Part 13: Leading in a Time of Crisis – a Conversation with Education Transformation Advocate Richard Gerver
“What we’ve seen in the last few weeks, is the extraordinary natural talent, passion, and commitment of a brilliant group of people who because of horrific events have been set free to focus on the children in their care. We’ve seen unbelievable levels of innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership, at every level, extraordinary ability to not just cope with change, but to take control of it and make something meaningful from it.”
Today on Getting Unstuck
For the last two weeks, we’ve been interviewing educators in various roles across the U.S., one in Canada and two in the U.K. to get their perspective of educators leading change during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was our hope that these conversations would provide nuggets of solid advice and emotional support to other educators on the front lines of change.
None of the calls lasted for more than 20 minutes out of respect for the enormity of the tasks our guests face at this time.
Four themes emerged. The educators we spoke with are first and foremost concerned with addressing
the safety, and the social and emotional health of students, parents and teachers.
the nutritional needs of their neediest populations.
the tools – online and sometimes paper – necessary to conduct instruction.
the question: “What do we do in the next school year?”
Few had firm answers for the last theme at this point, but the consistent idea is that some sort of “new normal” must be explored. Returning to the traditional ways of educating children shouldn’t be considered a given.
“I want our profession to reflect on this time, not in terms of what they had to deal with – all the horrors – but actually how remarkable they proved themselves to be.” — Richard Gerver
This is our last interview in the Special Series. In this excerpt from a longer interview that we’ll publish in a few weeks, we hear from Richard Gerver, an award-winning school principal and now a leading education transformation advocate – someone well equipped to argue the case that how we educate our children needs to be completely overhauled.
Listen for:
“What we've seen is our kids demonstrate the most unbelievable ability not just to be flexible, to cope with seismic transformation in their own lives, but actually to find a way to just make sense of it and get on with what it is they're dealing with.”
“Our professionals have just been able to demonstrate to the world how much they should be trusted to lead what we do next in education.”
“There is this need for policymakers at every level to control, and therefore their default setting is this assumption of incompetence.”
“We're in a deeply post Industrial Age. And actually, what we're living through at the moment is showing just how entrepreneurial and innovative communities are going to have to be. Because when something like Covid strikes, the rate of innovation we're going to need in the world will be off the scale, right? So we have to move away from believing that the future of education lies in doing what we've always done, but just more efficiently. And sadly, that's where policymakers always take us.”
Could a book on how to effectively lead change in schools be more timely?
We’re pleased to announce …
…that our book Shifting: How School Leaders Can Create a Culture of Change is now available from Corwin Press or Amazon. If you purchase from Amazon, please consider leaving us a rating and review. Thank you!
From our publisher:
In Shifting, educators and leadership experts Kirsten Richert, Jeff Ikler and Margaret Zacchei empower educational change leaders to proactively and coherently navigate complex change in schools to achieve the desired outcomes. Using a three-part framework—Assess, Ready, Change—this book leads educators to examine a school’s imperatives and readiness for change, identity the tools and abilities required to manifest change, and take action by defining the roles and processes necessary to effectively implement both sweeping change and smaller day-to-day adjustments.
This podcast is supported by the nice folks and transcription tools at Otter.ai.