Author Archives: David Truss

I teach leadership not followship

It was my second year as a teacher and my Vice Principal pulled me aside late in Semester 1 and asked me if I’d be interested in teaching a couple leadership classes instead of Physical Education as my electives in Semester 2. I think another teacher was slated for this and it was a change he wanted to make. He told me that it would be a great opportunity for me because I would co-teach it on Day-1 with an experienced teacher, and then on my own with another class on Day-2. He made it seem like I’d be doing him a favour saying yes, but I thought I was the one getting a golden opportunity offered to me. And it was!

The teacher I got to work with was Dave Sands. Dave became my first mentor, and to this day one of my most valued friends. We meet weekly for walks and today we were talking about old times and I brought up how much this opportunity transformed my teaching career. I ended up doing my Masters thesis on Student Leadership, and a large part of my leadership philosophy was developed from this opportunity.

“I teach leadership, not followship.” 

This was a quote Dave often said to students. It was the mantra of the course, and something not just said, but lived. Dave would run activities and lessons that encouraged students to pull the lesson out on their own. And whenever there were activities run by the class, they were authentically student run. There would be a prompt, “Here’s what we need to do,” or “Let’s plan this event,” then students would design the activity or schedule, then after then event there was always a reflection afterwards.

Students ran the events. Students stepped up, tried new things, succeeded and sometimes failed… but they always had ownership, and always learned from their experience. When Dave left, it left a void that I felt I couldn’t fill on my own. I distributed the leadership of student leadership across other teachers and we developed an out of the schedule leadership program that about 1/3 of the Grade 8’s signed up for each year. As it grew, so did the distributed model of giving others leadership over different aspects of the program.

From my Master’s paper:

“Leadership is getting others to do What the group needs to get done, Because they want to do it.” …

A Working Definition of Leadership

Before being able to investigate what meaningful student leadership is or can be, there needs to be some consideration as to what leadership itself is. It is evident that any currently usable definition of leadership would in fact be very different than a usable definition from only thirty years ago. Senge (1990) sees the traditional leader of the past as the charismatic decision maker and/or the hero. In this view, myths of great leaders coming to the rescue in times of crisis perpetuate the view of leaders as heroes, and “they reinforce a focus on short-term events and charismatic heroes rather than on systemic forces and collective learning” (p. 8). Senge sees current leaders in a different light, he sees them as, “designers, teachers, and stewards. These roles require new skills: the ability to build shared vision, to bring to the surface and challenge prevailing mental models, and to foster more systemic patterns of thinking” (p.9). These new skills require leaders to be thinkers and learners.

The quote I started this paper off with is an adaptation of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s quote, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” I adapted this quote several years ago to better fit with the times as well as to fit with my own ideas of shared leadership. The focus on a ‘top-down’ leader in Eisenhower’s quote was very appropriate for its’ time, however, today it is more fitting for a leader to be concerned with the group’s or team’s goals.

The quote, subtly but poignantly reworded, states, “Leadership is getting others to do, what the group needs to get done, because they want to do it.” Within this quote there is: a suggestion of influence, getting others to do a task; a suggestion of service, aiding the group rather than just the leader; a suggestion of inclusion, doing what the group wants; a suggestion of teamwork, working within a group; and, a suggestion of motivation or inspiration, getting people to want to assist you or the group. A lot of literature on student leadership focuses on the first three points, influence, service and inclusion. Literature focused specifically on either teamwork or motivating others, as principal themes, tends to relate to managers, primarily in the realm of business and not nearly as much in education.

In considering a definition of leadership that functions well when considering student leadership in a middle school, I think that leadership pertains to getting students to be of service to others, while teaching them to effectively influence and motivate others. This can be successfully accomplished when students work in inclusionary groups or teams that create and take advantage of opportunities to act as servant leaders.

