Listen to Episode 4
About the Series
At Change Matrix, we have been practicing training in, coaching around, and incorporating into our work adaptive leadership for the last 25 years. Based largely on the work of Ron Heifetz and Martin Linsky, we feel this practice is an especially equitable type leadership. We wanted to create this particularly timely podcast series to share what we have learned about and are learning as adaptive leaders. Learn more about the inception of the Living Adaptive Leadership series.
What We Discuss in this Episode
Elizabeth (left) and Leora (right)
Leora Wolf-Prusan has been working to integrate mental health in schools, to increase the focus on trauma and resilience in schools and to create more equitable and peaceful environments. Before March 2020, this was hard work that required adaptive leadership. The work is harder now and the need for shared leadership is more elusive and critical.
Transcript of the Conversation:
Elizabeth
I just want to welcome Leora Wolf-Prusan to my Adaptive Leadership series, Living Adaptive Leadership. It’s super exciting for me to welcome you into this space, because I’ve known you for a while. We were on the road providing technical assistance together. And even back then, we were talking about what it means to take the theory and the thinking behind adaptive leadership, and really apply it to the hard work that’s going on, in your case, in schools, in state education systems. And I’m just so excited that you’re going to be here to talk with me a little bit about that experience. And I wonder if you couldn’t add a little bit to your background where you work, what you do, how do we know you?
Leora
Through the miraculous colliding worlds of technical assistance. Yeah, thank you for having me. So I’m Leora Wolf-Prusan. I live in Los Angeles, California, and I’m from the Bay Area. I’m actually currently in the Bay Area to be closer to family during this time. And that’s where my story starts. So it’s fitting that I’m back here to share with you a little bit about my story and my leadership learning. My background is in education. I got my teaching credential just down the road at Mills College in East Oakland and was opened to the small schools movement at a really, really early age in my own psycho-education professional development journey.
Leora
And I had a really phenomenal conversation with a principal that changed my life, which I’m happy to share at some point during this conversation. But it changed the trajectory of my life, and it also changed the way that I thought about what it means to be a Warm Demander and as a coach and seeing people for their possibility and the realities instead of what they’re doing in the moment. And then for a variety of different twists and turns, I went to Hebrew University in Jerusalem and studied the impact of violence on school communities in Palestine. And this was in the early 2000s, mid-2000s and then came back to the Bay Area to do work around college-going culture and youth organizing around college-going culture.
Leora
And in that space, I experienced the death and the violent impacts of gang gun violence on a lot of the young people that I’ve partnered with, who were my leaders, who we called peer leaders, who led me. And realized through variety of experiences, that there wasn’t really any space for us as educators to understand what it meant when our students were killed. And when that relationship that we had been cultivating was suddenly gone, Professor Rick Ayers says, “It’s the empty seat in the classroom syndrome.” And so I’m someone who intellectualizes my emotions, another leadership trait we can talk about at some point. So I know that’s how I grew up. I need to understand the words in order to feel what’s happening in my body and in my experience, individually and collectively.
Leora
So I came to UCLA to study the impact of student death on teachers, and that was the doctoral work. And that’s what brought us together, because during that time period, Sandy Hook happened, and 2014 was the year that I graduated from my doctoral program and then met you on the road and doing national work around technical assistance. So the last, what is that? Six years, the last six years has been working with state education agencies, working with local education agencies, really thinking about how folks in complicated systems can find the humanity in each other. And maybe even find moments where they get back to their original why, the original purpose of why they’re in the work.
Leora
And then two more sentences. That work then moved from state education agencies to cities who had experienced police brutality and supporting cities at the government and in the community, finding ways to create recovery and renewal. That then led to this last chapter of work, which is I’m now the project director for the School Crisis Recovery and Renewal Project, which is a new National Child, Traumatic Stress Network project, five years thinking about the long-term recovery and renewal of school communities. So now that I said out loud to you, Elizabeth, it feels like it’s all pretty coherent, but that’s where I am. I hope that that feels like the most coherent sentence I could say.
