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Read the full transcript of Episode 37 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features Beth-Sarah Wright joining host Tim Fish to share her dignity lens framework, which helps lead school communities through the strategic process of clarifying who they really are. Wright is an Atlanta-based educator, speaker, and author of DIGNITY: Seven Strategies for Creating Authentic Community and a new companion workbook on implementing those strategies.
Tim Fish: We’re living in an age of adaptive challenges. To navigate the future, we need the courage for transformation and change in our communities, our institutions, and our lives. Today I am thrilled to welcome Dr. Beth-Sarah Wright to New View EDU. Wright is an advocate for authenticity in our communities, no matter what our context, by aligning our aspirational identities with our lived realities. Beth-Sarah is the author of seven books, and one of her most recent, DIGNITY: The Seven Strategies for Creating Authentic Community, will be the focus of our conversation today. A former college professor at NYU and Spelman College, she currently serves as the director of enrollment management at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School in Atlanta, and as an adjunct assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at Emory School of Medicine. Beth-Sarah, I am so excited to welcome you to New View EDU.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Thank you so much, Tim, for having me. I am so excited to be here with you and looking forward to our conversation.
Tim Fish: Well, you know, we first got introduced—and I just want to say thank you to my dear friend, Monica Gillespie, from the National Association of Independent Schools, who introduced us to each other. And then I remember in our first conversation, I think we were only booked for like, 30 or 45 minutes, and I don't know that we even began to scratch the surface of what you and I could talk about.
So I came away from that call, Beth-Sarah, saying, we have got to get you onto the podcast. We have got to share your insights and ideas with a much, much larger audience. So I'm just so grateful to have you here and so grateful to talk about your book, DIGNITY: Seven Strategies for Creating Authentic Communities.
You know, before we dig into the specifics of the book, I would love to hear about your journey and how you got to a place where you were ready to write this book after having written so many others.
Beth-Sarah Wright: So, as you and I discovered when we were talking, I had only been in enrollment management as a very new iteration of my professional life. That was very new and, and I didn't know much about it. I'm a trained sociologist and a trained anthropologist, and there's a lot about stories in the world and realm of enrollment management.
So I'll just go back to that beginning, those few, the first time that I had this position, at Holy Innocents'. So I was tasked with one of many board objectives in this position. And the one that I was tasked with that was noticeable was creating a more diverse student body.
And that is something that arguably many independent schools struggle with and are challenged with. And so it's there. So as I was thinking about that, I said, well, let me just see what, what is our present reality? What is, what is really going on here? And I started to just dive a little bit more into that.
Now, as a sociologist, I love data. So I was really looking into that. And as an anthropologist, I love stories.
Everybody has a story and every community has a story.
One thing that I noticed was that for 25 years of strategic plans, that had been a board objective, and yet the
statistics were showing very incremental change. So I was wondering what's really going on here? And I realized that this is really a, a challenge that goes beyond, I think people might be thinking about this in a technical way. But there's actually, it was something more that was going on. There was an adaptive challenge that we were dealing with.
Tim Fish: Oh, I love that. I love that thinking. I think you're spot on. I think that notion of adaptive challenges and, and we, you know, we, we often try to make strategies so tidy and clean, right? In an article I just wrote for Independent School magazine, I said, sometimes I think we try to bake what I call a comfort food casserole. That's just going to be lovely and warm. But it's not actually going to get at the strategy. It doesn't really live into what's really going on here, as you said.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Yes. And as I was thinking about that, I thought, well, what is the way that we really should be thinking about this? And it came back to the mission of our school, right?
Which is our core identity. It's who we say we are. What I realized is that often there is a gap between who we say we are and who we are in reality.
Tim Fish: Mm-hmm.
Beth-Sarah Wright: And so I was thinking, well, what could there be? I need something to really ground us, to
remind us of who we are. Our mission, who we are. As an Episcopal school, of course, that's grounded in our Episcopal identity. So I was looking and looking and came upon this wonderful, wonderful question, which is the culminating question in the baptismal covenant in Episcopal schools, will you strive to respect the dignity of every human being?
Now. So.
