or intellect. At the same time, the board must model with integrity the behaviors and values that it wants a school to manifest. Board make-up is vital to the health and growth of the institution. For many Quaker schools one important requirement for serving on the board is participation in the overseeing Quaker meeting or membership in the Religious Society of Friends. The benefits of having majority Quaker board membership are too important, according to Arthur Larrabee, to risk moving away from requiring that majority or that association to a Friends meeting. He says that Friends schools claim a special mission and
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way of looking at the world that necessitates the presence of Quakers on the governing board to monitor and maintain what has been called “principle-centered leadership.” As one Head explains, a Quaker board is a tremendous gift that allows work with integrity since members are comfortable raising and weighing values questions and considering the divine in each person. But even Larrabee acknowledges that the concerns of some Quaker meetings have shifted since their schools were founded, and they possibly wouldn’t consider founding a school today, and that a meeting has to ask itself whether it still has sufficient energy to serve the school. When association with a meeting or the Quaker majority on a board is at risk or lost, the following possibilities could be considered, in order for the school to stay healthy, continue to grow, and maintain its Friendliness. 1) Through FCE, offer the Membership Assessment Process to Quaker schools that choose to reconstruct their boards through strategic membership, an emerging notion of effective governance. 2) Have FCE member schools engage in a regular process of public accountability through self-assessment to determine adherence to Quaker values. 3) Bring together an advisory panel of knowledgeable Friends to provide ongoing support to boards of Friends schools. 4) Bring together a working group of interested, knowledgeable people to study the future governance of Friends schools and make recommendations such as the possibility of independent certification of Quaker schools. 5) In an existing publication, such as FCE’s newsletter, publish articles on the work of groups investigating this issue, to enhance the dialogue at the school level. 6) Provide a process through which the Quaker testimonies can be internalized and integrated into the workings of strategically chosen board members. a. Through FCE, offer an annual event with a speaker on Friends school governance patterned after ADVIS’s yearly evening. A trustee who is too busy to participate in a three-day workshop may set aside an evening. b. Through Friends meetings and/or FCE, offer a series of short workshops for new trustees, for Quakers to learn about board governance and non-Quakers to learn about Quaker leadership. c. Through FCE offer retreats for trustees new to Quakerism similar to the workshop for teachers new to Quakerism. d. Develop a series of short activities to be used at board meetings to help nonQuaker members learn about Quaker process. Richard Chait suggests that boards set aside 15 to 30 minutes of each meeting for such board education. If Quaker schools see their future without a majority of Quaker board members or if schools lose their close association with a Friends meeting, but still intend to maintain their Quaker identity and values, they will need guidance to maintain their principle-centered leadership. FCE is in a position to guide them through self-study to aid them in maintaining their Friendliness.
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Reflection in Action Research Ted Lutkus, Westtown School Background Taking on an action research project in another school was a somewhat daunting task. I began by visiting Oakwood Friends. The purpose of my visit was to interview different administrators in the school in order to learn about what they do. At the same time I was listening to common themes about the strengths of the school and areas where people were looking for change. In the back of my mind was taking on a project that would be helpful to Oakwood Friends, and also something that would be interesting for me to explore. But how does a person who is not a part of the school, without the benefit of truly understanding the inner workings of the school, bring insights to an institution? When I visited Oakwood, I was a visitor, an outsider, an observer. In some ways, it felt presumptuous to me to be making recommendations to a place that I had visited for only a day. Without the benefit of being able to frequently visit the school, I felt that I needed a project that was centered on a more objective, outside perspective. My experience in my own school is that when we work on problems within a school culture we can become myopic. Unconsciously, assumptions can be made which rule out possibilities because we are so immersed in the daily routines. We can be very good at explaining why things cannot work instead of why they can. So perhaps bringing an outside point of view could be helpful for a project. Exploration The project was to propose several models for the daily schedule. Presently, the Upper School and the Middle School at Oakwood have very different schedules, which leads to conflicts with scheduling facilities and teachers’ schedules. I gathered schedules from eight schools that had both middle and upper schools for comparison. Like most school issues, if there was one correct answer, we would all be doing it. Looking at the breadth of schedules that were trying to meet the daily needs in these institutions was overwhelming. At the heart of the matter was whether schools value long teaching periods in blocks, or whether shorter, more frequent contact time was important. At the same time, in all the schools, schedules are quite creative in order to fit in all the other competing needs of time—sports, faculty meetings, Meeting for Worship, clubs, extra help times, class meetings, lunch periods, etc. A colleague of mine once told me that you can see what a school values by looking at its schedule. Time is currency in an institution. Learning As part of the action research model, I focused on the area of “reflection” in my process of trying to develop different schedule models. An action research article suggests, “more attention needs to be given to the importance of the role of emotion in understanding and developing the capacities for reflection which facilitates personal, professional and ultimately system change.” While all projects involve a certain amount of reflection, it was new to me to emphasize this part of the process. What I learned was that this takes more time—not something that we always have in independent schools. But ultimately there was a greater sense of satisfaction that the models that I was creating came from a deeper exploration. The process of reflection resulted in the need to check back on original assumptions. By coming up with ideas, giving them time to mature, and then coming back to
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them again, allowed them to evolve. Having the luxury of focusing on the reflective process, as well as outcome, was an interesting process in itself for me.
