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systems. But this brick‐wall phenomenon falls into a different category of leadership competency building that calls for a very different approach. We can't see the obstacles to growth because they are hidden inside of us—or below the surface—and they're very personal. So even when we are teaching and learning discrete skills, we're not getting to that level of figuring out the real obstacles. Practicing skills without figuring out a leader's inner obstacles is like riding a merry‐go‐round that never stops.

      I have been obsessing about these brick‐wall leadership competencies for close to a decade now. Through hundreds of coaching and training sessions with school leaders across the leadership pipeline, I have built a development model based on Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence (EI) theory. EI brings an essential lens to leadership development with its focus on self‐awareness, self‐management, and social awareness—what we need to know about ourselves and others before we ever engage them. In the book, I share how we have operationalized EI to create a common language and road map for building personal leadership competencies. My framework—The 5‐Square—is applicable across competencies and across all levels of the leadership pipeline. This book introduces the 5‐Square, takes readers on a guided tour for applying it to their personal leadership challenges, and provides practice opportunities to build those brick‐wall leadership competencies over time.

      This book is essentially an EI‐based, replicable approach to social–emotional learning for leaders. Social–emotional leadership is a prerequisite to student growth because leaders are the creators and the keepers of the conditions for learning in our schools. Students depend on us to create the conditions for learning that everyone in our schools—from students to teachers to principals—needs to meet their full potential. I have learned that these conditions primarily result from the way that people feel. Because these conditions are difficult to name and measure, they tend to be overlooked and undervalued

      Since the days when I first started teaching 27 years ago, our profession has been moving toward an increasingly technical approach to teaching and learning. We have reacted to the pressures to improve student achievement—increased exponentially with the arrival of Common Core—by building more efficient systems to grow academic skills as fast as possible, for as many students as possible. I have watched as these technical practices that serve us in improving student achievement have also led to disconnection, inequitable conditions, and a limited growth trajectory.

      It is time to rebalance the conditions for learning in our schools. That rebalancing must start with the adults; not the kids. And it must come from the leaders.

      When I was immersed in schools as a teacher and then a leader, I felt but did not understand all of this. My eyes were opened when my work training school leaders collided with my introduction to Goleman's work on Emotional Intelligence (EI).

      I became a principal after 11 years of teaching in urban neighborhood, magnet, charter, international, and private schools. Amistad Academy Middle School was the flagship school of the three‐school Achievement First (AF) charter network. When I left the principal seat six years later, we had expanded to 31 schools. During my tenure, I experienced a shift from an entrepreneurial spirit of “build it yourself while flying the plane” to a determined focus on aligning to a set of organizational systems. From student discipline and culture to curriculum and instruction, we were leveraging our collective wisdom and energy to create best‐in‐class resources for teachers and school leaders so that kids were consistently receiving the very best teaching in the very best schools we could build—and fast! Our sense of urgency came from the belief that kids who were behind simply did not have time for adults to slowly get better at teaching. We had to develop the very best teachers and leaders as fast as possible.

      During my last two years as principal, we launched three major systemic initiatives. Our school was one of the first in the network to turn our merit/demerit‐based student culture approach into a tight, aligned system. We used Doug Lemov's Teach Like a Champion book and teaching model to double down on the technical training of core teaching strategies. This enabled us to take a giant leap forward in our ability to systematically and quickly teach teachers common instructional moves. Finally, during that same year, we launched a robust instructional coaching system in which every teacher was observed and received feedback and planning support weekly.

      Then Common Core dropped like a bomb on public schools. We were horrified when we saw our students' test scores plummet; the new assessment showed that not half as many reached proficiency compared to the previous year's state test scores. We had thought that our kids were closing in on their counterparts in the wealthiest public school systems in the country. We were wrong. But we were not alone. Almost every public charter and district had the same wake‐up call. AF's response to this crisis was one of humility, accompanied by an all‐out instructional leadership campaign to build our capacity to meet the rigorous expectations of Common Core. I was proud of our organizational response. It was not long, however, before I started to understand the unintended consequences of our reaction.

      During that first year's push to align to Common Core, I left Amistad to start a leadership development partnership with our district counterparts in New Haven, Hartford, and Bridgeport, CT. In this new program, built on the medical residency model, district leaders spent a half year in AF schools and then a half year in a strong district school, working with a principal mentor to apply what they had learned. Our pitch to Residents: “You are smart, passionate professionals. We are going to expose you to the best of what charter and district schools have to offer, and we expect you to make your own decisions about what works and doesn't work.”

      Over time, clear themes emerged about what district leaders experienced at AF: “These instructional approaches and the teacher coaching practices are INCREDIBLE! But the student and adult culture systems and approaches? We can't figure out why you would do those things.”

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