Tim Fish: That was it.
Beth-Sarah Wright: That was it. That was the linchpin. Dignity, human dignity, that was it. And so I was just really stuck on that. And I was thinking there must be ways, there are a set of strategies, we need to be able to think about this set of strategies, and how can I create these set of strategies that are grounded in this?
And the “dignity lens” was born. But in real time, what I also noticed was an incident that happened at our school, where we were trying to live into what we say we are. But then there was a bit of an explosion. There was an explosive sort of response to that, and that made me think, wow.
People make up these communities, people do. And people have emotions. People have these gut feelings, especially around some sort of challenge they might be having as a community. You know, we have these things. That's the explosive part. It's a very sensitive part. So the adaptive challenges are, they, they reside in that very messy, emotional, that part of us where we are going to experience some loss.
And just lots of questions are going to be surfaced. And I needed something to ground us and to remind us of our dignity and to be able to look at this in a whole new way. So to change the conversation from what we need to do, to how we need to do it, how we need to see the challenges in front of us.
Tim Fish: You know, I think one of the other things I often notice when we think about envisioning our future, we often take, and I'd love your thoughts on this, but from my experience, we often take a very aspirational approach to that.
We begin with the assumption that we are an awesome, lovely community and, and I will say as I tour schools, I always walk away seeing the loveliness that people, that teachers and staff are interacting with kids, the beauty that kids are interacting with each other. The community is lovely, and yet whenever I end up in the head of school's office and we close the door and we start talking about the future, we start talking about some of the challenges that they're up against. And things that are creating what you call the gap from, from where we are today, to where we want to be, where we know we need to be, to be the community that we say we are. Owning that, not, not feeling that we're failing because there's a gap, but understanding that that's the work, that's the core work of strategy.
That's the core work of trying to become who we are really meant to be.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Yes.
Tim Fish: And that's where the dignity framework comes in.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Yes.
Tim Fish: That I think for me, what inspires me so much is the way that it opens the door to standing in the gap and really making progress in the gap, is what my sense is. So tell us, tell us a little bit more about the framework and about the pieces and about what each letter means.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Well, sure. So when this lens was born, it really was about creating an opportunity for us to build capacity in our community, for us to make progress on that, on narrowing that gap between who we say we are, aspirationally, and who we are in reality. No guilt, no shame, no nothing. This is just a fact.
So dignity, seven letters, and each of them, each of these strategies do have a set of questions as we think about the issue at hand. If we are going to respect the dignity of every human being, the first D has to be human diversity. And I often want to stop there for a second and pause and ask people to just suspend for a moment what comes to your mind when you hear that word? Because it has been plagued with many different iterations and understandings, and diversity simply means differences.
So the question there for diversity is who's in the room? Who's around the table? Who are we talking to? Who is there, who is not there?
Why are they not there? When we are speaking about a particular aspiration, what kind of cognitive diversity do we need in the room? Have we thought about all the different aspects and perspectives towards that?
So this is about leveraging the diversity in a room, leveraging that to maximize the potential in the room, to maximize that, maximize the strength of the community, maximize the diversity in the community, leverage it, use it to create progress.
I is identity, our schools all have this core identity and what I love about, and this, this is my anthropological lens, is what is in our founding DNA.
Tim Fish: Oh, I love that.
Beth-Sarah Wright: What is in our founding DNA? Who are we? And that is just information. It's important information, Tim, you know that, right? We can look back on our history and we can surface all sorts of things about who we are, when we were founded, why we were founded, or what we've come to be or all of that.
But all of that is important. It's nothing to be, to throw away. It's nothing to discard. It's something. All of it is important and we need to be able to parse through that. Understand it.
Tim Fish: Yes, and it, and you know, I think this is a piece of understand—I love that notion of your DNA, that founding, when this, when the community was first created, what was present?
What was the motivation? What were the values? Who was there and who wasn't there? And again, what I love about your approach is it's not to, you know, make the community guilty or to say, you know, something's wrong or that our founding is a reflection on us at this moment. But it is, it is a way of just kind of taking stock of the journey that a community has been under.
