Life Lessons from Working with Great Teachers

By Rick Ackerly

As David Brooks says: “Children learn from people they love.” If you have all the competence and training in best methods, and have not love, you will fail. If you persist in love, you will learn to master your foibles and failings, and even transcend them and be a great educator. Perhaps, love isn’t all that really matters, but it is the sine qua non of the work of an educator.
Not only are relationships essential in education, but they are, also, the key to a long, happy and productive life. When we build relationships, we build community. The culture of that group of people is where happiness lies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664121638

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 by Rick Ackerly.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Cover Art by Elizabeth McClellan

Rev. date: 09/11/2020

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

811380

Forward

I have admired Rick Ackerly’s work in education and insights about child development for many years. A longtime school principal, he understands the kind of leadership that creates educational communities where kids learn to thrive. He also knows how to tell a beautiful story that captures imaginations and recognizes diverse experiences.

This collection of essays reflects Rick at his best—knowledgeable, a keen observer of human behavior, candid, and creative. Filled with great moments of clarity, learning, and love, Rick shows us how relationships are key to leading a meaningful life of purpose and well-being.

Rick’s true respect and love of children permeate the pages of this book. Creating winners and losers doesn’t help kids grow to their full potential. Building exceptional relationships based in love is the key to every child’s success. Period. As Rick shows us, love is hard but necessary work. It involves deep learning, creativity, collaboration, and resilience.

I suggest you sit back and enjoy the stories in this book. They just might transform the way you see American education and how good it can be when parents, schools, children, and communities learn together through respectful and loving relationships.

Marilyn Price-Mitchell, PhD

Author, Tomorrow’s Change Makers: Reclaiming the Power of Citizenship for a New Generation

Founder, RootsOfAction.com

Cultures change when a small group of creative individuals on the fringe

of society invent a better way to live and the rest of society copies them.

—David Brooks

Preface

It’s an American myth that the success of our great nation was due to our rugged individualism. This devotion to self is a tragic flaw in American culture. It is a half truth, that has misguided us in many ways, from the approach of our current president, to the dysfunctions of our school system, to our drift from time to time from democracy to oligarchy. What’s missing is the understanding of the reality that humans are social animals. The quality of our relationships is critical.

For me, this understanding of the centrality of relationships is distilled from the many lessons I learned working with dozens of great teachers in my 50 year career in schools from coast to coast.

But relationships are not only essential in education, of course. Research and good sense show that they are the key to a long, happy and productive life. When we build relationships, we build community. The culture of that community is where both happiness and success lie.

Furthermore—and I may be getting out of my zone here—getting competent at relationships is essential for the success of homo sapiens on this planet.

As David Brooks says: Children learn from people they love. (New York Times 1/17/2019). He’s right in so many ways. If you have all the competence and training in best methods, and have not love, you will fail. If you persist in love, you will learn to master your foibles and failings, and even transcend them and be a great educator. Perhaps love isn’t all that really matters, but it is the critical piece of successful human interaction.

But just because it’s that simple doesn’t mean it’s easy. In fact, it is hard. Most of us are still working at it. This is a book of stories of great educators (mostly teachers) from whom we can continue to learn the tricks of the trade—the trade of leading the life of a loving learner. These are the same lessons for the success of projects like building better schools, better cultures and a better world.

I use the real names of 57 of these educators, and list them in the acknowledgements at the end.

There are dozens more. I am eternally grateful for the thousands of other teachers, parents, administrators and children from whom I have had the good fortune to learn.

I hope these stories help us all continue the work of making humanity more and more humane.

