Jennifer D. Klein, the author of, “Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership: Doing Right by Learners Without Losing Your Job,” shares the need for leaders to support teachers who frequently struggle with false dichotomies like knowledge vs skills or play vs academics. Teachers and leaders often feel isolated and threatened in their efforts to prioritize what learners need most. Change work requires engagement from a place of courage not of fear. What beliefs and values build your courage to do right by learners?
Connect with Jennifer and find her book here.
Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!
Podcast Transcript:
[00:00:00.000] – 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.
[00:00:30.000] – Steve
Supporting Teachers in Turbulent Times. Jennifer D. Klein, an experienced teacher, head of school, consultant, and author, is returning to our podcast. Last year, Jennifer shared her landscape model of learning for building learning communities where students belong and thrive because they are supported for their experiences, gifts, and challenges. Her new book, “Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership: Doing Right by Learners Without Losing your Job,” is a timely topic for all educational leaders, including those supporting teachers in classrooms. Welcome, Jennifer.
[00:01:11.200] – Jennifer
Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be back.
[00:01:13.960] – Steve
Well, I’ve been following your work during this past year, since we got introduced last year on that podcast, and I was really interested when I saw the title of your new book. I’m wondering if you’d start with your use the word turbulence in the title.
[00:01:34.300] – Jennifer
Absolutely. We started actually with the idea of polarization. The term polarized was in the title originally. I think turbulent actually even captures it better because part of it is about a divide, a political divide, an ideological divide that seems to be growing all over the world. But there’s also a lot of volatility in our environments. There’s just a lot going on. We’ve got wars taking place. We have more knowledge, and young people have more knowledge of what’s going on in the world than ever before. When we’re talking about turbulence in this context, what I’m talking about is the resistance that educational leaders are facing to practices they know are important for learners. That comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes. But I basically interviewed 67 educational leaders, some still in the buildings, some not so much, some super the tenets woven in as well. What they shared with me were stories about facing resistance, pushback, backlash, sometimes that came from right inside their own communities, like, teachers who weren’t prepared to think differently about innovative education. In most cases, it came from outside the community. Legislation, right? Conservative legislation that might outlaw things that we know are really important for learners.
[00:02:59.140] – Jennifer
In the United States right now, we have a ton of executive orders in 2025 that are basically forcing educational leaders to reframe the way they’re thinking about or doing diversity, equity, and inclusion work. Some of it is legislative. Sometimes it’s these parent groups or the book banners and those kinds of things. Basically, what we’re talking about really is division or resistance. The term turbulence actually came from a specific story that was shared by a leader named Carmen Coleman, who has done incredible work, both as a superintendent and leader in educational cooperatives in the state of Kentucky, who visited high tech high for the first time many years ago, was deeply inspired. On the plane back to Kentucky from San Diego, they hit turbulence, and it left her thinking, well, now, how am I going to tame that turbulence? I know that people are going to react in a variety of different ways, both within the districts and outside the districts, how am I going to think ahead to tame that turbulence? My hope is certainly that the book serves a couple of different purposes. It provides some solidarity for leaders who feel alone in the challenges, and so many do.
[00:04:21.120] – Jennifer
It’s also, I hope, going to provide a way to think long term about the way that they want to roll out new initiatives. I also hope that it serves those who are already facing fires and really just need a way to put out those fires.
[00:04:36.660] – Steve
Well, the other part of the title that grabbed my attention was “doing right by learners.” I serve as a host for another podcast of Superintendents around the nation, and we continually come back to that’s got to be a bottom line focus. As I read that, I thought there’s got to be a connection there to core values. I wanted to know if you’d speak to that.
[00:05:06.000] – Jennifer
Well, when we think about it, in private schools, we often, or independent schools, international schools, we often think of the clients as being the parents because they’re the ones who pay the bills. But when you really get down to it, the students are our clients. There’s a very strong thread throughout this book about the incredible importance of centering students’ learners over and over consistently. That that’s what we exist for. That’s what our schools exist for, is for the sake of learners. When somebody who doesn’t understand education, and I’ll use one example, we’ll use book banning because it’s an easy one. If we are making assumptions about what students should be able to learn and are therefore not providing opportunities for them to see themselves in new ways, to see the world in new ways, to see their possible pathways in careers or adult life in new ways through the reading that they have access to, then we are harming their futures and their present. There’s a lot of research to suggest that kids need to see themselves in the educational resources that they work with. That’s a perfect example. Doing right by learners means a lot of different things.
