Finding the Right Balance

Erin Roche

Article

Finding the Right Balance

It isn’t a work/life balance. It’s a meaningful/drudgery balance—at school and at home. Here are ways to maximize meaning and minimize drudgery.

For school leaders, the demands of the job make a 40-hour work week impossible. We regularly work 50+ hours. At the beginning and end of the school year, it’s like tax season for accountants: 12-hour days and weekend work as well. There are simply too many emails, meetings, reports, and children and staff to attend to. We can’t just “turn off” an email or decide to just leave when the child that didn’t get picked up is still there and work is piled high.

For leaders looking to improve schools, the concept of work/life balance can be laughable. Rather, we should think of a balance between meaningful work and drudgery work.

Revisiting Daniel Pink’s Drive helped me to depart from the concept of work/life balance and instead guided me to his concepts of autonomy, mastery, and purpose throughout my waking hours—school, home, and life. For ease of thinking, I wrapped these three pillars (autonomy, mastery, and purpose) into one word: meaning. To increase my time on meaningful work and decrease my

time on drudgery, I charged myself with these two questions:

• How can I maximize my time spent doing meaningful work that leads to mastery for myself and my school and home communities?

• How can I minimize my time spent doing meaningless work?

Here are a few examples that might inspire in your days, increasing meaningful work and creating less drudgery.

Mastering a mentor program for new staff

For the past two years, teachers and I designed and piloted an in-house teacher mentoring program for staff new to the school. As a school principal, I never had time to mentor anyone, which we know is one of the most important teacherretention strategies; rather, drudgery ate up my time. In this new program, I contributed meaningfully to the teacher mentoring team in the construction and ongoing development of the programs.

Supporting teachers’ autonomy regarding a new math curriculum

A couple of years ago, a group of teachers came to me several times to complain about the inadequacies of our math curriculum. I was skeptical because our student learning was growing steadily, and I was leery to marshal limited teacher time and fiscal resources to analyze the current curriculum and search for a new curriculum. I was already time-stretched!

With teacher-leadership and a math consultant riding shotgun, the team did the heavy lifting and countless details. The math team and I met regularly in the beginning and then infrequently as the implementation year’s roots grew deep. Listening to teachers’ common complaints/concerns led me to build an autonomous coalition that addressed a significant change.

Revisiting my career purpose: How to visit classrooms efficiently and to energize me

Visiting classrooms is key for any school leader to have the pulse of the school, to get to know students and their learning, to celebrate with students and staff their successes, and to re-energize myself with a reminder of the reason I got into education—the delight of children exploring the world!

To stay on a path to visit each classroom about 40 times during the school year, I keep a simple chart of my classroom visit dates. With some 31 classrooms, that’s over 1,200 classroom visits! Don’t worry-- it’s doable. I committed to visiting 1-3 classrooms each time

I leave my office—coffee, meetings, and greeting student upon arrival. It is working, I’m hitting my mark.

That’s a serious investment for a timedeficit school leader. But it’s worth it because I have so much more credibility to connect with students, teachers, and

staff about problems and to congratulate them personally on their achievements. I tweet photos or post photos in the weekly family newsletter, which connects the school and classroom learning to parents and the outside world. I leave classrooms with lots of meaningful energy to tackle the drudgery.

Revisiting my parenting purpose: how to make time to travel

Months in advance, I connect with family and friends to see what travel plans overlap. Then I book the hotel and flight or train. When my 17-year-old son, Connor, wanted to visit colleges, he and my other son went to southern California for Spring Break, 2021. Five months later, Connor and I went to Boston for a long weekend to visit more colleges. With the plans set, I had no choice but to go and enjoy my family time.

Minimizing drudgery: getting to all those emails

I make sure that I set three times per day for about 30 minutes each to tend to all new emails.

• For urgent questions from staff, I answer immediately.

I leave classrooms with lots of meaningful energy to tackle the drudgery.

• For important concerns that could be led by other staff (Counselor, Case Manager, Grade Level Team), I loop in that leader to put the concern on their agenda. Such an email validates the importance of the sender’s concern while allocating time to address it by all the relevant team members.

• For emails from personalities who I know will turn the email into many exchanges, I schedule the response for the next day or 48 hours later. Typically in the email response, I empower the person to solve the concern. This slows down or often eliminates the response because they’ve already worked it out.

• For common answers, I extensively use google’s email templates. I have generic responses to position inquiries, reference requests, school

tours, congratulations to the staff for winning Donors Choose grants, and about 15 others. They vastly increase my email response rate, while still allowing me to personalize the email with a few word changes. The Gmail templates can be found in the “more options” (aka, three dots) at the bottom of an email you’re composing.

