What happens when a school system makes four promises as their mission: joy, connection, growth, and success and consider joy as the lead to the others happening? “If we want people to be present, engaged, and thriving, joy can’t be an afterthought. It must be a priority.” (George Philhower, Superintendent Eastern Hancock Schools in Indiana) Hear about their summer Joy Jam conference for educators.
Visit the Eastern Hancock Schools website here.
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Podcast Transcript:
[00:00:00.220] – Steve [Intro]
Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you are tasked with guiding continuous teacher growth to create student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from experienced guests, as well as my own insights that I’ve gathered over the years. I’m thrilled to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in.
[00:00:29.890] – Steve
A District’s Focus on Inspiring and Creating Joyful Experiences. On today’s podcast, I’m excited to be joined by Dr. George Philhower, the Superintendent of Eastern Hancock Schools in Indiana. I reached out to Dr. Philhower after reading a piece about his district hosting a summer conference for educators called the Joy Jam. The goal of Joy Jam is simple but profound, to create an atmosphere where educators can momentarily set aside the pressures of their work and immerse themselves in pure unbridled joy. Reading about Joy Jam had me interested in recording this podcast with Superintendent Philhower. After a short chat with him and a visit to the Eastern Hancock School’s website, I’m really eager to hear his insights and vision of the possibilities for joy in learning. Welcome, George.
[00:01:32.590] – Dr. George Philhower
Thanks, Steve. Happy to be here.
[00:01:34.280] – Steve
Could we start with a little bit of a description of the East Hancock Schools and your experiences there as superintendent?
[00:01:41.990] – Dr. George Philhower
Absolutely. So this is my fourth year at Eastern Hancock as superintendent. We’re a small rural school just outside of Indianapolis. As you come in to Indianapolis on that I-70 corridor from the Ohio East Side, we are the last rural school before you get to those big donnette school districts. When I came to Eastern Hancock, one of the first things that we wanted to do was some strategic planning work. And I’m a big believer in the idea of having a strategic plan to guide everything you do and having an ongoing strategic planning process that is a continual process that never ends. And as we’ve developed our strategic plan at Eastern Hancock, we settled on four promises. So joy is promise number one for us. And it’s built on the foundation that we believe that school should be a place that people look forward to going to. So we work really hard to make that true. Our other three promises are connection, growth, and success. And we can talk about each of those. But really, for us, the idea of joy comes from… It’s not something we do, it’s who we are. We’re trying to become a place that people think about, and it reminds them of joyful experiences.
[00:03:04.380] – Steve
So let’s take a look at how joy fits together with your other three of connection, growth, and success.
[00:03:14.020] – Dr. George Philhower
Yeah, sure. So we put those promises in order, and we think it’s the order that we need to think about them. So the first thing we want our people to think about is, how do we make kids look forward to being at school? And for us, we call that joy. And sometimes joy comes from whimsical experiences. The article that you were mentioning, we talked about a fifth-grade class that learned about Paul Revere, and they invited someone with a horse to come past. And while the kids were reading about Paul Revere in their textbooks, a horse and a rider rode past their classroom screaming, the British were coming. So we try to give kids experiences that they will remember so that when they’re sitting around their table at night with their families and their families ask them, “What did you learn at school today?” they have something to talk about. We really believe that just like when you and I, when we drive, and have you ever been…You arrived at your destination and you’re there and you’re like, how did I get there? It’s because that most often happens during the drives that you do every single day.
[00:04:25.250] – Dr. George Philhower
So your brain has this agreement with the rest of you to say, hey, I’m going to I’m going to put this thing on autopilot while you think about lesson plans and think about whatever else you’re doing. And I think school sometimes happens that way for kids, that they do it 180 times per year, and their brains go on autopilot. So I’ve got a friend named Kevin Honeycutt that talks about the idea of driving like we talked about. And he says, if a deer jumps out in front of you as you’re driving, you’re going to come right back to that moment, and you’re going to remember that. And so if somebody asks you, “How was your drive home?” That’s what you’re going to talk about. So what we’re trying to do is figure out how do we make deer jump out in front of kids in their learning experiences as much as possible so that they have an emotional experience to anchor their learning to. And then our other three promises. We think that there are levels of joy. So the first level is just that whimsicle fun. I’m looking forward to going to the Amusement Park, balloons, sprinkles, those have fun stuff.