Elizabeth
Well, I think what you offered is this incredible context for how you have become a leader, how you exercise leadership, how you see leadership. And I just, I love knowing the trajectory, the path, that you’ve taken through all of those spaces and in all of those, all of this theory basis. And so two things that I took from that is knowing the words to be able to understand the feelings, I really resonated with that. And I also liked the concept of the Warm Demander and hope to talk a little bit more about that, because that feels right. It feels good.
Leora
It’s not mine. It’s from a lineage of many, many teachers. Linda Darling-Hammond also helped all of us teachers understand the concept a little bit more. But the Warm Demanders it’s from, I think from Alfie Kohn, and even John Dewey, like early 1900s and then came to be a term. I just want to give citations where citations are helpful.
Elizabeth
Totally appreciate that. Totally.
Leora
Not mine.
Elizabeth
Well, let’s focus on you for a minute though. Because I would love to know a little bit about your early relationship with leadership. How did it show up for you in your life as a young person?
Leora
There’s so many different ways to start the story. One of them is that I’m a first born child of a community spiritual leader. My father is a rabbi and was a rabbi of a very large congregation growing up. And so I grew up with a model of community as the unit of analysis, not individual. So whatever folks were feeling in the community, that’s how our family felt it. We were a public service family, and that is how I think I crystallized my understanding of self. It’s interdependent versus independent. And I knew that every night we were somewhere doing something that related to service, related to justice, related to betterment, related to learning. And I think because I came from a really strong sense of identity and purpose in our family unit, I was able at a really young age to translate it across different.
Leora:
So my mom tells this story. We lived in Cincinnati when I was young and we were one of the first, only Jewish families on the block while my father was in rabbinical school. And Passover was in the mix. And my mom tells this story that she looked outside the front window and I had knocked on every kid’s door in the whole neighborhood and had gathered them in the front yard. And there was 10 kids. And I was teaching them the story of Passover standing in front of them as a four-year-old, which is not necessarily leadership, but it’s an interesting kernel into the spirit of not proselytizing, but wanting to share and wanting to connect. And knowing that in my feeling of difference that I wanted to educate and also just finding joy in gathering. So that’s been a through line. That’s been a through line in my life.
Elizabeth
Yeah. I love that because we keep talking about adaptive leadership as not being a solo act. It’s never… It’s not supposed to be a solo act. The work is what drives the leadership so that the nature of complex change means that we can’t do it by ourselves. So this idea that you come to leadership through community, and that part of what that means for you is that your job is to reach out and engage. It’s to engage the people around you in the learning and the excitement and the innovation and the joy in the community, which just shows up for you as a leader, is important.
Leora
It does. And also, I think, you know me and I think that hopefully in this conversation, part of leadership and part of my leadership ethos is really admitting my deep areas of growth. Really holding myself accountable, sometimes more accountable than I need to. And the reason I’m naming that is, because there’s been dual tensions in my leadership story and my own understanding of leadership throughout my life. Yes, collective and interdependent. And also there’s been a little bit of cult of personality and how to be seen and being the one person leading the professional development or the one person on the road, or the one relationship. And getting enticed by the ego and getting enticed by being the person that people need to hear from.
Leora
And a lot of that is related again to the dual beauty and challenge of having a parent figure who is figure both as a teacher, but also both understanding the power and the danger of cults of personality in the work. So I hope we can talk about that a little bit more. Because it’s definitely in this stage in my life in this moment is what I’m grappling most right now. Which is really how to lead from behind the scenes, but also own that I have skill in front of the scenes, and how to do both and to not shut people out, but bring people in.
Elizabeth
Yeah. I have to imagine, Leora, that that’s a tension that lots of leaders feel, particularly those who look out and can get on the balcony and can see the distance. So there are folks who are somewhat comfortable doing the day-to-day things that they do, right? And so when you get up there and… Somebody said to me, it was Monica Caldwell, who said, “It gets windy up there. It gets windy up on that balcony.” And so when you’re looking out and you’re seeing all of the things that you identified, but maybe others don’t, you see this need to jump in and say, “Hey, people. Hey, this is going on. Hey, this is important. Can I engage you in this idea? Because it’s really important.” So I think this tension of, “I have individual things of value to offer, and I want to be part of a group,” it’s something that lots of leaders I think struggle with.
