The Thread He Follows: A profile of Courage & Renewal Facilitator Chip Wood

It’s Monday morning at the Sheffield Elementary School in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Classes have begun, and the halls are quiet and bright, decorated with students’ colorful posters saying “peace” in over a dozen languages. But this calm belies the reality of Principal Chip Wood’s morning. He’s just met with a mother who’s distraught over her daughter’s behavior at home. And before he can sit down to talk, he needs to call the probation officer of a fifth-grader who’s headed to court the next day. “Monday morning,” Chip says, dialing the phone, “often feels like Friday night in the emergency room.”

On the table in Chip’s office is Naomi Shihab Nye’s Come With Me: Poems for a Journey. A Courage & Renewal Facilitator, Chip brings poetry and reflection into the life of his school. In response to recent incidents of bullying and exclusion, Chip has created a worksheet inspired by Nye’s poem “Envelope,” inviting students to create their own poems to share their lives and dreams with each other. On his wall are the Sheffield School rules, developed by students themselves. Rule number one is “Enjoy.”

The threads of Chip’s deeply held values are easy to follow as he describes the journey that brought him to Courage to Teach ten years ago, and to Sheffield today. “As a student in the ’60s, I was fire and brimstone, along with lots of us who were in college at that time. I got my MSW in Community Organization at Howard University right at the time of the Black Power movement, ’65-’67.”

A second-year graduate placement eventually led Chip to a job as assistant to Whitney Young, head of the National Urban League. “I had extraordinary admiration for Whitney. I believe he would have been the first black President. He drowned in Africa while at a conference, under somewhat mysterious circumstances.

“That did it for me,” Chip says. “I was personally spent. Dr. King had been killed, and Bobby Kennedy, and there was a sense of despair that everything had been taken. A friend who was running the MAT program at the University of Massachusetts said, ‘Why don’t you come up here and teach?’ I was thinking about it before Whitney died, and he had actually written a reference letter, so I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to do it now.’”

One year later, when funding for his position ended, Chip accepted a principalship in Gill, MA. “The superintendent said, ‘Cut your hair, put on a tie, and we’ll give you the job.’ I was a teaching principal. I taught sixth-grade and ran a school, no problem. That’s how much education has changed! It was a good time to be in education at the beginning of the ‘70s, but it got progressively worse as the decade went on.

“Finally a number of us in the area thought we’d create a different sort of school with the idea that if we had a foundation and gave workshops, we could help support it. I made that transition at a time when education was exactly where it is today—assessments, back-to-basics, pushing the curriculum to developmentally inappropriate ages. The Responsive Classroom© grew out of that, and the school and the Northeast Foundation for Children ultimately became separate organizations.”

Eventually Chip left the classroom to become director of the Foundation and a figure on the national stage in education reform. He would come home Friday night and leave Sunday afternoon, traveling around the country to lead workshops and attend meetings. He also found time to write two influential books, Yardsticks: Children in the Classroom Ages 4-14 and Time to Teach, Time to Learn: Changing the Pace of School, which reflect the heart of his work in education—paying attention to where kids are developmentally, age by age, and to what they need to thrive.

As Chip worked to transform education, he continued to experience transformation in his own life. “In the early ’80s, I made a big shift in the way I thought of my spirituality and the time I devoted to contemplation. I began thinking seriously about training to become a spiritual director, except that I couldn’t figure out a way of making it work financially for my family.

“Around that time, I was invited to a program at the Fetzer Institute. On the table at that meeting was a copy of a working paper for a program called ‘The Courage to Teach.’ I had read To Know as We are Known, and I knew of Parker’s interest in Thomas Merton, who interested me too. So I read this paper, and I was like, ‘Alright, if I can’t keep my family afloat with spiritual direction, this certainly resonates with me.’ I applied to the facilitator preparation program.

“During this time, I think three times I was a focus person in Clearness Committee, trying to figure out what I should do when I grew up. Even during the first Courage to Teach series I facilitated, when we needed an extra focus person, I would grab it. And I just kept realizing that I needed to be centered in one place, to be centered in myself. I couldn’t be doing a hundred different things, which has been one of my big problems professionally. This is now the late ’90s. I had my first grandchild. It was time to figure out a way to slow down and get off the road.”

Then one day, Chip learned that a district near his home was looking for a new principal. “This is my fifth year. The year I came in, 27 teachers were let go from the district because of massive budget cuts. So now it’s big classes and no services and then being declared underperforming by the state—pull yourself up by your bootstraps even though you don’t have boots. We have about 25% special education kids, which is way above the state average. And we have 60% free and reduced lunch, which tends to be undercounted here because it’s hard to get people to apply. We also have lots of domestic violence in the community—highest in the state. Our dropout rate is in the top ten statewide—nothing to be proud of.

“We were talking earlier about this boy who’s going to court tomorrow morning. These stories just repeat themselves. And one thing I’ve come to understand is that this job is as much about supporting adults, like the mother I met with this morning. And I have 30-year veterans in this building, many of whom live in this community, who know what goes on.” Chip lists the number of teachers facing serious illness this year, their own or of a loved one. “I imagine this is true in every school community, but we don’t talk about it. It’s just a lot, in a Courage sense, to ‘hold.’ I’ve come to find that a remarkable part of the job is about Courage work, about spiritual work. I know it at the core of myself.”

Chip’s commitment to Courage & Renewal is in K-12 education, and he looks forward to continuing to work with this community in collaboration with Courage & Renewal Northeast. He and Pamela Seigle are currently facilitating a group of public school principals as part of the Courage & Renewal for School Leaders program. As he reflects on the challenges he faces as a principal, Chip says, “In the principals’ group, that ‘holding’ of the adult community has to be raised up. We have to see it as more important than the next memo or MCAS prep or whatever you might be asked to do in this straight-line vision of what a principal is supposed to be about these days. I don’t think it’s the work before the work. I think it’s the work in the work.”