Episode 16: Julia

A school leader tells a story about an epic fail that taught her an epic lesson.

BB: Today is another interview day. It's very exciting. I'm going to be talking with a long-term colleague of mine about an experience that she had at a school she led many years ago. Without further ado, I'm just going to jump in and ask, who are you, Julia? Where do you come from?

JB: Hi, Betsy. Thank you for having me. Let me start with that. Who am I? I am a leadership coach, a leadership consultant. I work primarily with leaders who are new to their jobs, organizational development type consultant. But my career really started in education as I opened and led a school in Western Massachusetts.

BB: Okay. The school, that school, is what this story is about, if I'm correct?

JB: Correct.

BB: So let's just jump into the story. What was happening at your school that implied the need for action?

JB: We were a brand new school, a middle school and high school, back in the early 2000s. We were small and growing, and I was the founding leader. We, quite honestly, were in over our heads. We were maybe in Year Two of our school, and students were coming to us from many communities, and we hadn't yet established a really clear school culture, which meant that in many cases, students were behaving the way the students wanted to behave or the way they naturally behaved, without clear structures from our adults. We certainly had a code of conduct, and every adult in the building had their expectations for how students were to behave, which was probably confusing for our students. So things were a little bit out of control. Kids would yell in the hallways. Kids would get up and walk out of their classrooms whenever they wanted to. In some classes, kids would push against teachers, and then some kids had amazing relationships with teachers. It was really all over the map.

BB: What happened that made you realize, something's got to be done here?

JB: Well, for one, we were, again, in our second year, we had our principal in November tell us she was leaving. She felt like she was in over her head. We had lost a principal after the first year. This was a new principal who had been there for two months, and she came and said, “I can't do this.” So I was certainly a little thrown by that. We had teachers telling us that they didn't know how to handle the students. I remember one case in particular, a teacher thought it would be funny to throw an eraser at a student to get her attention. We had a parent come in, of course irate, although there are teachers in those situations who can playfully toss an eraser, and that's what the teacher thought she was doing. So there were expectations of what teachers should do to get students' attention and what students should be doing to behave in classrooms that were all over the map. And, importantly, that meant learning was not happening. Importantly, that meant that students – I don't think our attendance was great. People weren't enrolling at the level that we had anticipated. And the general feeling in the school was a little bit out of control. So teachers were asking, “You've got to get something,” looking at me saying, “You've got to get something in place.”

BB: Wow. So they were looking to you to fix this problem?

JB: I'm thinking about this, and obviously, 20 years ago, though the moments are very fresh in my mind, I believe they were looking to me to fix the problem. They certainly were saying, “Who is going to fix this problem?”

BB: “Not us.”

JB: Right! And I had just watched our second principal say that they weren't going to stick around. Whether or not they literally looked at me and said, “What are you going to do?” that is my experience. I felt that.

BB: Excellent. This is what I want to slow down on a little bit because everyone knows – they should know if they listen to this podcast – that I'm very interested in emotions and relationships. When this was happening, when you perceived that teachers were looking to you to fix the problem that they were involved in and could not see, the forest for the trees, what happened? What was happening inside you? What happened in your body that you thought, “Okay, it's time for me to to do something”?

JB: I will say I have always been somebody who feels deeply responsible, and so I'm sure that that is my gut instinct to move towards that. The creation of this school really did depend on me through any number of trials and tribulations to get our doors open the first time, including finding an alternate site when our original site wasn't ready. It was almost like I had just developed my role in the school as the fixer, as the problem solver, as the one who was supposed to make things okay. Again, whether or not they said to me, “You need to fix this,” they were up in arms and our principal left, and I'm looking around thinking, “This is on me.” I think it's, chaos does not feel good for me. Ambiguity is not something I enjoy. It makes me very anxious. I think I was having that feeling of anxiety and wanted to step in and fix this.

BB: Love it. What did you do to manage those feelings?