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Action Research – Planned and Unplanned Matt Micciche, Wilmington Friends School Background Having served as an administrator at Wilmington Friends School for about five years at the time, I was initially drawn to the Institute for Engaging Leadership in Friends Schools by my interest in exploring the unique dynamics of leadership in Quaker schools. As communities that are inherently (and, I think, rightly) wary of hierarchies and distinctions among members, these schools offer a peculiar paradox to those in administrative positions. My own experience had taught me that a remarkably deft balance of decisiveness and openness were expected of leaders in Quaker schools and that this balance was, even on the best of days, an elusive and frequently-moving target. I had always found this tension to be both healthy and energizing, but I also often felt confused and caught off guard when I encountered some new manifestation of it in my school. I knew quite well that I had a great deal still to learn about how to manage these dynamics, and I was eager to engage with colleagues from other Quaker schools in a sustained discussion and exploration of them. From our cohort’s first meeting for the Leadership Institute, I was struck by the thoughtful and reflective natures of the other members. As our sessions progressed, I saw that they, too, were ardent believers in the Quaker process as a means for seeking truth, and that it was their belief in this process that led them to want to improve their own understanding and management of it. I have learned a great deal about Quaker principles, practice, and philosophy through my experience as a part of the Leadership Institute program. More importantly, though, I have been inspired by the models of putting that practice to work that I have seen from the other members of our cohort. In choosing my topic for my action research project, I drew on this inspiration, reasoning that the kind of ongoing learning I saw taking place in the Leadership Institute program was exactly what should be happening in any successful school. Teachers must be growing and developing if they are to help their students do the same. For that reason, I decided to explore professional development – in particular the strategies for and obstacles to sustaining professional development in a Quaker school. Exploration One of the key elements in the development of the topic for my research was the connection with my mentor, Larry Van Meter, head of Moorestown Friends School. In our first lengthy conversation, we explored many different aspects of the challenges that leaders in Friends schools face. As a result of this conversation and some of the opportunities for reflection that were structured into our Leadership Institute gatherings, I came away with a distinct sense that professional development is one of the most significant indicators of health in a school community. And yet, what I have heard consistently throughout my time in independent schools is frustration from faculty that they aren’t able to pursue professional development to the extent that they would like and frustration from administrators that the faculty they supervise don’t take advantage of all the opportunities for professional development.