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART I.   CONFLICT IS OUR BUSINESS

1.     Don’t Get Mad; Get Creative

2.     Listen Till They Feel Heard

3.     Build The Relationship On Truth

4.     Think Creatively Together

5.     Define Your Self

6.     The Five Disciplines Of Making Conflict Creative

7.     Bring Genius To A Conflict

8.     The Nickel Gambit

9.     Dealing With Bad Apples

10.   It’s The Relationship, Stupid

11.   Courage Comes From The Heart And Soul

12.   Leadership And Collective Genius

PART II.   DON’T WASTE OUR

MOST VALUABLE RESOURCE

13.   Children Are Social Scientists

(Part Of The Solution. Not The Problem)

14.   Doing What Comes Naturally

15.   Conflict Is The Crucible Of Character

16.   Conflict Is Social Problem Solving

17.   A Very Important Ability

18.   Mean Girls?

19.   The Highest And Best Use Of A Cookie

20.   Learning Our Lines

21.   Social Responsibility Is A Natural Act

PART III.   RELATIONSHIPS

AND STRONG BRAINS

22.   Friends And Enemies

23.   We Are Our Relationships

24.   What School Can Do That Software Can’t

25.   When We Are Serious About Graduating Leaders

26.   Social-Emotional-Cognitive Learning

27.   The Hard, Cognitive Skills Are Learned While Leading

28.   Learning You Matter

29.   The Need To Contribute

30.   Learn To Love Challenges

31.   Begin A Sentence With My Integrity Requires…

32.   The Cannots

PART IV.   CREATING

LEADERSHIP CULTURES

33.   Arrogance Is A Learning Disability

34.   Thank You For Criticizing

35.   Designing A Learning Organization

36.   Measure What Matters Change The Progress Report

37.   The Aim Is Different From The Goal

38.   Leading Up

39.   Truth: Our Secret Hunger

40.   Communication Coaches

41.   Difficult Child Starts A School In Inner City Chicago

42.   Staying Out Of Trouble Is Not A Worthy Mission

43.   Count The Trials, Not The Errors

44.   When Every Genius Is Engaged

45.   Leading Out Authority In Others

46.   Making A Difference

47.   Take Responsibility (100%-0; Not 50-50)

48.   Why Social-Emotional Learning Programs Fail

49.   Real Learning Disabilities

50.   Transcending The Generalizations We Make

51.   What Spectrum Are You On?

52.   Executive Function Disorder Exposes A Schooling

Dysfunction Disorder

53.   Other Learning Disabilities

PART V.   CHANGING OUR MINDS

54.   A Management Nightmare/A Leadership Challenge

55.   Diversity: The Solution, Not The Problem

56.   A Final Exam

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

I never let my schooling interfere with my education.

—Mark Twain

From the rat-race of getting into college, to the rise of anxiety, depression, drug use and suicide in our young people, to the epidemic of learning disabilities, to a self-obsessed President, American self-reliance has lost its way in a sea of self-absorption. Be yourself. Accept yourself. Express yourself. Love yourself. These common cultural messages are good, but they are as helpful as one hand clapping.

Nowhere is this cultural flaw more obvious than in our school system. The very institution that could best address these problems is completely complicit in causing them. Instead of strengthening our young people, and graduating confident leaders who love learning and work well with others, we graduate followers who are stalked by fear that they aren’t good enough and are at risk for failure.

Schools keep trying to address these issues by changing curriculum, revising standards, instituting new programs, putting motivational posters on walls. But the more things change, the more they stay the same. This is because whatever the content, the children are absorbing the context. Teaching democracy in an authoritarian environment produces authoritarians. Culture is the delivery system for education, and school culture hasn’t changed significantly for a century.

In most schools, regardless of what the adults say, everyone is playing the pyramid game. The object of the game is to make it to the top. A few make it, and everyone else falls short. The culture is constructed to sort them into more-or-less-likely to succeed. In this context, positive self-talk doesn’t do the trick.

School acts as if children are dependent, selfish creatures, whose steady march toward independence peaks in late adulthood, when, finally, they may feel ready to give back, after making money and raising a family. Contributing is something they might do after they make it on their own. Making it on your own! Now there’s a concept! No one ever has. The self-made man is an oxymoron.