And that truthful look at identity, I love that as a second stage as well, because it says, let's think about who's in the room, and let's think about who we have been, if we go all the way back to our, to our founding DNA, and what elements of that are in our core still today? And what elements do we want to have in our core, and what elements would we like to not have, maybe, in our core?
Beth-Sarah Wright: Or simply be curious about.
Tim Fish: Yes.
Beth-Sarah Wright: The underlying premise of dignity lens, looking again, I just want to just go back on that a little bit. To respect the dignity of every human being, to respect, I love that word so much because the etymology of that word is to look again, re: again, and spect, the Latin root is specere, like spectacles. It's to look again. Look again.
Now we all can look at the challenges that are in front of us or even, you know, bring it down to human beings. We might look at another human being and think that we know certain things about that person based on whatever you may bring, whatever history you may bring.
But we're asking you, at least in that question, what I understand is, can we pause? Suspend what we think, we think we see, what we think we know, and look again to see immense possibility. To see immense potential. To see that, to see something. The commonality between you and I. And when it comes to our challenges, our adaptive challenges, it's to look at those challenges and to see potential, not, oh, but this is the way we've always done it, or this is what I feel comfortable with.
This is not, this is an opportunity to see with a new lens, a new strategic lens. That's what this dignity lens is. Let's look strategically, and use at the core of that, curiosity.
Ask some questions. Be curious. Let's just be curious.
Tim Fish: Yes. And let's be curious, to your point, about the second step,let's be curious about our identity.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Let's be curious about our identity. And the next, and granted, this is not chronological, so they don't have to go in order.
Tim Fish: Yes. That's so important and you make that point so clear in the book and it's a very important piece.
Beth-Sarah Wright: So you can hop on this just like—it's circular, just like our eyes. It's a lens so you can hop on at any part, but as we go on the next one, G, is growth, building capacity, building competency, building courage.
In what areas do we need to grow as we consider this particular challenge? Whatever that challenge may be. Growth. How can we grow in our understanding?
Then N: nurture. When we have decided that this is, these are the things that need to be done in order to address this challenge, to make progress on this challenge, how are we going to make sure that in the day-to-day, there are things put in place to nurture this particular, the progress that we want to make?
So we have to be able to question, what do we need to put in place?
Tim Fish: Yeah. What's the difference in your mind, Beth-Sarah, between growth and nurture? You know, as I was reading the book, I was struck by both of those words. You could argue lead to growth, but nurture—nurture's a little bit of a different element of inspiring growth. So can you speak a little bit more about that and how you see them connected and also unique?
Beth-Sarah Wright: So let's take growth for a second. You know, part of the dignity lens is recognizing where we do need to develop some new competencies. New skills. maybe even new courage. But it is also recognizing that because one thing is going to grow, something else might need to be lost.
So we are also going to experience some loss in that growth element, and we need to recognize that. So as we grow, say in some new competencies, the nurture part is how can we sustain that growth? What do we need to put in place to sustain that? And in those areas where we have experienced some loss, what are we going to put in place to care for that?
Tim Fish: Mm-hmm.
Beth-Sarah Wright: We need to be able to recognize that too. Loss is a big part of change, isn't it?
Tim Fish: Yes, It is.
Beth-Sarah Wright: It’s both, new things are happening, and some things are going another way. And we need to be able to create an environment where both of those things are affirmed and nourished and taken care of. So that's, that's how I see the difference.
Tim Fish: I love it. You know, in other episodes of the podcast, we've talked about this concept from Barry Johnson, of polarity and polarity thinking.
And the idea that, you know, in some ways this is not a problem to be solved, right? Loss is not a problem to be solved. Loss is a reality that we sort of encounter as we grow, and so our job is to sort of look to the upsides of growth and loss, and I think support and nurturing is a key piece of that.
I love the way that you hold onto that, because I think also when I look at a lot of work around strategy, we don't acknowledge the inevitable loss that inspired change will bring. You know, the change can be incredible. It can be empowering, it can be exciting. Innovation is, which I, you know, do a lot of work with, is a very exciting time. And yet it also brings with it loss for individuals, loss of the way we did things in the past.
