Non-judgmental stance
Wisdom from the Field #23
In his guide Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, Jon Kabat-Zinn devotes a chapter to “non-judging”.
He notes that we are “constantly evaluating our life experiences, comparing them with other experiences or holding them up against expectations and standards that we create, often out of fear.”
Kabat-Zinn offers an alternative to our judging mind: “non-judgmental orientation” (also referred to as a “non-judgmental stance”).
“It simply means that we can act with much greater clarity in our lives, and be more balanced, more effective, and more ethical in our activities, if we know that we are immersed in a stream of unconscious liking and disliking which screens us from the world and from the basic purity of our own being.” (p. 57)
An initial step to seeing things as they really are is to just be “familiar with this deeply entrenched pattern (of liking and disliking) and watching it as it happens.”
A More Mindful Approach to Leadership
Below is one of the first lines in my new book:
This is not a traditional “school leadership” book. Rather, I offer an integrated and more mindful approach to educational improvement.
This work was borne out of my frustration with the current educational supervision and evaluation systems. I was trained to determine the level of effectiveness of teachers’ performance. If their practice was aligned with the language on a rubric, it was deemed “proficient”. If not, I might have to decide if a plan of improvement was needed. Regardless of my judgment, professional growth was rarely an outcome.
Like many initiatives in education, people’s good intentions have led to unintended consequences. One is an overly judgmental stance toward teaching and learning.
It is my intention with Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H. to flip this paradigm, for…
Teachers to become leaders of their own learning, and
Leaders to become learners first to make more informed decisions.1
Helping everyone become more self-directed and less judgmental of other’s and our own practice - modeled by the principal - is a better pathway to sustainable schoolwide improvement.
Check out all of the posts within this series here. Wisdom from the Field is also a feature in my new book, now available with Corwin (30% off through February).
These two bullets are a paraphrase from Read, Write, Lead: Breakthrough Strategies for Schoolwide Literacy Success by Regie Routman (ASCD, 2014). Regie’s work has a large influence on my practice.