“A teacher can never put in a method what he does not have in himself.” -Emerson White

This is part 2 of this pair of talks from Jonas Sauder on orienting teachers to their work. Jonas speaks from a deep and passionate vision for education that has sustained and guided him over the past decades. It’s inspiring to hear him cast vision for teaching from a place of fullness and freshness.

In the first episode, Jonas laid out some basic concepts for teachers in forming healthy expectations for their work and their place in the community. In this episode, he delves into the need for and fundamentals of classroom management. Jonas is keen to emphasize that you don’t manage a classroom primarily by how you plan but through who you are. Especially for new teachers, that may feel daunting. Maybe even like a bit of a dead end. I hope you’ll find some language for how to communicate about both the more concrete and abstract components of effective classroom management.

Infused in this talk is a core understanding of children as persons, not pawns. Classroom management is about creating an orderly, nourishing environment for little humans not designing and maintaining some kind of machine.

Jonas closes with a few cautionary ideas on how to lose control of your classroom.

As you press into this new school year, may God give you grace to lead your team with clarity and joy.

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Preparation is vital to building solid momentum. Our next segment of four episodes will explore two areas that will play a huge role in the building or defeating momentum at your school this year. These two areas are orienting your teaching team and investing in healthy school culture. What do your teachers need to understand and prepare in order to succeed? In both August episodes, Jonas Sauder will address this question. In September, Gerald Miller and Richie Lauer will help us orient and deepen our leadership of our school culture.

Description

Many of you school leaders are in the process or will soon be onboarding new teachers. All of you are about to guide your team through a new school year. Perhaps your staff have experience, maybe you have someone starting their first year of teaching. How do you see your teachers, especially your new ones? What expectations do you have for them? How do you go beyond just helping them to feel good for the first weeks and set them up for a successful year?

Jonas Sauder has labored for decades in many levels of Christian education. Listen in as he addresses a group of new teachers and glean from his perspective as you lead your team through the opening days of this upcoming school term.

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What sources of motivation power the performance of your roles? Not only is perseverance a challenge, but it has so many imposters.

There are so many broken versions of true motivation that offer us a way forward just when we’re in a pinch or when we’re sitting in silence waiting impatiently for some fresh inspiration. It seems that it takes some suffering to strip away our ambition and expose our egotistic motivation. And it’s deeply unsettling to be left with what feels like nothing.

Perhaps you’ve been through this or are going through this even now. We require many rounds of training here. This talk explores three elements of the courage to endure.

John Coblentz offers these three sources of motivation that draw us towards what’s real, true, and beautiful. John has taught, led, pastored, and counseled in a variety of places. He now serves at Faith Builders and is part of the leadership of a church in Meadville Pennsylvania.

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What’s the link between our destination and our way? This is one of those things that is not difficult to comprehend but by all appearances, famously difficult to obey.

The way is often not apparent or is offensive to us. Or it may be that the way we have chosen is so precious to us that we have lost both the clarity and the concern about our destination. In any evet, it is improbable that we will choose the way of Jesus even if we affirm the goodness of his destination.

This is the situation that Mahlon Zehr addresses, exploring how these four virtues enable us to follow the way of Jesus.

Mahlon speaks as a farmer, educator, and writer from northern Oregon.

“A foolish man chooses his way and must accept his destiny, but a wise man chooses his destiny and accepts the way.” -Anon.

These are five questions that according to Steven Brubaker are essential for every school leader to help his school to answer clearly and to communicate relentlessly to everyone involved with the school.

When God has work he wants done, he looks for a person fit for the job. Obviously, there are many different positions that God fills when he forms a community of faith. School administrators and leaders are among them. Drawing from Ezekiel 22 and from his observations over 30 years in the conservative Christian school movement, Steven Brubaker identifies school leadership as one of the wider gaps in our communities and one that we’ve had trouble filling. Steven reflects on his experience as a teacher and administrator from the day he accepted his first job at a school at age 22. There he was tasked with both teaching and administrating. That first year he learned that he liked teaching. In the decades since he has developed a passion for administration as well. Clear and thoroughly communicated answers to these questions will go a long way to turning this gap into a strong part of the wall.

Like other speakers on this show, Steven warns us about the shallowness of a negative answer to the question of why we exist born out of our departure from the public schools. And if we do some hard work on that first question of existence, we are primed to form clear and powerful answers to the rest. God has sustained our schools with his grace. The questions that Steven unpacks here lay out a way for us to steward the tremendous resources that God has entrusted to us.