JB: Problem solving mode. Solution mode. I called a colleague, an old friend of mine who was in a similar role in another school, and I said, “I know your school struggling and you fixed it. What did you do?” And he said, “Call this woman at this organization. She helped us. She fixed it for us.” And so I called that woman. I mean, I was just like, problem solve, problem solve, problem solve. I remember being very focused. As soon as he told me I should call her, I went and visited his school to see what it was really like. Stepping away from my school, by the way, which felt like it was in flames, but I was like, I have got to solve this problem.

BB: At all costs.

JB: At all costs. And I do believe that student culture is a central element of a school, so I knew that that was the priority in that moment.

BB: And that's what you were working on, even though you were trying to put out a fire, a massive fire.

JB: Yes.

BB: So the first thing you did was you turned to people, human resources. You turned to people you knew. And I think that's a great thing just to underline that so many, I think many leaders or many people would just be like, “Okay, I will power through this by myself. I'll figure this out.”

JB: That's true.

BB: But you did a really smart thing, and that was to turn to friends and colleagues, primarily people who knew what they were doing to get some suggestions.

JB: Right.

BB: Okay, so what was the suggestion? What happened then?

JB: This woman came to the school who had a lot of experience coaching schools, and she and her organization had been involved with our school in the earliest of days. She looked around and she said, “Your school's in crisis.” Which is like a gut punch, right? I can't tell you the number of challenges we had gone through to get to that day and how hard I had been working and, frankly, how much weight I had lost, which I did not know was my stress response. That's the only time in my life that's been a stress response. That degree of stress I had felt I had been under. And so, she came, she said, “Your school's in crisis, and I have these six suggestions for you,” and I was like, “Great! I will take them!” One of them, specifically related to student discipline, was around instituting what was called a merit-demerit system. That system is what I'd seen in my colleagues' school. And it was very prescribed. A student does X, they get a merit. A student raises their... Is a consistent contributor in class, they get a merit. A student holds a door for other students, they get a merit. A student does the right thing, often, and they get a merit. The alternate is a student shouts out in class, they get a demerit. A student chews gum, they get a demerit. A student does something, pushes a kid in the hallway, that was probably more than a demerit. But it was very prescribed. It felt like, “Okay, this is a way we can clarify the expectations of everybody.” So I really liked it. As I said, I don't like ambiguity. I didn't like chaos. I was like, this is something that is so clear. It feels clean. We can track it. We can know how we're doing. This is great. I came to the teachers and said, “This is what we're going to do.”

BB: Operant conditioning, punishment and reward, just to get those guardrails in line. So everyone knows where to go and when they're bumping up against the guardrail.

JB: Exactly. Felt great.

BB: Okay. So how did the plan work? You brought it to the teachers. What happened? How did they respond? And then how did they implement?

JB: Ohh, the teachers…There was a mix of emotions because there are people who are like me who just want very clear guardrails. And I think those teachers were like, “Yes, that sounds great.” But also, of course, there are teachers who are not like me whose perspective was, “Wait, this is an intense system. How are we going to track all of these things? How can I be assigning merits and demerits throughout my class period when I'm supposed to get a flow in my teaching? Or how does this work for students with disabilities and students with special needs who have fidgeting challenges or they may shout out? And, importantly, why are we rewarding and or trying to incentivize behavior in this way instead of teaching children intrinsically right from wrong?” And I understood those arguments, and I believed them in theory. But I was like, “We are in crisis. We are doing this. And I've seen it work, and we need to do this.” And at some degree, I think because I had probably hired most of them, or if not all of them, they had seen me solve other problems. I say they went along with it. They at least went along with it in word. That they would try this. And so we set up all sorts of systems. We had people tracking in the office and counting the merits and demerits each day for the 150 students we had at that point. We were working our buns off, trying to make sure we could keep up with and make sure we understood what behaviors were happening and weren't happening.

BB: So how long did the system – How long did you do this?

JB [laughing]: Too long! We were doing this – and I laugh now. I'm just going to name. I laugh now, but I was not laughing then.

BB: It was serious business then! You were trying to save your school!

JB: It was so serious. I was in knots around how to have a calm, good learning environment. It lasted... So that was in Year Two. In Year Four, we still were not seeing the academic results that we wanted. The school culture had calmed down, so it felt like that must have been working. Though, in the ensuing two years, the pushback and the like, “What do we mean by shouting out in class? And is there a time we're shouting out in class as appropriate?” And trying to define everything to the nth degree and recognizing, of course, teachers have different ways of managing their classroom. And of course, when we asked them to take on a system for which it did not feel authentic to them, they really struggled. And then we had to hold them accountable for following a system that we had said needed to be followed. And they didn't want to, but they had to. I mean, it was just this ech! difficult two years. And by the way, we thought it was working because the culture had calmed down. But when you really dug into the data, the kids for whom that system didn't work left.

BB: Ugh. Yes.

JB: And so I don't think we dug into the data completely in those early days, but we were struggling to try to make it work, and we still weren't getting the outcomes we wanted in terms of academics. And people were just unhappy with the relationships that they weren't necessarily building with their students because they had to adhere to this very structured, very prescribed way of interacting. So we had these consultants come in, and they said –

BB: New, different consultants.

JB: Different consultants, not the consultant that came in in Year Two. Different consultants, and did a whole study of everything in the school and observed classes, and there were four or five of them. So they were team working together and sharing observations and discussing all these things. They came to me and they said, among other issues that we had, “You have a desire and a mission, and everyone professes that they want every child to feel like they belong here. And you have this merit-demerit system, which systematically is making children feel like they don't belong. And by the way, nobody likes it. The teachers don't like it, the students don't like it, the parents don't like it. We've had one-on-ones with the administrators who don't like it.” I didn't like it. [laughter] I was like, “But what do we do?” So that was a realization that – I just put my head down and kept moving, and people were just willing to follow through what I, quite honestly, I'm so glad I have this conversation with you today because I still believe that is one of the greatest failings that I put into place in that school.

BB: Wow.

JB: I still believe that it, at least the way we implemented it, did harm to kids.

BB: Wow. I just want to point out how interesting it is, and probably how common it is, for a school, an administrator, a leadership team, a teaching team, to come to some conclusion about a response, to make a response to a problem in a school, and to stick with that response, come hell or high water, because it's at least something, as opposed to retreating back into this void where you don't know what to do. Can you trace any feelings or motivators that took you through those two years? You mentioned that there was this surface assumption that things were working well because the culture had –

JB: Yes.

BB: Yeah. You can also imagine that after the fourth year, the culture would be a little bit more settled than the second year in any case.

JB: In any case, we had no control!

BB: So there wasn't really a correlation that you could make, but you wanted to. So you thought, was there anything else? Do you remember thinking, “This is working. This is great!” Or, “Oh, my God, I don't know if this is working, but I don't have any time to do anything else.”

JB: I believe that what I was thinking was, “This isn't great.” We spent a lot of faculty time parsing out what it meant to speak out in class, as I mentioned, or whatever it was. I knew that was a terrible use of faculty time. On the other hand, we had a lot of things we were working on. This is still Year Four of a brand new school. I was also responsible for building out our facility. Each year, we had to build new classrooms, and I was managing the contracts and the budget and all of those pieces. Hiring new teachers. We were growing by a whole bunch of students each year. I was worrying about hiring the new teachers. And by the way, when we shared with teachers, “Oh, we have a system that really makes the school feel calm,” everybody's like, “Oh, my God, that's so great. I want to come for that!”

BB: “I want to work for you!”

JB: Right? So despite the fact that I had a niggling feeling that there was something wrong with it, the surface-level commentary was in support from everybody, but maybe not everybody, because, again, we were having these protracted faculty meetings. But I don't think I had the bandwidth to try to look more deeply.

BB: Exactly, which explains, number one, why you couldn't and why you didn't want to.

JB: Exactly! Exactly!

BB: To be perfectly fair.

JB: No, I mean, subconscious, I didn't want to.

BB: Yeah, absolutely. So the second group of consultants came in and said, basically, not so much that you're in crisis, but “This discipline problem, this discipline system is not working.”

JB: Correct.

BB: Then what? What happened inside you then when you heard that?

JB: Ohhhh.

BB [laughter]: “Oh no! I thought we had this solved!”

JB: I mean, there was an element of relief, right? There was an element of uncovering of what I knew subconscious, like my inner selves, the various voices that are working in my head as they're working in everyone's head at any time, were in conflict. So it was almost like a relief to have somebody see what I was seeing and help name it for me. So there was a degree of relief. And then there was a, “So what next?!” And these consultants were fabulous because up until now, of course, I still had the same, “What next and what do I have to figure out?” And they helped me understand I did not have to figure this out on my own.

BB: Wow.

JB: Right. And part of this is I had stepped into this job and I hadn't had outside support in-depth like this, right? I mean, I had a wonderful board and they would support me, and they didn't know how to push my thinking in the ways that probably would have been beneficial. But that's not because they weren't excellent at what they were doing. It's just I was such a new leader. The consultants said, “This is something that your community needs to solve. You can't solve this on your own.” And that was, again, both a relief because I thought, “Okay, nobody expects me – or theydon't expect me,” right? “to have all the answers.” Wow, I thought everyone expected me to have the answers. But then, of course, it raised the question, well, how on earth do I have a community answer this issue? This was also a new set of skills for me, engaging a broad set of voices to solve something like this.

BB: It’s so interesting because one of my first thoughts when you started the story was, you went to resources that you trusted and were actually helpful to you in coming up with an immediate solution to the problem that you perceived, the crisis that you perceived.

JB: Sure. Right.

BB: But there is that element in you of, “I've gotta do this. I've got to do this all by myself. This is my problem. I got to fix it.” When you hear, okay, yet another thing that I have to – you've been putting out fires and dealing with all kinds of growing pains of any normal school, even an older school. You just take it on, you do it, clippity-clop, and here you are, one more problem. Add to my basket on my back. I've got to figure this out. Oh, my God, how am I going to figure this out? And what they said was, go to your resources, reach out to other people. But this time, the resources were your community, your school community. And you were like, “What does that even mean?”

JB: Well, in part because my understanding of leadership at that moment was I was the leader of that school. Therefore, as a leader, I need to have the answers.

BB: Love it.

JB: And I was comfortable seeking help outside.

BB: Yeah! Secretly. Quietly. [laughter]

JB: Secret! Quietly. Or even saying, “I've done the research because here I am still solving the problem. I've done the research.”

BB: Nice.

JB: Right? But now, turning to a community and saying, “I don't know know how to do this.”

BB: Big deal!

JB: That is hard and that is vulnerable. That is making me very vulnerable, especially because I think they need me or they want me or they believe it is my job to solve it.

BB: And so more about that, the vulnerability. What did you think was going to happen if you actually turned to the community and said, “I don't know how to solve this. You're going to have to help.”

JB: I thought they would give up. This felt existential. This felt existential. I thought they would, “Well, if you don't know, how are we supposed to know?” I thought that would be the response.

BB: Wow. This is the kind of pressure that was on your shoulders. I just want to say, if you're a leader who recognizes this feeling, just for a moment, let us dwell in how impossible and horrible that is.

JB: I know.

BB: And why people get back pain and their joints start to hurt because that's too much pressure. That's like putting the impossible on your back and carrying it around all day long. So your fear was if it wasn't you, it was going to be nobody, and that meant the school would die. Existential crisis.

JB: Existential crisis.

BB: It would die. Okay. So the consultants, did they help you visualize what you could do?

JB: Yes. Yes.

BB: What did they say?

JB: They walked me through the steps I needed to take. They said, “You need to name the problem with your faculty and staff, and you need to outline a solution for how the team, how everybody will participate in trying to find the way forward.” And they walked me through. I worked out with them what I might say to the faculty and staff. They supported me through that. They supported me through that. And so I still had somebody saying, “No, you can do this.” They were so kind. I mean, in the face of what they saw, which was really still quite problematic, I felt they believed in me, and I needed that, too. I needed somebody from the outside to say, “No, we see you, and we see the problem, and the problem is bigger than you, and here's a way forward.”

BB: And no blame, importantly. They didn't blame you.

JB: There was no blame. There was no blame. I mean, I had all my self-blame, but I was the only one blaming myself.

BB: Super important.

JB: There may have been teachers and parents blaming me, but they didn't say it out loud. So importantly, the people that I trusted and who I knew saw what I was seeing did not blame me.

BB: Yeah! Fantastic. So what did you do? You turned around. They were supporting you, they were advising you, and you turned around and what did you do in the community?

JB: I remember we, at that point, our then principal and our assistant principal and I, stood in front of the whole faculty and shared the findings of their report, which went beyond this piece, the discipline piece. But it did talk about other elements that contributed to a challenging student culture. So I went through the findings with the whole faculty. The three of us stood up there and shared these. And it was a somber meeting. [laughter] It was, to say the least. I can laugh now. I know! It was a somber meeting. You're laughing. That is an understatement, yes. And there was a little bit of a... Of course, the next question out of the faculty and staff's mouths were, “What next? So what do we do?” Which I knew.

BB: Which validated your expectation.

JB: Which validated my expectation. But interestingly, it wasn't “What next, what are you going to do?” It was just open-ended. “What next?” And because of my own support from these outside consultants and my own desire to feel responsible, such that I sought the support, I knew what to say. “Well, we are going to form committees, and we are going to work together to come up with solutions.” And that gave everybody what they needed, which was a step forward. This is a moment where it was clear we couldn't sit in that room and solve the problem, but we could cause progress. I think that's what people need it, to just cause progress.

BB: Yes, I would say to become agents in their own lives and feel as though they are empowered to make a difference, even if they don't know what that is going to be, what it's going to look like.

JB: Exactly! Exactly.

BB: But being in a group that they can trust to start generating ideas. That's fantastic. Okay, so then what happened?

JB: We created these three groups. One was about the schedule of the day. One was about the merit-demerit system. One was about Special Ed support, all the different – we had different groups looking – one was the structure of the high school. There were all different groups that were...It was more than three.

BB: One was the dress code.

JB: Sorry, I'm confusing two parts of the story. We created groups where faculty were raising the concerns or talking through the concerns and trying to start to identify solutions. But one was around student culture. And in that one, there were a small number of teachers who actually had volunteered for all the committees? [BB laughter] Which there always are those, which was fabulous. They volunteered for all the committees, and I turned them into a bit of a brain trust. I thought, well, they're going to be able to see and make connections across the areas in a way and help me brainstorm or understand the connections. And of course, they were all teachers. And so they were in the classroom with students, and they were in the middle school and the high school. They had a really great perspective. So they come to me as we're talking about school culture, and they say, “We need to ask the students.” And I'm thinking, “What? The students? No, no, no. It's the student behavior we need to change.”

BB: “They're the problem!”

JB: “They're the problem. Why would we ask them what we need?” Right? And I sit here now and I say, “Why did I listen to them?” I listened to them because I knew they were all great teachers. Their classrooms wereclassrooms I wished my own kids would be in someday. The students really respected them. They were thoughtful. I knew their classrooms were content-rich. It wasn't just that they knew how to have fun with or connect with kids in some fun way, be friends with kids. And I was probably desperate. I had multiple committees, multiple issues. By the way, we were going to be in the midst of yet another principal transition. We had curriculum work we had to work on. I was probably, again, not overly desperate that I was throwing caution to the wind, which I frankly had done that second year, but it was enough that I think it broke down my guard of feeling like I needed to be in control.

BB: Wow.

JB: And so I listened to them and I said, “Okay, how do we do that?” And they each had different backgrounds and experience in working with young people, as we all did. This is where there were three different rooms. They said, “We need to cancel school for an afternoon, and we need to have students discuss these issues.” And they set it up so that a student led the conversation in each classroom, and the co-facilitator was an alumnus of the school. But no adults in the building were allowed to speak. [BB laughter] “What?! What?!” And we did this. I still said, “Okay, all right, I'm following here. I'm going to let you tell us what we need to do.” So we had three different rooms. One was on the discipline and merits and demerits and what our code of conduct should look like. One was on the dress code. That's where we focused on dress code, because we had a strict dress code, and it was an area of constant conflict with our students. And one was on how the high school could be different than the middle school. Because one of the comments we had heard is that our high school students felt like our high school was no different than the middle school. So students self-elected which room to go to. We didn't assign them. We said, “These are the three topics. Which one would you like to be in?” The room that had the greatest engagement was actually the dress code room.

BB: Aho! That's so funny.

JB: I know, right? Though it obviously had very close linkages to the others. Telling high school students what they have to wear felt no different than middle school. Telling high school students, if you're not wearing these things, these are the ramifications, was about this –

BB: “You get a demerit.”

JB: Exactly! “You get a demerit.” Exactly. It was very tightly linked. That's the room I spent my my time in watching. And in that room, it was really hard, right?

BB: To be clear, faculty could be in the rooms –

JB: Yes! Sorry. So faculty and staff could not say anything, but we were encouraged to observe, right? Which was really powerful.

BB: Fishbowl.

JB: Yeah, fishbowl. Exactly. And I remember in the room that I was in, they were debating the dress code, and it opened up with a question that the facilitators had really been carefully thoughtful about making sure it didn't turn into a venting session. And these were high schoolers who hated their dress code. So what did it open with? Whatever their question was going to be, they were going to vent about the dress code. So the first – I think it was a two-hour meeting. I'm not sure. The first 20 minutes were about how awful the dress code is. “Oh, my God, I can't believe it!” And by the way, the dress code was a pair of pants, not jeans, and a polo shirt that had our logo on it. It was not like the jumper from Catholic school. It was not a coat and tie. It felt pretty casual to me! But it was not appreciated by the students. So they had this rolling debate, and it opened up with venting. But then somebody, some brave soul, student, of course, because adults weren't speaking, said, “Well, I like the dress code, and here's why.” And then it opened up other students saying, “Well, I like it, and here's why.” The students pretty quickly had like, “Well, these are the good things about it, and these are the hard things about it. And it really just feels like our voice is being taken away. And it's not that the dress code is so bad. It's that we don't get to have a voice in how we show up at school, but we like that we don't have to think about what we're going to wear, we don't have to buy the latest fashions.” It really was this debate back and forth among these students, and their ending place, having come in railing against the dress code, their ending place is, “Well, do you think the board would let us have one day a week where we dress like professionals?”

BB [gasp]: Like, “What?!” [laughter] Not like grunges.

JB: No!

BB: Professionals!

JB: Professionals, right?

BB: They wanted to make it worse for themselves!

JB: That's what it seemed like to me. But that would be – one of their complaints was, “You're trying to teach us how to operate in the world of work, and you're not giving us voice. We don't think you're trying to teach us how to work in a place where we have to wear a uniform and –

BB: And conform all the time.

JB: And conform all the time. We think you're trying to teach us how to be in a place where we are professionals. So can we have a day of professional attire?” That was where we landed. This was a policy that went to the board because it had been in our original agreement with the state that we'd have a dress code. So it goes to the board and the board says – they listen to the students and they push back because they are seeing this now as a learning experience. It's part of the process. It's part of the process is to really understand what the students want. And they approved it. Yeah.

BB: I mean, what a remarkable story.

JB: Yeah. It really was remarkable because when we stepped back, just like these teachers told us, when we stepped back and gave students a chance to share their voices, they were not unreasonable. Their pushback and their behaviors around the dress code were rooted in their own developmental needs. And we weren't seeing it that way. We were seeing it as conflict when what they really were trying to express was something different. And so when we stepped back and were able to listen to them, we could hear what they were really trying to express. And I think that day 100% shifted how I thought about education and the role of voice in the process, though I can't tell you that that day solved my sense of responsibility. I still fight that one.

BB: You still have it.