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The irony of the situation – that people who have dedicated their lives to providing opportunities for others to learn find themselves too busy with that work to continue learning themselves – would be humorous if it weren’t so sad. I therefore designed my research to investigate the obstacles to professional development in a school. What, in other words, was keeping these lovers of learning from pursuing their own professional growth more actively? I also wanted to explore how faculty had successfully shared the results of their professional development experiences in ways that made it possible for their colleagues to learn from that experience indirectly. Learning Just about the time that I was preparing to conduct my action research, I became involved in a powerful professional development experience of my own, when I became a candidate for the head of school position at Friends School of Baltimore. I have always believed that interviewing is one of the effective means of professional development, as it forces the candidate to reflect upon the “big picture” in ways that just don’t happen in the hurly burly of everyday school life. That was certainly the case in the very thorough interview process I went through as a part of the head search at Friends School of Baltimore (an initial interview with the Search Committee and then four full days on campus). When, in December, I was fortunate enough to be offered the position, I was launched on an entirely new growth experience. I have been engaged since that time in as authentic a process of action research as I can imagine, trying to get to know the various facets of the school community in all their complexities. It has been a deeply rewarding process, and one that is accelerating as July 1 approaches. The unfortunate result of this fortunate development is that it made it far more difficult for me to follow through on my planned action research project at Moorestown Friends School. With the gracious help of Moorestown’s academic dean and my mentor, I developed a plan to visit the school, discuss in small groups the faculty members’ views on professional development and the obstacles to it that exist, and survey the faculty as a whole. Much labor (mostly on the part of the kind folks at Moorestown) was expended in trying to find a day that would work for the various divisions and faculty members’ schedules. I then fell victim to Murphy’s law, by coming down with the flu on that very day. Though I have not been able to follow up and conduct this research as I’d hoped, the conversations I did have in planning for it did help to illuminate the issue for me.
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Professional Development Action Research Project Cecily Selling, Stratford Friends School Background As I began my action research project, I was very interested in the question of how to set up a professional development and teacher evaluation program that would actually help teachers to learn and to improve their teaching. Supervision of teachers had just become part of my job as Assistant Director at Stratford Friends School, and I was interested in exploring the issue. My mentor, Lynn Oberfield, head of Media-Providence Friends School, was thinking along similar lines. As a relatively new head, she felt that professional development and evaluation of teachers was an area of her own practice that she was not satisfied with. She noted constraints of time and a lack of an organized system as the limiting factors. Since my interest and Lynn’s need seemed to coincide, we agreed that my action research project would be to set up a professional development and faculty evaluation system. Exploration I began my project of setting up a system of goal setting and faculty evaluation at MPFS with Walker Buckalew’s idea that professional development and evaluation should be geared to the 90% of teachers who are doing a good job who need a system that will help them to grow and that will increase the sense of community in the school. (loosely based on Walker Buckalew’s Meaningful Faculty Evaluation ISM) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Mission statement: Why do I do this? Self-evaluation based on queries: How am I doing? Development of two goals: Where do I want to go? Action description: How will I get there? Assessment: How will I know when I am there?
As someone coming into the school, I decided that I needed to get a sense of the school as a learning community. I began with interviewing Lynn about the school, reading the most recent PAPAS evaluation report and meeting with the division leaders and the admission director (I will refer to this group as the administrative team). I wrote a first draft of a proposed instrument. I brought this draft, several lists of evaluation categories and a list of questions to the administrative team. Based on feedback from this meeting, I rewrote the instrument and presented this second draft to the teachers in March 2004. I shared with the faculty my own learning about how adults learn and how they can continue learning. I was very impressed at the eagerness among the MPFS faculty to embark on this adventure. My plan was to ask for a committee of volunteers to help me revise the instrument. However, all of the teachers wanted to participate. Based on their feedback, I wrote a final copy of the instrument, and Lynn gave a copy to each faculty member to complete before the end of the school year. She also asked that each teacher make an appointment to discuss the goals listed in the instrument during the summer. Lynn was very enthusiastic about the project and the response to it. When school started in September, I wrote a survey to ask the teachers how the process was going. Lynn wanted to meet with each teacher to find out how
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the goal process was going and she set up a schedule for this. In February 2005, I wrote a second survey for the faculty. Based on that feedback, I wrote a new version of the goalsetting instrument so that the cycle can begin again. Learning Although this section is entitled “Learning,” I think that a better title would be: “On-going Questions.” Three particular questions we struggled with at MPFS were: What are the qualities of a good teacher? One community member did not want teachers to have to rate themselves as “good” or “not good,” so we changed the self-rating to: “What parts of my teaching practice would I like to improve?” On the other hand, Lynn, as head of school, wanted to reserve the right to tell a teacher what to work on if she felt it was needed. Teachers were reluctant to rate themselves on just eleven items, so I gathered checklists from various forms of teacher evaluations. I wrote these as queries and the teachers said, “the longer lists…help narrow our own ratings and goals.” What is the role of the Head in this process? Each faculty member met with Lynn during the late spring or in the summer and again in the fall. Lynn’s comments were generally positive: “It helped me to have conversations about curriculum, to help teachers relax and to affirm people. I was surprised at how easy it was to give feedback.” The faculty members were also generally positive about Lynn’s role. “I loved having time to meet with Lynn,” and “It made my work seem more important to be able to talk to Lynn about it.” One person did not take the process very seriously, and another felt “freaked out” by having to meet with Lynn about the goals. Because these were mandatory meetings, Lynn was able to deal with these issues with the individuals. What happens to those faculty members who do not meet their goals? There is no set answer to this question other than, “It depends….” Just as a good teacher in a classroom takes into account all s/he knows about a student when deciding how to react to failing to meet a goal, so a head of school must take into account such circumstances as how much of a stretch the goal was, health problems that got in the way, attitude, perceivable effort and other feedback when deciding how to react to a teacher with unfulfilled goals. I think that the process is open-ended enough to allow for flexibility. The flip side to a flexible system is that it can be time consuming. My hope is that MPFS can continue to use this instrument and have on-going conversations about how to make it more useful.
