Letter from the Head of School

Exploring Our Shared Values

Letter from the Head of School.

I write this letter for our community Bulletin in the waning days of 2021, a year that has delivered many challenges to all of us. As in so many moments over the last 12 months, I am preparing for the unknown. When we return to campus—all 901 of us— we will face the latest Covid variant: Omicron. We do not know yet how it will impact our program or community this winter, but we do know that we will do whatever we need to educate, support and guide our students through another unprecedented moment in their young lives and in our own. We meet this latest disruption with a pursuit of the truth and commitment to the toil of keeping our community safe. And in this particular moment of uncertainty, we must lean on each other, united in our individual values.

Throughout this fall and early winter, members from all corners of the Brearley community have participated in an exercise that is a first step in clarifying our institution’s values. Led by Paul Ingram, Kravis Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, our eager and engaged Middle and Upper School students, faculty and staff, parents, alumnae and members of the Board of Trustees examined their own values and developed their individual value hierarchies. Each person had to choose eight values that were most important to him or her and to interlink them, with one ultimately emerging as the most important and from which all the others logically flowed.

Each individual then fed his or her results back to Professor Ingram to form a word cloud that graphically depicted our priorities. The result, rather than being an endless list of disparate and conflicting values, showed surprising cohesion: Our community, with its hundreds of participants from different constituencies and varying perspectives and backgrounds, placed a few values above all else: empathy, integrity, creativity, love, family and kindness. In addition to the values noted above, each group, as anticipated, had other favored values. For alumnae joy and trust ranked highly. Upper School students prioritized happiness, achievement and trust. Faculty and staff agreed on openness, contentment and humor. Parents and school leadership (trustees, administration and student leaders) coalesced around courage, with parents joining on inner peace and joy and school leaders overlapping on honesty and humor. The antiracism advisory groups ranked compassion and balance highly. Our facilities and food service staff frequently noted communication, accomplishment, enthusiasm, growth and respect.

Interestingly, however, Professor Ingram explained that even with these differences, there were no constituencies that stood out as being out of sync with one another. Our individual values aligned in a consistent pattern; and we are learning that the more our values align, the more productive and collaborative a community can be. This isn’t meant to dismiss our differences in opinions or beliefs. But the values that drive those differing thoughts are aligned and that, in my mind, provides a sure foundation for the ways in which our community meets its challenges and plans for the future.

I also wonder how the pandemic and the racial reckoning in our country and our community may be shaping our individual values. That empathy partners with integrity in our own values and is joined by creativity, love, family and kindness bodes well, I believe, for the Brearley community at this moment in its history. Today we rely on one another in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago. Principled engagement in the world is not some lofty goal that exists in our students’ future, it is in evidence in our daily lives at school: how we take care of ourselves so that we take care of others. How we engage with ideas that are unfamiliar to us. How we center creativity and kindness in our daily problem solving. The lessons we individually and collectively are teaching and learning have brought home the need for adventurous intellect and principled engagement in the world. This experience is exhausting and trying. As it tests our resilience and courage, it also refines these values for us and in us.

As I was walking along an icy path with my dog, Balas, the other morning, I was struck by how often I needed to force myself to look up at the nature surrounding me. Similarly, this values exercise asks us to shift our attention from the real challenges of getting through the day to what is meaningful in our lives. Many members of the community have shared their enjoyment of this structured activity that moved them from a temporal to an emotional/spiritual space. Our next step is to articulate our institutional values. Over the coming weeks, we will invite you as a community to help elucidate and describe what values you believe best represent our institution. This process will be conducted asynchronously online. Ultimately we will arrive at four or five values that inform who we are and what we aspire to be.

We thank all who have participated to date and also Professor Ingram, whose facilitation connected us to one another and in our shared values. I hope this issue of the Bulletin, which is a true community endeavor, does the same. I encourage you to read on to learn about exciting new school programs as well as the return of some of Brearley’s heartwarming traditions after a pandemic-imposed hiatus. As always, we feature the voices and experiences of our students and alumnae who inspire us all. Thank you all for your support of Brearley.

Yours in Truth and Toil,

Today we rely on one another in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago.”