In the Old Testament book of Exodus (chapter 18), Moses was trying to manage several thousands of people--ensuring justice for their legal needs, tending to their spiritual needs, establishing and administrating government for their daily requirements--and keeping track of the twists was exhausting. Managing a classroom of 30 can feel this way--I can only imagine what it felt like with that many people. Anyway, his father-in-law, Jethro, observed what an impossible task this was and had heard a strategy from God. He told Moses, "Why are you laboring at this morning till night? What you’re doing is not good. You and the people will wear out this way, because it’s too much for you alone. Let me help you set up a system for sharing some of this responsibility..." It's the first place where we see delegation explicitly being taught in the Bible. He was counseled to choose a set number of people to do specific tasks, and to assign the work to them. But now, how about the enormity of the teaching task in public schools (and in most schools, I suspect)? Today we would call what Jethro was teaching him distributed leadership.
I want to put this in big, bold letters: I believe that in this day and time, only distributed leadership will allow public schooling to stand. The needs are just so great, and the limitations of one human mind so real, that we can't possibly move forward or grow without a model that makes room for leadership to arise from the ground up in all kinds of ways. Right now, I am learning first-hand about this--and it is fascinating.
In my building, there is a grassroots work emerging, where a small group of staff members “accidentally” discovered our common love of strategy and problem-solving around school culture. Our principal has brilliantly opened the door to this personal ownership of the school’s work. She has given the green light to creating our committee, securing funding to pay many of us to work over the summer. She let us plan the opening day of school meeting for staff, in which we arrived at homegrown solutions affecting us all.
Essentially, the existing systems for school operations, particularly in urban centers, have holes in them. If we wait for our school district to create solutions that make our buildings run safely, keep employee morale high, and encourage student/family ownership over learning, it will be a very long wait. High-needs schools like ours just look different from most other buildings in our district. This is no one’s fault, but it absolutely points up the need for differentiation. In light of these unique needs, we have two choices: wait to be saved, or throw our own capes on!
Our Jethro is Here
It is literally, physically impossible for one person to do all that a public school like ours requires. This year we are realizing that we must own this work in order to have the school culture we envision. Our core group has learned that “owning” the work does not look like signing our names to lists of required committee choices--or at least not in this case, since the choices do not exist. We literally stumbled upon our work, but now recognize that it need not be a stumble. We are coming to believe it may be as simple as a group of similarly invigorated folks coming together to find solutions...and creating an ongoing shared commitment to it. This is truly grass roots delegation, in that it is self-appointed, -realized and -driven. It can only work when the particular work happens to also advance the goals of the administrator and higher administration, of course...so what if, even beyond our small group, across our building we could find those sweet spots where the self-designed and the organically necessary intersect? This is our new question.
This is our Moses moment, friends. At least in public education. More and more, I’m realizing that to spread the leadership load in ways like this is the only thing that will help us survive in the years to come. This term “distributed leadership” literally brings to my mind a picture of a band of hard-working ants, shouldering something way bigger than they should be able to carry, using the power of synergy. That image strikes awe in me even just imagining it. But this is where we are. For us in our building, it is an exciting moment, because along with our self-directedness comes a shift in each individual’s professional development focus. When you are conducting your own “action research”, you seek your own development opportunities, your own networking ties, your own ‘tribe’ beyond your borders.
Our current quest is to train with Vital Smarts, in its Influencer program. If we find the value there that we think we will, it will have scored 4 times: directly impacting our work in the building; building our professional skill set; making connections beyond education; and boosting our people skills to the benefit of even personal and family life. What a win! Some of us are even interested in certification after the initial training. Who knows where we’ll go from there! Who knows what industries we’ll connect with, whose work will fascinate us or who we may inspire. Our world will grow bigger, our students and families will directly benefit, we can help our school district shine, and our job satisfaction will automatically stay high. Who doesn’t want something like this? And we want it for ALL of our colleagues, as each finds his or her “thing”--and runs with it!
Moses moment, indeed.
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