A Year without Summer PD-- A Reflection and a Preview
James Robinson • August 8, 2024
Reflecting on a Leadership Persona
Summer of '24 was the first time I wasn't involved in the first days of school or the summer professional development. The feeling was complex-- a mixture of nostalgia, pride , sadness , isolation and regret-- partially because my role and persona in education was not in play and I failed to integrate into a new one.
To reflect , I spent an afternoon reviewing several videos from over the years, and was reintroduced to team members I miss dearly. Many of them are now in school or network leadership. Some have moved onto careers in other industries, and some consult.
Here are a couple of things I'm proud of:
- Practice the Leads to Muscle Memory and Resilience: My favorite videos illustrate how much we practiced. Practice helped create muscle memory, but repeated practice with feedback built resilience. We transformed the gymnasium into four classrooms while keeping the center area clear for presentation. In each of the micro classrooms, there were 10 student desks organized in two rows of five, an easel, and a carpet. We spent a lot of time practicing the transition from desk-to-carpet, then carpet to desk . The idea was to make practice as real as possible. To ensure the practice was effective, each area had its own coach, and I was perched on the second floor with a birds eye view, overseeing it all and filming. From that vantage point, I could also walkie or call down feedback to the coach team. Everybody practiced and repeated practice until we reached proficiency.
- Fostering Deep Internalization and Ownership: Additionally, I reviewed a "State of the First Grade" briefing I asked one of my assistant principals to do that same year. Her work was meticulous. She analyzed all elements of the grade level, including the attendance records of every child, growth data, absolute data and action steps to improve outcomes. The document was 25 pages long, but it served as a road map for her and the teachers she managed. She presented it to her team in July, three weeks before the kids came in. The achievement and growth that year was outstanding. In the upper grades, teachers made double-digit gains on the state test. I attribute all gains to the depth of knowledge acquired by our APs-- it fostered a sense of ownership like nothing I'd witnessed before.
Here are a few things I regret:
- Trapping myself in a role. My best PD was done at the building level. Back when I was a principal, there was very little oversight from the central office-- so my team could design PD aligned to the needs of the school. However, as I rose up to the network and national level, there was less creativity and less responsiveness to local needs. My first year or two as a principal manager, I managed to be responsive to the region, and I made it known. However, after my colleagues in the national cabinet categorized me as "going rogue", I aligned myself more to the centralized vision and national plans regardless of how effective, relevant or ineffective the plans were. There's a self-consciousness and low-grade fear of losing your job the higher up you go. You become the face of a region, yet are expected to uphold the centralized tactics and priorities despite how irrelevant they may be. In other words , my role and persona as a senior executive made me brittle and stifled in my approach. The centralized team even provided a speech writer to ensure my words were aligned. This episode of The Courage Gap covers the overarching issues of centralization-- especially when it comes to charter school growth and the political nature of the role.
- Family : Missing in action. Here’s where the regret comes in, it’s what I don’t see. I don’t see any photos or videos of my own children on their first days of school. Between both daughters, there would have been 26 first days total. And I wasn’t present for any of them– not a single one. I regret it. Instead of being with them, I began crafting my persona as a “leader”. On Sundays, I’d go into the building and work for 8-9 hours, preparing for the week. There was always a desire to be more “hardcore” and more “all in”– especially, because I worked for mission driven organizations. In truth, there was a lot of ego on my part– because the ego’s job is to help build the persona. And there was also a sense of leadership shame– that if you didn’t show up , you didn’t care about the students. There was a brief period of time when the phrase, “So and So is not good for kids” was the ultimate insult. I heard it used by a few managers across different organizations: “So and so was 3 minutes late to the meeting. He or she is not good for kids.”
Ouch.
Depending on the persona we wear, we can become calloused. For me, I was definitely stuck in Warrior mode for a good portion of my career– and it is exhausting. My beard is aspirin-white and just as brittle. What I’ve learned is that I didn’t integrate other elements of myself into leadership roles at first, because I let myself get stuck in the warrior role– essentially using it as my operating system for a few years.
Nowadays, the warrior is still there when necessary, taking a nap. It’s the roles of the coach, father and creative that are getting more airtime.
If you’re curious about how you’re showing up, reach out for a free persona quiz by emailing
james@miningandshining.com. Then
Sign Up for a free consultation– we can talk about what your results mean.
