LDC: Mid-Year Reflection

For my mid-year Leadership Development Conversation, my manager asked me to write a speech that looked back on my first year of Fellowship and gave advice to incoming 2017ers. I want to keep it safe so that I can look back on it later in my journey, so I’m posting it here.

“No.”

She looked at me fiercely, shutting me down mid-sentence.

I was arguing with my co-fellow in my living room about Teach for India, disagreeing over whether it really did a good job of combating educational inequity. Her position was clear, that if didn’t. But I couldn’t look past what TFI had given me, and I said so.

Teach For India hasn’t done anything to help us, she continued. And if you look at the Fellows and PMs we’ve had, there have been too many cracks and full-on breakdowns that TFI didn’t even know about.

As I rose up to argue, she talked over me.

“It’s you,” she said. “It’s you who have shown me that we can create magic in our classroom. Not TFI, not PMs.”

I sat, humbled and unable to continue my argument. I didn’t know what to say. But I’ve thought about it since, and Aarti hit on a truth in our drunken argument that I’d never considered before.

This Fellowship is incredible. It allows us to be changemakers, to create magic for students who deserve to be wizards. It turns us into leaders. And if I were to give one piece of advice to the incoming Fellows, it would be to never forget that — we are leaders. It’s something I’ve tried to ingrain in my students, but an equally important lesson for Fellows. At the end of the day, we and our students create magic — no one else. And as much as people tell us about the support, the trainings, the resources, ultimately our success (and our failure) depends on us and us alone.

The broader implications of this, I think, are important. Being a leader in our classrooms and in education means that success and failure WILL happen. Taking risks for our kids makes failures inevitable. Leadership means plowing through when thinking questions didn’t improve Vivek’s reading levels. It means celebrating when Recipe for Reading did. It means believing in structures or values well before the work (mine still haven’t), but still compromising when things clearly aren’t working. And we don’t get to run away because things WE tried aren’t working.

So embrace failure. Accept failure. TFI spends too much time giving us things what to do about failure and how to move past it. But first, we have to learn to love it.