“Leading with love” in education: a cliche or a cure for what ails us?
Yesterday and this past weekend, as many Americans celebrated the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I noticed this phrase popping up in many education-related conversations: “Lead with love.” There’s even a viral video and a hashtag.
This year, as my middle students might say, I am here for all of it.
In some ways, the phrase “lead with love” has become my mantra for the year, in which I have resolved to teach, write, cook, and otherwise live from a place of love rather than fear.
However, it hasn’t always been this way for me.
A phrase like “leading with love” might have sounded clichéd to me before this year (and it does to me, sometimes, still!). In the past, I have figured, well, it’s easy to lead with love when you’re Oprah handing out gifts on your Christmas show; less so when it seems like your run-down workplace is designed to suck you dry emotionally.
Yet this is an idea that has been echoed back to me by many a mentor, even in such trying workplace settings. In fact, it seems to be common currency among the most resilient teachers I meet across all workplace settings, whether they are teaching preschoolers or college students, in private schools or public ones.
They may have enough pencils and books for all the kids in their classes, but none of these folks are working in what would be considered cush surroundings by my non-teaching peers. They’re not calmly checking the news while sipping coffee each morning, from their desks in some downtown startup where the snacks are free (though I’ve worked in places like that, and I know they can be challenging in their own ways). Brogrammers who brag about marathon coding sessions, accomplished with the support of high salaries and limitless free energy drinks, could still stand to learn something from teachers, who often spend 12+ hours a day giving high-stress presentations and writing high-quality, standards-aligned lesson plans, all while surrounded by flying objects and screaming children.
Teachers, especially those working with neglected and traumatized human beings, see real darkness daily. Nevertheless, the teachers I have interviewed who are successful seem to survive and thrive not because they have a limitless supply of energy drinks, but because they’ve decided to embody the light.
Successful teachers, the ones who emanate the kind of life-changing energy that rescues students and colleagues from despair, are love embodied. They are loving towards themselves, first and foremost; they are loving and present in their relationships; and they are loving and fearless in the actions they take within their communities.
Knowing this, believing deeply in the importance of embodying this stance, I have still struggled to follow their examples as a mid-career teacher. Working in many stressful settings as a journalist, a boss, a consultant, and now, an educator, I might have described my own past mantras as, well, a bit more hard-nosed than “lead with love.”
“Lead with data and research,” might have been a contender. (This is one I picked up in journalism school.)
Or “Lead with a process you have carefully researched and developed until it is airtight.” (This is one I learned from working in those downtown start-up settings.)
Or even, “Lead with the message that as a five-foot-tall woman in a sexist world, you are not to be f*cked with.” (I have my four-and-a-half-foot-tall mom to thank for modeling that one.)
While this year was an especially good one, work-wise–I had the opportunity to design and teach in inspiring educational programs all over New York City– I still felt low. Where was the sense of positivity, resilience and integrity I had witnessed in my heroes?
In fact, at the end of 2017, following a slew of health problems throughout the fall that seemed to coincide eerily with my biggest teaching challenges, I began to feel that I might actually be entering what Seth Godin terms The Dip. That is, a place of deep questioning, a stripping away of my original illusions and motivations about my intentions for self and career growth, and heart-pounding wonderings about where I needed to stick, and where I needed to quit. I wanted to climb out, but I didn’t know where else to go.
This is when I called Shanté.
Shanté is one of my aforementioned superheroes. At St. John’s University, she is an assistant professor of Black Literature and Culture. She sits on the board of The Journal of Hip Hop Studies. She writes widely about music, gender and queer theory, and the places where they intersect. And I have the incredible good fortune to have her in my corner as a meditation teacher. I met her through Shambhala NYC, a center for mindfulness whose name refers to a legendarily compassionate society in Tibetan lore, similar if not identical in spirit to Dr. King’s “beloved community.”
I asked Shanté to meet with me about my work in schools, and about my ever-more-tenuous grip on a positivity. I began our meeting by sketching out the details: My new students in the Bronx were funny, talented and passionate about social justice. I was invigorated daily by them. However, they were also struggling: as kids of color in a racist society, as kids coming from backgrounds of poverty and de facto segregation, as kids who had seen a million well-intentioned White teachers in high-turnover schools come and go without truly seeing them–or sticking around. As one such White teacher, unproven and unmoored in this new setting, I was also suffering alongside them.
Our main problem? We were having trouble listening to each other. When I spoke, they continued talking. When they argued with me, I often felt uncontrollably frustrated. Every day, I struggled to find my voice as a leader among them, to remind them of the norms they had developed together, to even believe in my right to do so. As a White woman facing a sea of Black and brown faces, I often wondered: who was I to take up space in the front while they “sat in the back,” literally and figuratively? Who was I to be the instrument of discipline and social conditioning in a society that already over-regulated the Black body, sometimes in lethal ways? What kind of role model could I be for them, given the fact that we did not go home to the same streets or go to sleep in the same kind of body?