And so we have to own that and we have to nurture ourselves and the community as we go forward.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Yes, we often forget about loss, but the thing is, is that part of the explosive nature of adaptive challenge is the potential for explosive nature, is for explosion is, is loss. People are going to feel, people, the community, will feel some loss. How can we acknowledge that?
Tim Fish: So your point is that the, the root of explosions in a community is loss.
Beth-Sarah Wright: I think so.
Tim Fish: Yeah.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Then caught up in all of that is some sort of fear.
Tim Fish: Yeah.
Beth-Sarah Wright: And really at the root of that is dignity. One might feel, you know, violated. A dignity violation. But hold on. But my voice is not being heard here. Or I, I just don't understand. I don't get it. I, whatever it may be, I don't, you know. I think at the root of that is loss.
And we can look at that even at a national scale. We can look at that all over. We can see it in our communities. That's part of progress, making progress.
The next strategy, or tenet, is integrity. Again, that's another, just a question. When we look at who we say we are or who we aspire to be, our question should be simple. Are we doing what we say we're doing? Are we doing what we say we are doing when we've created this? We say we want to introduce this in our community. Are we holding ourselves accountable?
Tim Fish: And how do we know?
Beth-Sarah Wright: And how do we know?
Tim Fish: How do we know if we're doing what we say we're doing? With fidelity? You know, it makes me think about, as I've mentioned on other episodes of the podcast, we've done a lot of work with something called Jobs to Be Done.
Why do parents hire independent schools, et cetera? And we, we did some research on why teachers hire an independent school. And what we actually found is that in many cases when a change happens, the change was more about why they were firing the school they were leaving than it was about why they were hiring the school they were going to.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Hmm.
Tim Fish: And what we in particular found was that job two of the teacher jobs is largely, I feel disillusioned.
I feel that the school says one thing and does something very different. and that often comes from the administration. Not always comes from prac—but in practice, you know, we are not who we say we are. And that creates a context where a teacher says, I don't want to be part of this community anymore, and leaves. And it was a significant number of the people that we interviewed who were in that context.
Right? And so I think, to your really good point, I think people notice when there is a real gap between our espoused values and our lived reality.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Yes, and it's up to us, being members of that particular community, to try and close that gap. Or it can be up to us, and perhaps there might be a decision that needs to be made that says, I don't really want to be a part of this particular aspiration, because the gap is too wide, maybe. There's that. But what I love about the dignity lens is that really it's for all of us.
This is also about taking up that work ourselves. Not to say go rogue. That's not what I'm saying. But we as a part, as being an institutional partner, a community partner, we play a role that's mobilizing that leadership potential within all of us to take up some activity, and to try to narrow that gap.
Tim Fish: Yeah, we all have that responsibility, right? As a member of that community, you know, it's very easy to just point it out, but what are we doing? What are each of us doing as individuals, to really live into that integrity ourselves?
Beth-Sarah Wright: And then transparency is next. The T, transparency about who we are, about what we're hoping for, our aspirations, about how we tell the story of who we are, how we communicate the change, the progress we are trying to make, how we communicate the pacing of this change, how we communicate why this is important.
It's the communication part. Very important, because oftentimes, you know, we might be in a community where, you know, how easy is it for fish to describe water? It's not easy. So if we are not communicating, if we are not reiterating, if we are not linking our change-making progress, those steps to the core identity, to the mission, to who we say we are or hope to be. If we're not doing that, things are out of alignment and therefore out of authenticity.
Authenticity is when all these things are in line, when what we say and what we're doing are in line. So we are just trying to keep closing that gap, so that transparency is key. And yes, there is some strategic transparency.
And then the Y. I love when you just mentioned there, how do we know what we're doing? How do we know? Well, the Y is the yield.
Tim Fish: Yeah.
Beth-Sarah Wright: It's the measurables. And as a sociologist, we've got to ground this work in data. This is
not an esoteric, out in our minds, just, you know, thinking about it.
We have to ground it.
Tim Fish: We have to ground it.
Beth-Sarah Wright: We've got to ground it.
