What Question Has No Right To Go Away?
Photo: Garry G / UniiQe.
What question has no right to go away?
When it comes to leading change in your school, what question has no right to go away?
We posed that question to the participants at the November 13 launch of The Journey, a new summit on leading change in schools from Middle States.
The question comes from the poet David Whyte (sound on!), who has also consulted to organizations seeking to transform themselves for more than three decades.
At The Journey, one head of school’s question was: “How might we design school to be a place for ‘birthday party energy’”?
During his career, this head had observed that teachers are often burned out—but when it’s someone’s birthday, everyone has enough energy to celebrate. So what would have to be true, he has been wondering, for his school to be a place that generates birthday party energy by design?
Here are some other questions shared by participants:
What prompts a teacher to resist change?
How do we slow down now so that we can speed up later?
How might we listen deeply to find out what fills people’s cups?
What moves do not work when trying to create change?
How can we put to work “the helper’s mindset”?
What keeps people coming back to this school year after year?
If we don’t set the agenda for education, who will?
How do we scale the things that humans do well that machines cannot do?
But there was more to The Journey than posing questions. Any summit on leading change also has to equip participants to take action, so we modeled three tools. Participants chose one of those tools, prototyped it for their school’s context, and then shared it with a peer for feedback.
That part of The Journey—sharing with a peer—was as much about community building as tool building. Because leading change is a lonely endeavor. You need kindred spirits, from inside and outside your school, to inspire you, support you, and guide you. Participants may have come from places as far-flung as South Korea, Greece, Spain, Puerto Rico, and all over the United States, but they connected deeply because of their shared purpose: to lead wise change in their schools.
Because of limited space, the launch of The Journey was by invitation only. If you missed the summit this year, you will soon have an opportunity to experience a digital version of it through The Evolution Academy. Sign up for early access here.
And if you want to be among the first to hear about the next version of The Journey in 2025, please join the waiting list.