Humans are neither dependent nor independent, but interdependent from the beginning. Self-determination and self-actualization occur in relationship, and children start life knowing this in their bones. As the stories in this book show, interdependence is obvious in children. It is also obvious in great teachers. Working with such teachers taught me the most important lessons for leading a good life.

At the age of 29, I became principal of a private school in Kansas City, Missouri. The school was in trouble—such trouble, in fact, that I was the only person they could find to be its principal. Enrollment was low, kids were misbehaving, racial diversity was increasing, and parents were pulling their kids out of school. Eight years later, it was a happy school with full enrollment, a waiting list, still 38% African American, and a reputation in Kansas City as the hot school. People loved it: parents, students and teachers…and the test scores were lovable, too.

Since then, I have had the privilege of working with dozens more great teachers in schools from coast to coast, and love was a good word for what they were doing all day long. The good ones, the ones I would call educators, had one thing in common. They showed how putting relationships first is the keystone of the education arch.

But not all teachers are educators. The non-educators all had one thing in common: they did not take responsibility for their relationships. I had to counsel them out of the profession.

Sometimes when the word relationship comes up in conversation, a person will say: But I’m an introvert, as if extroverts have an advantage when it comes to getting relationships right. They don’t. A good half of the great teachers I have known have been introverts. What makes an introvert an introvert is that they get their psychic energy from within rather than from others. One might need to go meditate, rather than needing to have a cup of coffee with someone. But all people exist in relationship. It is just as hard for everyone.

Love is not the soft, squishy word many people think. Love is as hard to do right, as it is valuable when you have it. In fact, one of the reasons that so many schools aren’t very good, is that they don’t do the hard work of love. The hard work of love involves deep learning. For instance, learning over and over how to make conflict creative—and then just when you think you have it, learning it over again.

The stories in this book are of educators in schools all over America showing that relationships are what it’s all about. They show how it works and how good it can be when we put schools to their highest and best use: communities of people learning together. The lessons I learned from these great teachers are the critical lessons for leading a long, happy and productive life.

Some lessons are a little counter-cultural: how to make conflict creative (Part I), how children can be altruistic (Part II), how relationships are essential to building strong brains (Part III), the kind of leadership that creates an educational culture (Part IV), and how a culture of diversity is another name for an educational culture. (Part V).

In Times Of Crisis The Nomenclature Must Be Changed:

A Glossary

Underneath it all, I learned that leading life in relationship requires the hard work of changing your mind. Changing your mind often includes using language differently.

At the core of all these stories is a theme voiced by my physics professor at Williams College, Robert Parks. He said: In times of crisis the nomenclature must be changed. That was true in physics a hundred years ago (when they coined quantum), and it is true in education now.

Throughout these stories you will notice different understandings for some very common words. To begin with, we must redefine education as leadership.

Education is leading brains out, not putting stuff into brains. Education and schooling are not necessarily the same thing. (Mark Twain isn’t the only person who has noticed this.) Education is leading each person’s character out into the world to contribute creatively and gracefully to it. School doesn’t always do this.

Character: We need to stop talking as if character is a set of virtues and understand character as the unique person we are in the act of becoming.

Genius is the guiding spirit of a person, or place, or organization not a special intelligence. Genius is the voice of our soul calling us toward our character, our inner teacher, our calling. Our genius is the source of inspiration and enthusiasm, our muse. Genius is something each of us has rather than a few of us are.

Graceful If a moment is graceful, it is because the players involved are in harmony with their genius. Our rational mind cannot know our whole self. Our rational mind is afraid of letting go. Letting go of control, judgment, mindset, outcomes and self are essential for using imagination and creating graceful moments.

Leadership: is not an elitist term. Leadership is defining yourself to the situation. Leadership is another name for self-actualization. Leadership is not something only a few of us have either by position or temperament. Leadership is something each of us is called to. We are called to leadership by our character. Rather than looking for leadership qualities, we do better when we delight in characters in action. Being a leader and building your character are two names for the same thing.

Self is neither independent not dependent but interdependent. Leadership is not a solitary business. If you feel it’s lonely at the top, you’re not doing it right. We are our relationships.