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Nurturing Care Relationships: An Aspect of Leadership in Friends Meetings and Schools Deborra Sines Pancoe, Abington Friends School Background Because I am a Quaker and an educator and I have experience with a number of Friends schools, I see that it is important to encourage schools to more fully integrate Friends beliefs and values into school life. I also hold it to be important for Friends meetings to find ways of continuing and expanding their influence in the world. The relationships that grow between meetings and schools have potential for helping these to happen. As a member of the governance group of one Friends school, I have a compelling reason to understand how best to nurture the relationship between the meeting and the school. As a staff member in other Friends schools, I have observed this complex relationship and how it affects school life. My action learning grows out of these concerns. The guiding principles for my study are as follows: • •
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To survive as strong, vibrant educational institutions with Friends beliefs and principles as part of their missions, Friends schools must actively maintain and nurture good relations with the Friends meeting communities with which the schools are associated. To survive as strong, vibrant religious communities, Friends meetings will benefit from nurturing a positive and dynamic relationship with the Friends schools with which they are in a care relationship. This can help Friends meetings expand to include a more diverse group of people. As a form of outreach, Friends schools serve broad populations, and 24% of Friends state that they learned about Quakerism through their association with a Friends school (Standing Committee on Support and Outreach, Making New Friends Initiative for Growing Philadelphia Yearly Meeting). To build strong relationships, Friends meetings and Friends schools should participate in each other’s strategic planning. The interconnectedness of a meeting and a school strengthens both. Each can support the other, in the words of one focus group participant, “in being flexible enough so that we can remain the same” in transmitting the abiding values, beliefs, and traditions of our Quaker roots.
Exploration I spoke with many people about the care relationship: heads of Friends schools, other Friends school administrators, meeting members, others who hold positions of leadership in Quaker circles, and people who serve on governance groups. I read about Friends education, the history of Friends meetings and schools, and about school governance. My reading dipped into the methodology of action research and focus groups. I meandered into systems theory and group dynamics. I also roamed into community relations. To collect data, I facilitated three focus groups with meetings and Friends schools that currently are in dynamic and positive care relationships. The focus groups were given queries to consider, and conversations grew out of the responses to the queries. The process of asking questions, reflecting on the queries, and engaging in open dialogue for a focused period of time has the potential to produce a positive effect by strengthening relationships and is in
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itself a powerful tool to support schools and meetings in their educational work and spiritual lives. Learning I will offer my insights and findings to Friends Council for publication to assist Friends schools, governance groups, and meetings in nurturing care relationships through strategic planning. I was surprised to find an NAIS (National Association of Independent Schools) publication, Effective Community Relations: A Handbook for Independent Schools, to be a useful jumping off place in guiding my own writing. I note similarities between the school/meeting relationship and the community relations that benefit any school and its community. Good leaders are mindful of the importance of being good neighbors and of modeling the kind of strategic planning it takes to live and work closely together in community. I confirmed that a triad of leadership relationships—head of school, clerk of the board of trustees, and clerk of the meeting—is key in nurturing the complex relationship between a school and it’s meeting(s). When these people have trusting and positive interactions, both the meeting and the school communities benefit from the care relationship. A learning came in using the carefully structured focus group process. I feel dissatisfied that I did not facilitate more groups to further develop my skills; I could have learned more about how concrete issues were tackled and how care relationships were strengthened. The process of thinking about leadership in education, experimenting with ideas about career, meandering through some shifts in roles, and the paradox of being open to spirit and being intentional about change—all of these experiences have contributed to my growth. My Leadership Institute mentor, Ed Marshall, head of Greene Street Friends School, was very helpful in talking with me about his views of the care relationship between meetings and schools. He shared a wealth of insight, specifically from his work at Greene Street Friends School, and from his experience with other governance groups and other heads of schools. I am thankful for the time he spent with me, giving me access to the school for observations and conversations with school staff, and for helping me look at systems of human interaction. Other mentors emerged from the process of my study. Irene McHenry mentored me through our conversations on the steps of running the project. She modeled intellectual curiosity and appreciative inquiry, and she encouraged my work. I work in partnership with Anne Javsicas, head of Plymouth Meeting Friends School. As clerk of school committee it is important that I have a trusting, open and honest relationship with the head of school, and I have treasured the opportunity to work with her on some community-building projects. Anne’s informal mentoring gives me a close-up view of the large and small issues of leading a Friends school and nurturing the care relationship.I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in the Institute for Engaging Leadership in Friends Schools, to have inspiring colleagues, and to learn from a number of mentors about the dialogue we want to encourage to strengthen the care relationship between meetings and schools.