Tim Fish: What I also like though, and I understand that they're not in order, I get that. But I like that the, in some ways the Y here is at the end, right? It's very important. But I think too often, sometimes, we jump very quickly to how are we going to measure, what's our KPI going to be on this thing?
And we don't take some of the time to really dig into some of the other letters, some of the other sort of reflection and interrogation of ourselves and our community that we need to do to see the gap, to fully see the gap. And then, to design our yield around what we, how are we going to know that we're making progress on closing the gap?
Beth-Sarah Wright: Well, I'm going to throw out another way of looking at it. Suppose it's the first question that you ask.
Tim Fish: Oh.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Suppose you ask, what do we want?
Tim Fish: Oh, thank you.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Suppose we threw that out. What do we want? What do we want? What do we want this work to yield? What are we hoping for?
Maybe the yield is the creation of the aspirational identity. Maybe that's where it is. It's just, it's both how do we measure it, but also where do we want to go?
Tim Fish: Yeah, that's a great way of thinking about it. Because in my mind I was like, we got to do some of that first, but to come back and say, no, no, no. Maybe we start with that aspiration. Maybe we start with that yield that we hope to see, the world we want to, that, that we want to create in our community and beyond our community.
Beth-Sarah Wright: And then hold ourselves accountable.
Tim Fish: And then hold ourselves accountable and then find the gap and then really do that. But to put the gold right out there, the thing that we want to see. Oh, that's such a great way of thinking about it.
Well, it's interesting too. It's counterintuitive because Y is at the end, right? So I saw it as like, this is the last thing you do.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Yes. But I, I think, you know, when it comes to, let's say in our schools, we often think about climate studies and climate surveys, those sorts of things, getting a sense of, well, where are we right now? That's part of yield, and that could be the first step that you take.
Well, hold on. Let's just see where we are right now. Let's get a sense from the community about this particular issue that we are working with. Let's get a sense, and then let's get a sense of where we'd like to move to make progress to. So there is valuable work in even beginning with that.
We have lots of stories that can be told, and that's very important too. We have this level of, of experiences, people sharing their experiences, and then we also, and that's all very important, but, and then there is the sort of raw data that we can actually gather from our community.
And sometimes just depending on what community we're talking with, some people might get, be very intimidated by getting data. Data can be overwhelming and, and scary, and sometimes what I try to say to people is, well, you know that stories are the currency for dignity.
Tim Fish: That's right.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Let's just start there. Let's try and just get some stories in the room.
Tim Fish: You know, one of my favorite parts about the book is that you actually pull a story through from the very first pages throughout the book, you tell a story of a school. And something that happened at a school, and we're able to see that event through the eyes of different people in the community, in different roles.
I wonder if you might want to just take a moment and give our listeners a little bit of an overview of the story and how the Dignity Framework can play out with that particular story.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Sure. At Holy Innocents', we did have this incident where we held a chapel service, which in many, in our tradition, is both affirming of our Christian traditions and religious diversity.
And so it's not uncommon for us to read from different scriptures, different holy texts in our services. And a student did. She read, who was a member of our community since she was in kindergarten. So she was an Alpha and Omega. She was a senior this year, and she read from the Koran and read in Farsi, her family's language, native tongue, and it was beautiful.
She read it in Farsi, then read it in English. We also had another student read from the Torah. And there was such an explosive reaction to that. Such an explosive reaction. Questions that we couldn't even quite grapple with. Why are we reading from the Koran? This is a Christian school. Or what are we trying to do? Teachers were grappling with that. Well, why do I need to, how can I talk about this in my class? Parents were, some parents were upset. Why is this happening? What are we trying to do? Are we changing the culture of our school? Are we changing the mission of our school? What does this mean? Lots of questions and an explosive reaction, really an explosive response. We had to do the work of reminding folks who we are as an Episcopal school, why we do the things we do. Our head of school had to think about that and what that meant, how to communicate that. The transparency, our community had to once again be elastic and to grow in our understanding of why that was important.
