I've decided to start doing some occasional posts on books I read or listen to on my commute to work. Recently I finished listening to Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Willink and Babin are former Navy SEALS who have created a consulting firm (see Echelon Front) and accompanying book to apply the leadership skills they've learned and taught as leaders in their unit, Task Unit Bruiser, to leadership roles in the business world and beyond.
The book follows a 3 part format of first telling a story from their tours in Iraq or training as SEALS, then teaching a principle learned from the experience, and third an application to the business world where through their consulting business they applied the principle to help their clients improve in their desired needs.
The books is great. I highly recommend it. First and foremost, I have an even greater appreciation and respect for our Navy SEALS. It's common for us civilians to say thank you for the commitment and sacrifice our men and women in the armed forces give for our country, but the stories the authors tell and the passion you hear in their voices, make me feel we should be doing even more to thank them for their service. I am in awe of not just the sacrifices, but the passion they have to be the absolute best they possibly can for their teams, their country, and their families. I've always known SEALS were bad ass, but they're not just great at dominating the battlefield, they embody what it means to be the absolute best you can possibly be, and because of this they are superior on so many levels. We have a lot to learn from them.
So why am I writing on this blog, about education?
Their book is mostly about leadership principles, and the application is exclusively tailored to the business world, but I think there is a lot of overlap with leadership hierarchies at the school level as well as the application of teaching leadership practices. After all, our students will undoubtedly grow up to be leaders. We should help them become the best leaders they can me. Below are some of the topics they teach in the book, and I'll discuss the connections I've made to education and some the ideas I have for my class.
Extreme Ownership.
The title of their book, and the foundation of it all, extreme ownership is a practice that means as a leader you have to take ownership of everything in your world. If you have a problem with your boss, it's not their fault. It's because you haven't made it clear to them what you need. If your team fails at something, it's because you didn't create the systems and plans to guarantee success. Don't make excuses. Take ownership of everything. And if you do this well, your subordinates will take on the attribute themselves. Good leaders who exhibit extreme ownership, breed a culture of extreme ownership.Teacher vs. Administrator
I think this is a huge lesson for me as a teacher. I have totally blamed administrators before for not supporting me, or other teachers, in one thing or another. Did I ever go to them and explain the problem from my perspective? Was I assertive and made my case known? No. And I think a lot of us do this. It's very easy to play the blame game, but administrators are detached from the classroom and because of the nature of their job, are going to miss things. It's up to us as the educators with firsthand knowledge of the situation to make our needs known up the chain of command.
Group Projects
I just finished a big group project in my bio class. Students were working in groups of 4 and were tasked with making a 5 minute video about an ecosystem of their choice and corresponding threats to it. I tend to make my group work very egalitarian and this year I really scaffolded the group work so that they would plan out daily tasks for each person and set benchmarks for their team. I tried to create a team contract that would force them to work equally. For many this helped, and it was a big improvement from past years, but inevitably you get group work that ends up like this:
I had a student come talk to me on the day it was due who was basically the guy on the left. She tried so hard to collaborate with her team. They had agreed on an equal share, yet some didn't do their job completely. As an instinctive leader she tried to help to take up the slack and do more, but in the end she just burned herself out, felt taken advantage of, and the group still didn't do all they were supposed to do.
Her and I had a good conversation, and I had to explain to her the key thing about leadership and one that the SEALS know all to well, being a leader, and taking Extreme Ownership, does not mean doing all the work. It means that a leader must be assertive. They must communicate exceptionally well with their team and let their needs be known. Letting group-mates walk all over you is your fault, not theirs. As I said, she was an instinctive leader, but she has not yet learned this key understanding.
Take away: Create leadership opportunities in the classroom.
The book and the discussion (which I feel like I have repeatedly every year) has really made me wonder about creating more leadership opportunities in my class. I do believe students need to learn to work in groups with equal stature as these are often the kinds of groups kids will collaborate in as adults in the workplace. Yet, I think they should also have opportunities to be a leader as well as work in a group with a leader. They should be given opportunities to have autonomy and take ownership for a group. But if we do give these opportunities, they should be done incrementally in environments were they feel challenged and pushed, but allowed to fail and learn from their mistakes. The SEALS spend months training and creating scenarios that will help their leaders learn these lessons before they go on to the battlefield. I feel like we should be doing the same.
Student Roles/Decentralized Power
The authors also talk about the importance of decentralized power. A key point: Leaders can't really control more than 6 people effectively. This underscores the importance of spreading leadership roles out so that a leader isn't spread so thin trying to manage too many people. Man isn't this truth? Think about how hard it is to control a big class and ensure everyone is learning. It's not possible. Kids fall through the cracks. What if kids had the opportunities to really help each other and complete the mission together (which I determine as the leader)?
In a way I have been headed in this direction for the last year. At the start of this year I created several roles for the class in my effort to have a more collaborative, student-centered, classroom that was less dependent on me as their source of learning. Despite my best efforts, some of the roles have just not worked. I think it's because those roles were not really leadership roles, and kids didn't really have autonomy or the opportunity to take extreme ownership. Next year I want to rework these roles. Since I have groups of 4, perhaps each time I do a new seating chart a group will be assigned a group leader, and every student will have the opportunity over the course of the year to be a leader. The trick will be to think about the tasks they'll be responsible for, and the scaffolding I will need to provide throughout the year to teach leadership attributes, so that person doesn't just become a dictator who delegates and becomes overbearing, but exhibits extreme ownership and communicates well with their peers.
Imagine, if I could just teach the practice of extreme ownership in groups of four, what kind of a culture of extreme ownership I could cultivate in the class? Talk about collaborative, student-centered, classroom. Kind of exciting.
Immediate Next Steps:
We're on break next week, but when we return I plan to talk to students about different types of conflict styles (i.e. passive, passive aggressive, aggressive, and assertive) as this is a key piece of communication either as a leader or otherwise. I have a self assessment I found that I'll have them take to figure out what their dominant style is. Then I'm going to have them watch the video below about how to be more assertive. From there, when they do their written reflection for the unit they'll be asked to comment on their collaboration during the group project and how they can be more assertive in future group work.
Man this turned into a long post. There's so much more I want to talk about, so maybe I'll revisit some of the others later. I know I've taken some really valuable lessons from the book to take into my practice as a leader in the classroom, and a leader among colleagues through my role on tech committees and social emotional learning. It's also really made me think about ways I can build leadership opportunities in the classroom for students. It's a skill like so many others we have to teach.
Teachers, what opportunities do you give in the classroom to help students develop as leaders?