Creating leaders, not followers. That’s the underlying lesson. Too often leaders run activities such that they are the lead and those around them follow. “Students we need to… and we need people in the following roles… and here is the ‘to do’ list… and …and …and.”

It’s more than just a subtle shift to change this to providing students with an authentic leadership opportunity.

Prompt: Here is the task/activity/opportunity. How shall we do this?

Activity: Authentically planned and organized by students.

Reflection: How did it go? What went well? What could have been better? What would you do differently if we did this again?

Empowering students. Letting them lead. Teaching leadership, not followship.

Memory Lane

I had an absolute blast yesterday as I continued the purge of my garage. I got into some old albums (that I’m definitely keeping) and had an absolute hoot recalling different memories. My youngest one was actually remembering this cake.

Even though it’s a black and white photo and I’m only turning 4, I can remember the colours and texture of the cake, and how perfect the lines were between the colours. It looked fake.

I loved seeing old photos of my family, and especially with my grandparents.

And I often forget how much fun it was having a baby sister that was 14 years younger than me.

The fishing trips with Gus, (and Dino).

Then there were the adventures, like the fashion show my buddy Jerry talked me into doing with him in university.

Weddings.

And adventures like coaching this awesome team, including an outrageously bizarre road trip down to Ft Lauderdale.

Wonderful memories of China with my family.

And even a few pictures of staff from my early teaching days.

Not every shot was a memory, I don’t remember this photo being taken, but it cracks me up wondering what I could be so upset about?

Oh, so many captions could go with this picture!

On the topic of memories, I found these:

And also many, many CD backups of files and photos. It made me wonder how many photos I have taken that I’ll never look at again?

The weirdest thing was throwing away hundreds of wedding photographs that I took, photographing over 100 weddings. These were all duplicates because I not only gave the bride & groom the negatives, I also gifted them an enlargement of any photos I kept of them. Still, tossing hundreds of memories of other people away feels strange, although keeping them with no reason to do so also didn’t seem right.

I had such a wonderful time reminiscing over old photos and memories yesterday, it made me think that I should plan intentional trips down memory lane with my family and friends… while also making plans to create new photo-worthy memories.

The purge

Our garage was a mess before our big renovation, and since then it has been an absolute disaster. A couple days ago we threw out a lot of garbage. Yesterday I started cleaning out boxes I’ve had stored for years. The last time I did go through them, I just went down a nostalgic path and kept everything. This time I purged.

I was pretty ruthless. I took a few photos of things, but I also dumped a lot, including photos too. I realized that if these things have stayed in boxes for 15 or 20+ years already, why keep them in a box for another 20? It’s not going to get easier moving them around at 74 years old.

Besides, I just don’t feel attached to ‘stuff’ anymore. Here’s an example:

I wore #13 in high school, and when the school got rid of the reversible caps and got a set with ear protection, the coach gave me my number… that was 1985 and I still have it. The blue & white #9’s and red suit were from the Maccabiah games in Israel… that was 1993. Well now I have that photo above and the items are off to the dump. These, and many other items that would otherwise end up in a box for many more years, have now been tossed out.

Some of the more unique items I dumped: the rough start of a script for a water polo movie; A collection of tacky owls that my grandmother bought for me over many years because she knew I liked owls (these were sold by my wife on Facebook marketplace for a whopping $40); Wedding albums I used to promote my wedding photography business (I gave enlargements of any photos I kept to the couple, and they got all the negatives, so I wasn’t throwing away anything unique); Animal bones… So, this probably needs an explanation… No I wasn’t a kid who tortured animals and kept their bones, I travelled all through the southern US with my dad and kept some pretty neat skulls I found on our adventures.

Stuff.

Stuff I’ll never use. Stuff I don’t need. Stuff that doesn’t need to sit in my garage for another decade or two.

I’ll keep a few items. Books I find hard to part with, and other nostalgic articles, but what was 6 or 7 boxes will probably become just one. Still just stuff, but a lot less of it.