[00:05:31.470] – Dr. George Philhower
But real joy comes from discovering those other three promises. So we talk about connection as the idea that every person that comes Eastern Hancock feels known by name, strength, interest, future hopes, hopes, and dreams and needs. And we feel like if we’re creating a space where people feel known that deeply, then that’s a pretty special spot. Promise number three for us is growth. We want our kids to learn new things every day that they will remember. And that sounds It’s really simple. But we know that 60% of the time that kids are spending in school, they’re learning about stuff that they already know, which means that kids are showing up to school not to learn new stuff, but to show the stuff they already know. But we also know that joy comes from learning. And I love learning, but I don’t know if I loved learning when I was in school. So we’re trying to make sure that our kids are learning new things that they will remember. And we think that that whole that they will remember part is in joy. Those kids are going to remember Paul Revere for the rest of their lives because he rode past their classroom when they were in fifth grade.
[00:06:36.550] – Dr. George Philhower
And then promise number four for us is what we call success. And that’s just our reminder that producing academically proficient kids is not the end goal for us, that we want to produce kids that are ready and confident for that Monday after graduation. We think that has a direct connection to joy as well, because kids, when they have an experience at school that they see as relevant, there’s lots of joy that can be found in that.
[00:07:02.080] – Steve
You used a word when you were talking about connections that’s a biggie for me, and that’s the “known,” that you’re “known.” How do you approach that? Because in my head, it takes a consciousness.
[00:07:22.730] – Dr. George Philhower
Yeah. I think the word we talk about in that sentence the most is feel. So Steve, if you’re going to feel known, that means I have to do something about the information. If I just know you, that doesn’t mean that you know that I know you.
[00:07:38.130] – Steve
I use the exact same words. You need to know me, and I need to know that you know me.
[00:07:46.450] – Dr. George Philhower
That’s right.
[00:07:47.150] – Steve
And so that comes from an action.
[00:07:49.600] – Dr. George Philhower
Yeah, that’s right. So for us, it comes to a lot of student voice. So I’ve got a group that I’m meeting with them today, actually, the 11 I’ve got a group I call it my Student Advisory Council. And it’s a group of, I think it’s 11 kids at this point in the year that I meet with once a month. And we just talk to them about their school experience. What do you like? What do you wish could be different? It’s the most important meeting I have during the year. We learn more during that meeting than we do any other time. We spend the month of August, which in Indiana, that’s our first month of school, convincing those kids that they can tell us whatever they think. And then we spend the rest of the year buckling up and holding under our seats where they tell us things that sometimes are hard to hear in school. And then from there, we’ve got advisory groups at the high school where we’re trying to empower kids and put them in spaces where kids can…The grown-ups that are around them can get to know them a little better.
[00:08:54.130] – Dr. George Philhower
We’re a small school, so a little bit of…That’s easy for us. When I came to Eastern Hancock and we started to design the design principles that we were going to craft our strategic plan around, we had two conversations. One was the what do we want to become conversation? But also we were really intentional about what are the things that are true about us already that we want to make sure that as the new superintendent, that I don’t screw up. And that was one of them, that we’re a small community, that people know that they’re loved here. And so we just want to double down on that strength and make sure that we’re moving forward with it. Another thing that definitely goes to the connection promise, but also the success one is that I meet with every single junior and senior, our high school principal and I, meet with each individual, one of them to talk to them about what are they planning for after school, when school, even after they graduate, because we want to make sure that we’re preparing them. I can’t know if I’m preparing you unless I have a conversation with you about it.
[00:09:56.700] – Dr. George Philhower
We make sure that we are connecting them with the right community partners and putting the right programming in place. And so we meet with each individual, one of those during their junior and senior year. And then we scaffold that down all the way to an eighth grade, our advisory teachers are talking to kids about their future aspirations and those conversations.
[00:10:19.230] – Steve
It’s an awesome example of the conscious approach to creating being known. I love it. It’s another connection jumping in my head as I was listening to you. Just earlier today, I was beginning work. My first conversation with an international school that I’m going to be working with. They shared that they had in their vision statement that they would be inspiring students. Then beginning to work backwards from that, they identified that while inspired students would have the success piece, they’d also have the other pieces that are part of your joy and connection and realized that wasn’t necessarily there. The whole project I’m working on with them is unpacking that further to identify more parts of inspiring than looking at the achievement results that were coming in.
[00:11:30.890] – Dr. George Philhower
It’s so fun to think about. It makes me wonder, Steve, do you think kids come to us prepackaged as inspired, and our job is to make sure we don’t uninspire them by the stuff that we do? Is that part of it?
