Matthew Taylor - The Noble School Leader

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9781119762874 (Paperback)

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Cover Design: Paul Mccarthy

Cover Art: Courtesy of the Author

This book is about a kind of leadership development that we haven't paid much attention to in the education sector. Every school leader experiences the need for this approach when they have been working hard to grow a technical leadership skill and inexplicably hit a brick wall. We double down on skill and knowledge building over time, and still there's no movement. As managers we begin to assume that our leaders may not have what it takes, or that there's some fixed trait that will keep them from getting there (they just have a low bar … their awareness is too low). As leaders we just can't figure out why we don't do something (delegate to our teammates, show vulnerability) that we deeply want to do. Or we assume that some competencies are just not our strengths and that we are fixed in certain ways (I will never be good at conflict. That's just the way I am.).

We've gotten increasingly good in our sector at technical leadership skill and knowledge building in the areas of instructional leadership, data practices, and building school‐based systems. But this brick‐wall phenomenon falls into a different category of leadership competency building that calls for a very different approach. We can't see the obstacles to growth because they are hidden inside of us—or below the surface—and they're very personal. So even when we are teaching and learning discrete skills, we're not getting to that level of figuring out the real obstacles. Practicing skills without figuring out a leader's inner obstacles is like riding a merry‐go‐round that never stops.

I have been obsessing about these brick‐wall leadership competencies for close to a decade now. Through hundreds of coaching and training sessions with school leaders across the leadership pipeline, I have built a development model based on Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence (EI) theory. EI brings an essential lens to leadership development with its focus on self‐awareness, self‐management, and social awareness—what we need to know about ourselves and others before we ever engage them. In the book, I share how we have operationalized EI to create a common language and road map for building personal leadership competencies. My framework—The 5‐Square—is applicable across competencies and across all levels of the leadership pipeline. This book introduces the 5‐Square, takes readers on a guided tour for applying it to their personal leadership challenges, and provides practice opportunities to build those brick‐wall leadership competencies over time.

The leaders who have used my 5‐Square have experienced significant growth in competencies that they often believed were fixed, and the impact of that growth has been evident in their 360 feedback, org health data, staff retention, and other organizational outcomes. Just as importantly, this work has reduced suffering, sparked hope, and helped leaders and the people they lead thrive in their work and their lives.

This book is essentially an EI‐based, replicable approach to social–emotional learning for leaders. Social–emotional leadership is a prerequisite to student growth because leaders are the creators and the keepers of the conditions for learning in our schools. Students depend on us to create the conditions for learning that everyone in our schools—from students to teachers to principals—needs to meet their full potential. I have learned that these conditions primarily result from the way that people feel. Because these conditions are difficult to name and measure, they tend to be overlooked and undervalued

Since the days when I first started teaching 27 years ago, our profession has been moving toward an increasingly technical approach to teaching and learning. We have reacted to the pressures to improve student achievement—increased exponentially with the arrival of Common Core—by building more efficient systems to grow academic skills as fast as possible, for as many students as possible. I have watched as these technical practices that serve us in improving student achievement have also led to disconnection, inequitable conditions, and a limited growth trajectory.

As a sector we have arrived at a moment of reckoning. Schools that have taken an increasingly technical approach have become increasingly unhappy places for both the adults and students. The conditions we have created hold everyone back—adults and students—from reaching their potential. This is because emotions are contagious, and they are most contagious when they come from leaders. When adults are working under leadership and conditions that are antithetical to social–emotional health and growth, they create those same conditions in their classrooms for students. Very few students will develop the social–emotional competencies to be strong learners in spaces that are unhealthy for adults. The learning and life outcomes of our children depend on healthy adults, and leaders create adult conditions to thrive. This has become even more painfully clear as we have all experienced the trauma of the Covid pandemic. Academic growth has stagnated for sure, but our collective emotional capacity to teach and learn as educators and students is at rock bottom. Without addressing the affective—the social–emotional—obstacles of the moment, most of us and our students will remain academically incapacitated.