Havens of Hope: Ideas for Redesigning Education from the COVID-19 Pandemic

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:14] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program my longtime friend and colleague, Dr. Shira Leibowitz. She has more than 20 years of experience leading schools from nursery through eighth grade. She's the founder and CEO of Discovery Village, a project and play-based preschool in Tarrytown, New York. And she also supports preschool leaders and education business owners through RevAbilities. Dr. Leibowitz is also a faculty member teaching in the doctoral program of education at Northeastern University.

[00:41]

And she's the author of two books, including The Coach Approach to School Leadership with Jessica Johnson and Kathy Perrette, And she's the author of the new book, Havens of Hope, Ideas for Redesigning Education from the COVID-19 Pandemic.

[00:56] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:58] SPEAKER_01:

Shira, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.

[01:00] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, Justin. It's so great to see you.

[01:02] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, great to reconnect again and learn more about what you've been up to. And it has been quite a bit since we've last spoken. I wonder if we could focus first on what prompted you to write Havens of Hope. What did you see happening in your corner of our profession that led to this book?

[01:19] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. I opened a child care center in preschool in 2019 after leading schools. and got it up and running and functioning really well. And seven months in, March 2020, we all know what happened. So the center is just north of New York City in what was among the first and worst COVID hotspots in the United States. Just a few miles of here was the first place that then Governor Cuomo shut down the first quarantine in the country.

[01:51]

And we never closed. We were deemed an essential business. We were allowed, even encouraged, to stay open and closed. The world changed literally overnight, and so I stood in this one open room, so this the Center is large it's 11 rooms we we serve 128 students. We dropped overnight to six children of essential workers. And, you know, the place was dark and silent and this one room was opened and me and a couple of teachers.

[02:21]

And as I stood there inside, outside, we didn't know what was happening. It's so hard to recapture what those early days of pandemic were like, especially in New York and the places that experienced it first. We created COVID health and safety protocol three months before New York State did. We were figuring out so much on the fly. This is my own business. There was no income coming in.

[02:45]

I was making payroll out of my savings, right? We were just figuring everything out. Yet when I stood in that one open room, it was the most magnificent, joyous, play-based learning I have experienced in my career, a kind of learning that I had been working on for so long to create. I just stood back, and we're a Reggio-inspired program. Reggio-inspired learning comes out of Northern Italy, right after World War II. And the first Reggio school was created in literally the days following World War II in an area that was devastated.

[03:21]

And a group of people, mostly who had been active in the Italian resistance, knew that while the war was over, oppression, injustice, and equity was not. And they started a preschool to prepare their children to stand against injustice and oppression, and inequity. And that story has always inspired me and shaken me to my core. And I stood there thinking, are we at such a moment? Might we be at such a moment? Might something new be able to emerge from this pain and crisis and devastation?

[03:52]

And that set me off on a path of exploring what other educators were doing, what I could do, asking the question of who do we want to be through this time? How do we want to lead? What do we want to create And when we get to whatever the end of it or end-ish of it is, what will be able to emerge? So that inspired a lot of work I did in the center. It inspired the book Havens of Hope, and it inspired the training program Revabilities.

[04:19] SPEAKER_01:

And I understand in putting the book together, you also spoke with people who worked in or led other preschools and childcare centers. Is that right?

[04:28] SPEAKER_00:

Not only preschool and childcare. So preschool and childcare centers, K-12 programs. pods that became never closed, became micro schools and some alternative education community programs. So a range of programs that were not only navigating through, but getting better and creating the kind of education that they had imagined or thought could maybe be possible. And it was coming to life in this very challenging time. I think What I'd love to share, what I think might be valuable to your audience is what we focus on increases.

[05:03]

And so there were throughout the pandemic and even today were two narratives in the field. One was everything is horrible. It's devastating. There's burnout. There's pain. And that's true.

[05:17]

And then there's this other narrative of we're recreating something. And so what you focus on is what becomes real. And so when I set out to write the book, and even now the people that I'm looking to connect with, I just put out a few posts on social media saying, is anybody getting better? Does anyone feel we're at a founding moment? And I got three responses ignoring it. Yes, that's me.