Deep space

A year and a half ago I wrote, ‘Limits of time, space, and intelligence‘ where I stated,

We are not alone in the universe. Our insignificant planet, in an insignificant solar system, in an insignificant galaxy, in an insignificant part of the universe, can’t be the only place intelligent life exists. So where are the aliens? Why haven’t we discovered them or why haven’t they discovered us?

Yesterday breathtakingly beautiful images were released from the James Webb Space Telescope.

The 6-pointed, flared stars are just that: stars. They develop those flares as a byproduct of glare and the design of the telescope. But every other glowing ball or disc is a galaxy. A galaxy with billions of stars inside of it. That’s so hard to fathom. Furthermore, the first of the 3 images above is a section of the sky that, if you held a single grain of rice at arm’s length away, the rice would cover the area of sky that image is looking at.

Some of the distant blurs are actually galaxies that formed near the start of the universe. The light we see is not just millions, but billions of years old… almost 10 billion years before our solar system was even formed. Many of these really distant sources of light might no longer exist, but it would take another billion plus years for us to even know, because the light from the catastrophic end of the galaxy won’t reach our planet until then.

I’m convinced that if so many galaxies exist in one tiny part of the sky, each with billions of stars, some of them must contain intelligent life. Our Milky Way galaxy alone has somewhere between 100 billion and 400 billion stars. Even if intelligent life is so rare that we are the only ones in our galaxy, the odds that we are the only ones in the universe would be greater than someone winning a lottery daily for 20 days. (I’m making this figure up, I didn’t do the actual math, but I think that’s a low estimate.)

I still don’t think we will learn of intelligent aliens in the next hundred years, but with new high definition images coming from the James Web telescope, we can peer further into our universe. We can marvel at the vastness of space, the variety of galaxies, and even find out more about possible life-sustaining planets. We might not be able to find intelligent life, even knowing it’s likely out there… but we will be able to look deeper into space, and farther into to past of our universe… and that is both beautiful and exciting!

Chores with headphones

Yesterday I cut the grass and cleaned out my hot tub. Two boring jobs that aren’t hard, but take a bit of time to do. I did them both with headphones on, listening to a spy novel series I’ve been enjoying the past couple weeks. I was able to listen to the last couple hours of book two and then start book three.

It’s amazing what a shift in attitude I have towards menial jobs when I’m listening to a book. Music doesn’t do this for me, but a good book or long format podcast does. Suddenly the job is a physical distraction that allows me to keep my focus on what I’m listening to. I find it hard to sit and do nothing for too long while listening to a book. I also can’t do something that involves a lot of thinking while listening to a book or my mind wonders and I need to rewind and listen again.

Simple chores (and driving) are the perfect things to do when listening to a good book or podcast. I enjoy doing the task more, and I enjoy the book I’m listening too as well. It’s my chores equivalent to pairing a good wine with dinner… it makes both things more enjoyable.

Easy distraction

I’m finding my phone to be a painfully easy distraction that’s sucking away too much of my time. I need it to write this post. I need it to meditate. I need it to listen to music while I work out. I need it to listen to my book. These are all legitimate reasons to ‘need’ my phone.

I don’t ‘need’ it beyond that, but it still ends up in my hands, it still takes my attention. It still sucks time out of my day.

I’m realizing that I need to put it down more, tuck it away more, leave it alone more.

Less phone, more life beyond the screen.

Weeding

I spent some time weeding my in-laws garden yesterday. I put on headphones and an audiobook, and just went to work for a few hours. It’s not a job I have to do often and so I enjoyed the process, but I wouldn’t enjoy gardening every day and weeding all the time.

It’s interesting to see how weeds can really blossom when they find a space to grow and spread. They can take over a section of a garden, spreading far faster and wider than the intended flowers, creating a root system that ensures their return unless the entire plant is removed.

I think addiction is like that in the mind. It takes over a part of the brain and takes root. You can try to remove the addiction, you can do some addiction weeding, but if there are roots of it left behind, you relapse and the addiction returns.

