This blog post was originally published on Getting Smart.
By: Kathleen Osta, LaShawn Routé Chatmon, Tom Malarkey
What kind of leadership is needed to design and sustain new approaches to public education that are personalized, purposeful, joyful, authentic and challenging – and consistently and equitably meet the developmental needs of every young person in every community?
At the National Equity Project, we believe a caring, equitable, and innovative education ecosystem is possible. Examples of H3 learning environments exist today, but too few young people have access to them, and children, families, and educators who are most marginalized in our current systems are least likely to have access to innovative options or be invited to co-design new approaches.
How can we ensure that efforts to “re-architect public education” don’t reproduce or exacerbate existing inequities? How might our work to transform public education be done in ways that increase belonging, interrupt us/them narratives, and activate collective agency to create change? Antonia Rudenstine speaks to what “young people [should] get really good at” to prepare them to respond to this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) moment. Likewise, we need equity leaders to get really good at leading in VUCA conditions.
How we lead change is the change; the creation of Horizon 3 learning environments requires Horizon 3 leaders. If Horizon 2 leadership creates cultures of innovation within the basic paradigm of the current system, Horizon 3 leaders create the conditions for diverse teams of people in and across systems to imagine something different, believe that it’s possible, and catalyze energy, commitment and strategy to move in a new direction.
Our experience working with educators for the last 30 years tells us that leaders need to be equipped with mindsets and practices to help them lead for equity in conditions of complexity and uncertainty. The greatest challenges to creating ecosystems of care in which every young person thrives will not be technical. Instead, the challenge before us is how to intentionally design change efforts in ways that weave people—their fears and pain as well as their hopes and dreams—together in service of a shared vision for youth thriving.
While knowledge of innovative school designs is important, the most impactful leaders we’ve seen are the ones who know themselves and understand how their lived experiences and identities shape how they see the world, and impact how people experience their leadership. Equity leaders show up with humility and possess the emotional intelligence and fortitude necessary to take people’s concerns seriously, but not personally. They make room for the stories of the teacher who feels undervalued, the parent whose trust was broken, the young people who feel silenced or pushed out, and the community leader who feels disrespected. They show up as hosts (not heroes) and build containers strong enough to hold divergent perspectives, attend to healing, and nurture relational trust. Equity leaders prioritize co-design, intentionally involving students, families, and communities in shaping educational solutions.
NEP utilizes a set of twelve Liberatory Design Mindsets, drawn from Liberatory Design, that provide helpful guidance about how leaders will need to see, engage, and act differently to bring an equitable H3 vision to life. All change efforts sit in a historical and social context. In the United States, access to power and opportunity is shaped by race, class, gender, and other social factors. These mindsets articulate intentions that explicitly acknowledge and counter the effects of systemic oppression, transform power, and invite more humanizing and liberatory ways of collaborating and designing.
We invite you to explore the Liberatory Design mindsets with your teams and communities. Review the full set and see which mindsets feel especially important in your context, which feel challenging, and which ones you want to try on.
In addition to working with these mindsets, we propose a short set of leadership practices that can help leaders respond more skillfully to the complexity and uncertainty of the moment and design change processes consistent with what we know about equity and complex systems.
Distinguish between complicated and complex problems. There is a significant difference between these two types of problems and each requires different leadership moves.
Complicated problems may be challenging, but known solutions exist and can be reliably applied across contexts. With complex challenges, there are no reliable predetermined solutions that work in every context, and no expert can tell us exactly what to do. When leaders respond to complex challenges with predetermined “solutions”, the result is often frustration and blame. In complexity, the leader’s role is to foster a culture and establish processes that promote collective sensemaking, where people are encouraged to generate and test many ideas—understanding that some will fail—and continuously learn and adapt along the way. Learning to work effectively with complex challenges will be critical for leaders working to create equitable H3 approaches to education.
Example:
For leaders working to move a school or system towards a real Horizon 3 approach, some aspects of their work will lie in the complicated domain. For example, installing a new HVAC system in a school may be challenging and require expert input but can be reliably executed. However, when a problem is complex, like chronic absenteeism among high school students, there are multiple variables at play and the contributing factors are too entangled to discern a clear cause and effect relationship. Here, sensemaking, safe-to-fail experimentation, learning, and adaptation are key.
Consider:
- Which aspects of this challenge or situation are predictable? Which aspects have too many moving parts to know what might happen next?
- How can you foster an environment that embraces emergence and adaptation while maintaining a shared sense of direction and purpose?
Expand our mental models. We all make sense of the world through mental models that we have inherited or gained through experience or study. Leaders working to create new designs for education will need to increase their self-awareness and intentionally and continuously expand their mental models to incorporate new ways of seeing and understanding. Leaders need to challenge their own assumptions about, for example, where and how learning happens, the purpose and practice of public education, what ‘good leadership’ looks and sounds like, the role of young people in shaping their own future, how change happens, and who gets to decide. Here, the role of the leader is to rigorously challenge their own and others’ entrained ways of seeing, engaging, and acting.
Example:
H3 leaders will need to expand their mental models about educational equity, moving well beyond a focus on eliminating disparate outcomes based on race or other identity markers, toward imagining and co-creating joyful, liberating learning environments that reflect and nurture the brilliance that every young person possesses. Expanding mental models means pushing beyond success within the existing paradigm to imagine what truly vibrant equitable learning systems might look like.