[05:42]

I'm in. Or anger, that how could you not be honoring the pain that's being felt? And so those were the responses. Those who said we can rebuild, yes, there's grief. Yes, there's tragedy. Yes, we're not negating any of that.

[06:00]

But those who rebuilt... really found creativity in themselves and really dug down to a core vision. So happy to give you some examples. There's Mary Train, who was a kindergarten teacher in Maine.

[06:12]

And Mary knew her school said they were going to shut down May 13th. It was a Friday. School said we're going to shut down for a week, maybe. And she knew that it wasn't a week. So kindergarten, she packed these kids' backpacks with tons of books and tons of materials. And the kids looked at her and said, why are we taking all this home?

[06:32]

And she said, you never know when you might not be able to come to school. She knew. And teachers came back for two days to prepare. And what we prepared, all of us, we experienced a transformation that in the past would have taken a decade, and we did it in overnight, two days, maybe. So we shifted in all kinds of ways. And Mary shifted to online learning, as everybody did.

[06:57]

And throughout that, a number of families she knew reached out to her and said, would it be crazy to hire a private teacher? And she said, no, it wouldn't be crazy. Do whatever you need to get through. And a few families gravitated towards her. And she ran a pod out of her home teaching kids and found a freedom. She's a very veteran teacher.

[07:17]

It's taught in many, many schools. Found a freedom to teach in the way she believed was right that she never wanted to let go of. And she's expanded that pod into a full-on school. she inspires me. And there are so many stories of that. Or early childhood programs that moved fully outdoors because it was safer there, but it wasn't only about the safety.

[07:43]

The people who moved outside, it was about the safety. It's not only the early childhood programs. I can talk about K-5 or K-8 programs that did this. So the Randolph School and right here near me in New York, Hudson Valley, just moved full on outdoors. New York is, it's not Canada, but it's not warm. They stayed out in the winter, everything.

[08:07]

They built these little lean-to structures and learning moved outside and it was reinvigorated and people felt inspired. And this independent school, they also reworked their whole tuition structure. to become more affordable for families and a kind of way of paying based on an algorithm of how much you have. So major transformations, those are two examples. Or My Reflection Matters Village is a new online, it wasn't new, it was an in-person co-op for homeschooling BIPOC families primarily, homeschooling, unschooling. that transformed itself into an online community for people looking for an alternative way to educate.

[08:53]

So those are three examples of a more traditional school, a pod that formed, and an alternative program. But there was so much rich creativity in these incredibly challenging times.

[09:06] SPEAKER_01:

Well, it's so interesting, Shira, to hear you talk about the Reggio Emilia model kind of resurfacing, and it's always been here, but maybe getting some renewed and well-deserved attention in this particular time, as well as the fully outdoor, full-time outdoor model, which we've heard about here and there, maybe some preschools have done that, but really kind of a ground up reimagining of how we can do school and how we can approach things. At the same time, I feel like there's a lot that we went through in online learning and and, you know, virtual learning. You know, there are a lot of things that we kind of had to do in the short term that we don't really want to do again. You know, like I would not be surprised if, you know, Zoom meeting becomes a bad word to a lot of our kids just, you know, because they had to do so much of that and missed out on some in-person things. What do you see as some of the best insights and takeaways or, you know, especially practices that we discovered or rediscovered

[10:04]

in the last couple of years that we want to hang on to, maybe even schools are building their model around that are really worth hanging on to?

[10:12] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. I think it was about sculpting away the peripheral and getting to the core and finding the core and holding on to that core, even when we had to educate in ways that we don't believe in and we don't want to. So Sarah Lev, for example, is a transitional kindergarten teacher in a charter school in Los Angeles. She teaches four-year-olds before turning five. And she has long been a leader in project-based learning in early childhood space. And so now she's teaching Then she was teaching online and she was very determined to bring the project-based learning that she believed in, the focus on social emotional learning she believed in and transfer it to this online space.

