A Year without Summer PD-- A Reflection and a Preview
James Robinson • August 8, 2024
Reflecting on a Leadership Persona
Summer of '24 was the first time I wasn't involved in the first days of school or the summer professional development. The feeling was complex-- a mixture of nostalgia, pride , sadness , isolation and regret-- partially because my role and persona in education was not in play and I failed to integrate into a new one.
To reflect , I spent an afternoon reviewing several videos from over the years, and was reintroduced to team members I miss dearly. Many of them are now in school or network leadership. Some have moved onto careers in other industries, and some consult.
Here are a couple of things I'm proud of:
- Practice the Leads to Muscle Memory and Resilience: My favorite videos illustrate how much we practiced. Practice helped create muscle memory, but repeated practice with feedback built resilience. We transformed the gymnasium into four classrooms while keeping the center area clear for presentation. In each of the micro classrooms, there were 10 student desks organized in two rows of five, an easel, and a carpet. We spent a lot of time practicing the transition from desk-to-carpet, then carpet to desk . The idea was to make practice as real as possible. To ensure the practice was effective, each area had its own coach, and I was perched on the second floor with a birds eye view, overseeing it all and filming. From that vantage point, I could also walkie or call down feedback to the coach team. Everybody practiced and repeated practice until we reached proficiency.
- Fostering Deep Internalization and Ownership: Additionally, I reviewed a "State of the First Grade" briefing I asked one of my assistant principals to do that same year. Her work was meticulous. She analyzed all elements of the grade level, including the attendance records of every child, growth data, absolute data and action steps to improve outcomes. The document was 25 pages long, but it served as a road map for her and the teachers she managed. She presented it to her team in July, three weeks before the kids came in. The achievement and growth that year was outstanding. In the upper grades, teachers made double-digit gains on the state test. I attribute all gains to the depth of knowledge acquired by our APs-- it fostered a sense of ownership like nothing I'd witnessed before.
Here are a few things I regret:
- Trapping myself in a role. My best PD was done at the building level. Back when I was a principal, there was very little oversight from the central office-- so my team could design PD aligned to the needs of the school. However, as I rose up to the network and national level, there was less creativity and less responsiveness to local needs. My first year or two as a principal manager, I managed to be responsive to the region, and I made it known. However, after my colleagues in the national cabinet categorized me as "going rogue", I aligned myself more to the centralized vision and national plans regardless of how effective, relevant or ineffective the plans were. There's a self-consciousness and low-grade fear of losing your job the higher up you go. You become the face of a region, yet are expected to uphold the centralized tactics and priorities despite how irrelevant they may be. In other words , my role and persona as a senior executive made me brittle and stifled in my approach. The centralized team even provided a speech writer to ensure my words were aligned. This episode of The Courage Gap covers the overarching issues of centralization-- especially when it comes to charter school growth and the political nature of the role.
- Family : Missing in action. Here’s where the regret comes in, it’s what I don’t see. I don’t see any photos or videos of my own children on their first days of school. Between both daughters, there would have been 26 first days total. And I wasn’t present for any of them– not a single one. I regret it. Instead of being with them, I began crafting my persona as a “leader”. On Sundays, I’d go into the building and work for 8-9 hours, preparing for the week. There was always a desire to be more “hardcore” and more “all in”– especially, because I worked for mission driven organizations. In truth, there was a lot of ego on my part– because the ego’s job is to help build the persona. And there was also a sense of leadership shame– that if you didn’t show up , you didn’t care about the students. There was a brief period of time when the phrase, “So and So is not good for kids” was the ultimate insult. I heard it used by a few managers across different organizations: “So and so was 3 minutes late to the meeting. He or she is not good for kids.”
Ouch.
Depending on the persona we wear, we can become calloused. For me, I was definitely stuck in Warrior mode for a good portion of my career– and it is exhausting. My beard is aspirin-white and just as brittle. What I’ve learned is that I didn’t integrate other elements of myself into leadership roles at first, because I let myself get stuck in the warrior role– essentially using it as my operating system for a few years.