JB: But I think it opened up so many of our educators' eyes about the power of students. I can tell you 100% it has impacted the way I mother and the voice I want my children to have in rule-setting or helping me explain to them why a rule is as it is, but hearing why they don't like the rule. We do a lot more, not ad nauseam, but a lot more open conversation around why I expect certain things of them or my husband expects – we have a very different conversation, I think, than if I hadn't experienced that.

BB: Yeah, there are a couple of things, at least that occur to me in the story, I'm sure others will hear other things, but one of them is when you said that the students respected this small cadre of teachers who said, “We need to open this up to the students,” I was going to also say the teachers respected the students, and the students knew that.

JB: Yes. Yes.

BB: I just love that. That's what some of us would call “student-centered instruction” or “student-centered life.”

JB: Yes!

BB: There's something not just so wise and wonderful and brilliant about having that faith in students, but also very brave and deeply trusting for you who did not think of education in that way necessarily. You, like many of us in the world, we're afraid of teenagers. We don't trust teenagers. We say we trust them, but we don't really trust them. That's another element that I think is important here is the difference between – I mean, in your voice, you can say, “We trust you. Oh, yes, we trust you.”

JB: Right!

BB: But your actions prove otherwise. And this leads to a final point that occurs me, and that is that I love the difference. I often talk to teachers about content versus emotional bedrock, or you would say voice. Content is, “I don't like the dress code.” Everyone starts fighting about the dress code when, in fact, that's a smokescreen. It's not aboutthe dress code. Because it turns out if you let your students speak, they want the dress code. They want to actually tighten the dress code. It's what they needed from you guys was a chance to be heard. And you said a developmental need. I would say it's a developmental need, absolutely, for that age group, but it's also a need for every human being.

JB: Everybody. Yes! Yes! Absolutely!

BB: Sometimes when you find yourself trapped in a discussion of content where you're not getting anywhere, stop and listen to the emotional need or the emotional bedrock. What are they trying to get out of this argument?

JB: So the interesting thing is, I think I naturally did that with adults before. The shift for me was students. I think almost anybody who has worked with me knows that I would say, “You need to balance your advocacy with your inquiry. You need to ask questions and learn where they're coming from.” But interesting that as an educator, I wasn't seeing that it had to be the same thing with students.

BB: I love it. You've written about this. I happen to know that you are writing a book about accountability in school leaders, and you wrote about this experience at your school. You in the book call it “magic.”

JB: Yeah, that was a magical room.

BB: To look back on it, what would you say – I mean, just to get up a little bit, 10,000 feet, what were the conditions that allowed the magic to happen? Given the growth that you experienced and being the leader who allowed the space to open up?

JB: Well, I think that was a major condition, right? to create the magic.

BB: Which is, what is it?

JB: What you just described, to create the space for this to open up. One teacher from that time describes it as “suspending disbelief.” That's a phrase she used for other things in that turnaround time when we were really making great changes in the school. But the willingness to believe in students and their ability to help us through this required us suspending our disbelief that they could. I do think we've already touched on this for how she was one of those key teachers, but how those teachers conducted their classrooms was with deep mutual respect for students. I think that by creating the structure or the format of the discussion, it demonstrated respect for students. I think those students came – if I remember correctly, they created norms for their discussion at the start of their discussion. Then the facilitators could say, “Remember the norms.” So the facilitators, their peers, could help hold them responsible if the discussion was going off track. So it was really student-led in that way, obviously. But I think early in those conversations, they were looking to us to see, “Are you going to jump in here? Are you going to tell us we shouldn't behave this way?” And we abided by the rule that we couldn't speak. And that was hard. [laughter] Let me be clear! That was hard! But we abided by that. And I think they could feel that respect for them when we didn't jump in.

BB: Yeah. There's a material element here to the magic, which is that you had bodies and rooms with limits that were respected.

JB: Yes, yes.

