Episode 65: Leadership and Design for the Future of Schools

Available October 22, 2024

Being a school leader is a complex job, and it has only grown in its scope and challenges in recent years. How can we develop our capacities as reflective changemakers, dynamic leaders, and future-focused thinkers in a culture that often demands we be reactive rather than proactive? Carla Silver, Executive Director of Leadership + Design, has been partnering with schools for over 15 years to help create cultures of learning and foster human-centered design thinking. She sits down with host Morva McDonald to discuss her views on leadership and where schools are headed.

Guest: Carla Silver

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Really since the internet, things are changing so rapidly. And teaching and learning is having to change to keep up with those technological changes. So change is just rapid. And so that means that school leaders have to be way more flexible. They have to be way more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. You throw in things like a global pandemic, and the second thing I think that's happening is that heads of schools, and school leaders in general, are being asked to respond to so many external events in ways that they hadn't in the past.” (9:21)
• “We don't necessarily define ‘leader’ as someone who necessarily has positional authority. I mean, obviously that's the most common definition. You think about someone who has a position or a title, but some of the most effective leaders that we work with… they're actually classroom teachers and they don't necessarily want to leave the classroom. They actually want to influence change from that position. And so I think it's really important to think about the fact that when we talk about leaders, we think about anyone who's really trying to mobilize other people to make change, to manage adaptive work, adaptive challenges.” (15:22)
• “One of the things we really try to help leaders of all different backgrounds and genders and race and ethnicities think about is, how do they lead with their own signature presence? Which is, what are the things that they, where they naturally feel really gifted and in the flow and how do they amplify those qualities and be attentive to them instead of trying to necessarily come from a deficit model of leadership, where I'm not good at this or I'm not good at that, but rather where are you naturally really gifted as a leader, and how do you build more of that in your life?” (22:25)

Related Episodes: 64, 56, 42, 38, 25, 20, 9, 5

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