A Nod to Otherful

I was grateful for the opportunity to learn from Mike Kleba and Ryan O’Hara for two days this past week. I could go on and on about their highly original, engaging, and meaningful presentation style. They had us laughing and crying at times. If you haven’t read their book Otherful, our superintendent has truly rallied our admin team around it as an anchor text.

But what I really want to call out is the way they treat people. They remember names. They notice and celebrate people in the room who may often go unnoticed. For example, the way they acknowledged the staff at the venue where we hosted the event. They celebrated the people who supported set-up for our event and provided hospitality services. Without such support, the event wouldn’t have been what it was, and Mike and Ryan went out of their way to recognize them. They also went out of their way to see and celebrate so many of us.

I’m sharing this to not only remind us that, as I say in Legacy of Learning, there are no small jobs in a school. I share it because I was watching them. I was watching them because like it or not, when you’re a leader, people watch you carefully. What you say and what you do carries a weight to it.

As a teacher in your classroom, kids are watching how you treat not just them but other kids and not just other kids but the adults and even how you talk about yourself. Through you, they are learning about adults and how to be people. For better or worse. At any given moment, we’ve all been positive models for others and sadly, and harder to accept, not so great models too.

A heightened awareness of this reality allows us to be more mindful of the kinds of modeling we want to do in schools every day.

Every moment in schools- whether we intend or not- is spent sending messages of safety and belonging or lack thereof. The more consistently we model the good, the better schools and classrooms feel. When we show up in our humanity and with our best, it’s more accessible for students and staff to do the same.

As George Couros says, we need “to help students not only become ‘prepared for the future’ but create a better world now and in the future.”

The most important (and hardest) work is the work we do on ourselves. Everything else is secondary.

The more authority we have in our schools, the less likely it is that people will be honest with us about how they are experiencing our classroom, school, and district leadership.

Mike and Ryan urged us to find someone in a different role who can lovingly call us in and show us ourselves even when it’s painful to see.

Let’s all find “callers in” this year.

And let’s all see and celebrate others too.