[11:02]

And not only did she, but she learned some things that she's brought back to the in-person space because of course she wanted to go back to in-person. So she found the power of small groups because she structured the classroom around the students together in the morning and then in the afternoon, giving them activities that they could do at home independently and working with small groups of children. And when it was her and those small groups of children, it was uninterrupted time like she had not had in the classrooms. And she loved that and students thrived. So she has designed ways of bringing that focus on small groups back to the classroom when they moved back to the classroom. That was one example.

[11:47]

She also, using an online app for kids to upload their work, found a way for kids to, young kids, to take more control over giving critique and feedback to each other. in respectful ways that she's bringing back into the classroom. So there were things that we learned right through constraint that when those constraints are lifted, we can even bring on more fully.

[12:16] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think an important way of approaching the decisions about what do we keep is to not throw out the baby with the bathwater or not let maybe the difficulties of our initial experience with something keep us from holding on to what's good. I think so many companies now are realizing that maybe a lot of their travel was unnecessary. Maybe a lot of their face-to-face meetings were unnecessary. We've come to rely more on Zoom meetings or Slack or asynchronous types of things. We realize that maybe there is a time and a place.

[12:47]

We do still want to get together. We do still want to have some meetings or all get together at the same time. But maybe we are more thoughtful about that. Maybe we're more purposeful about what we hang on to. And I love the example that you gave of Kind of rediscovering working with small groups and just having that opportunity to see what was possible when we get students together in that format. I think that's just a tremendous example.

[13:12] SPEAKER_00:

So the book ends at what is the beginning and the work that I hope that we'll do now, which is the next chapter is up to us. We changed so much so fastly because we had to. Imagine what we can do together when we choose to. And we've spoken, Justin, you and I have known each other for years. We've heard this refrain for years that education isn't changing as education isn't changing. And it surprises me now when I still hear education isn't changing because education changed, not the way we wanted it to maybe, but it changed literally overnight.

[13:47]

And that can, if we choose... give us evidence that we can change, we're capable of change, we're capable of quick change when we decide that we're just gonna do it and we will figure it out. So that's the beginning, I think, to look back at the adversity and to find the strength in it and to look back at models from the past. So we spoke about Reggio, which was born in the days following World War II.

[14:17]

The book also talks about Waldorf and Montessori. Those three have long inspired me. So Waldorf was born in the months following World War I in Germany, in a Germany facing economic political devastation and real fear of what did transpire in Germany following of the rise of fascism and what happens when conditions are so difficult. And so Waldorf learning was a response and was about the political and the economic not being enough. The spiritual and the cultural and the arts matter profoundly. And so Although they did not stop what was happening in Germany, they made a dent, such a powerful dent, that when Hitler came to power, he shut down all the Waldorf schools.

[15:07]

They were a real threat because independent thinkers are a threat to fascism. So that's powerful. And Montessori, you know, beginning with a commitment to independence, being the first female physician in Italy and living this incredibly independent life and seeing what was possible for many, but was denied to too many with horrible inequity. She starts her schools and then extends her vision to to peace experiencing two world wars. So that peaceful feel that you have in Montessori classrooms up to today was deeply grounded in a belief that promoting world peace starts with peace in classrooms. So teachers, educators are warriors for the future we want to create.

[15:59]

And if we go back to that and say, well, what problem do we want to solve today in the world? And there are so many answers to that. And that's where I think we have the opportunity to de-standardize and to have different schools and even different parts of schools. If we look at the micro school movement, the pods, you could split a large school into smaller segments with visions that emerge from a place of passion for what's possible. And there are examples past and there are examples present because there are schools that are quietly doing it. They don't have much time now to talk about it.

[16:41]

They're not the ones posting so much on social media. They're figuring out as they go. They're there. It's happening. And if we highlight that, we can see and experience so much more of that.

[16:51] SPEAKER_01:

And I'm struck by the potential for someone who is trying to reimagine their piece of the world to read these stories, to read these examples of how people have adapted and have kind of reconnected with practices that in many cases and philosophies have been with us for decades and generations, but have maybe flown under most people's radar. And I'm thinking about the the unit of redesign, you know, like what are we redesigning? Are we talking about a whole school, a classroom? And I'm so glad you mentioned, you know, different types of organizations or different pieces of a program, because, you know, probably a lot of people listening to this are thinking, well, I could never start my own, you know, 10 or 12 teacher preschool. You know, I'm not signing up for that that much. or maybe I'm not a principal, or maybe I am a principal, but I don't have carte blanche to just redesign anything I want.

