Philosophy of Teaching 

I wish I could think back on everything I learned in high school, but I can’t.

When I think about the discrepancy between how much math, science, history, English, and Spanish I was taught, and how much I actually remember I just want to jump out the window. But don’t worry. I’m on the first floor.

Forgetfulness.

That’s my chief enemy now that I've become a teacher. I don’t want all the hard work I put into assessing a paper, or planning a poetry unit to end up as some student’s hazy reminiscence that I was a nice guy. I think forgetfulness should haunt all teachers, especially if we really believe that what we teach is important -- not just for today but forever.

My education in a competitive high school generally involved a highly educated teacher standing up at the front of the room, telling us what we would be asked to reproduce later on an exam or paper. I paid attention, took notes, and did well enough. Once the exam was over or the paper turned in, I would take a deep breath and seemingly exhale all the knowledge that I had only grasped in the most tenuous and superficial way.

My central goal as a teacher is teach in a way that requires my students to do more than reproduce my understanding.

Over time I’ve managed to learn how to read a text with curiosity and discipline. I want my students to have the same opportunity to build their own understanding. I believe that the best way to make my students’ knowledge and skills deep and permanent is to create a classroom in which my own understanding is not always the central focus. Of course, it can be very pleasurable to display one’s erudition, and I remain interested in my own ideas and arguments. But I ultimately left the academic world because I found that I’m as interested in other people’s minds as my own.

To contest the role of the teacher as the most important mind in the room I’ve had to upend the usual cognitive division of labor. The conventional task of the teacher is to read with an eye towards developing a line of interpretation, and a series of questions – almost like bread crumbs -- that will lead students to discover a path already laid out in the teacher’s mind. The students prepare for class knowing that the teacher will be doing the heavy lifting, so all they need to do is follow his or her lead.

There’s no better way to learn something than to have to teach it.

So I ask my students to act more like a teacher than a student. For example, I require my students to prepare for class the way that I do. We all read the text with an eye towards developing a line of interpretation, and a series of questions that could start to unravel our understanding of the text. Before class, everyone is expected to post online – me included – textually based, interpretative questions. Then in class we take turns leading discussion on the basis of our own interpretative questions. Because we are now all doing the same preparation before class, my role as teacher is transformed from “chief brain” to one among many brains working hard. I still have a distinctive role to play in the classroom, but it is now more exemplar than dictator.

Thinking of education as a cooperative endeavor ––in which everyone has a say and everyone understands the importance of what is at stake–– has allowed me to strike a balance between two pedagogical extremes. On the one hand, the cooperative classroom eschews the notion that teaching is a mere form of entertainment, and students nothing but passive spectators. On the other hand, it avoids the opposite threat that comes when we imagine education as a commodity, entirely subjecting our pedagogy to the whims and preferences of our students. My teaching aims to challenge students to do their best possible work, knowing that what and how they learn will affect their lives far beyond the walls of the classroom.

Philosophy of Leadership

It’s all about the mission.

The first requirement of a successful leader in an independent school is to generate enthusiastic consensus for the mission and vision of the institution. Only when this is accomplished may a leader have reason to believe that the various members of the community -- students, faculty, staff, parents, alumni and Board members -- are likely to exercise the kind of commitment that is necessary to ensure that its practices, policies, strategies, and initiatives will develop and thrive. The successful leader lives and breathes the mission, and ensures that all constituents have been given adequate time and space to grapple with the implications of the mission, and the way in which its values resonates with one’s own deeply held convictions. In an independent school in which the broadest range of constituents relate to the mission in a thoughtful and personal way, the first obstacle to institutional success — a lack of commitment — has been addressed.

The second requirement of a successful leader in an independent school is to create a framework that solicits, aggregates, curates, and ultimately harnesses feedback from all members of the school community.

A culture of feedback is the most reliable way to ensure that a school’s practices, policies, and initiatives are aligned with its mission and vision.

At the root of this approach to alignment is the leader’s recognition of the need for epistemic and moral humility. No one leader or senior administrative team has the range of information, ideas, experiences, interests, and values that is present in complex social organizations. To rule in a dictatorial manner is to risk the formulation of school practices that do not resonate with the nuanced ways that the members of multiple constituencies in the school have grappled with the meaning of the mission. It is only when the leader acknowledges the limitations of his or her own experience, emotional life, intellectual abilities, and moral reasoning that they can transcend the pride that distinguishes the leaders of all failed social experiments.

Epistemic and moral humility suggests that the leader is not fundamentally a monarch.

Rather, they are a facilitator for an ongoing, complicated conversation among people deeply united by their sense of the mission, and sometimes divided on its application to reality. The successful leader sees him or herself at a crossroads asking for, collecting, sorting, curating, and ultimately accepting or rejecting the various inputs from members of the community. When a leader embraces his or her role at the crossroads of the busy intersection that is an independent school, it is more likely that the decisions made are going to be well informed and give due consideration to the conflicting ideas and values one always finds in diverse communities.

In the end, an independent school leader is not a puppet of the popular will. He or she must do as his or her conscience and best judgment ultimately dictates. But the successful leader is one that while bearing responsibility for institutional actions and decisions does not formulate these actions and decisions alone. Leaders can get it wrong, but it’s in the open nature of the decision making process that authority and credibility are preserved.