Leora
Yeah. And also we can’t not name that there’s, like the double-edged sword of urgency, which it’s false and authentic urgency as a leader. So I move fast. I know that about my personality. I’m fiery and I’m fast and I have ideas, and I also tend to have a stern voice and that sometimes communicates to people that it’s the way. Even though I actually have a generative internalized system. Anyway, meaning that as a white woman, yeah, I’m moving fast. So also how much of it is a sense of urgency that’s real and authentic, because I’m standing in allyship and solidarity and alignment for folks who are being disenfranchised and harmed. And where is my sense of urgency also in viewing some white supremacy and in viewing power in a way that’s not, that’s not power with, but power over.
Leora
And that I sit with all the time, all the time, Elizabeth, and think about as a school in schools, too. Because as a leader, you have to. There are so many school leaders right now who are actually school managers, but are being asked to be school leaders at the same time, especially in this moment. They’re being asked to see the big vision. When we know from a trauma-informed space, that’s not possible in the moment of crisis and pandemic. Or the moment of any big thing, you have to deal with what’s right in front of you. And so there’s that tension of, “How do we create sternness so that people feel safe and held and consistent and feel trust, and also feel open enough where we can co-create together?” There’s so many dualities to sit with.
Elizabeth
Yeah, there are. That’s why they call it adaptive work, because there’s never one answer. Right? We’re always thinking, “What’s the environment calling on us to do?” And I think the environment right now is calling us to be different then it was maybe eight months ago. So I actually like to take you into the world of schools right now and ask you to think with me a little bit pre-pandemic.
Leora
Okay.
Elizabeth
Where did you see good leadership in schools, especially in school mental health and becoming trauma-informed, because that’s an area you and I have spent a lot of time thinking about. And it’s an area that sort of at that Cusper frontier of change for a lot of the schools that we worked with in systems we worked with. So I guess I’m curious if you saw some really excellent leadership and what does that look like for you in that space?
Leora
Yeah, that’s such a good juicy question. It’s funny when you asked the question, I was thinking metacognitive and was realizing that people were coming into mind. Good leaders who I looked and wanted to celebrate and wanted to honor, which is not entirely the same question. So I think I’ll try a couple of things and then you’ll just signal me when there’s too many and we should just stop. So I’ll say this, I think we have both seen, particularly in Project Aware, advancing on this and resilience and education, a lot of state leaders who have stuck with it despite different political tenors who have changed the names of things to match the environment, as you said, who have seen an idea, sat with the idea in their own experience, and then thought about how to bring that idea to quote unquote, the masses. And, of course, I’m thinking of Tennessee in this moment and that was happening. So much of the good work has happened behind the scenes.
Leora
We were able to support the end of the five years in Michigan, Department of Education Michigan, where there were some state system leaders who were reaching across to Health and Human Services to juvenile justice or injustice, some might say, to child welfare, thinking about how to do this work cross collaborative for so long. And behind the scenes, really behind the scenes and making it huge shifts in the way that folks even sat with the term, school mental health. I really want to pay homage. There are a lot of folks who helped us widen the term from student mental health to school, so that educators were implicated in that, so that administrators were implicated in that who were thinking about policies and practices and paradigms that were for everyone. That was happening before.
Leora
It’s gotten a lot more resonance now, but that was happening before. And there’s been anti-racist movement for anti-racist education has been happening for years and years and years and years. And now there are many scholars and writers and thinkers who are getting the platform and the public sticking the adhesion like, “Yes, I will stick to what you‘re offering, yeah.” Now so there’s been beautiful leadership that was happening before March 15th. I’m using March 15th, because that’s when Los Angeles shut down, March 15th. So then the last thing that I’ll name that I’ve been really thinking about a lot is how we in education learned from the fields of domestic violence and how we in education have really learned from the world of homelessness and Homeland Security?
Leora
There are many fields that have been the leaders in the world of trauma-informed everything for a long time to center lived experience and survivorship. And I’ve been thinking a lot about how to pay homage and lineage to a lot of folks who are working in different fields or industries that we as schools have really learned from.
Elizabeth
Boy, there are so many little adaptive leadership elements in what you just described that I want to name for a moment. One of them was like you said, “Stay the course.” And I would label that maintaining discipline detention, because it is so hard after a great idea and maybe some initial momentum or movement around it, it’s easy to just sort of let that go. And the folks that were the best leaders, the leadership that was displayed amongst these groups, were people that could stay with it and be persistent. But also the work of adaptive leadership really focuses on these beliefs and values. And I think what you brought up for me and what you were talking about was that adaptive shifts don’t necessarily happen quickly. The changes in values and beliefs that shape practice sometimes take decades to really move the needle.
Leora
Yes, they do.
Elizabeth
And the folks that don’t get discouraged, that can step in and take a risk, that can continue reach across the aisle, or even just reach into another agency to engage them. But you then also said, “Reach back to the folks who were doing it to build on what works.” And Heifetz talked a lot about this isn’t about dismantling everything and building something new. It’s about looking back and taking what works and bringing it into the future and looking at it with new eyes. Because the thing that makes this change so hard, people aren’t grieving the change. People are grieving the loss of what they had.
Elizabeth
And so understanding that so that our values and beliefs are shifting authentically together in a generative way, I love that word. That is a word that really resonates with me, that generative space, is so good-
Leora
It’s so good.
Elizabeth
But the fact that that can happen over a long period of time with a lot of disciplined attention to what I think is important. And one of the things about the pandemic that I wanted to bring up was that prior to the pandemic, we talked about change as something we wanted. We articulated. We could identify this change needs to happen. Kids need social and emotional learning in school. Kids need a different disciplinary policy. Students do. So it’s not punitive. It’s trauma-informed. We identified that. We articulated it. We mobilized for change, and we engage people in it.
Elizabeth
This March 15th was change that was forced on us. It was imposed on us and we had to change quickly. And now we’re having to look at change that some of it will be sustained. Some of it won’t. And I think the thing I heard from the teachers last week that I was working with was that you don’t have an opportunity to notice the change, because you’re in the day-to-day crisis mode all the time, doing what you can do when you can do it. And so this opportunity to sort of notice what I’m doing and why I’m doing it, it’s not available at the moment. So I just wonder if you have some thoughts about that from what you’re seeing from your balcony view.
Leora
Yeah. So a couple of things. It’s not available, culturally and structurally. It is available, if we make it available. Meaning even taking five minutes a day to attune into where we are, what our needs are, where our feelings are and how it’s implicating our behaviors, that’s available. We just don’t necessarily have the culture and structure right now that’s giving room and air and oxygen to it. And so sometimes I’ve been thinking a lot about, again, how does scarcity mindset and abundance live in this conversation around adaptive leadership? And I think the work of a leader is to remind us of the abundance, even when there’s a feeling of constraint, not for Pollyannish hope and not for avoidance or dismissal, but actually to allow the brain to potentially tickle into neuro synaptic expansion. I don’t even know what that sentence was, but it was a good sentence.
Leora
So meaning when I’ve experienced crisis and someone says to me, “Yes, but what are your dreams next week?” And I look at them like, “Give me a break. I’m handling what’s in front of me right now.” Even I’m planting that question, even if I’m not ready for it, it’s still planted something. And it’s allowing me to even remember that there is a next week. So that’s the first piece that I wanted to name. The other is that it’s what you just brought up, Elizabeth. I’ve been in so many conversations with folks who’ve been championing educator mental health for years, years, and anti-racist work for years. And all of us sitting in this moment, how are we the busiest we’ve ever been right now? What’s happening right now where there’s a collective seismic, “Oh, yes. School mental health.” That is not a separate thing. It’s not an afterschool special. It’s a foundation.
Leora
So it did happen to us, but also allowed, again, a window opening for the seeds that folks have been planting and working on for so, so, so, so, so, so, so long for them to actuate. And part of it is… I’ll just offer one other thing there. I was really thinking about last week. I was on a call with Dr. Marleen Wong at University of Southern California. And she was giving the history of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. That’s 20 years old, 20 years old, really proliferated after 911. And here I am now leading a project that is connected to that ancestral work.
Leora
I guess what I’m trying to say is part of the adaptive leadership, that leading from the balcony image, is always thinking about there is a horizon and you have to keep working on working and holding the vision of the horizon with the hope and determination that there will be the cultural shifts to allow the vision you have to grow. That’s really been what’s on my mind. And then the last question was for me, that I’ve been sitting with is, “What am I not seeing?” What are other folks seeing that I haven’t mapped on to? What’s the bold vision? What are other leaders from the balcony seeing in this moment that I’ve been thinking about? I’ve been in my own myopic space in schools for so long that might even be bigger and newer and all the things.
Elizabeth
Yeah. We’ve been talking more about not being on the balcony alone, or at least finding space to offer your view, your vantage point, and hear the view and vantage point of others. And I think that does two things. One, it creates a more 360 view, right? Because you can only stand on one side and see one direction. But I think the other thing it does is it encourages people to get up there and look around and think about the horizon as you… I love that metaphor of the horizon. It keeps going. If you’re looking at a horizon, you can’t see an end point. But this idea too, that you can create a vision of what could be. You could try to look for things that you hadn’t seen before, but then you have to get back down and get on the dance floor and engage others in it and maybe bring them back up with you. What’s that been like for you?
Leora
I think that anyone who’s listening to this who have touchpoints in education or schools, I hope it would resonate that the folks who have been my biggest teachers in all of the work are students always, always, always. And they, I have learned there’s not a lot of interest or patience in us as adults, mapping on to timelines or time. They’re like, “We’re here. We’re not even dancing on the dance floor.” We sometimes feel like, “We are the floor of the dance floor and all y’all are dancing on us.” And actually maybe you can see us and then either dance with us or clear the dance floor out for it to be ours. Be right, get off the balcony so that we can create some sort of bridge from the dance floor to the balcony and dismantle hierarchy altogether.
Leora
There are… I know it sounds so cliche to redirect the conversation to students, but it is that. This novel idea that young people have the answers to the most pressing needs is not so novel. And so that is a question I think… You and I, we’re in technical assistance work now, which sometimes creates so much distance from the folks we’re serving. We work with state leaders who have a lot of distance from the folks they serve. And there is power to that, because there’s space to think and create and not be in the minute-to-minute. But there’s also a little bit of vulnerability and danger to that in our leadership.
Leora
So I think the question again, that I’m holding… All my answers to your questions are going to be questions that I’m holding on to. But my constant question is, “How do I remain connected to the pulse, and then create the container of that reverberation of that pulse to folks who may not be connected to the pulse in the same way?”
Elizabeth
Yeah. This is classic. Let’s create a holding environment. Make sure there are diverse voices that we can elevate and provide space to. Don’t take all the work. Share it. Engage others in the work. There was something else you said about young people though. And I wonder as we’ve gone around to different states doing work where engaging students felt so critical and so important, in my experience and what continues to be my experience is that that’s a risk for adults. It feels like if there’s one area, well, there’s lots of areas now. One area that’s a through line from the before-times to the quaran-times, we really are talking about the risk of listening to young people.
Elizabeth
Which is always a surprise to me, because we all were young people with big ideas and wanted things to happen. And we weren’t stupid when we were young people. And yet, we get a little… Once we become adults, we do get a little afraid of what can happen when you trust young people to be the masters of their own destiny, to be the navigators of their own lives. So what can we do?
Leora
But that all has to do with our relationship with control. Sorry, I know I just interrupted you, but it really has to do with control, which is a completely understandable, very complicated relationship, especially in times where we feel out of control. So school environments are consistently… There is a lot of structural chaos, funding, policies, change. You’ve new communities, almost every three years, four years. There is shift happening all the time. Teachers coming in, teachers coming out, districts replacing this principal, district replacing that principal, this one getting moved to that department, this one.
Leora
There is constant change, and that can make the people feel wildly out of control. And that’s usually what do people then do in response? You find the one thing or the two things exactly to constrict in order to feel safe, because control has to do with power and safety. So all of it’s understandable, right? If a young person is telling me, “Actually the way that you’ve been defining crisis is not authentic for the way that I have experienced crisis,” that will then potentially have me rewire all my programming, all my budget, all the time, all of this, that’s really vulnerable. I interrupted you.
