Category: Uncategorized

This week’s blog comes to you from The Happiest Place on Earth.  I’m at Disneyland!  And it lives up to the hype.

Our lives are busy.  We usually have too much happening at work, too many errands and activities at home, and too many thoughts running through our heads.  Sleep can allude us.  Worry can distract us.  If we aren’t intentional about recognizing our stress and anxiety, it can consume us.

Rest is important.  Time away to decompress and to clear your head is essential.  This is hardly a new idea.  Stephen Covey called it “sharpening your saw” over 25 years ago in his widely successful book Seven Habits of Highly  Successful People.

Time to disconnect matters.

This is the final, crazy push in our school year.  It’s a busy time.  I’m lucky to be able to take a couple of vacations days and enjoy some playtime with my family.  But you don’t need vacation to sharpen your saw.

Talk a walk outside.

Go fishing.

Hide in the basement for a couple hours with a good book.

Bake something.

The key is to be present in the moment.  Turn off your phone (I struggle with this) and just enjoy the experience.

Now I’m going to take my own advice and get back to Mickey Mouse!

Being alone can be meditative and refreshing.  A solitary walk outside in this newly warm weather can clear your head and help put a tough day in perspective.  Being alone is not the same thing as being lonely.  Being lonely is an awful feeling.

On this week’s episode of The Big Bang Theory (“The Fortification Implementation”), Sheldon asks Amy, “Do you think there comes a point in life when it stops feeling bad to be left out of things?”  Her answer?  “Probably not.  It’s an evolutionary advantage to be included in group activities.”  She’s right!  The need to belong is primal.

People need to belong.  People need to have a sense of connection…deep connection…in order to be fulfilled.

Gallup defines this need as having a “best friend at work”.  Ideally, people will find colleagues that share their personal interests, passions, and attitudes.  I was lucky enough to have a strong social network as a teacher and an administrator.  I worked with people who were also friends.  For whatever reason though, that does not always happen for everyone.

How can teams create a climate that fosters a sense of belonging?

Learn Together

Getting better at our work is a powerful way to bond as a team.  Teaching can be a lonely profession.  Having opportunities to investigate and to try out new strategies or to watch each other teach can build a team.

Play Together

It’s important to have fun at work.  Build in time throughout the day to play.  Use a grade level, team, or department meeting to facilitate activities that allow people to get to know each other on a personal level.  Ask someone to join you for lunch.  The staff lounge is a lonely place when you don’t have a group of people to join.   Strike up a game of hallway mini golf before school one day.  Pull together a 3 person team and challenge some students to a  game of Hoop-It-Up.

Celebrate Together

Make a big deal out of the moments of success in people’s lives.  When someone gets engaged, has a baby, hosts a graduation party for a child, celebrate!  Our lives outside of work are important.

Recover Together

When you work with people for long enough, difficult times are sure to happen.   They may get sick, lose a parent, have a child suffer an illness.  In times of grief or sadness, being there for the people on your team matters.  Show up!

A friend reminded me that a sense of belonging is deeper than simply having social events and doing fun things together as a staff.  That matters!  But there is a deeper and more meaningful connection that people seek.  People want to help set the vision of the work…especially when the work is as important as it is in education.  People want to belong to the decision-making body.  They need to feel connected to the bigger purpose of the work.  As a leader, how are you seeking every voice when making decisions and setting the vision?

We do our best when we belong to a positive team.  It is a primal need that not only feeds our collective souls, but truly does bring out the best in our performance.  This week, do one thing to help someone else belong.

Over and over I hear leaders speak of the importance of servant leadership.  But what does that really mean?  And do we truly value the leadership of those not in the spotlight?

There’s a story about this in the Aaron Sorkin show Sports Night.  “You guys know who Philo Farnsworth was? He invented television. I don’t mean he invented television like Uncle Milty. I mean he invented THE television in a little house in Provo, Utah, at a time when the idea of transmitting moving pictures through the air would be like me saying I figured out a way to beam us aboard the starship Enterprise. He was a visionary. He died broke and without fanfare. The guy I really like though was his brother-in-law, Cliff Gardner. He said, ‘Philo, I know everyone thinks you’re crazy, but I want to be a part of this. I don’t have your head for science, so I’m not going to be able to help much with the design and mechanics of the invention, but it sounds like you’re going to need glass tubes.’ You see, Philo was inventing the cathode receptor, and even though Cliff didn’t know what that meant or how it worked, he’d seen Philo’s drawing, and he knew that he was gonna need glass tubes. And since television hadn’t been invented yet, it’s not like you could get them at the local TV repair shop. ‘I want to be a part of this,’ Cliff said. ‘I don’t have your head for science. How would it be if I were to teach myself to be a glass blower? And I could set up a little shop in the backyard. And I could make all the tubes you’ll need for testing.’ There ought to be Congressional Medals for people like that.”

When I became an assistant principal, my principal told me that “if someone else can do it, someone else should do it.”  He recognized that my time was better spent on the tasks that no one else could do.  He insisted, in fact, that I work collaboratively to craft the vision of my projects, oversee the design of the process, and then let others carry out what I was not explicitly required to do myself.  He helped me see that time is finite and that I should be spending my time on the things that no one else could do.  He did the same.

In Multipliers Liz Wiseman describes the Challenger.  The leader who lays out a just-beyond-reach challenge for others and then provides the motivation, but not the specific details, to execute.  Others become better than they knew they could be by reaching the challenge themselves.

Many times that meant that I was doing the legwork on projects that our principal had envisioned.  It also meant that others in our building were doing the legwork on mine.  To me, that is servant leadership.  It is doing your work in service to others. Often times our teachers were leading in service to my ideas.  I was leading in service to our principal’s ideas.  And he was leading in service to the mission of the District.

At the District level now, I see this so clearly.  There are an incredible number of secretaries, teachers, para-professionals, technology specialists, building leaders, and district leaders implementing our Strategic Plan.  They do the work to build a better and more effective way of teaching and learning.  They do the work to ensure the necessary supports are in place to help all students achieve.  They do the work to make life better for children.  They are in service to others through their leadership.

Leadership like this is not always recognized.  It is not flashy.   But it is necessary, and it should be celebrated.

Like Philo Farnsworth, the best leaders are skilled at both the vision and the implementation of innovative ideas, but the best leaders also understand that their time may be better spent on the big picture than on the details.

I am a teacher, and I am a learner.  For 22 years I have worked in education, and my strongest belief is that people (both students and the adults who teach them) are responsible for their own development- personally and professionally.  Having said that, I also disagree completely with the saying that “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”  Teaching is not about making anyone do anything; it is about facilitating a long and engaging journey to the water and then enticing the learner with the best water they can imagine.  Students want to learn.  Everyone does.  It is an innate instinct.   We never lose it.  That’s why I am also what can only be described as a staff development fanatic.  I believe that great PD (or professional development for those of you not living in our acronym world) can fundamentally change who you are and how you work.

Learning is a reflective practice.  This blog is my attempt to model my own reflective practices.  As a former English teacher (which anyone who has ever been an English teacher knows is never true-  you never stop being an English teacher),  I know the power of writing.  Writing is one powerful way I learn.  If my reflections can be of use to others, I want to share them.

My name is Heather Phipps.  I taught middle school English and reading for 13 years, and I have spent the last decade as a middle and high school building administrator.  I am currently a District administrator.  Welcome to my Educator Insights!