[00:11:46.040] – Steve
You jumped onto my history because I started my teaching career as a middle school teacher. After five years, I switched to be a Grade 1 teacher. I would tell the the story of starting some work that we were going to do, and my Grade 1 student yelling out, “I’m done. What’s next?” And I thought, man, five years of middle school, I don’t know that I ever heard that. And I picked up exactly that piece that you said. I think kids arrive that way, and we really had to figure out how we didn’t dampen that by getting caught up on too many other things. For me, there’s nothing greater than watching preschool kids engaged in learning. Well, watching my grandkids as youngsters, whatever they got engaged in, they were inspired to master it. I think it’s a big piece for us to work on, to capture that and carry it all the way through.
[00:12:53.840] – Dr. George Philhower
And don’t you think the challenging part from a leadership standpoint is working with the middle school teacher, the high school teacher, to help them understand that while I’m pointing out things that I believe are true, it doesn’t mean that I think you’re doing a terrible job. Or that what’s really tricky in education is that when we say something to someone to make them think that maybe they’re not doing a good enough job, it’s very close to telling them that they’re not a very good person because they attribute those two things to mean the same exact thing. And I think that’s the hardest about leadership in the school space is that asking people to do a job where they’re doing the best they know how and often…less.
[00:13:42.550] – Steve
It’s one of the reasons I’m big on teachers observing in other classrooms. But when they do it, don’t observe the teachers. Just observe the kids. Because you don’t get the opportunity to watch kids learn while you’re teaching the way you do when you can go into another classroom and watch kids, and you can have your full attention on watching what’s happening in learning. Because you can read all those individual nonverbals of kids scattered around the room, and you can pick up the signs of interest or disinterest, things that you don’t get to do when you’re trying to figure out what I’m going to do next as an instructional piece. I think inspired learners, for that school to say the learners are inspired, you can observe that by watching kids engaged in the learning process.
[00:14:39.670] – Dr. George Philhower
Yeah, that’s a fun word. I like that a lot.
[00:14:42.340] – Steve
So tell us a little bit about Joy Jam and what happened there last summer.
[00:14:47.160] – Dr. George Philhower
Yeah. So we’re gearing up actually for this summer. July 15th and 16th will be Joy Jam number three. So we, a couple of years ago, just thought…Well, first of all, in Indiana, they an initiative called the Summer of E-Learning, our Summer of Learning. And they have grants available. They’re small grants to help a school that wants to get a conference started at their school, one or a two-day conference. And they will help give you a little bit of seed money to help you get that off the ground. And so that led to some conversations here locally about, well, wouldn’t it be fun to have a conference just around the idea of joy? And we think differently around here. I think anybody who lets a horse to school, it probably isn’t a stretch to say we think differently. So our conference has some similarities to other education conferences that you would go to. There are some great speakers and inspiration conversations and all of those things that you would find in lots of places. But we also take it a step further. So when you sign up for Joy Jam, you tell us what your favorite candy and your favorite snacks are so we can make sure that we have those things for you when you show up to Joy Jam.
[00:15:59.390] – Dr. George Philhower
We have a candy snack room that’s available anytime. We’re out in the middle of nowhere. You can actually see our school from the interstate. You can’t get to us from the interstate because of our remote location. So we don’t have Starbucks across the street. So we provide a barista on hand to make you a fancy coffee if you want one. We have all kinds of different snack stations and that stuff. So we have a vendor hall. We can’t personalize for every person without some money. So we have some sponsors that help with that, and they set up booths. But alongside them, we allow people from our local community to come almost like a county fair where they’re setting up their little trinkets that they’re selling and stuff. So our vendor hall is like none other that you’ve ever seen. And then on top of that, we try to think about what are all the things…What’s something we could bring to Joy Jam that would make people smile and make them that maybe they wouldn’t expect? So the first year, we had Joy Jam, we had a puppy room where people could just go and play with puppies.
[00:16:59.810] – Dr. George Philhower
We had a petting zoo last year. We had a couple of mini horses. Horses might be your theme for this podcast, Steve. We had a couple of mini horses there where people could come and get their picture taken or pet a mini horse. I joke that it’s the first time I ever had to answer the question, “which door should the horse come in?” I don’t know that too many superintendents are answering that question. This year, we’re actually partnering with a circus group from Cincinnati where we’ll have some circus performing happening. And one of our keynotes is an administrator that also is a circus performer that will do some juggling and teach some people how to make some balloon animals and how to incorporate that into that they’re teaching. So it’s a pretty awesome conference. It’s a lot of work. I’ve got a wonderful team at Eastern Hancock. If you think about everything that goes into planning a conference, and we do it for free. So if you sign up for Joy Jam, it looks like it’s going to cost you $7,000, but we’ve got a code. You can’t even enter money into it because we think joy should be free.