I’ve only ever met one person who had an addiction who I think got all the weeds out. He was not someone who had to fight the addiction daily, he didn’t have to do any more weeding. I asked him about this and he said he filled the space that the addiction held. He planted new seeds.

He found a way to fill the deep seeded needs the addiction gave him. For him it was love, of family and life, which brought him more joy than the addiction. He grew a new garden that prevented the weeds from taking root.

I have not dealt with addiction, I have not had to fight the battle that others fight daily… but I wonder if the idea that every day you must weed out the addiction is the best model? Are there ways to plant new gardens so the old weeds can’t take hold?

There are some therapies that seem to be able to do this, like the guided use of psychedelics, which seem to rip all the weeds out; Which rewire the brain so that weeds can’t grow where they used to take root.

I know programs like the 12-step program work and have saved many people from addictions, but they are designed to teach you that you must weed daily for the rest of your life… I wonder what other ways there are to weed, such that life can go forward with new healthy roots that reduce the need for daily work?

Any easy question to ponder when you aren’t the one that has to do the weeding every day.

Undershooting Your Potential

“If you’re always right, you’re not learning.

If you’re never failing, you’re not reaching.

The objective is to be right. The objective is to succeed.

But if you’re always winning, you’re undershooting your potential.” ~ James Clear

I’ve written about this as it relates to school a number of times… but I like this slant of ‘undershooting potential’. Our school system is filled with smart students who know exactly what to do to get ‘A’s. They jump the provided hoops, they strive for the 95%, rather than 88, or 90. They complain to the teacher about the 96% because they want 98. They know how to play the marks game, and yet they are nowhere near their potential.

No, I’m not saying that their potential is actually 100%… I’m saying the entire system allows them to underperform. They do a dance to earn an extra 2-3%, they read and re-read the criteria to make sure they hit all the targets, they spend an extra hour editing their work. But that work is nowhere near their potential. They are doing work that shows their answer is right. They are proving they can succeed at the task. They are winning at the good marks game, but they are undershooting their potential.

They are answering the same questions as their peers, they aren’t developing their own questions.

They are responding to questions that have a clear and definitive answer, they aren’t trying to solve complex problems with no clear answer.

They are following textbook experiments with pre-defined procedures which have been replicated thousands of times with the same results, they aren’t testing their own unknown variables.

They aren’t trying something epic and failing. Back in 2009, in a post called, Chasing the ‘A’, I quoted Bud Hunt,

“In no way am I suggesting getting good grades is a bad thing; that would be foolish. Getting good grades is not the problem. Allowing grades to dictate one’s life is.

Grades don’t guarantee success.

Passion + Determination + Positive Attitude = Success

I’ll give you an A if you transform the world.”

When you chase marks, good marks are the goal. Many students can play that game without really hitting their potential. The problem isn’t wanting good grades, these are still needed to pursue future dreams. The problem is a system where students always succeed without knowing what their potential is. I’ve said before that this is an injustice:

Every student will encounter failures later in life, ‘in the real world’, so if we don’t challenge them in school, we have not given them the tools to face adversity later on. The question we have to ask ourselves is, “Are we challenging students enough, so that they are maximizing their learning opportunities?” 

The pursuit of an extra couple percent on a cookie-cutter assignment with uniform cookie-shaped answers is a system designed to allow students to undershoot their potential.

Students need to design their own learning challenges, and learn to fail and to overcome those failures along the way.

More on faith and evil

A couple days ago I wrote: The paradox of religion, and this morning Miguel Guhlin responded with an insightful post: Skirting Paradox. I encourage you to not just read the post, but also to follow the links… grab a coffee and dig in, if you have any interest in faith and religion, this is a piece you’ll want to read and reflect on.

Here is my comment response, but it does not stand alone, it sits in reflection to Miguel’s thoughts and ideas and if you choose to read only one of the two, read Miguel’s thoughts above rather than mine below.