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A Path Towards Cultural Change Carol Swainson, Sidwell Friends School Background I began at Sidwell Friends School (SFS) as a French and Spanish teacher who also clerked various diversity committees. After a number of years, I was appointed SFS’s first All School Diversity Coordinator (ASDC), became a member of the Administrative Council and clerked the Diversity Advisory Group (DAG), an all school committee. By the end of my second year in this role, I found myself interested in questions of effective leadership in general. Moreover, the position rekindled the same fascination with systems that I had while pursuing a Master’s in Social Foundations in Education. Additionally, leading the DAG reaffirmed my ability to motivate and lead people through both mundane and difficult tasks. Subsequently, I became interested in the Institute for Engaging Leadership in Friends Schools. Exploration In forming a plan for the action research learning project, I initially looked to expand an area in which I had limited knowledge: compensation, evaluation and budgeting. Yet, in the interest of finding a topic that would prove beneficial to the George School, I invited my mentor, Nancy Starmer, head of school, to share other current project possibilities with me. With a sparkle in her eye, Nancy described an extensive curriculum project, which was in its second year. She laid out the research, the plan, the successes and the struggles. Immediately, I became excited by the project, but it carried themes like cultural change which I had encountered in my diversity work. For that reason, I remained with my original topic in the hope of strengthening my understanding of fiscal matters. Over the next year, I visited George School twice to get to know the school and to meet with the committee charged with compensation and benefits. Additionally, I read various handbooks and articles to complement my research. Back at Sidwell, I also consulted with my colleagues about the topic. In the process, I learned much more about stipends, scales, percentages of duties, the role of evaluation in compensation, and the long-term impact of all of the above on creating budgets. Nevertheless, Nancy and I could not translate this research into a project that would benefit GS. Like many others in the leadership cohort, I was aware that our fall retreat loomed near, and clarity about my action learning project was nowhere to be found. As a result, I met with Nancy and suggested that we change gears. After analyzing my research, I concluded that compensation, evaluation and budgeting possessed a more well-established methodology than curricular change. Moreover, good teaching and great curriculum are at the core of any great school. What's more, George School’s approach, to me, appeared extraordinarily original, comprehensive and well-structured. So, I spent my August visit at GS studying their curriculum project. Nancy and I decided that George School and other Friends schools could benefit from an executive brief that chronicled the GS curriculum project. Ideally, the document would serve as a guide for other schools who wish to make real curricular change. Although the
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George School’s curriculum project possesses great merit, it would not be presented as the silver bullet for curricular change. Structured by queries, readers would come to understand which variables afforded GS success, as well as which ones impeded and still impede progress. More importantly, the document’s queries would provide a helpful checklist to guide educators through curricular change. Lastly, any major shift in program incurs a cost; therefore, the document would also include a section on budgetary consequences of this approach. Learning The George School’s curriculum project spans several years in order to allow for new training and absorption of new curricula and methodology. Throughout my explorations and analysis of this topic, I was struck by GS’s respect for the process, which includes change through modeling. Unlike many other proposals for curricular change, GS committees and departments examined theories by putting them into practice in their classrooms. They also developed a system of observation and evaluation of the efficacy of each approach. Naturally, this generated much needed discussions around methodology and content within and across departments. After a period of study, the committee of faculty then presented their unbiased findings to the Curriculum Steering Committee, who by that time already had a positive sense of the process. In essence, this type of process has the potential to promote curricular change exponentially. The sheer fact that a group of faculty works across disciplines means that all departments have a taste of how the work is faring; consequently, the process of buy-in and application begins in advance of an official change. Needless to say, this kind of comprehensive course of action allows groups to coalesce around healthy and important curricular discussions which, in turn, plant the seeds for the cultural change that will ensure application of decisions made. All in all, this experience gave me an invaluable body of knowledge from which I hope to fashion my own effective style of leadership. Even though my project consists more of research and learning than action, Nancy Starmer and her colleagues taught me more than I could have imagined. Having the privilege to work directly with them provided me with a superb model of how to lead by example and, equally as important, how to encourage growth in others.