Minimizing drudgery: Don’t do others’ jobs

School leaders are capable and licensed to do just about anyone’s job in the school—from mopping floors to substituting in the classroom to administering assessments—but you shouldn’t. You have to have hard conversations with staff about their doing their work and your not doing it for them just because you can. Of course, spending five minutes cleaning the microwave while the staff is eating goes a long way in showing others that you care. That (very brief) drudgery is meaningful!

More ways to maximize meaningful time

My bucket list of books is shrinking as I listen to books on my bike or drive to and from school, while I do the dishes and laundry, and when I exercise. I’ve gone from reading a book every three weeks to reading four every three weeks. Try listening at 1.2 or 1.4 speed! I coordinate celebrations for students, staff, teachers, and families. I try to spend little time actually planning elaborate parties but rather quick, symbolic, and public acknowledgments—e.g., hallway plaques honoring National Board Certified teachers; cafeteria plaques of student teams who won Battle of the Books; and framed play programs from the Drama Club’s productions. I make sure that staff and teachers can thank each other in the weekly staff bulletin as well as calling out heroic efforts by the building engineer and parent volunteers in the weekly family newsletter. These celebrations refill my sense of purpose in my career choice.

I look for short personal interest connections—e.g., math problems or math jokes with the Mathletes Coach, biking paths with the cycling Sped Teacher, theater updates with the classroom assistant who doubles as an usher supervisor at a downtown theater, and common plights and triumphs of our own children at home. These personal stories matter.

When a staff member or teacher has a personal crisis, I double my effort to lower their stress level immediately by tapping into our school network to divide up responsibilities. In this way, I don’t burn out by taking on even more but do make sure that they feel their stress level

goes down because they don’t have to worry. They then have the autonomy to care for their crisis and then re-engage when they can. Their autonomy is meaningful to me.

Of course, my list and solutions fit my life and job contexts and don’t project to everyone. You’ll make your own list and find unique solutions or better ones. For some school leaders, the current position is simply untenable and the emotional and physical toll is far beyond the concept of finding purpose, mastery, and autonomy; those leaders should leave the organization to find one that has opportunities to find meaning despite long hours. In the end, we should enrich our short time on this planet with as much meaningful work and as little drudgery as possible. Erin Roche is the longtime principal of Prescott School in Chicago Public Schools and led schools for almost two decades. He also serves as the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy and a school administrator representative to the Illinois Balanced Accountability Metrics Committee. Erin completed his Ed.D. at Vanderbilt University with a collaborative study on PLCs in the Louisville system, and he currently co-leads a PLC with Chicago principals on operationalizing change based on equity audits. He is a National Board Certified Teacher (EA-ELA). Erin’s school leadership interests are teacher-leadership empowerment, operationalizing grading for equity, and data-driven instructional improvements. He can be reached at eroche@cps.edu.

In 2014 when IL ASCD reorganized our leadership team, the role of Area Representative was created. Our “Area Reps” as we call them are a link to and from the various regions of our state. IL ASCD follows the same areas established by the Regional Offices of Education.

Our Area Reps are led by two members of our IL ASCD Board of Directors, Denise Makowski and Andrew Lobdell. Denise and Andrew are the Co-Leaders of our Membership and Partnerships Focus Area.

Denise Makowski

Chicago 773.535.7252

dmakowski@cps.edu

Andrew Lobdell

Principal of the Junior High School in the Lena - Winslow School District # 202 815.369.3116

lobdella@le-win.net

AREA 1: (Green)

Current Area Reps

AREA 2: (Dark Blue) AREA 3: (Yellow) AREA 4: (Pink) AREA 5: (Light Blue) AREA 6: (Gold)

April Jordan Jennifer Winters Chad Dougherty Heather Bowman Kelly Glennon Annette Hartlieb Vacant

Contact information for them can be found HERE.

The roles of the IL ASCD Area Representatives are:

• Encouraging IL ASCD membership to educators in their local areas; • Assisting with professional development; • Attend board meetings and the annual leadership retreat, when possible; • Disseminating information from IL ASCD board meetings or other sanctioned IL ASCD activities to local school districts or other regional members • Being a two-way communication vehicle between the local IL ASCD members regarding IL

ASCD or any educational issues. • Keeping IL ASCD Board of Directors apprised of pertinent information regarding personnel issues (e.g., job vacancies, job promotions) and district program awards/recognition within the local area. • Communicating regularly with IL ASCD Executive Director and the Co-Leaders of the

Membership and Partnerships Focus Area.