Perspectives on Leadership in Early Education: Getting Underneath Feelings of Incompetence

In this interview, we talk with Ron Heifetz, King Hussein bin Talal Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership and Founder of the Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Heifetz’s research focuses on leadership practice and building the adaptive capacity of organizations and societies. We focused our conversation with Ron on the early education leader in the face of increasing demands, daily challenges, a press for improved quality, and working across differences. We especially discussed how leaders can better support educators to address the challenges that children bring with them into early education classrooms. Key excerpts from the interview follow here.

Nonie: Collaborating closely with early education leaders through the Zaentz Initiative has reinforced just how challenging the working conditions can be for the adults in this field. Burnout and attrition rates among educators are high, childhood stress and adversity are on the rise, and quality ratings suggest a lot of room for improvement. I’d love to focus on this kind of system while we talk.

Ron: I think it’s key to prepare people to work in contexts where people come from different backgrounds. Even then, teachers will often burn out because they are being asked to compensate for critical factors that are strained or failing in the ecosystem of the child (e.g., key relationships, environments, supports, services, and institutions that surround a child). So, we need to figure out what to do with teachers who are experiencing burnout. Like an athletic trainer looks at the shoes and calluses on the feet of a runner as diagnostic indicators of faulty mechanics, we need to look at the calluses of teachers, or burnout, as symptomatic because I don't think teachers start off thinking that they will struggle to help their students reach developmental milestones or academic benchmarks that are important for their progress.

Nonie: And these calluses develop over time.

Ron: Right, exactly. It is terribly difficult for people who love and care for children to face challenges and feelings of lack of competency and confidence in their work, particularly year after year. After a while, teachers may begin to externalize blame, make cultural or racial generalizations, or rationalize in some other way.

Nonie: Yeah. The locus of control is external. In other words, I start to distance myself from the meaning and/or the outcome of the work.

Ron: We sometimes see various narratives to rationalize—some of them racist—when instead what’s needed is to hang in there, face into the complexity of the situation, and address the ecosystem of the child. From my point of view, teachers and instruction are a key part of that ecosystem, but so are the peers, the parents, clergy and religious communities, and other key organizations—public, nonprofit and private—that hold and support families. I think people need strategies that prepare teachers and administrators to identify and coordinate this fuller ecosystem of the child. And, because children have different constellations of resources, we need teachers and administrators to be adaptive to the micro-ecosystem of each child, engaging resources beyond the classroom when needed.

Nonie: Right. We see the inequities in the system that reflect this pressing need. For instance, we know that black boys are suspended and expelled from preschools at higher rates than any other group of children.

Ron: I think this points to the entrenched ways that, though the Civil War may have ended the slavery of people, it did not bring justice to our land. Instead, racism became more widely distributed and institutionalized across America. I think it is important for our teachers to learn American history and not just cognitively learn about unconscious bias. We need to feel and imagine the lives of others. And until we do that, people will often resort to the most convenient narrative that will then justify an avoidant response, like suspension and expulsion.

Nonie: Yeah. All of the trusted adults need to have a shared mission.

Ron: Yes, and in addition, there is a lot of expertise to be developed. For example, we need to help people achieve the emotional and mental freedom to manage their multiple identities to ultimately better understand the relevant environment around a child. We want people to ask the right questions to find out what's happening, and observe the way their different identities are activated, depending on the social context, to limit inquiry. So often, people protect their loyalty to their identity group rather than renegotiate them, limiting their ability to listen across differences.

Nonie: You mean that we need to recognize when and why we might feel defensive or uncomfortable?

Ron: Yes. To stay in the game, stomach conflict, and listen hard for what's really going on around the circle surrounding a child, one needs the psychological freedom and skill to explore the unfamiliar places and people that make up that circle, that ecosystem of the child. For instance, this might look like adopting the mindset that all parents love their children. It might also involve suspending judgement about parenting, when discussing a child’s challenging behaviors with their parents.

Nonie: Yeah. And we need to wrap our hands a little more around the mindsets and the work of the adults in the system, to help them with the quality of the interactions and their positive support for children’s development.

Ron: I think that's right – and one option is to ask the early childhood educator, "Tell me about the kids with whom you're having trouble connecting." And then support educators to be inventive to figure out how to respond. Educators need diagnostic tools to inquire and assess the ecosystem of that child because educators see, hear, and sense a lot. The data the teacher sees first-hand with the child may be a foggy window, but it's not an opaque window.

Nonie: It’s really important for leaders and educators to be reflective in order to grow others. What else?

Ron: I think it's helpful to assume that educators want to help kids and don’t like to fail kids. And it’s frustrating and disappointing to feel stuck, to encounter one’s frontier of competence. To cross that frontier, people need to keep working and exploring in a zone of incompetence until they discover something new. Educators need to be supported through that trial and fail process of discovering what they do not yet understand about the ecosystem of children who challenge them; and then from that understanding, figure out how best to intervene to bolster any weak parts of the ecosystem, be it family members, other teachers, peers, or key community institutions (medical, faith, neighborhood services, etc.).

Nonie: It's this idea of well-held vulnerability—the trust that you can take a risk with other people in your group, that you can look less than perfect or not know what to do because you have confidence they care about you and your growth and “have your back”?

Ron: Yes. We need to bless the incompetence that comes with trying hard and failing and learning fast to try the next thing. We can bring to bear the instructional expertise that has been developed already to fill in many people's frontiers of competence, but beyond that, we need to create a collaborative space where educators can keep learning while in that zone of incompetence to engage the wider group of relevant parties in the life of the children that challenge us.

Nonie: Yeah, no question.

Ron: I think we’ve got to loosen the scar tissue, soften the calluses, and get back to that raw, elemental caring, drawing from it and staying true to it as we wrestle with situations when we don’t know what to do.

Nonie: This really aligns with the Zaentz vision that we need to think in psychological terms about the adults. It’s not just about developmentally appropriate approaches for the kids—it’s about the adults, too. Thanks, Ron, for your time and insights on leadership challenges in early education. We appreciate your perspective.

Please join us for our next blog, where we’ll hear from Lisa Lahey about the psychology of taking risks and how early education leaders can better understand behavioral barriers that get in the way of achieving their goals.