I had even lost my voice during this process, my primary teaching tool and self-defense weapon. It was as if my body were refusing to aid and abet me as I bulldozed forward under the banners of “Lead with data and research, with a perfect theoretical process, with the message that you are not to be f*cked with.” In their stubborn uniqueness, their resplendent and difficult humanity, my students also refused to go along for the ride. They would not conform to my first mantra, poked a million holes in the second, and as teenagers, delighted in finding ways to disprove the third on a daily basis.
By the time Shanté and I sat down to meditate together, I felt as though I wasn’t simply teaching about the American Revolution in a historical context: I was witnessing a literal revolution unfolding in the present, both on and off the cushion–and somehow, after years of feeling beloved by my past students, I had become King George.
Shanté was careful, calm, ever the professional mentor–someone who knows how to call you in, not call you out. She validated my desire for more structure and more control in my teaching settings. Data, models, and rules can serve students, sure, but they also serve to protect us from the vulnerability that the work opens up in us.
However, it seemed apropos for Shanté to remind me of one of the primary concepts in Buddhism: the paradox of form and emptiness as two sides of the same coin. Discipline and creativity, structure and freedom: these notions were interdependent, not opposites.
Shanté reminded me that the opposite of structure was not chaos–it was spaciousness.
“I find in my own practice,” she told me, “that when I teach from a sense of spaciousness with regards to my students, rather than teaching from a place of structure, I have my best moments of teaching.”
This deeply resonated with me. As I mentioned, this is a message I have heard in different forms, from different teachers throughout the years. I nodded in agreement every time they told me. I wrote their words down. I may have embodied this notion instinctively a hundred or a thousand times since I began teaching. Spaciousness: the ability to let your students voice their choices, to help you design your lesson plans, to lead you with love to where they want to go.
This time, I was here for all of it.
But how could I begin to lead with love in a setting where there had already been so much struggle? How could I regain my students’ trust?
After our conversation, this phrase, “lead with love,” began to appear everywhere in my life, and the answers followed soon after. After the holidays, I decided to sign up for Breathe For Change, an organization that trains classroom educators in the practices of yoga and mindfulness. Though Breathe for Change enables participants to earn an official Yoga Alliance 200-hour Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT) certification, making it possible to teach “real” classes in yoga studios across the country, their mission is to encourage educators to take these skills back into the classroom, sparking positive change and a deepened sense of humanity in school environments. I hoped that through this program, I could build on my existing humble home practices of yoga and meditation, and learn how to take the ease and spaciousness I was cultivating there in my quiet apartment into the wider world, where things get a little more complicated.
During my first weekend of the training, the idea of “leading with love” was, of course, foregrounded in conversations and in our written materials. Hearing this phrase over and over again was a fitting way to kick off this past weekend of celebrating Dr. King’s work, which was so deeply grounded in love.
Following the training, I went back to school, to volunteer on Martin Luther King Day. I felt lighter, more energized, and ready to connect. Of all things, the project our school chose to do together with families was to create personal, empowering mantras, and to print them on posters that we could hang in our homes and communities.
The sentences we wrote together whispered themselves to me like poetry last night.
We are artistic Muslims.
We are young feminists.
Somos immigrantes orgullosos.
We are devoted mothers.
We are brave fathers.
Somos familias unido para amor.
We are families united for love.
I made one for myself, too. It read: Somos trabajores de paz. We are workers for peace.
In these mantras of love, I can start to see my way out of the Dip. I can start to see how I can begin to create more trusting relationships with my Black and brown students.
The way will be long–and in NYC, the commute will also always be long! But for me, the work to move from a place of fear to a place of love with this new group of students feels worthwhile and essential.
As Dr. King wrote in 1957, “Love is creative and redemptive. Love builds up and unites; hate tears down and destroys. The aftermath of the ‘fight with fire’ method … is bitterness and chaos, the aftermath of the love method is reconciliation and creation of the beloved community. Physical force can repress, restrain, coerce, destroy, but it cannot create and organize anything permanent; only love can do that.”
For myself and my fellow educators, trabajores de paz laboring for personal transformation through leadership and love, I offer this benediction, inspired by Dr. King:
Here’s to a year of experimenting with the love method, rather than fighting fire with fire.
Here’s to a year of fostering reconciliation and creation, not bitterness and chaos, in our classrooms.
Here’s to cultivating a sense of re-dedication to our shared work–that of building a more permanent monument to love, and to King’s legacy, in our own “beloved communities.”
I hope to continue to chronicle my journey of leading with love this year. And I hope you’ll follow along with me. If this post resonated with you, feel free to clap along–and to read along with me as I continue to figure out how to lead with love in 2018.
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