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What makes education distinctly Christian? Is this more a question of what it is or what it isn’t? But whatever we make of those questions, how do educators remain passionate about their mundane, sometimes thankless, often discouraging role in carrying this work forward? Anthony Hurst, who has over 25 years of experience in Christian Day Schools and currently works as school representative for Christian Light, offers valuable insight on these perennial questions.

School leaders, you’ve likely experienced just how quickly your own vision and motivation can fade. You are also in a prime position to renew the passion of the teams that you lead. Join Anthony in reflecting on what keeps the fire burning. As you listen to his ideas and insights, take note of memories and experiences this brings to mind.

How could you and your team tap into the experiences of the past year to renew your commitment for the next one?

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How do children develop? How do we give them the best chance of healthy development? The fact of the ocean of ink spilled on this question has not lessened the actual wonder of this process or the reality of its mystery.

In a presentation filled with stories and examples, Brandon Mullet explores the basic needs of children. Brandon speaks as an administrator, teacher, and parent.

He discusses themes such as:

This presentation was given over 25 years ago which highlights the reality that these issues are timeless. May you find them illuminating and orienting as you head into the summer and engage with the children in your life as well as reflecting on this past school year.

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How are your teachers’ root systems? If you have the opportunity, ask an arborist talk about root systems and about the tree planting and care process. From root hairs to mycorrhizae, it’s a fascinating world. But one that is mostly invisible to us and that tends to fall prey to our drive to control and manipulate what is visible to us. Melvin Lehman employs the metaphor of roots as he reflects on nearly four decades of teaching.

He did his first teaching back in the early days of the Christian school movement when he observed much rapid planting driven by the need to quickly fill the empty spaces in all the new classrooms. We have better opportunities for cultivating strong and healthy roots today. But of course, this is not automatic and there are plenty of pressing reasons for ignoring our root systems. As a school leader, you are in a position to model the development of healthy roots and to care for those of your team. Without them, as Melvin says, we will be unable to access and appropriate the resources around them, however rich and abundant they may be.

Here are some of the main recommendations that Melvin makes in his talk:

This episode was first published on The Dock as "Intentional Growth:" https://thedockforlearning.org/lecture/intentional-growth-melvin-lehman/ 

Does your school have mission, vision, and values statements? Who knows about them?

We’re probably all familiar with these three terms and in this episode, Merle Burkholder offers simple definitions and provides clear examples of each one to refresh our usage. He also suggests a variety of means to communicate these guiding statements so that they can become second nature for you and your people.

Merle brings many years of experience in church and organizational leadership including his work at Open Hands and Servant Institute. After working through definitions and examples of guiding statements Merle explains four elements of an organization that can be used to measure its health and life-stage from birth to death. It’s a useful grid for evaluating the health of a school. On that note, this episode echoes our last episode on evaluation. Merle proposes that, “People produce what you measure.” Clear guiding statements, particularly core values, give you an effective basis to evaluate your school.

Merle was addressing leaders of different types of organizations. Where Merle discusses the responsibilities of a leadership team and CEO in carrying the vision, I think we can insert the school board and administrator. You might consider going back to episode 14 by Steven Brubaker outlining the role of an administrator who works at the intersection of the various parties involved in a school.

Finally, it is possible for a school team to share a vision that is sufficiently vivid and understood to occasionally take away your breath and consistently guide your decision-making. May this strengthen your gains here or guide your steps in that direction.

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How do you know when you have a good year at school? When the people around you talk about having a good year or a bad year, what do they have in mind? As an administrator, it matters that you feel a sense of satisfaction or concern when things are actually going well or going poorly as the case may be. You play a key role in setting the tone for celebrating success and learning from failure. But you need to know what success looks like, and it’s often not enough just to trust your intuition. Further, Mark reminds us that we will never be effective evaluators if we are under the tyranny of only keeping up with what’s urgent. Effective evaluation requires clarity about our desired ends, attentiveness to our current progress, and scrutiny of our chosen methods.

Mark Kurtz speaks with a background in both teaching and administrating and also shares the connections that he’s made between raising strawberries and school children. Mark takes us through an overview of the who, what, and where to evaluate, offering a trove of penetrating questions for administrators and school boards.

You’ll hear Mark describe the four quadrants used by Steven Covey and others to develop time management skills. If this is new for you, use the link below to find a copy of this diagram and consider keeping it in front of you for the section near the beginning where Mark introduces these concepts and gives a few examples of quadrant one and two activities.

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Four Quadrants for Time Management

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People – Steven Covey: https://a.co/d/2D8FvBL