BB: The faculty contained themselves almost as if there were a wall between you and the students, and the students contained themselves by creating the condition, by creating the ground rules. They did the necessary, obvious, but so often, even in classrooms, undone thing, which is to set ground rules for a conversation that everyone would hold themselves accountable to and each other accountable to. There was something about that what I would call “holding environment” that allowed everyone to know their place, as it were. It wasn't a free-for-all. There were limits. There were structures in place, there were walls in place that allowed everyone to know what they could and could not do and gave the right people permission to remind each other, “You can't do that. And it's okay for me to say that you can’t.” I mean, what did it take for that first kid to say, “I actually like the dress code.” There was something about the space. We call it “safe space.” I'm using air quotes. Sometimes I get really irritated by “safe space.” It's thrown around like a word, but it's not created. This was really, and it wasn't just created, it was co-created by the very people who needed to feel safe there. It's just brilliant. And there is something magical about that. It's like greater than the sum of the parts, greater than the laws and the rules that were put in place to sit back and follow and stay contained in yourself and watch other people do their work. There's something – and to trust them because the conditions are there and the structures insist on trusting them. They are demonstrating the trust, as you say. Magic can happen.

JB: Right. Right.

BB: Just giving everyone a chance to let this sink in. I think it's a lovely story. It's a success story, as I call them. Really, just looking at you, you're relaxed and like, wow, that was great. Can you talk explicitly, just in wrapping up, about what you learned about the role of emotions and school relationships in those leadership decisions that you made in this story?

JB: So somewhere in all of that, I learned as a leader not to only act out of emotion, but also to be in touch with my emotions, to allow them to be. And I use language now that I did not have then, but to recognize that the emotions were telling me something. So that unease, when I think about the earlier part of that story where I kinda knew something was wrong, but I was stressed about all these other things, so I was just going to bury that. That's an inner conflict I was experiencing, that saps energy. Having to force those emotions to go away saps energy. And so the experience with the students was more like a both-and. I could allow the various emotions to be there. And again, the voices in my head and everybody's head to speak and have their place and to use that more as an informed process to move forward. So I sometimes work with leaders now, and we talk about the parts. They're parts, right? There's a part of me that wants to do this, and there's a part of me that wants to do that, right?

BB: Yes.

JB: Those parts are real. And so helping a leader give voice to those parts and think of it almost like their cabinet, right? Their advisory cabinet in their mind. How to help those parts that are very much emotional. The part that wants you to do something is the part that might be the anxious part that's like, “You must do something!” Right? And the part that's holding you back might be the fearful part. I think that whole experience was seeing in action multiple parts being heard and respected, not all followed, right? Being heard and respected and playing out together to get to a better place. If that makes sense.

BB: It makes sense. I think of it, like these emotions, anxiety, fear, to let those parts live, it's not just so that you can immerse yourself in horrible feelings.

JB: Of course not. No.

BB: Because one element I think of when I work with emotions is there are good reasons for the emotions. The emotions themselves are alert -- they're signals. They're alerting you. They're alarms. And to just take them at face value. Like, “Oh, anxious. Okay, I'm anxious, so I got to do something to resolve the anxiety.” No. What's underneath the anxiety? What's underneath the fear? What are you afraid of? What do you think is going to happen? As you were saying, existential. I thought the school was going to die if I didn't solve this problem. Now, that's something that any consultant could actually question you about. Like, “Okay, let's stop there and think about the real consequences of your sharing responsibility or sharing,” right? So paying attention to the emotions and trying to figure out where they come from or further asking, I think the question, “What are you afraid of? What do you think is going to happen?” Is really important because the emotions are trying to get our attention about what's not going right in the organism. Like pain tells us something's wrong. Emotions tell us something else is going on. Look for what's going on and what your assumptions are that might be really off. Like “you can't trust students. They don't know anything.” That's an assumption that deserves to be dug up and interrogated. Like, “Really?” And your experience is teaching all of us, no, actually, the students know a whole lot. They know a whole lot.

JB: They do. They do.

BB: And they want to, and they want to cooperate, and they want to be members of a community, but they don't want to be force-fed or unheard or unseen, just like every human being.

JB: Exactly.

BB: Well, love the story. Julia, thank you so much. This has been really great. I've loved hearing the story, and I congratulate you on that fantastic turnaround.

JB: Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for having me here today.