Educational Leadership - October 2009

entering the realm of strategic planning, and the result was a lower level of genuine contributions, to the detriment of the climate at the retreat. When an activity unwittingly trespasses into what can be perceived as school business, participants tend to switch to their professional mode.

Ensuring Institutional Openness

When a school opens up spaces for profound reflection, the result is often the recognition of wounds within the organization. If the school does not take steps to heal those rifts, the whole initiative may become divisive and self-defeating.

Therefore, it makes no sense to foster self-reflection among teachers unless the school as an organization commits to a parallel process of soul searching. Some of our activities have, indeed, uncovered hard truths about our school, which we

Wholeness is
the key to 21st
century education.

have taken into account in reviewing some of our processes, including staff appraisal.

Shared Leadership A major spinoff of our program has been the opportunity to identify potential leaders. Many activities at our retreats involve small-group reflections.

When we started identifying leaders to coordinate these reflections, we found ourselves looking for those among the staff who best epitomized the emotional and spiritual components of our school mission statement, which calls for “nurturing students’ intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual dimensions.”

Thus, the alternate environment of the retreats gave us a different starting point for discovering leaders. It opened our eyes to the fact that the academic and intellectual traits that are conventionally regarded as the preeminent indicators of leadership potential sometimes emerge only after the person has been given the chance to exhibit those traits in a different environment. In our case, some staff members whose positive traits we might otherwise have missed have subsequently moved on to formal leadership positions. Others

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