Starting Smart, Working Smart, Living Smart

By Gary Gruber, Director  

The origin and the history of the Smart Cars are quite fascinating in terms of their beginnings, its evolution and where it is today.  If I lived in a city and felt the need for a car, I would opt for one.  However, I live in the country and drive a pick up truck for very practical reasons.  

The Smart Car is really the result of a partnership between Hayek Engineering and SMH, the makers of Swatch watches and Daimler-Benz, now just Daimler AG, the makers of Mercedes Benz.  Hayek wanted to call it the Swatchmobile.  Fortunately, he lost that contest.   Nicolas Hayek believed that the auto industry had ignored a lot of potential customers who wanted a small, economical and stylish city car.  It's smart to recognize a need and respond to it creatively.  

Starting school year smart would be to show the faculty (and students) one of the more popular TED or TEDx talks and there are many.  I have used Simon Sinek's TED talk "Starting with Why" and then, with the faculty, in a half-day workshop, I would ask these three questions.    

• Why do you teach?  In other words what got you into teaching as a profession and why do you continue to teach?
• Why do you teach here?  Why do you teach in this school and why now?
• Why do you teach the way that you do?  Why do you not change the way you are teaching and if you do or if you don't why or why not?

With the students, show them Ben Zander's Ted talk about "Music and Passion" because it's smart to help kids discover more about their own personal passion and purpose. And then have them talk about what they care about the most and why.  You'll learn tons about them and how best to teach them. 

Working smart, to me, means: 

• Hiring people smarter than I am in many areas
• Being efficient with time management both personal and professional
• Establishing a few priorities for the year and working to accomplish them
• Delegating a lot of responsibility and work to others whom I trust to get the job done and done well
• Communicating frequently with clarity and purpose
• Recognizing and appreciating the efforts and accomplishments of others
• Understanding and applying the dynamics of planned change
• Attending a professional development experience that will challenge my assumptions and practice
• Spending quality time with family and friends and taking care of my personal interests and needs beyond work
• Making sure the environments where people work and learn are optimum desirable and aesthetically pleasant

Living smart in these turbulent times means having a place that is a sanctuary and a haven that is comfortable where you can read, rest and create.  Living smart means having a hobby or diversion that requires your mental, physical, emotional and spiritual attention that will take you away from your regular daily work.  Whether you walk, run, ride a bicycle, hike in the mountains or walk on the beach, if you do yoga or meditate, you already know what I mean.  If you have children living at home, it is critical that you get away from them from time to time and not allow them to think that they are necessarily the center of your universe and that your world revolves around them.  You will love them unconditionally and intensely but you need also to take care of yourself if you are going to be good for them and all those others with whom you work.  Living smart means eating well and exercise. Those still have tremendous value.  And finally, make a contribution to something that you believe is worthwhile and merits your gift, whether of time and talent as a volunteer or of money towards a special purpose.  We all end up with whatever we have been able to give away.  That is living smart and living well.   

All We Teach 

By Timothy McIntire, DIrector

 All we teach, all we learn, and all we mean resides in our power-filled memories.  As this school year begins, who has not prepared for leading by first acknowledging the magnitude of what lies ahead, by then appreciating the consequences of what is at stake, and finally by remembering the successes and failures that have come through the processes of past years?  The "unit" is not the school years passed, but the remembrances of people and places that are alive with us constantly both in the nature of schools and in human nature.  

July 13,1783 for me personally is a significant memory.  That year, William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy sat on a hill under a sycamore tree high above a valley through which the River Wye runs and where the ruins of Tintern Abbey lie.  

Here, do yourself a favor, and read the poem commonly called "Tintern Abbey."

FIVE years have past; five summers, with the length

Of five long winters! and again I hear

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

With a soft inland murmur. -- Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

That on a wild secluded scene impress

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

The day is come when I again repose

Here, under this dark sycamore, and view

These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,

Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,

Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves

'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see

These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines

Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,

Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke

Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!

With some uncertain notice, as might seem

Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,

Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire

The Hermit sits alone.

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind,

With tranquil restoration: -- feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man's life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened: -- that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on, --

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things.

If this

Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft --  

In darkness and amid the many shapes

Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir

Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,

Have hung upon the beatings of my heart --

How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,

O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,

How often has my spirit turned to thee!

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,

With many recognitions dim and faint,

And somewhat of a sad perplexity,

The picture of the mind revives again:

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

That in this moment there is life and food

For future years. And so I dare to hope,

Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first

I came among these hills; when like a roe

I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides

Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

Wherever nature led: more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads, than one

Who sought the thing he loved.  

For nature then

(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,

And their glad animal movements all gone by)

To me was all in all. -- I cannot paint

What then I was.  

The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite; a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, nor any interest

Unborrowed from the eye. --  

That time is past,

And all its aching joys are now no more,

And all its dizzy raptures.  

Not for this

Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts

Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,

Abundant recompence. For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear, -- both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense,

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

Nor perchance,

If I were not thus taught, should I the more

Suffer my genial spirits to decay:

For thou art with me here upon the banks

Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,

My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch

The language of my former heart, and read

My former pleasures in the shooting lights

Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while

May I behold in thee what I was once,

My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,

Knowing that Nature never did betray

The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,

Through all the years of this our life, to lead

From joy to joy: for she can so inform

The mind that is within us, so impress

With quietness and beauty, and so feed

With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,

Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,

Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

The dreary intercourse of daily life,

Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb

Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold

Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon

Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;

And let the misty mountain-winds be free

To blow against thee: and, in after years,

When these wild ecstasies shall be matured

Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind

Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,

Thy memory be as a dwelling-place

For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,

If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,

Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts

Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,

And these my exhortations!  

