How to Have a Conversation About Transformational Leadership

This post about transformational leadership is part of our Aurora Institute Symposium 2024 series sharing ideas from #Aurora24 that we want to move forward. 

In our years-long quest towards competency-based, student-led learning, we’ve been asking many, many questions. What are competencies? What are our competencies? How will this change the behavior of teachers? How about students? The structure of the day? The structure of the year? The structure of our campus? Assessment? Grading and reporting? Celebrations and interventions? How can we, collectively, engage in this change process, and what kind of leadership will increase the probability that this will all happen as we’d like?

This last one—what kind of leadership?—was what interested me most as I approached the #Aurora24 conference in New Orleans. A quick look over the agenda showed me that there were many sessions focusing on leadership. Here are just some of the sessions that touched on the relationship between leadership and the change process:

• Leading with Foresight: Advancing Competency-Based Learning in an AI-Driven World
• Stories, systems and structures: How strategic communication can support competency-based learning success
• Lessons from Years 1-3 in Washington’s Mastery-based Learning (MBL) Collaborative: Hear from district and state leaders about our culturally responsive MBL implementation
• Traversing Change: One District’s Journey to Sustaining Personalized Learning
• Supercharging Strategic Plans with Inclusive Design
• Conflict Analysis: A Transformation Approach

This is a smattering of what was offered. Each session came at a different leadership challenge from a different angle. Each session was led by pedagogues from around the country, and was based on their experience with the change process.

Defining Transformational Leadership

One particular session pulled back even further, though. They’re setting some first principles and taking a page out of the Portrait of a Graduate book. Lead for Learners is a national network led by KnowledgeWorks, with partners from districts around the country. On Sunday morning, they lead a conversation for about eighty educators in order to continue development of their framework, Portrait of a Leader.

To define the Portrait of a Leader, the network proposes to determine what skills, body of knowledge, and dispositions a person would need to be an effective transformational leader. The two operating assumptions are 1) we need more transformational leaders in our k-12 system, and 2) if we can define the attributes of transformational leadership we can then determine what training and support folks would need to enter leadership, and we would have a clearer idea of what resources those leaders needed to create transformation in a lasting and sustainable way.

The conversation that morning was generative. We responded to prompts, formed small “think tanks,” and engaged in a number of protocols or liberating structures. The ideas and insights we generated were captured and will contribute to Lead for Learners’ Portrait of a Leader, and help them consider policy, advocacy, training, and implementation angles.

I needed that conversation about leadership. What differentiated it from all the other conversations I’ve had about leadership was its intentionality, its structure, and the abundance and variety of minds in the room. In addition, the conversation was fueled by the previous conversations the Lead for Learners team had conducted, as well as its research into work already done. Finally, there’s the model of the Portrait, a frame which, as we’ve learned from Portrait of a Graduate, supports meaning-making and coherence.

Create Your Conversation

One of my favorite things about protocols and structured conversations is that the frames are transferable while the outcomes are individualized for each context. There’s a lot of skill in the education world around how to run a meaningful conversation. Here’s how the Lead for Learner’s folks did it.

The conversation is an attempt at discernment or learning and, therefore, requires a learning environment. KnowledgeWorks’ Laura Hilger previewed the agenda for us. We talked about and agreed on norms, and each, individually, set an intention for the conversation. (Mine was to get the lay of the leadership land post-COVID, and to look for things being proposed that were different from what we’ve done before.)

Laura had us grouping ourselves according to the shoes we were wearing. I began by looking for other folks wearing Skechers, but gave up when I realized that precious few of us were wearing any kind of sneakers. So, the sneakers thinkers found each other and formed into a Think Tank of eight. Our introductory prompt was to share “something that is bringing us joy lately” or “the values that drive our purpose.”

You should already be noticing the mixture of sublime and ridiculous. It’s a powerful mixture that keeps energy up in the room, and focuses it at the necessary junctures. Abandon humor and whimsy at your own risk!

Mining Our Mindsets

The next part of the conversation had us delving into our own pasts to find precedents to inform our work. It may seem obvious, when we’re trying to engineer, for example, a meaningful collaborative experience, but many of us do not look back to past successful ventures and ask, “What made that successful? What were the conditions in place that allowed that to work?” In our Think Tanks we asked these questions:

Individually think (and maybe journal) about: 

• What collaborative work have you been a part of that you feel was transformative?
• What mindsets helped make the transformation a success? 
• What other qualities were essential for this change?

In your group: 

• Take turns sharing out the effort you’ve been a part of and the essential mindsets that made it transformational 
• Listen for trends across your group and capture your mindsets, one per sticky
• Hang them up on a shared poster

What Makes a Great Transformational Leader?

From the Mindsets conversation we’re in a position to ask, “What were the qualities of our leaders that allowed this to be successful” (or, if it makes more sense, ask “What did our leadership do that allowed this to be successful?”) 

If your school or context has a model of transformative leadership it’s already working with, you can look to the qualities that model defines as “good leadership” and ask where do you see those qualities emerging in your school and its change process. How might the school promote more of that? Especially in younger leaders? What questions do you have about that quality? What further conversations do you need to have?

The value of a conversation like this is beyond measure. An early mentor of mine once told me, “The job of a curriculum coordinator is to make sure that the conversations that need to happen happen.” I’ve lived by that aphorism ever since. Conversations are the stuff out which relationships are made. Conversations are what move mindsets. Conversations turn the many of your faculty into one. Conversations also create genuinely meaningful Aurora conferences.

Learn More

• At the Aurora Institute Symposium 2024, A Call to Center Young People and Transform K-12 Systems
• A Conversation about Leadership with Adam Aronson
• Talking Leadership and Transitions with Ron Schmidt
• The Skills and Mindsets of Transformational Leadership

Gary Chapin is the co-author of 126 Falsehoods We Believe About Education (2021). He is an advocate and supporter of equity-based practices in schools such as competency-based learning, performance assessment, adaptive leadership, and collaborative cultures. Gary works with Educating for Good, The Essex County Learning Community, the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment (MCIEA), as well as school districts across the United States.