My current online course aims at helping students discern the nature of particular educational approaches. One aspect of that exercise is to discern how context influences what constitutes learning and education (and therefore, the roles of teacher-pupil or teacher-learner, master-apprentice, sensei-disciple, etc.). It doesn’t take long for most students to make the distinction that school is school but church is church (community).

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I recently received an e-mail from a friend who is doing self work. He asked:

I was just wondering if you thought attaining a higher level of differentiation of self lends itself to becoming better able to manage or not get pushed around by ones feelings. I hope this question is not too vague, it’s just something I need to get better at so I’m not letting my emotions/ reactivity dictate my actions.

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I met a rare kind of person last week. He was what I’ll describe as a genuinely intelligent person. There are plenty of smart or knowledgeable people around, and given that I spend a lot of time around “academic types” I run into a lot of them from all fields. But there’s a difference between being merely smart, and being truly intelligent. And often it takes meeting a genuinely intelligent person to learn the difference.

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Bringing about organizational change isn’t rocket science, but it’s not easy either. Those who step into a leadership position that requires engaging in institutional and organizational development in effect and by default will need to bring about changes on several levels: administrative, cultural, organizational, relational, and in processes and structures. In other words, institutional development is systemic. It requires addressing change in everything all together at the same time.

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I’m just beginning to gear up to teach the educational philosophy course during J-term. It’s a course I enjoy teaching and one I think of critical importance in the training of “real educators” for the church. There is some frustration in holding the conviction that philosophy is critical to one’s effectiveness as an educator, and living into the pragmatic limitation of being able to teach only one educational philosophy course during a three week J-term. But sometimes one does the best one can with what one has (how’s that for a philosophy?).

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I’m delivering another presentation on leadership this week. Sometimes an invitation to speak comes with the requirement to follow the theme of the conference or event. That’s a hit-or-miss prospect. I thought we were gratefully past the millennial-themed emphasis (leadership in the new millennium, etc.), but apparently not. The invitation was to speak on “leadership in the 21st century.” The dilemma for this speaker is that I don’t think the “new century” is a factor of significance in thinking about leadership. The point being that it misses the point.

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I’m becoming a fan of Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, former president of George Washington University. In a recent entry in The Chronicle Review (of the Chronicle of Higher Education) he talks about vision and the predilection of leaders to (over)use metaphor.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

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For some years I’ve been working with a group of teachers who have been motivated to improve their courses and their classroom performance. These teachers were in a teaching in-service seminar I gave some years ago (almost a decade ago!). It was one of those rare experiences when everything seemed to click: the right people in the same room at the same time sharing the same interest and serendipitously finding the right seminar. A small group from this seminar has continued to pursue their work of becoming excellent teachers, and it has been gratifying to see.

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