[00:18:06.360] – Dr. George Philhower
But if you think about the work from an IT standpoint and custodial and maintenance and facilities, we’ve just got an incredible team. Also, it’s middle of July. We start school in August. But it’s an awesome event.
[00:18:22.910] – Steve
Very cool. I’m guessing that you must be able to get folks to reflect back on their experience there at different times during the year that you’re addressing issues and if they can reflect back to what they felt or what they experienced, and how do I go about making that happen for students.
[00:18:46.610] – Dr. George Philhower
Yeah, that would certainly be our best hope. We believe that joy is a choice, and to choose joy requires some intentionality. And that’s the reason it’s one of our promises. I think if you just do nothing and just watch the news, the gravity of the world that we’re living in, in terms of education, is not pulling us naturally to a place of joy. So if we’re going to get there, it’s going to be something that we do intentionally. And sometimes that requires big initiatives like Joy Jam or bringing a horse to school. And often it requires just conversations with the individuals through those other three promises that we talked about. But yeah, that’s my best hope is that it causes a big enough splash that it gives us things that we can pull from throughout the rest of the year.
[00:19:36.940] – Steve
Also, it seems like it’s a pretty good way to reinforce for the community that that’s a key element of your mission and vision there.
[00:19:48.370] – Dr. George Philhower
Yeah, for sure. So something like in terms of driving our culture, we’re always…I have got an athletics background, and they always joke that if the coach walks into locker room and the players are making fun of the things that he’s saying, then he knows that they’re listening. And that’s my best hope, too, is that I know that all of my staff could tell us what our four promises are. And we joke that not just my staff, but other staffs in the neighboring districts can tell us what our promises are in our strategic plan, and we’re pretty proud of that.
[00:20:23.410] – Steve
Terrific. Well, before we close out, I pulled a quote from your post that I’d like you to respond to for school and teacher leaders and instructional coaches that are in the audience. And here’s the quote that I pulled: “If we want people to be present, engaged, and thriving, joy can’t be an afterthought. It must be a priority.”
[00:20:48.960] – Dr. George Philhower
Yeah, I think it goes back to the intentionality that I was talking about. I think we’ve got to really prioritize the idea that our school should be places that kids and grownups are looking forward to coming to. You can look at the national trend data and student attendance and teacher attendance and teacher attrition and all of the things. And the indicators are all saying that schools are not places that people are looking forward to coming to. So it’s going to require all of us to join hands and think about how do we move towards creating schools that are places of joy. And it’s going to require the intentionality that I’ve been talking about. And if we don’t, we have no reason to believe things are going to change by… We’re not going to legislate these changes. We’re not going to incentivize them financially. There’s nothing we’re going to do that outside of leading towards creating moments of joy that cause people to look forward to coming to our schools.
[00:21:59.490] – Steve
I I love it. In my leadership work, I talk a lot about modeling the model. So whatever it is you want to have happening in the classroom, it’s got to be happening through the rest of the culture of the school. And I hear that loudly and clearly in your message.
[00:22:17.700] – Dr. George Philhower
Yeah, we sure hope so. We all have days that are imperfect, obviously. And that’s where those other three promises come in, that if people know us well enough because of the connection and They see the growth we’re trying to make and those things that gives us the grace to carry on. But it’s definitely something that we think about every single day with intention.
[00:22:42.300] – Steve
Thanks so much, George. How can the listeners check in with you, follow what you’re doing or ask you some questions?
[00:22:50.660] – Dr. George Philhower
Yeah, Steve, you mentioned our website. We’ve got a website that talks a lot about our promises. My email address is on there. I’m also on LinkedIn. I’m learning that that’s a pretty positive place that a lot of the social media I’m learning, that’s not the case, but I’m enjoying LinkedIn. Those are probably the two best places to find me.
[00:23:10.690] – Steve
I’m finding the same. And I’ll put both your website and LinkedIn into the podcast lead-in. So if people are listening in a spot, they can’t be writing down. It’s easy for them to go back and find it.
[00:23:23.950] – Dr. George Philhower
That sounds great.
[00:23:24.910] – Steve
Really appreciate your time. Thank you so much.
[00:23:27.500] – Dr. George Philhower
Yeah. Thank you.
[00:23:30.370] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.