[17:40]

What do you see as some of the smaller units that people might be able to do their rethinking within?

[17:46] SPEAKER_00:

start wherever you are and do whatever you can. And those small acts are not small. They're huge. And together they make a huge impact. So I think we get ourselves paralyzed thinking about we have to change the whole system. Maybe somebody could.

[18:06]

Maybe there's somebody out there who has that influence to make those larger sales plans. There are. There are superintendents that have leeway of large districts, but there are constraints for all of us. But within those constraints, when we look to the core, and if we look at what do we believe, so Reggio, standing against oppression and justice and equity, Waldorf, revitalization, Montessori, independence and peace programs today, That I'm blessed to work with healing intergenerational trauma, well-being for people in the planet, finding our voice in the world, building leadership, creating healing communities, connecting with nature and the planet, right? There are these visions that when we cut it to the core and we can say it in less than five words, that...

[18:59]

can infuse everything. And what's beautiful about those visions is that they don't belong to any one person. They're big enough that they can be owned by many people in a school who can translate it in their own way that's meaningful to them. big enough to together be field changing and world changing, but they're small enough to impact the way that one teacher interacts with one child, those micro interactions that are so powerful. And that's what I think great education has always been. We just lose sight of it.

[19:37]

And sometimes when we're forced to pull back to the core because there's so much thrown at us, there are so many constraints, we can again find that meaning and then we can again choose to hold onto that when things get easier.

[19:51] SPEAKER_01:

It strikes me as the kind of conversation that you might have with an educator colleague, you know, or a longtime friend who maybe doesn't work in the same school that you do, but you know, you can, you can talk about ideas. You can talk about what if we could change this? What if we could just kind of rethink things? And often we, we don't feel like we can change things. So I, you know, one thing that I think is very compelling about this book is that it's real examples from people in a variety of different contexts who have not only thought about it, have not only had those conversations, but have actually taken some action. and really been able to do some of those things that we spend a lot of time maybe dreaming about, maybe thinking about, but maybe afraid to act on.

[20:30]

So what would you say to someone who maybe for many years has been that thinker, has been that conversation partner, but finds that maybe they don't have within their organization a whole lot of support for actually changing things or taking action? What would you recommend to someone who is on board with the kind of rethinking that you're talking about, but isn't sure what to do action-wise?

[20:51] SPEAKER_00:

So what I would say is free yourself and trust yourself and trust that small actions make a big difference. Don't get yourself frustrated and overwhelmed because you can't do everything. Take the next right step every single day. Really think deeply about what do you believe at its core is The purpose of education is if it is only career and college readiness, what are we even doing? We can be warriors for a better future. We really can.

[21:29]

What is that better future? We hear it at the preschool world of getting them ready for kindergarten. No, we're helping them open their minds to the possible right in whatever it is that that vision is, and so you know I was, I was speaking recently to to a colleague who is creating an incredible program. that focuses on healing intergenerational trauma in some really high needs communities, working with families during those vital years where children are from birth to five. And talking about how much we were aligned in terms of education, but how our approaches will be somewhat different because my focus is on coming out of the pandemic. well-being for people on the planet, creating hope and action, and hers is intergenerational trauma.

[22:20]

So we might do something very similar, but the subtleties are the power of what great education is. And knowing that vision and knowing what you're bringing in that interaction is really, really powerful. And a teacher in a classroom has an unbelievable amount of power to bring that even if the rest of the school doesn't understand it. So if a teacher is focused on independence, that can happen. even if she or he needs to conform in the ways the schools are required or focused on standing against injustice that can inform the way students interact. And so when you can get your vision to a couple of words, although of course your vision is bigger and you're bigger and you're not just a few words, if you can get down to the essence, if you could wave a magic wand and

[23:12]

Fix one thing in the world. What would that thing be? Say it in a couple of words and then bring it in the small actions. You're changing lives and you're contributing to changing the field. Then you connect with others who are also doing that. And that just expands and expands.

