Being the Director of Character and Leadership Development at Holy Trinity School in Richmond Hill, Ontario Canada is my dream job because I get to hang out in the classrooms and in the hallways and think about how we can develop better leadership, character, and values in our students. But the past two years we weren’t hanging out most of the time.
Instead, my role became to figure out how to engage with everyone – and to get everyone engaged. I was spending a lot of my time trying to get the kids, many more metaphorically speaking, to turn the camera on and engage. I focused on who was and wasn’t turning on their camera and worked with them enough to understand where they were coming from.
We saw a similar effect in our student leaders. In some cases, students were almost desperate to have something to do and lean into. And then others stepped away and sort of protected their own space to cope during this time. It didn’t matter if they were more seasoned leaders or just starting their leadership journey. It really depended on the individual. The reality is that this experience was collectively felt but internalized individually and we needed to factor this into everything we were doing.
We began to see the impact on how we were operating as a school community as a golden opportunity to grow in new ways. One of our Middle School students Claudia explains how it impacted her:
“Even before the pandemic I was always an extremely social person. I loved having my friends next to me and the teacher a few feet away and, I really fed off the energy of others. So, when the pandemic hit and people felt isolated, it took a toll on their mental health and a lot of people grew away from me. It kept me up at night. I was always thinking about why they were acting the way they were, and what they might have been feeling, I wondered what they were going through? This really helped me connect with other people more and it really let me listen to them. Going out of the pandemic I always pay attention to how people might be feeling, difference in behaviour at school and extracurricular activities. I think empathy and the ability to connect with other people is an extremely important skill to have so you can learn what drives people and what inspires them.”
As educators and leaders, we harnessed the elevated attitude of empathy and concern for each other that surfaced, and encouraged it and promoted it, in a number of ways. One of the strategies we used was focusing a lot more on Social Emotional Learning (SEL), particularly in our Middle School. We found ways to help students stay connected.
In addition, we focused on what energized students, including our Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Council. Those groups are flourishing today, and we have never had more or better conversations about inclusivity. Where we used to be a bit more controlling as to who gets to lead something, now it’s “If you’ve got an idea, go for it – we’ll support you”. The impact has been significant and will have lasting effects on how we run things.
The collective experience became all about embracing the individual experience.
But it wasn’t easy. Fostering effective leadership in the student body had its challenges. Being online for much of two years we had lost the experience that comes with institutional knowledge, as students didn’t get to see the leaders of the school in action during the year, or participate in programs that offer experience outside of the classroom. We saw the impact of this in our leaders, when we tried to draw on them to reignite school programming. When we asked them to take on various leadership capabilities it didn’t work. We quickly realized they were suffering from a deficit of modelling and mentorship (both informal and formal) and we had asked them to do something they weren’t prepared to do. They needed to become leaders; expectations weren’t enough. Experience is how we develop our skills and we needed to find ways to remedy that.
If we were going to revitalize things the way we wanted to, we had to open up our controls.
We called in experts to help with what was missing including Captains & Poets, who ran a leadership program with our Middle and Senior Schools during the second term. Another strategy we used was to call on our leaders from the Upper School to help our younger leaders develop. We had to make a real effort to incorporate mentorship and make it part of that process, bringing it to life.
In the end, the challenges at hand were a gift and we were able to align our leadership and character development initiatives more powerfully than ever before. The collective experience became all about embracing the individual experience and going from there. Jay, one of our Senior School students captures the experience we had hoped to create:
“A skill that we could all use is the ability to bounce back from adversity…to take such a negative situation and use it to better themselves, to better the world, and to just grow in the face of adversity. What the last two years have shown is that this will not be the last time we’re going to face adversity…I do believe that overcoming challenges, overcoming fears, using resilience can really allow all of us to be better leaders and just be better people overall.”
James is the Director of Character and Leadership Development at Holy Trinity School in Canada. He completed a teaching degree at the University of Toronto and his Master’s of Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia. James is a graduate of the CAIS Leadership Institute and a graduate of the CAIS Next Steps program. Since James first came to HTS in 1999, he has taught both English and drama in the Senior School, serving as chair of the department for eight years. He was the Leadership Program Coordinator for the Senior School before moving into his current role as Director of Character and Leadership Development in 2018.
This blog is based on the Captains & Poets and yLead webinar Celebrating Leadership in the Classroom Across the Globe and highlights the learnings and successes as well as the connections between well-being and leadership that have surfaced over the past two years.