By Sam Uzwack, Head of School
What does the term “compassionate leadership” evoke as you read it? As one of our four mission points, our school and community center on developing young leaders who are not only concerned about getting things done, but the manner and tenor in which they are accomplished. Much like Thinking Critically, Compassionate Leadership focuses not only on the product, but the process as well.
Last spring, we chose the theme Wise Innovation for Inspire. This school year, and thus this issue of Inspire, inaugurates a rotation of our mission points as our annual overall school theme. We selected Leading Compassionately: Empathetic Dialogue as our focus. On the surface, it would be easy to say that this is in response to our upcoming presidential election when in truth, this theme has always been at the heart of the Eastside Prep experience.
Eastside Prep was founded to bring together a diverse array of thinkers to solve novel problems. In order to achieve any novel thinking, different perspectives are a necessary ingredient. When you have differing perspectives, you may have conflicting ideas of the best way forward. It is this very condition, this moment of conflict, that we want students equipped to navigate. This can only happen with practice in a safe and supportive academic setting.
Unfortunately, we find ourselves in a time when our country is ever more polarized, making it far more difficult to find examples of the kinds of discourse we strive for. Multiple conditions contribute to this dynamic, such as the ability to tune your news to an ever narrower array of perspectives and the structural intransigence of the two-party political system. Moreover, compromise does not seem to be a primary value anymore, oft dismissed as caving or being weak on an issue.
This is the reason we chose to include the words “empathetic dialogue,” to help provide a focus on leadership. These are skills that can be taught to students. These are ways of being that can be modeled by faculty and staff. To this end, Eastside Prep sent teams to the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) Civil Discourse Lab and the NAIS Institute on Intercultural Dialogue (Details on these experiences can be found later in this issue of Inspire) to learn about best current pedagogical practices. We have been learning more about the skills students need to listen with empathy, respectfully share perspectives, and build a more inclusive community. We are contemplating what the limits of free speech should be in schools. The best ideas are developed through challenge and discussion, so we have a responsibility to create the conditions that allow good ideas to become great ideas.
As with all four of the mission points, these serve to enact our vision, to inspire students to create a better world. What better way to do so than by developing our next generation of leaders who are equipped with the skills necessary to dialogue across differences in a meaningful and productive manner?