Episode 67: Leadership Through Listening

Available November 12, 2024

We most often focus on how we are educating our students. But how are we also educating our leaders, across every level of our schools? Debra Wilson sits down with three educational leadership experts from top programs at Columbia, UPenn, and Vanderbilt to talk about the importance of listening in developing the leaders of the future, and how we can help them grow the skills and capacities to meet the evolving challenges of our times.

Guests: Nicole Furlonge, Carrie Grimes, and Steve Piltch

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “So for me, listening, building people's capacity and understanding around listening as

a giving audience, as something that you do not because you agree with someone, but because you are giving them the dignity of space to articulate what is on their mind and heart. For me, that is both urgent work, it is important work, but it's also quite joyful work.” (10:51)

• “Since the pandemic, we've seen every year that there's one quote, ‘crisis’ after another. You know, you can talk about Gaza, you can talk about the potential of issues with the election, you can talk about almost everything. It used to be that those things were the exception rather than the rule. And I, for one…don't believe that's ever going to happen again. I mean, we're going to find different ways to deal with the issues, but I don't believe you're going to go through a year without something happening outside the realm of your school that's going to have direct impact in one way or another. That even if you're able to take what I'm going to call an unbiased perspective on what happens, you're going to have to deal with the wellbeing of your community around the given issues.” (17:16)
• “The research behind this is really powerful, that leaders who carve out intentional time– as little as five minutes a day– will experience more integration and balance in their leadership, better self-regulation in terms of their responsiveness, enhanced self-awareness, improved relationships at work, inner calm and peace. And so I think it's the idea here of just start small. And setting aside a small amount of time every day for mindfulness can have, in the aggregate, a significant impact not only on your own well-being, whether you're leading in a classroom full of first graders that are bouncing off the walls, or you're in the head's office.” (35:50)

Related Episodes: 65, 62, 50, 42, 25, 20, 15, 5, 3

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