Consider:
- Where do we notice our assumptions about the ‘givens’ of education or leadership constraining our ability to embrace new possibilities?
- What is the equity opportunity that might be on the flip side of an equity challenge? How might we give ourselves the chance to imagine liberatory possibilities?
Hold the problem space open. The paradox of the times we are in is that the changes we seek are urgently needed and yet, rushing to quick solutions will likely not yield truly transformative or durable change. The practice of holding the problem space open challenges the way most leaders have been socialized. Rather than jumping quickly to solutions, this practice asks leaders to keep the problem space open long enough to engage multiple perspectives and make new meaning about why particular challenges are playing out – long enough for deeper insight to emerge and ultimately for new, unexpected and innovative ideas to be generated.
Doing this will require us to resist our socialization to rush to “fix” or “solve” and instead work with the fear and discomfort that may arise when we don’t have, or can’t provide an immediate answer or solution. As Dr. Bayo Akomolafe reminds us, “The times are urgent; let us slow down.”
Example:
Consider a scenario where out-of-school leaders collaborate with district leaders to reimagine powerful learning opportunities in various community settings. Instead of rushing to solutions, the leaders might first focus on developing a shared understanding of the challenges at hand. They could explore questions together like: Which students are most adversely affected by the lack of powerful in-school learning experiences? What obstacles do community-based organizations face when designing or credentialing impactful learning programs for young people? What has hindered our collaborative efforts in the past? By taking the time to examine these questions together, leaders gain deeper shared insights into the complexities of the situation and pave the way for more innovative and effective solutions that address the nuanced needs of their community and surface the opportunities and barriers in both in-school and out-of-school learning environments.
Consider:
- How can we resist the urge to prematurely narrow our focus and instead invite divergent perspectives to further illuminate the full complexity of this challenge?
- Whose voices or perspectives are we missing that could provide new insights into this issue if we take more time to listen?
Manage the anxiety that naturally arises when we are uncertain. The process of creating Horizon 3 learning ecosystems is full of possibility and uncertainty. As humans, we are wired for both survival and connection. Our brains and nervous systems like predictability. Even if we are consciously excited about a change process, uncertainty can activate a physiological threat response in which our body prepares to fight or flee. When our survival physiology kicks in, it is more difficult to be socially engaged or think creatively. As leaders working in complexity, it is important that we recognize this natural neurobiological response to change in ourselves and the people around us and have practices in place that help us pause, notice, and connect. Learning to anticipate and work with fear and discomfort – both our own and other peoples’ – is key to leading complex change processes. Leaders who are prepared in this way can be a steadying resource, recognizing that connection and belonging are key antidotes to fear, and creating cultures where all feelings are acknowledged, support is abundant, and a shared vision holds people together through the fear and discomfort of change.
Example:
A district is launching a new student-led, project-based learning program that deeply engages with local environmental and economic challenges. This represents a significant shift from traditional teaching methods, and many teachers feel unprepared and anxious about their new roles as facilitators rather than lecturers. Students feel a mix of excitement and apprehension and parents feel similarly conflicted; excited about the new approach, but worried about how this will be perceived by colleges and future employers. Instead of pushing forward, and minimizing these concerns, district leaders organize a series of sharing circles for the community to voice their hopes, fears and uncertainties. The purpose of the listening is not to find solutions for the concerns but to acknowledge and normalize the discomfort in a way that helps people feel heard and supported through the transition.
Consider:
In what ways can I model vulnerability and openness about my own anxieties to create a culture where it’s safe for others to do the same?
What rituals and routines can I introduce to help my team and community feel more grounded and connected as we navigate this uncertain terrain?
The journey towards Horizon 3 education is not a predetermined path, but a dynamic web of possibilities that demands new forms of leadership. New structures and innovative technologies are necessary, but insufficient to the creation of H3 education. The leaders we need are not just architects of new systems, but cultivators of shared visions and collective agency. H3 leaders embrace uncertainty as a catalyst for innovation, hold space for diverse and divergent perspectives and nurture cultures of belonging and innovation in service of co-creating learning environments where all young people thrive.
Kathleen Osta, LCSW, is a Managing Director at the National Equity Project. She currently leads the organization’s field impact work, contributing to national networks exploring the intersection of liberatory practices, the science of learning and development, youth-centered approaches, and social emotional well-being in schools and communities.
LaShawn Routé Chatmon, as the founding Executive Director of the National Equity Project, has dedicated her career to inspiring, coaching and orchestrating leaders to transform educational experiences, conditions and outcomes in schools and communities, with a specific focus on racial equity in education.
Tom Malarkey is a Director at the National Equity Project and specializes in equity-centered inquiry and design practices for educators and school systems. Tom was a co-creator of the Liberatory Design and Learning Partnerships frameworks.
This blog series is sponsored by LearnerStudio, a non-profit organization accelerating progress towards a future of learning where young people are inspired and prepared to thrive in the Age of AI – as individuals, in careers, in their communities and our democracy.
Curation of this series is led by Sujata Bhatt, founder of Incubate Learning, which is focused on reconnecting humans to their love of learning and creating.