This is my fifth piece exploring what it means to lead with love. See the other pieces at the links below:
#1: learning love: a beginning
#2: what does it mean to be love?
#3: how do we lead with love through our mistake?
#4: what is wrong with urgency? what is beautiful about patience?
As we work to build classrooms and schools filled with and powered by love, we want to slow down on the path to justice, without detours or car accidents, to borrow Alex Venet’s metaphor.
Urgency can hide organizational responsibility and devolve accountability onto individuals. It can create cultures of pressure, resentment, and distrust that can turn toxic and dangerous.
So, modelling patience should center leadership and system-level accountability, give grace to individuals to make mistakes, and avoid what Paul Gorski calls “pacing for privilege.” Patience and slowing down should create cultures of flow, of grace, trust, and shared ownership.
Once, in my fifth year of teaching, I had a colleague ask for help with talking through an issue they were experiencing in their classroom. I spent an hour asking them about their goals, what they had done previously with those same students, what their goals were for those kids by the end of middle school, what they felt was getting in the way, and what evidence they were collecting and what observations were coming up that was inviting them to change things. I remember the bell ringing and I got up to get ready for my class. To me, the conversation was a productive one, and I felt good about deepening my understanding of what had been a deeply complex issue. I’d felt confident that we had laid foundation for potential collaborations, and that my questions had probed hard enough that my colleague didn’t always have ready answers. They’d deepened their reflection/thinking to respond. Most importantly, perhaps, I remember the conversation being engaging and fun. Some other teachers had listened in and jumped in with additional information and questions and resources and I’d felt like we had worked together to really unpack what all had been tried and why exactly change was needed and what different pathways existed in front of us for improving student learning.
But when the bell rang and I got up to leave, the colleague who had asked for the meeting sighed loudly and exclaimed, “well that was a waste of time.”
At the time, this interaction had been hard. I was filled with doubt and guilt and tried to figure out if I should have done something differently. But both in reflection and in conversation with the colleague, I realized that this kind of deep, curious engagement with an idea was what worked. While my colleague had initially wanted a quick fix, and was frustrated with the conversation’s lack of decisions, my most successful partnerships have spent months or even years centering curiosity about each other’s work before moving towards changing or creating something radically new. Of course, in the midst of those conversations, we were trying ideas out, modifying our work to respond to what we were learning, and adjusting parameters of success to reflect our evolving schema of the problem. Progress wasn’t ‘on pause’ while we learned about each other’s work – we were learning and practicing and revising our ideas in real time. But we were slow to completely ‘rehaul’ something – we had high standards for evidence and for our own understanding to prevent giving students intellectual whiplash.
#1: Curiosity is usually a better orientation than trying too quickly to be a “fixer.”
When I was a school leader, I felt almost constantly overwhelmed. I took my leadership role seriously, and really wanted to be held accountable to clear, visible shifts in student outcomes.
But I soon realized that considering everything part of my job now wasn’t ‘taking responsibility.’ It was impatience.
I wasn’t willing to accept that Project A or Task B or Priority Y would have to wait 3 years or maybe 5. I was so used to the low retention of teachers I was reading about globally and so stepped in burnout culture that I was afraid to assume that I (or anyone I knew) would be around to do the projects I was deferring. How can I say that I will get to trying out a new approach to parent engagement in 2027? Or figure out sex education in 2028? Somewhere in the back of my mind sat a voice that told me that if I didn’t do it now, I never would.
The reality is that if I had tried to launch sex education and a radically new alternative to parent-teacher meetings in the same year, I would have missed a lot.
Patience, for me, was saying ‘next year’ even if I didn’t know what/who would be around the following year. Patience was choosing my priorities and being honest with the actually nonnegotiable parts of my job and saying ‘no’ to the rest. Sayiing ‘next year’ was HARD.
I really think that constantly saying “next year” drove some of my colleagues mad. Not everyone was sure they’d be around next year, and those who were committed to staying in the school long-term still felt like I was deferring projects that mattered and were highly personal.
But the reality I eventually had to accept is that time is finite and my bandwidth hence a valuable resource. Picking a small set of priorities and being honest about what it would take to achieve those priorities rigorously, thoughtfully, and inclusively really helped with feeling real progress and visible change rather than constantly overwhelmed and like I was playing Whack-A-Mole over and over and over again. Staying “next year had a lot of costs, and I am by no means at ease doing it even now. Many years later, though, I do think that it made an incalculable difference in modelling patience.
#2: moving away from “my job is everything now” to “my job is achieving these priorities this year” can help with progress feeling more visible and concrete and achievable.
Both curiosity and saying ‘next year’ have forced me to slow down in a job that is often all urgency all the time. Our kids, their learning, it is all urgent. But slowing down for me has also meant real accountability – if I ask questions to gain context and choose a small number of core priorities for a school year, I can make sure that those priorities are, well, actually. Too often, I see urgency lead to too many projects taken on with too little respect for quality. When we jump too quickly to action or to overcommitting ourselves, we build a ready excuse that there is ‘so much going on’ that enables avoidance. Curiosity and conscious prioritization are two ways we can embrace accountability so that the spaces we lead grow visibly and measurably more loving, inclusive, equitable, and excellent.
sruti teaches 