Nor, perchance --

If I should be where I no more can hear

Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams

Of past existence -- wilt thou then forget

That on the banks of this delightful stream

We stood together; and that I, so long

A worshipper of Nature, hither came

Unwearied in that service: rather say

With warmer love -- oh! with far deeper zeal

Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,

That after many wanderings, many years

Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,

And this green pastoral landscape, were to me

More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

By William Wordsworth (1770-1850).  [Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting The Banks Of The Wye During A Tour. July 13, 1798.]

How good to see you on this side of "Tintern Abbey."  Compound your joy and read it again.  While individual lines and ideas hold special meaning for me, I resist abridging my reading and hold myself to the discipline of reading the entire poem.  Why?  Because leading in schools is grounded in the wholeness of the experience, it cannot be abridged.  It is not a simple pill to be swallowed but the beautiful complexity over years past and over the years ahead that we experience the "aching joys" and "dizzy raptures" set amid "the still, sad music of humanity."

In your leadership, I think Wordsworth is an excellent model.  Clearly, he has matured from knowledge-based understanding to wisdom.  He works on his inner-self as a way of making decisions and leading change.  He appreciates that his physical senses are generative just as his mental faculties are.  And he has a friend.  

It was a SFLC 2010 Fellow and friend who provoked my re-reading Tintern Abbey.  He's a Middle School Head who is younger than I and he lives in Nashville where two of my contemporaries lead schools.  These school heads are friends to me, to him, and, in turn, I trust, we to them.  In this serious and beautiful work of school leadership, remember

Thy memory be as a dwelling-place

For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,

If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,

Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts

Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,

And these my exhortations!      

The Art of the Meeting

Carla Robbins Silver, Executive Director

With the beginning of the school year comes the inevitable flurry of back-to-school meetings. Administrative team meetings and retreats, opening faculty meetings, department meetings, board meetings, staff meetings, and grade-level meetings will all be scheduled in the planning week before the students arrive. Over the course of the school year, most of these groups will continue to formally meet with some frequency - maybe weekly or monthly.

A meeting should be a relatively simple experience. A group of people come together to make group decisions, coordinate efforts, and plan for the future. In truth, most meetings are long, boring, poorly planned, badly executed, and thus less effective and less enjoyable than they could be. Some meetings I have attended have been downright painful to sit through.  At one school where I worked, administrative team meetings functioned more like a game of "whack-a-mole" with each idea and statement serving as a target for obliteration. The culture of those meetings was neither productive nor healthy, and each week there was a sense of dread as we marched into the meeting room. Who knew where the hammer would fall this time?  

Here is a question to ponder as you begin the school year. What is the culture of meetings at your school? If you don't like the answer, then now is the time to rethink why and how you do meetings.

"Read This Before our Next Meeting" is a new book (or "manifesto") by Al Pittampalli.  The book makes the case that organizations simply suffer through too many bad meetings that inhibit real work. He writes, "If an operating room were as sloppily run as our meetings, patients would die." Meetings in most organizations kill ideas and people.

He proposes the "Modern Meeting" as an alternative to the status quo of long, boring, frequent meetings. "The Modern Meeting  focuses on the only two activities worth convening for: conflict and coordination" and has seven essential qualities.

The "Modern Meeting:"

• Supports a decision that has already been made
• Moves fast and on schedule
• Limits the number of attendees
• Rejects the unprepared
• Produces committed Action Plans
• Refuses to be informational (reading memos is mandatory)
• Works only alongside a culture of brainstorming

The "Modern Meeting" can be supported and avoided by individual conversations, group work sessions and brainstorming -- none of which are technically meetings, but rather productive and generative activities.  Pittampalli goes on to help the reader set agendas with care, decide who should attend a meeting (and even gracefully decline attending a meeting) and also has some terrific advice on ensuring that every meeting attendee is an active participant.    

Given the plethora of meetings school leaders endure, we need to take care in making the most out of each one and avoid holding unnecessary, information-driven meetings, or even worse, meetings that pose as consensus building gatherings informing group decisions when in fact, they are meetings of convenience, formality, or mere social occasions (Pittampalli).

If you are going to commit to overhauling your meetings, either as an individual leader or as a whole school, you might also consider another resource, Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes and Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity by David Sibbet of The Grove Consulting.  The SFLC summer cohort was fortunate to have Tomi Nagai-Rothe from The Grove do a working session with them on strengthening team performance and also visual road mapping.  The Grove has consistently proven that using visual tools can increase the work that groups do together. In fact, Al Pittampalli would likely argue that Visual Meetings are more along the lines of the "brainstorming sessions" and "group works sessions" he condones.  

You don't have to be a professional graphic facilitator to organize a visual meeting, but you do have to plan more and be more active. The benefits outweigh any drawbacks because using visual tools encourages everyone to engage, and all participants feel heard.  Nobody feels like the guy in the Fed-ex Stolen Idea Commercial.  Visual tools can transform the culture of a meeting to be more creative, transparent, innovative and open and they also create a permanent record for the organization to use in the future.  For potentially game-changing meetings, it might be worth it to hire a facilitator or a consultant to help set you up for success by providing clarity on the goals and the format of your meeting/brainstorm/work session.

Finally, before starting your year, consider for just a moment these final three questions:  How many minutes will you spend in meetings this year? Can you replace a meeting with a memo, conversation, work session or brainstorm instead?  If not, can you enhance the quality of the meeting for all participants?  

With that, I wish you a smart start for the 2011-2012 school year.