The person who created it, she had to think about why that she did the things she did. I thought we were in line, and so it was a wonderful task to be able to look at this particular incident from the various perspectives. From the parent who thought, this is not my school. I've been here for so long and this is not what I expect.
To the parent who says, this is exactly who we are. To the teacher who says, I'm not sure how I'm going to even talk about this in the classroom. My goodness, my student, she feels a certain way. Oh my gosh, how do I navigate this conversation in the classroom? How does the head of school navigate this? How does the board navigate this? There's so many different, all these different perspectives, which are all valid, all of them, and I just wanted to be able to put this dignity lens on that story and ask questions about each of those things. What does diversity mean in this particular story?
What does identity mean? Who are we? Who? Who do we say we are?
Where do we need to grow? Grow in competency, in courage, and grow in understanding, nurturing. We created this event in line with who we are, but hold on, wait a minute. Did we communicate this effectively? Have we been transparent in that? Did we just make assumptions? There are all sorts of questions. Integrity, are we doing what we say we are doing? Yield, what did we want out of this particular event? Anyway, so it's just, I enjoyed the task of looking at this. It was, to me, a perfect example of what can happen when we try to make progress on narrowing the gap between who we say we are and who we are in reality.
Tim Fish: Thank you for telling that story. Thank you for sharing that. And I think our, our listeners, I know I can, as being someone who spent a long time in a school, can think of other examples where that same type of situation emerged. One that no one planned for. An explosive reaction came on quickly.
And what I like so much about the framework is you're starting with questions, you're, it is fundamentally about questions. It's about curiosity, as you said. Right. And I also like the idea that, that story in the book actually provides a way that a school community could ask if that were us, what, what kinds of questions would we ask? What would it look like in our community?
And that brings me to a question about the dignity lens, and how it's kind of transportable or useful across other scenarios in schools or institutions. How could you see a team in a school really internalizing the dignity lens to help them make progress on a host of different adaptive challenges that they face?
Beth-Sarah Wright: What I love about this lens is that it is translatable, that it is not prescriptive in any way. It is descriptive.
Tim Fish: You know, I also have been thinking, Beth-Sarah, thank you for that comment. That in this particular story that you tell in the book, you know, the, the adaptive challenge that the school faces is around differences of people and their backgrounds and their values and their identities and how they celebrate those and how they are able to be their true selves in the community.
And those are challenges that many, many schools are facing. And I was wondering in my mind, I want to apply it to a different kind of challenge that a school might face. Let's take something that maybe on the surface doesn't look quite as adaptive.
Let's take something like changing the upper school schedule.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Love it.
Tim Fish: And you say, well, that's very different. Do we apply the Dignity Framework to a change in the upper school schedule, moving from a seven period day where all classes meet every day, to a schedule where some classes are dropping during the day. Some, we have longer blocks of time. We don't see our students every day. I'm thinking about how in that kind of situation, which can also lead to a different kind of explosive reaction.
Beth-Sarah Wright: I love that, and I thank you for that. And I'm going to ask you some questions. Let's just go for it. Let's just take a, let's just take a scenario. Let's just try it.
Tim Fish: I, I was in a school that changed the schedule in a dramatic way, and I can tell you it was, it was a different kind of explosive, maybe. But there was, there were explosive elements to it.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Absolutely. Well, I'm going to ask you some questions based on the, the strategies. OK. Let's go through it pretty quickly. Let's start with just because we're going to be linear today, even though it is not a linear model. Let's just do that for, for today. So who is in the room when you have those conversations?
Who is in the room? Is it the deans? Some teachers, students? Do you also include maybe a counselor or a psychologist with regards to learning, understanding what that might mean in terms of maximizing students’ ability? Do you think about the student body that you have, as in what kind of learners are in your student body?
Do you also link the schedule perhaps to the, the mission of your school? If you're a school that really cares about the wellness of our students, is there an emphasis on trying to create space in the day to get homework done so that they're not up till three o'clock in the morning doing homework when they get home?
Tim Fish: Mm-hmm.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Are you thinking about all those things in that conversation. Yes?