Spirituality is bringing your whole self to a situation: mind, body, heart and soul. Education and leadership are fundamentally spiritual activities.

Collective genius When leaders are successful, the people experience what one might call a collective genius.

Authority: In an educational culture, authority is a good thing and exercised in such a way as to bring out the authority in others. All children are seen as decision makers and expected to want to contribute to their community. Learning how to tell the truth is an essential element of decision-making that grows authority, builds relationships and brings out the best in all of us.

Intelligence: Intelligence is not something objectifiable on a test; intelligence is manifest in decisions. Cognitive skills, social skills, and emotional skills are intimately linked in all decisions. You can’t have one without the other two, and you build it by making decisions.

Non-cognitive skills The "Soft skills and non-cognitive skills" are hard and they are highly cognitive. It’s useful to think of them as disciplines like cleaning your brush before you paint with a different color.

Ability. Ability exists in action; it is not a static, objective, immutable commodity. Generalizing ability takes our eye off facing the challenge at hand with your whole self and making decisions. If an ability doesn’t make a difference, does it exist? What if we simply stopped talking about ability altogether?

Diversity is about uniqueness of each of us, rather than a mixture of different kinds of people. When diversity is central to our culture, we transcend the generalizations we make about ourselves. A commitment to diversity is a commitment not to think of types of people.

This concept of diversity is central to changing our minds about ability. There are not three kinds of people: gifted, normal and those who learn differently. Each brain is a unique combination of gifts and weaknesses and education is about helping each person maximize that brain in action. Diagnosing disabilities is dysfunctional.

Success is taking on challenges with enthusiasm.

Discipline is a good thing—an unqualified good thing. Disciplines are those behaviors, attitudes and habits that help us accomplish our goals and become the characters we want to be.

Conflict: in most schools, where conflict resolution is taught, it is understood as a method for making conflict go away. In an educational culture, conflict is understood as a good thing, an opportunity to be creative, build your brain, grow your relationships and build a better world. School teach the disciplines of making conflict creative.

Courage is a discipline; a habit not a trait. Fearlessness is a characteristic of all learning cultures, because fear of failure, mistakes, diversity, loss, disappointment and the other challenges prevent learning.

Integrity is the whole thing not a value. Integrity results from bringing our whole selves to a situation.

Enthusiasm is what integrity feels like. The Greek enthousiasmos means imbued with the divine. In five different cities in the course of 45 years, what made parents want their kids in these five schools was the enthusiasm they saw when they visited classes and walked around the school. This is what Johnny’s parents felt when they visited the school in 1977 (Pg. 20). Almost no one ever asked about test scores. It was enthusiasm that made teachers want to teach there. Academic achievement follows enthusiasm, and everyone actually seems to know that. Enthusiasm is what we get when our collective genius is activated. Educators inspire (bring on the spirit), and so enthusiasm is our best metric.

Love is what enthusiasm feels like. Love is the end: children, teachers and parents loving to go to school every day.

Love is also the means. If I win and the other loses, I haven’t won. Being "conflict averse" compromises our ability to love. By practicing the disciplines of turning conflict into collaboration, we engage our own genius and the genius of others, and the result is more truth, beauty, justice, grace and love.

Leading is learning how to love. Whether you are trying to make a relationship work or fix a broken school or anything in between, Love is the beginning of our effort. Love is also the measure of our success. In between is a dance between leading and learning.

The core concept embedded in our new glossary of terms is that a leader’s job is to define her character in such a way as to increase the authority of others, thus creating relationships in which all people define their unique characters in partnership with their genius. These concepts are central to a loving, learning, leadership culture.

The stories that follow show people of all ages, all backgrounds and all positions in society doing just that—sometimes in surprising ways, sometimes in ways that are so common we don’t even notice and take them for granted, missing our own educational opportunities—the opportunity to change our minds.

We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the

life that is waiting for us.

—Joseph Campbell

PART I