—

Miguel, thank you for sharing such an insightful post! It took a while to read because I paused to go to every link. I appreciate your links to scripture and your perspective on them. I wrote this back in March, From Faith or With Faith.

In honesty I did not remember writing this when I wrote the post above… the consequence of writing every day is that I often repeat concepts months later, not remembering what is unexpressed versus written thoughts in my mind. But the slant in the link is a little different, less harsh, less of an attack on religion (which I was concerned about, but you saw through in your response). This previous writing reminds me of a conversation I recently had with a religious colleague, whom pre-covid I often spent time with speaking of and about religion. In this conversation I said to him at one point: (paraphrasing) 

When I share my atheistic points, they are not intended to convert you. I do not perceive atheism as a religion to adopt, simply a lack of religion… there is no intent to change your mind on your faith… in fact I see how your faith grounds you and I see no benefit in you not believing what you do. 

But that is a conversation between two educators, two public school principals, both of whom do not share their religion/beliefs with students. This does not change the ideas above that you succinctly reduced to:

“What religion does to support good people is grossly outweighed by what [evil] it does.”

That is the thesis statement. That is the problem today, be it with evangelical beliefs on abortion versus the liberty of women over their bodies in the US; Or warring Shiites versus Sunnis in the Middle East; Or Chinese versus Tibetans in Asia; Or… Or… Or… the list is almost endless. Why would a benevolent, all-knowing, and un-interfering God want His/Her worshippers to impose their beliefs on others? When two people of differing faiths squabble, no finger of God comes waving down upon one of them. When that squabble leads to the use of swords or guns, no hand of God shields the supposed Righteous One. Instead, Man’s evil against Man is shed, and the God they love is no longer represented in their actions.
And there in lies the problem of religion, it does not remain in the ‘respective closets’ you mention. Instead, it manifests in hatred of the heathen non-believers. In fact, the wrath of God on non-believers in scripture is what turned me away from religion. I wondered as a teen, “What kind of cruel God would do this?”
~ Coffee after Class

“What religion does to support good people is grossly outweighed by what [evil] it does.”

Faith in God will not ever end, but maybe we can find a humanist… (I fear saying Humanist with a capital ‘H’, for this too can become dogma worth fighting to protect)… maybe we can find a humanist approach to faith that invites love of life and liberty, dialogue not conflict, and faith without evil.

Thanks again for your insightful reflection.

Summer mode

There are still a few things I need to do before I go full into summer mode. Most I’ll get done this week, but a few items will drag into next week. But I’m already feeling distracted and like I’m slowing down. I don’t feel very efficient right now.

Part of this is the routine woes that I already spoke about. I have tried to keep my routines, but it’s 6:30am and I’m usually done writing and meditating by now. I’ve already pushed my workout later in the day twice and missed a workout this week, and it’s only Thursday.

Part of me knows it has been a long year and I’m partially checked out, which is easy to do going to a building where there are no students or teachers, and even my secretaries have been relocated for summer. Part of me feels like I’m just being lazy. No matter how I look at it, I’m less productive than I should be. Yesterday I checked two things off of my ‘To Do’ list and I added two more. Today I hope to add nothing new and just check off a few more.

One item I’m excited to do will have to wait. It’s a series of lessons I’m developing based on James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. I want to create 10 two-to-three minute lessons to run over 2 weeks, with a goal of students starting a good habit that they decide on. My whiteboard in my office has had most of the concept and plan on it all year, but I really need some uninterrupted planning time to get it from idea to reality, and my ‘to do’ list is too big of a distraction right now. Still, I’m excited to get this ready for September, and I know I’ll be coming into my office to get it done over the break.

But for right now, I need to stay in work mode and get stuff done. Summer holidays won’t feel like holidays until I can put my ‘away from office’ notification on my email. Until then, I need to push summer mode to the side.