Courage & Renewal for School Leaders

By Terry Chadsey, Program Director

“New leadership is needed for new times,” Parker Palmer wrote. “But it will not come from finding more wily ways to manipulate the external world. It will come as we who serve and teach and lead find the courage to take an inner journey toward both our shadows and our light—a journey that, faithfully pursued, will take us beyond ourselves to become healers of a wounded world.”

Nowhere is this need for new leadership for new times more pressing than in our public schools, especially those serving the neediest learners. We are now eighteen months into an initiative that allows us to engage school leaders across the nation in Courage to Lead retreats thanks to the generous partnership of the Rainwater Charitable Funds with support from The Angell Foundation.

Courage & Renewal for School Leaders has two components. First, we are providing grants to Courage & Renewal facilitators to develop and implement introductory experiences and retreats for school leaders in their communities. Successful completion of Round One projects qualified local teams to apply for Round Two funding to develop and implement retreat series for school leaders. To date, we are funding seven Courage to Lead ® retreat series and expect to fund more. In this work, we are emphasizing building local partnerships and innovative retreat forms that effectively engage busy school leaders. By the end of this three-year initial project, we expect to have a number of successful and sustainable local models that can be adapted and applied to other communities.

The goal of the second component of the initiative is to give state and national K-12 leaders an opportunity to experience our work and to become partners and advocates. To accomplish this, we are holding three invitational Courage to Lead retreats. The target audience includes superintendents, philanthropists, national and state association leaders, university deans and professors, writers and consultants in educational leadership. The second of these will be held near Seattle in May.An overview of the initiative and a list of local projects and lead facilitators can be found on our website .

Over four hundred school administrators have participated in events through this initiative. One persistent theme I hear from local project facilitators is that it continues to be tough to make the case to overwhelmed school leaders about what we offer and how it makes a critical contribution to their ongoing leadership AND that once principals, attend they quickly engage and extol the benefit of the experience.

Pamela Seigle is lead facilitator for a local project in the Boston area. “What was most striking,” she wrote about the intro retreat she lead, “was the suffering expressed by young principals who are actively questioning whether they can sustain the personal cost of their role. The retreat experience gave them comfort and supported their resolve to continue. It also invited new and experienced school leaders into profound and sometimes transformative reflection on their leadership. Here is an insight one principal shared with us from his journal:

"What I’ve heard from myself is that without this kind of deep reflection, community, and trust, I had taken a few, tentative steps down the wrong road, a path on the leadership trail that is primarily concerned with an agenda—my own. While I’m committed to all the work recently done in my school, I’m committed to the creeping feeling that people who disagree are in the way. I’ve heard myself, these three days, sighing the long deep sigh of someone dragged out of the surf just before they started flailing and going under.”

Facilitator Janet Wakefield relates a story about a superintendent of a mid-sized district who had recently completed the first retreat in a series. “During a retirement party for a school administrator at one of his schools, a superintendent shared with the gathering his own powerful experience in a new program called Courage to Lead. He described that he realized that the key elements of good school leadership come from within and that he wished every school leader would have the opportunity to participate in this type of experience.”

Another team held a three-day Courage to Lead Introductory retreat that engaged not only ten administrators from a local school district including the superintendent, assistant superintendent, and the director of secondary education and three administrators from neighboring school districts, but also representatives from the top three post-secondary institutions in the area, the mayor, the city manager, and the President and CEO of the Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Facilitator Marianne Houston writes, “We worked at creating a retreat that would give the participants a balance of solitude and community with open-ended experiences that would give these very busy, over-committed yet often isolated people an opportunity to be on a real retreat. As one participant said, ‘Both solitude and community tapped into another layer of the inner work that was necessary and essential for me personally. Time outside combined with full circle time and small group work provided the catalyst for the challenge that came in solitude… of facing myself.’

"There was tremendous synergy created by the presence in retreat of community leaders, building principals, central office administrators, neighboring school district administrators, and leaders from the community’s post-secondary institutions. Comments in the final circle like ‘How strong, and rich and diverse we are!’ ‘This has been so important to me - to be with people in the community who are struggling with the same issues.’ ‘I am in awe of the Public School leadership. It is such a privilege being here,” remarked a city official. ‘I need a circle and a community to do this work. I am more understanding of others, less judgmental.’ ‘Feel free to look me up when you need someone to talk to and I’ll do the same,’ promised one of the participants.

"On the final morning,” writes Marianne, “we posted an invitation: ‘This has been an introductory retreat experience, but we hope to continue our work with a series of retreats for the group. We realize that this will be a considerable commitment, and understand that all may not be able to make such, but ifyou would like to be a part of a continuing retreat cycle, please sign below.’ An indication of the impact of this work is that every participant wants to continue in a series!”

In the next 18 months, we expect to see eight to ten seasonal Courage to Lead series for school leaders completed in communities across the nation. These experiences will provide rich stories from participating principals, and deepen our own understanding of the most effective ways to connect Courage work with school leaders. My hope is that we all find ways to grant many more school leaders the experience captured by one participating principal who wrote: “I have always wished to be the author of my own story. I leave here with my burdens, but they are more equitably distributed. I feel strong enough to carry them.”

For additional information about Courage & Renewal for School Leaders, please contact me (terry@couragerenewal.org)!