Tim Fish: I mean, I think we thought about some of them, and I think this is what we talk about. I think that's what we say. We didn't, no, we didn't, we didn't do that as—if we had, if you had asked those questions when we were early in the process, if we had been able to connect with you, I think we would've done a better job in that notion of diversity, and who was in the conversation.
Beth-Sarah Wright: OK. All right, well let's take the I, the identity. So as a school, what is your purpose? What is the purpose of this change? You know, is this a college prep school? What are we trying to do with our students? What is the purpose of this change? Is this to align with other divisions in the school? Is it to align with them? Is it to build some sort of cohesiveness amongst the different, upper school and middle school?
Have we looked at that wider picture? Does it make a difference? How much of a change will it be for our middle schoolers to come into this type of schedule? Those sorts of questions.
Tim Fish: Mm-hmm.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Where do we need to grow? Does this mean that our teachers are going to be teaching for longer? Does it mean that our students will need more time to focus?
What about our students who need, who have different learning styles? How are they being accommodated in this? Where do we need to grow? Are we going to lose some time? For those student teachers who are teaching AP classes, do they have enough time to teach their AP curriculum in order to prepare for the test?
Are they going to feel at loss or gained regardless of how you go? So you're asking all of these sorts of questions. Nurture. What do we need to put in place? Do we need to have more? Is it important that our students see the same classes every other day or every day? Do they need a change?
Do we need to have classes that are math in the morning on one day and math in the afternoon on other days because our students are at their peak in the morning, but some students are at their peak in the afternoon. How do we accommodate for that? And is that in line with who we say we are? Are we really being, doing, what do we need to put in line here?
What do we need to put in place? Do we need more study halls? How we're going to use them? Who's going to monitor them? Those sorts of things. Do we need to create space for our students to go and visit teachers? Is there space for that? And will the teachers have space for that in their own professional development during the day?
All sorts of questions like that. Then we get to I, integrity. Are we saying what we, are we doing what we say we're doing?
Tim Fish: Yes, yes.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Holding ourselves accountable? So when we make this shift, now, how are we going to hold ourselves accountable to this?
Tim Fish: What I like so much about it also, Beth-Sarah, is that as you've just been going through the letters, what you were generating was questions, not answers. What you were generating was ways to think about something that we're taking on strategically in the school, right?
And that, that process, which just took two minutes for you to go through many of the letters. And each of them gives you an opportunity, as you said, like a circle, to look at it slightly differently, from a slightly different perspective to ask new questions. And the generation of those questions creates an opportunity to do that work even better, right?
To ensure that that change, that important change of changing the schedule can be as successful as possible, right? And so, you know, that for me is, is a piece of this framework that I think is just so powerful.
This has been such a gift, to spend time with you, to be thinking with you about how we stand in the space of adaptive challenges. I think we live in an age where we, we are facing, and will continue to face, complex adaptive challenges. Our students will face those challenges in the world that they inherit. They always ha—we've always had these adaptive challenges. Nothing new. And yet it's, it is a little different now, and impacts of things like technology and so on.
And so what you've given, I think, is a way of standing in that space, a way of helping schools, leaders, teachers, students, parents, to ask questions, to reflect, to get more information, to align our work with our identity and our values.
I just want to say thank you and I, my last question for you is what are your hopes? What are your hopes for this work? What are your hopes for our schools? As we do walk into and stand in the space of very adaptive challenges that we're facing.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Our schools are so important, Tim.
We need these schools to be much more in line with who we say we are. Our students are at the center of this. Our teachers, the people involved, the parents. We want to maximize these communities to be the best, to be the most authentic that we can be. This work is part imagination, part capacity building. Part Non-negotiable, and part urgent.
It's important. We've got to do this work, and if this lens can make that work just a little bit easier in the sense that we have something to hold onto and hold ourselves to and align to, I just hope that our schools can do that. I just, I want to put dignity at the core. I want to put dignity, to bring dignity back to the center. And I want to give us something, a tool to do this important work.
Tim Fish: Such a powerful conversation. Beth-Sarah, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for spending some time with me today, and spending time with our listeners. It's been a true joy.
Beth-Sarah Wright: Thank you. What a joy to be with you. Thank you so much.