New View EDU Episode 65: Leadership and Design for the Future of Schools

Available October 22, 2024

Find New View EDU on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and many other podcast apps.

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 react rather than being proactive? Carla Silver, executive director of Leadership + Design, has partnered with schools for over 15 years to create cultures of learning and foster human-centered design thinking. She joins host Morva McDonald to discuss leadership and where schools are headed.

Carla outlines the three pillars of Leadership + Design’s work as: developing reflective changemakers; instilling the habits of human-centered design thinking; and creating the capacity for leaders to become optimistic futurists. She reflects that 30 years ago, school leaders might not see much change in their scope of responsibilities over a five-year span; but now, the pace of leadership is evolving rapidly alongside societal changes. Not only do leaders have to be more comfortable with ambiguity as technology, innovation, and expectations evolve, but Carla notes that they’re often asked to wade into the territory of responding to global events in a way that school leaders of the past would not have been called upon to do. 

That evolution of school leader as “moral compass,” as Morva frames it in this conversation, creates more complex and potentially polarizing conditions. Carla observes that the most capable and successful leaders are those who are able to do the inner work that sustains them, respond to their communities without personal entanglement in issues, and seek feedback from all sides to help them become a “non-anxious presence.” She also stresses that leadership now is grounded in the need to be more curious than certain and can come from anywhere within a community—not just those who are tasked with the role and title of “leader,” but those who practice the dispositions of leadership from any position.

Carla shares that Leadership + Design has been working on materials and resources to help schools proactively plan for the challenges of a divisive election season, rather than reacting in real time. She encourages leaders to be thoughtful about their approach to the election, pointing out that even if the decision is to not do any kind of preparation or programming around it, that’s at least a position that has been considered in advance. The Leadership + Design materials are intended to help with all aspects of possible engagement around the election, including how to talk about some of the more controversial elements, how to hold space for respect and curiosity, and how to show up as a community after the fact, remembering that not everyone will feel the same way about the outcome. The keys in this work, as in all the work of leadership, are to model curiosity, compassion, and connection.
 


Key Questions

Some of the key questions Carla and Morva explore in this episode include:

  • How did Leadership + Design come into being? Across 10 years as an organization, what have been some of your biggest learnings?
  • Has the role or responsibilities of school leadership expanded in recent years? What are the inherent challenges of leadership that are now part of the job, which may not have been present in decades past?
  • What are the skills and dispositions of a leader? What mindsets, practices, and habits need to be in place for effective leadership right now?
  • How can leaders proactively manage polarities and high-conflict situations that inevitably arise?

Episode Highlights

  • “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)
  • “One of my favorite lessons that we developed is something called the glossary of controversy. And I love that because it's basically a list of words that we like to call ‘cover terms.’ They're words like woke or safe space or whatever it is. There's just a list, and we all think we know what they mean. But each of these words have histories and stories behind them. And they also can be used as weapons.” (34:16)

Resource List

Full Transcript

  • Read the full transcript here.

Related Episodes

About Our Guest

Carla Silver (she/her) is the executive director and co-founder of Leadership + Design. She is an experienced independent school educator, school administrator, and experience designer. She holds a B.A. in English from Emory University and an M.A. in nonprofit management and leadership from the University of San Diego.

Carla partners with schools on strategic design and enhancing the work of leadership teams and boards, and she designs experiential learning experiences for leaders in schools at all points in their careers. She also leads workshops for faculty, administrative teams, and boards on design thinking, futurist thinking, collaboration and group life, and leadership development. She has presented regularly at the NAIS annual conference as well as other regional and local seminars, workshops, and conferences. She has served on the boards of both The Urban School of San Francisco and The San Francisco School. As a lifelong learner, Carla has recently pursued her interests in design thinking, creativity, improvisation, and education innovation. She lives in Los Gatos, California, with her husband, three children, and two King Charles Cavaliers.