[23:29] SPEAKER_01:

Wow. I feel like often as educators who are kind of in the middle, you know, we have like a middle level of, you know, you and I have both been school principals. You know, you feel like you have kind of a middling level of control over things. And we think, oh, if only I was the superintendent or the state superintendent or the secretary of education, you know, then I could really change things. But at the same time, the higher you go. the less actual ability you have to get anybody to do anything, right?

[23:52]

You're so far removed from practice. So one of the gifts of being closer to the action and having a smaller scope of influence is that you can actually do things, right? You're not relying on other people to hopefully implement what you're thinking of and what you're talking about. You know, if you have a classroom, then you have, as you said, more power than almost anybody, because you have, you know, actual students that you can influence directly. And that's just a A tremendous place to be. Let's talk a little bit, if we could, about your work in supporting people who are in settings similar to yours.

[24:22]

Do you want to talk about Revabilities a bit?

[24:24] SPEAKER_00:

So Revabilities actually is a word that I created to describe what it is. Each of the letters stands for something. that were the kind of foundations of what we worked through. And the approach and what RevAbilities does and is committed and is passionate about is helping people find their own visions, implement, not find, discover their own visions within them because they are within them. They're within us. We know what we believe.

[24:54]

We know the future that we want to see. And it doesn't have to be the same as anybody else's. And that's the beauty of it. So to find that vision, to plan how to implement that vision into everything. And this is, I think, one of the key findings through what happened during the pandemic is our visions weren't just in our program. They happened in our operations.

[25:16]

They happened in how we looked at finance. They happened in how we looked at human resources. It happened in how we looked at facilities. So it was expanding what educational vision is from an educational approach to the way that we are, and then living that in an ongoing way, which is the way you shift culture. And something that's become more and more real for me is Culture and purpose and it's that shift from vision driven to purpose vision so setting your vision but when you really live it and implement it, you're living a purpose, purpose driven education takes constant input and it's like it like drinking water because you drank a lot of water last month doesn't mean you're not going to be dehydrated today if you don't drink water today. So, you know, school culture, school purpose is something that requires that daily ongoing attention.

[26:08]

And if you pull back even shortly, like if you don't drink water for three days, you're going to feel it. You're going to see it. You're going to experience it immediately. So RevAbilities is, it's a community, it's immersive coaching that walks people through that framework so that they can bring their vision to life with whatever constraints they're facing, and while also tending to themselves and their own well-being. And it's been very powerful. I've been very blessed to work with the beginning cadre of truly visionary educators who are changing lives and changing the field in remarkable ways.

[26:47]

It's been a blessing.

[26:49] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So you're working to support and coach people who run preschools, people who are starting new programs. Tell us a little bit more about who's in that

[26:57] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So there are people who, there are a range of people in the program. There are people who are creating training programs for other educators. One focused on anti-racist, anti-biased education. One, a couple of them, nature-based learning, teaching educators how to bring learning outside, even if you don't have a beautiful outside setting, but in whatever it is that you have. to connect with nature and to understand what that means for you.

[27:26]

There are people starting schools. There are people currently running schools, preschools and pods, micro schools. So that's the range of, and people writing books along with it. So people who want to bring their vision to a broader arena and help other people create theirs.

[27:45] SPEAKER_01:

And if people want to learn more about that, where should they go?

[27:48] SPEAKER_00:

My website is RevAbilities.com, R-E-V-A-B-I-L-I-T-I-E-S, RevAbilities. You can find me on Twitter at Shira Leibowitz and reach out. You can email me, Shira, at RevAbilities.com, or you can join, there's a Facebook group where we, a free Facebook group where we talk about a lot of this, standout educational leadership. So those are the best places.

[28:12] SPEAKER_01:

And of course, the book is Havens of Hope, Ideas for Redesigning Education from the COVID-19 Pandemic. Well, Shira, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Justin. So great to speak to you.

[28:24] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.