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Addressing Diversity Through a Coordinated Foundational Curriculum Colette Weber, George School Background An obvious reality of Friends schools’ commitment to diversity is that the students walking through the Admissions’ door are far from uniform in experience. Equally, the Quaker desire to see the light of God in everyone is often used as a defense for giving all incoming students a uniform experience. I would argue that a one size fits all approach serves only a small section of the freshmen body and in fact heightens the inequality of experience that Quaker schools are trying to counter. An essential part of a freshmen curriculum is that it has a dynamic dimension, that it has structures and flexibility in place to respond to the needs of the group coming in and to make early, purposeful interventions to student behavior. Popular thinking defends the one size fits all approach to most freshmen year classes on the grounds that providing levels would separate students into high and low achievers. Actually, looking at the student make up of high and low/normal level classes revealed that the students who had entered the school with gaps in their education, despite showing incredible potential, were not catching up to peers who had transferred from academic private schools. They were not taking the most difficult classes. Exploration This project sprang out of work I did as Diversity Steering Coordinator at George School. I am not alone in noticing that there were very few students of color in International Baccalaureate (IB) and Advanced Placement (AP) classes and higher level classes in general. Trying to explain this phenomena quickly exposed that the students who were already high functioning, personally motivated, organized and who had experienced teaching typical of that at most private schools were the most successful. So those arriving with the skills advanced quickly, and the gap between these students and the less well prepared students broadened rather than narrowed. As Clerk of a Foundational Skills Committee, I set out to research what was happening in freshmen curriculae and experiment with some new ideas. The first task was to identify what had to happen for students to make the shift from middle school to an academic high school. Students need to move from regurgitating information to thinking on a critical and creative level. Students need to move from being dependent learners to taking charge of their own learning as independent learners and thinkers. Being an independent learner means knowing what to do when meeting new material, or what to do when confused. It means that students have skills and know which skills to use and when to use them (Project Zero, Harvard). At a fundamental level, high functioning students understand that the work done in class and set for homework is only part of the learning process. Reaching a full understanding of anything studied requires that students reach a point where they could teach that material or set of skills themselves. Reaching this level of proficiency is sometimes facilitated by the teacher, but more often than not, the most successful students know how to get there themselves.
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Learning An ideal freshmen curriculum would have both common and differing experiences according to the needs of the individual. If a line of communication can be set up between Admissions and a group of freshmen teachers who habitually work in a collaborative way across the disciplines, then the emphasis of the year can shift according to the needs of that particular group. It is crucial to note here that the end point, the standards to meet by the end of the first year, can remain the same and indeed should be an ambitious point to reach, given the typical profile of the freshmen group. The dynamic part of the curriculum should depend upon identifying where the gaps in skill and knowledge are and responding appropriately to fill them in. Teachers’ efforts therefore can be coordinated, reinforced in several ways and targeted to the needs of this group. Much work on foundational skills is best done within subject areas. Making use of advisors and additional courses or seminars outside the typical five major load of the freshmen year can be a way of filling in gaps and responding to particular gaps in skills and knowledge.
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