All You Need is Love

Well, not quite, but almost. Love is a requirement, a foundation, the place from which we start when we form a community, especially a learning community.

As a leader I would start by letting each and every staff member and student know that they are loved, automatically, without having to earn it first. This is because in order for me to do the job I need to do, need to start with love for the people with whom and for whom I work.

Love is a scary word for many people. It's too intimate, too mushy, too touchy-feely, too insincere. But I don't think anything short of love will do the job. If a community accepts me, asks me to join, and most importantly asks me to lead, I'm going to love each and every member of that community.

That love will help me find the energy, the compassion, the perseverance I will need to help every person grow. Wherever they are, each teacher, each staff member, each student can grow and learn and improve, and they will do that best when they are loved.

This does not mean I will have less love for my family and friends. This does not mean I will have no other life outside of my job. On the contrary, if I also love myself, I must make time for me. Self-love includes taking time for yourself, doing the things you love, and staying connected to the very people who make your life worth living. But it does mean I will work hard, I will spend extra time, I will keep learning and growing myself.

At the center of it all is our students. Every adult needs to feel the same love I do for our students. For us to work as hard as we need to work, to recover from setbacks, to get past the overwhelmed feeling we all have sometimes, to care most about the kids who are hardest to care about, there must be love. Once the foundation is there, the community that is built can support each member on his or her learning journey.

Building Relationships

As George Couros says in The Innovator's Mindset, "If we want meaningful change, we have to make a connection to the heart before we can make a connection to the mind."

Connecting to a person's heart requires a strong, positive relationship. Relationships are intentional, they take effort to build, but that doesn't mean they can be faked. A leader must genuinely care about the people he or she leads to have the most success in building relationships. There is no shortcut here. All day every day leaders need to show they care by listening, asking about people's lives both in and out of school, remembering details that are important to people, celebrating success, offering support, and making time for people.

Just as important, leaders need to model the relationship-building actions they'd like their staff to use. Leaders need to be all in for whatever the school needs, willing to do any job because all jobs are important, and interacting with all students because they are ALL our students. Leaders need to hold expectations high for staff and even higher for themselves, share their goals and passions, take risks, admit mistakes, model growth, be human, and also be their best selves.

When staff can connect to their leader on a human level and they know their leader genuinely cares about them as people, they will be ready to learn from and with that leader in the name of what's best for kids.

Kindness Through Gratitude

Like so many schools, ours is working toward improving our climate. Our Safe School Climate Team is made up of several very caring and dedicated teachers, mental health specialists, paraeducators, and parents. We meet several times each year to discuss ways we can generate positive school climate. We research, go to workshops, read, and go to our colleagues and PLNs for ideas.

We were using data from our district-wide safe school climate survey to identify areas of weakness until the survey results no longer gave us useful information. Last year, in a search for direction, we created our own school-specific survey written in student-friendly language. What we learned, we really knew all along-our students need practice in tolerance, inclusion, and participation in conversations. These are the mindsets and skills that many K-4 students might need to practice.

At first we focused on teaching and encouraging students to join games and conversations. Now we've turned our attention in a new direction-gratitude. We realized that it was not as effective to encourage the few more timid students to take risks as it was to encourage the many more confident students to be kind. The problem is the "be kind" message, although simple and powerful, was vague as well as overused in our community. Our team felt a more active way to promote kindness was to teach students how to be grateful, for research shows that people who practice gratitude are happier, kinder, and more satisfied. This made sense to our team because we, in our individual ways, felt the power that consciously practicing gratitude had in our personal lives.

So we are embarking on a new mission-to teach students how to recognize the people, places, things, and ideas in their lives for which they should be grateful and that taking time each day to acknowledge their good fortune will motivate them to spread kindness to others.