Elizabeth
No, I think what you said was really… It was very powerful. And what you’re talking about is, as a leader, you see your role to create that space, to make sure that the voices of young people, not only have a place, but they’re heard, that they have meaning, that they can continue to be in that space and challenge the norms of control and power even in a time when it doesn’t feel so safe. And I think that’s risky. That’s also really hard. And I definitely heard that. I have heard that a number of times from folks who are doing the really hard and really important work of coming to school, teaching on Zoom, all of the work that they’re doing. It’s really hard to be a teacher. And every teacher I meet tells me with those big eyes, “It’s really hard right now.”
Leora
It’s really hard. It’s hard. And if we think about it from an intersectional standpoint, which teachers are holding most labor at home and on the computer, it’s hard for a principal. The folks who are really not getting a lot of support or attention are now our administrators and principals. Like that middle actor is having to navigate different inputs from the district or the state, and then output. It’s really hard not to mention wildfire, not to mention hurricanes, not to mention a lot of unknowns. So it’s really hard. And I wonder about ways in which school communities can still revisit and re-examine, like we say, “With the new eyes of what it means to be in community with each other.”
Elizabeth
Yeah. I hope for that too. And an actually that’s a great lead into my winding down question, which is, you talked a lot about being able to still see, even in the space of fatigue and being overwhelmed and crisis, being able to, even for five minutes, get on that balcony and create vision. To see things that you haven’t seen before. To imagine what could be. What do you imagine what could be? In two minutes or less.
Leora
Let me get my other cup of Pete’s coffee. The quickness with which relics of structural oppression in the education system were dismantled in the pandemic was fascinating. SATs and ACTs, no longer necessary. It took two weeks, right? And that’s been something that a lot of folks have been championing for a very long time. So what it showed us, or… There’s so many examples of that. Different discipline policies, out the window, because now they’re irrelevant or actually weren’t even relevant before the pandemic.
Leora
There are so many ways that this moment has surfaced our core values. What we believe in, what we don’t believe in, who we believe in, who we don’t believe in. And it surfaced all of our vulnerabilities and all of our gorgeous strengths. And I think what I’ve been really holding onto in myself is that mindset of, “It is, because it always has been.” Versus what this time period has shown us, like, “No.” Action things could be dismantled pretty quickly, if they are harmful and not working for us in the moment or always. And so that can be really frightening for a lot of folks, again, back to that conversation with control.
Leora
But for me, personally, I’m like, “Man, what creative possibilities now might we have?” What openness might we have from folks, who may not have experienced openness before, to try on things that are a little spicier, to have conversations about what healing-centered work can add on to the trauma-informed center at work? What does it look like to structurally, not just tell educators to practice self-care and eat an apple and walk around the block and they’ll be okay. But structurally look at bereavement policies, structurally look at family leave policies, structurally look at the actual, the literal infrastructure that can hold up or hold back or hold down all of us from experiencing collective wellness and health and healing and recovery and renewal and all that good jammy jam jam.
Leora
So that’s my wind down, which you just now wound me up, because now I’m like, “Excellent.” But there’s… I think that’s the answer that I want to land on, which is like this last couple of months has shown us that nothing is forever, except our constant work, our lifelong work, our constant questioning, our constant growth.
Elizabeth
Who we choose to be as inquirers, who we choose to be in curiosity and courage, who we choose to be in service and in community and, Leora, I can’t think of a person I’d rather talk to about all of those things than you. And it has been so fun being your partner on the road.
Leora
I’ve learned so much from you, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth
Well, we learned from each other and that’s what’s been fun about this relationship and that’s what leaders do. Because none of us hold the only key. None of us hold the biggest key. And so throughout my career, I hope to be on the balcony with people who see things differently than I do, and aren’t afraid to say it. And I really appreciate you as being one of those people. And I really appreciate all that you’re doing for our schools and our students. Most importantly, our students.
Leora
Thank you for seeing me and seeing us and all the folks that I support. Thank you.