A swarm of lemmings continues their march to the proverbial sea, attracted by a temporary vision of sun and beauty, but ultimately distracted by that vision—thus, they fall off the cliff in a passive suicide. It wasn’t a conscious decision. Their deaths were the consequence of distraction alone. In this allegory, the lemmings are writers (and many in publishing) who ignore the erosion in elementary schools and K-12 education. Writers may create brilliant work, but if students graduate without the skills to engage deeply, our audience vanishes. From a cultural perspective, this is alarming—and the stakes extend to the health of Western civilization itself. In my day job, as Executive Director of a small non-profit, I oversee a pre-K program, a charter school, and our efforts to revitalize a publishing company re-dedicated to high-quality children's books, which we're strongly considering. These trends hit close to home: we're building foundations early because the data shows the stakes are high—not just for individuals, but for the shared knowledge, critical reasoning, and civic discourse that have sustained Western democratic traditions for centuries. Key trends: Average Grade Level of Books Sold Now vs. 1950: Decline Toward Grade 5–7 Bestsellers today often score 5th–7th grade on Flesch-Kincaid (many 4th–6th for broad appeal), with simpler sentences and vocabulary to match declining adult reading stamina. Mid-20th-century works frequently demanded more (closer to 7th–9th in analyses), reflecting a market shift toward accessibility amid falling literacy. Didactic vs. Non-Didactic vs. Classics: Effects on Brain Development Narrative-driven reading (non-didactic stories or classics) sustains broader brain activation—engaging language, empathy, memory, and connectivity regions more effectively than passive or overly didactic methods. Neuroscience shows immersive storytelling promotes neuroplasticity and deeper neural pathways, while fragmented/instructional approaches may limit sustained engagement and cognitive depth needed for complex literature. If Trends Continue: What Will Texts Look Like in the Future—4th Grade? Pleasure reading has plummeted ~40% over 20 years (daily readers from 28% peak in 2004 to 16% in 2023); adult literacy scores dropped sharply (many below 6th grade); NAEP reading scores remain at historic lows. Unchecked, popular texts could simplify to 4th-grade or lower: basic vocabulary, short sentences, reduced nuance—eroding space for sophisticated writing. These declines threaten more than literacy: they undermine the foundations of Western civilization. Deep reading fosters critical thinking, empathy, and shared cultural references essential to informed citizenship and democratic debate. As reading wanes, societies risk shallower discourse, greater susceptibility to manipulation, weakened civic engagement, and a fraying of the reflective reasoning that has driven progress, innovation, and self-governance in the West. This isn't inevitable. Writers and creators bring storytelling, imagination, and engagement that schools and early programs need most. Call to Action: Get involved in schools and early education. Ask kids about the books you remember reading when you were a kid– The Oddyssey, Of Mice and Men, Leaves of Grass. Advocate for narrative-rich curricula, or support initiatives like ours in pre-K and charter settings. Or send me an email, I'd love to chat. When we relaunch our website in the summer, we'll have some exciting news. We have a lot of work to do-- and we're all learning from it.
Pushing and Pulling The "push" connotes aggression whereas the "pull" connotes invitation. The "push" is a criticism, and the "pull" is coffee and advice at a nice cafe selected just for the advisee. Both are needed in different measures, at different times and often towards the same ends. In 2024, I engaged in a sabbatical to step back, read, study, think, and reflect about schools and leading through the pandemic. It was a very prolific period. However, what made it prolific was the "push"-- spending days reviewing data and learning to criticize the sector I worked in. The Courage Gap Talks document those learnings, in the most lo-fi way. They're ugly, but they inform the work and solutions we're imlpementing at the park, where our goal is to "pull" folks into a transformative educational envioronment. Originally, they were called "Career-Suicide Notebooks", the original plan being to walk away from education all together. Instead, what I learned will inform my work for years. It's been said that Buddhist monks can see the world in a grain of rice. After being immersed in education for several years, I see the world in a school ecosystem. Thus, schools enter my creative work and the way I think about creativity enters my work in schools. The first video is called 33% and it looks at the proficiency scores of 4th grade students on the NAEP Assessment. Additionally, it looks at the broad economy that works to maintain the status quo.