Nowadays, the warrior is still there when necessary, taking a nap. It’s the roles of the coach, father and creative that are getting more airtime.
If you’re curious about how you’re showing up, reach out for a free persona quiz by emailing
james@miningandshining.com. Then
Sign Up for a free consultation– we can talk about what your results mean.
Precious Metal Notes
context In an earlier post, I wrote about the need for a self-inflicted sabbatical from educational leadership in 2024. The time-off allowed me to step back, read, study, think, and create at a level I've not known in years. Although we went without my salary for six-months, the data reflects it was also the most stress-free time in recent years-- likely driven by the walks, meditation, prayer and just leveling myself to a position of just learning again. The openness matters. During that time, I created a series of talks, titled The Courage Gap: Another gap in education that a consultant can't close. Originally, they were called "Career-Suicide Notebooks", the reason being my plan was to walk away from education all together. Instead, what I learned will inform my work for years. I've heard it said that Buddhist monks can see the world in a grain of rice. After being immersed in education for several years, I see the world in a school ecosystem. Often, schools enter my creative work and the way I think about creativity enters my work in schools. The first video is called 33% and it looks at the proficiency scores of 4th grade students on the NAEP Assessment. Additionally, it looks at the broad economy that works to maintain the status quo. It's a very performative video, very low-brow-- but it sets the context for the rest of the talks. Moreover, many of the issues can be extrapolated across sectors.
Lettuce Entertain You “Lettuce entertain you” is a classic line from an old reading assessment passage. When kids read it aloud, assessors listened for more than just smooth delivery—they hoped for laughter, or at least a chuckle, as a sign the pun landed. Too often, though, the reading was fluent but flat. No chuckle meant the joke flew right over their heads; students weren't picking up on the playful language. In one district, coaches and a principal were so eager for better results that they printed t-shirts featuring “Lettuce entertain you” with a cartoon head of lettuce. The goal? Prime students to spot the pun. It backfired into a perfect illustration of two broader lessons that apply far beyond reading: Fluency goes beyond word-calling and prosody—it's also about the fluency of ideas, vocabulary, and real understanding. Outcomes aren't a competition; chasing short-term wins can undermine genuine mastery. Fluency In reading instruction, we often emphasize how smoothly words flow from a student's mouth—rate, accuracy, expression. But we under-discuss the clearest marker of comprehension: real-time emotional responses. A laugh at a pun, a gasp at a twist, or a puzzled frown when something doesn't add up—these are the tells that a reader is truly processing and connecting with the text. Genre knowledge matters too. In a mystery or whodunit, fluent readers adjust tone for foreshadowing or suspense. True fluency integrates decoding, word knowledge, genre conventions, and quick comprehension. This isn't unique to reading. Fluency of ideas—the ability to recall and apply mounds of knowledge fluidly, under pressure, with little time to look things up—is a universal hallmark of expertise. A doctor in the ER doesn't have minutes to Google symptoms; they need instant recall of anatomy, pharmacology, differentials, and protocols to make life-saving calls. That's fluency in medical knowledge. A chef in a busy kitchen doesn't pause to consult recipes mid-service; they fluidly combine ingredients, techniques, flavors, and timing to plate perfect dishes under the heat of the line. That's fluency in culinary craft. An artist doesn't deliberate over every brushstroke in isolation; in flow state, they draw on a deep reservoir of techniques, composition principles, color theory, and intuition to create without hesitation. That's fluency in creative expression. States have experimented with measuring aspects of this in reading. Tennessee came close around 2020 with a foundational literacy fluency component on the TCAP ELA assessment (especially in Grade 2). It was a simple yet powerful timed task: students read short, grade-level statements and quickly marked YES or NO to indicate if each was true. In a minute or so, it gauged decoding speed, basic vocabulary, and instant comprehension—exposing gaps that many elementary programs overlook . See the snippet below:
