I was recently at a luncheon for independent school administrators in the San Francisco Bay Area where the topic was "Retaining Excellent Faculty." I attended with high hopes that I would hear about a magic formula (spoiler: there isn't one). The teachers on the panel shared story after story of feeling seen, valued, and supported, reinforcing what I already knew. Relationships matter, so how can schools ensure relationship-building and encourage growth mindsets for all teachers?

Early in my teaching career, my then division head Ken Aldridge gave me a copy of Zander and Zander's The Art of Possibility , and he and this book shaped the way I view leadership. The authors use the analogy of the orchestra to show that it is not about one person making success happen but rather about each musician working as leaders from where they sit to make beautiful music together. I was not yet an administrator, but I found that I could help make change right from where I was as an 8th grade teacher of English. Like Benjamin Zander, I started asking myself how I was helping others shine. It gave me a sense of purpose and satisfaction that I hope to pass forward.

Then administration became a part of my professional path, and I had the opportunity to create a system that would support teacher development. What should it entail? I was at first unsure about revamping faculty evaluation to be more about professional growth until I talked to some sage mentors who convinced me that all teachers deserve to feel the excitement of taking control of their own professional path and designing it according to their needs. Prioritizing professional growth honors the complexities of teaching and the unique gifts each individual brings to the classroom to make learning possible. The priorities for any growth plan should be time for conversations, observations, relationship-building, and empathetic feedback. In a school culture that encourages a growth mindset, everyone invests in each others' development.

Brené Brown in Dare to Lead writes, "The data made clear that care and connection are irreducible requirements for wholehearted, productive relationships between leaders and team members". I have learned that it is in the day to day that I forge my relationships with others, and I schedule my time so that I can be available, walk through classes, have conversations with all teachers, and ask questions out of curiosity. Brown's research also shows that "...trust is in fact earned in the smallest of moments. It is earned not through heroic deed, or even highly visible actions, but through paying attention, listening, and gestures of genuine care and connection". I mostly write this as a reminder to myself that there is nothing more important than taking care of my team.

Teachers tend to be so busy focusing on their students, they rarely take time for themselves. I recently saw a meme on social media that said, "If speaking kindly to plants helps them grow, imagine what speaking kindly to humans can do" (no source provided). Teachers are emptying their proverbial buckets by trying to meet the needs of all of their students, so how are they refilling their buckets? How are administrators helping to refill buckets? As an administrator responsible for the well-being of faculty members, these were the questions that led me to research and whole-heartedly jump on the bandwagon of the professional growth model as a system to ensure that we in education are never depleted because the lives of our students are too important, and educator burnout is all too real.

If you care about others and enter relationships with curiosity, I hope you will embrace your inner leader and support someone else in developing their potential. You'll find that you are improved for it as well.

In September of 2015, a former student of mine died. He had been a freshman in high school. He was crossing the street after practice when he was hit by a car. He died a few days later. He was a sweet kid (though not always), a devoted older brother, had a sharp wit, was a deep thinker and a tremendous athlete. And I believe he had been misunderstood in many moments during his middle school years by our faculty, myself included. This was one of those crushing reckonings-that sometimes we do not fully know or honor the children we serve-that came afterwards, ushered in and sharpened by the loss. But this is not the place to tell his story. This is a story about what happened at school in the days surrounding his death.

In those days, his classmates started to show up on our campus-before, during and after school. They wandered mostly to one area and sat. Students in our older grades who knew him left classes and sat too, and some older alumni who had played on teams with him, also returned. Many of them came back onto campus for hours, late into the afternoon and evening, multiple days in a row. They watched music videos, they cried, they consoled, they sat silently, they shared stories, they walked around the parts of campus you would expect recent ninth graders to remember as belonging to them. And while it took me a few months to put my finger on why, this behavior was the one possibly heartening thing about that time period for me.

Perhaps you've had this other kind of experience as an educator: In 2014-15, I had had a fabulous teaching year. I'd rewritten much of the sixth grade science curriculum, designed new projects, really hit a stride. My students had given me great feedback and, I believe, had learned a lot of high-quality science mindsets and skills. And then, there we were sitting in the science lab on the last day of school, waxing nostalgic, and a student spontaneously exclaimed that she had loved science class this year. Some peers nodded. I thanked her. She went on to explain that the very best part of science class was that one day I let her climb our back campus fence, into neighboring property, to retrieve a drone she'd accidentally lost at recess that belonged to her brother. I was floored, perhaps even humiliated. I knew what she meant. I knew she also had enjoyed all the great things we'd learned in what I thought of as the class. I also knew she was telling me the truth: that in that moment when we broke school together, and entered a space of genuine problem-solving and blurred authority, that was the best part of "my" science class for her. When she told me this, publicly, I could have thought she was the wrong kind of student, or I was a bad teacher, or I could embrace that my impact on her had been one I could not have predicted. Her experience wove around and through the parts of class that I had consciously designed.

Returning to that September: In the months following my former student's death, there was a popular song on the radio by Twenty One Pilots. A portion of the lyrics went:

Sometimes a certain smell will take me back to when I was young

How come I'm never able to identify where it's coming from

I'd make a candle out of it if I ever found it

Try to sell it, never sell out of it, I'd probably only sell one

It'd be to my brother, 'cause we have the same nose

Same clothes homegrown a stone's throw from a creek we used to roam

Struck by these lyrics, in the aftermath of the loss, it occurred to me that that's what these young people were doing gathered on-campus: burning the candle of their shared childhood. The one that we could watch and relate to somewhat, but could not ourselves smell.

Educators often conceive of schools as places where we practically operate on children. We spend tremendous heart and energy and time reshaping our procedures, collaborating to improve them, drafting and re-drafting the questions, the goals, the policies. But we fool ourselves; children are delightfully slippery and out of sync with our adult world. The experience they have at school is the one they make. We are merely a presence, a feature of the landscape that they weave around as they form their own secrets, their knowings, their pacts, their understandings of the world and one another. We matter. But the ways in which we matter are hardly the ones we spend the most time, energy or heart designing.

Our schools are not places that instruct children. Our schools are containers for childhood; ones we shape and maintain, but that merely create an outline of space for them to fill. We get to decide if the containers will be rough or polished, if they will look out into the world or invite it in, if they will be places of curiosities or certainties, what values they will practice. But children in our schools make their own way. When my former students gathered in that one part of campus after the accident, along that creek, they may have shared the physical location with us, but not the psychic location. 

I was unsure about the purpose of school until after he died. And now, though I forget sometimes, I feel more sure.