[00:06:21.540] – Jennifer
I should say, too, that the book certainly focuses on my own experience as a leader, and my experience is a through line. I was a head of school for three years outside of Bogotá in Colombia with a community that was not ready for student-centered project-based learning. I was hired to move the school in that direction. It was tough. There was a lot of resistance. When I started doing the interviews to get more voices into the book than just mine, I asked them, “What’s the work that you’re really proud of that’s garnered resistance?” And all of the stories they shared with me fell into two main categories. The first was innovative pedagogy and instruction with a focus on student-centered learning. That included anything from a deeper learning, project-based learning, active learning, real-world connections, community partners, all those kinds of things that we think of as student-centered, which is what a lot of my work has been on. And then the other avenue was all inclusion. And it was It was anything from cognitive and physical inclusion to cultural inclusion. I was able to get some really lovely stories, too, from indigenous educators who are trying to find ways to bring indigenous culture back into their schools, which have been so colonized over the last 100 years.
[00:07:49.640] – Jennifer
I think there’s really so many ways to think about it. The core values piece is essential. Our core values are that we care about kids. We care about their well-being now and in their futures. That’s why schools exist, and that’s why people go into educational leadership, because we believe we can help to make that happen, not because we dislike children and want to make life hard for them. I tell the story, actually, at one point about a principal I had in Colombia who always asked, “Is this of benefit to kids?” when we were talking about anything, and it was like having this living litmus test in my space who was consistently drawing us back. I was so grateful, Steve, that he was so consistent in centering the kids. So many of these leaders talked about love. Love is a core piece of all of this. We love our children. We love them as much as their parents do, probably in certain ways, slightly differently. We don’t have the extended time with them. Our love might take a slightly a different shape. But we’re in loco parentis, right? That’s the Latin term. We’re there in place of parents for those hours of the day.
[00:09:09.080] – Jennifer
To assume then that any educator in the classroom or in leadership is somehow trying to brainwash children or harm them somehow is ridiculous. I do think that that becomes a key way to not just justify, but explain why are these initiatives important? Because kids need them. Because whether or not somebody feels comfortable with the idea of LGBTQ plus inclusion in the classroom, we’re talking about an incredibly vulnerable population. If we don’t pay attention to their needs, the highest rates of suicide and homelessness of all the populations we teach in schools. Doing right by learners means a lot of stuff. I’m sorry, this is a really long answer. I always do this to you, Steve, but I think it’s really important to think in those broad terms. We really are talking about initiatives that place learners and their needs in the center.
[00:10:10.420] – Steve
I found a spot in your book that you talked about false dichotomies. I think I see that erupting a lot, this forced of either or. I think you had examples about knowledge versus skills about play versus academics. Talk about that a little bit. I just thought that rang true to so many of the situations I find.
[00:10:41.040] – Jennifer
I’m going to take a step back to Steve and tell you that I taught Lord of the Flies in a girls’ school for 11 years. One of the things that came up as we were researching gender and the brain and all these things was this tendency toward dichotomy thinking, particularly in the more masculine mindset. I don’t need to go into all the brain science. But my point being, I think actually it’s wired into more than half of us, this mindset of it’s going to be this or that. It’s such a missed opportunity. I really love Zowail’s ideas about how when we dichotomize those things, when we think of ourselves as only able to do one of the two, and there are only two, then we’re missing a million shades of gray between those two polarized sides. I think we’re doing the same thing politically, of course, that we’re becoming increasingly polarized. You’re either on one side or the other. There’s almost no recognition of the middle ground. And education doesn’t work that way. I don’t think society should work that way either. I really believe that when you think about, why would we be choosing between play and academics when play is such an incredible way to access academics.
[00:12:02.940] – Jennifer
Why would we think of knowledge and skills as separate? I mean, it’s probably the same as why we’ve siloed the disciplines. I mean, we have to have things in nice little neat containers. I don’t know. I mean, I would think the goal should always be knowledge and skills, the two combined. And of course, when it comes to knowledge, I mean, we’re all walking around with these cell phones now that give us access to so much information. I’m not suggesting we don’t need some of the knowledge, but I’m suggesting that a lot of it is whenever my nieces hit a question that they don’t know the answer to, they go to Google and they’ve become savvy enough. They’re critical thinkers, so they know how to check their resources and make sure that what they’re looking at is valid. It’s got to be that. Those are skills that have to be woven in with the knowledge for it to be useful.
[00:12:56.060] – Steve
I’m wondering about the role that school missionaries mission and vision plays in this, establishing mission and visions, ways for teachers who want to be innovative to look at how the innovation still aligns. I guess the it’s getting away from that dichotomy allows you to show how it aligns.
[00:13:19.360] – Jennifer
Yeah, absolutely. Well, definitely that’s a piece of it. I want to approach that question from two layers. I’m going to start from the leadership level and say that an existing mission statement almost always has a few key words that try to capture, at the very least, the ethos of the school, the reason we exist, the reason we are here doing this work, and who we’ve always been, if you will. When we can tie new initiatives to that, they feel less threatening, particularly to parents. When it comes to innovation, parents are often frightened, and understandably so, frightened by anything that looks different than their own education. Obviously, people who are not well-served by their education are thrilled to see a different model. But those who have been successful or do feel that their education was valuable are confused and scared. They love their children. They fear for their future. They’re not sure that the universities have made the shift yet, and a lot of universities still haven’t, toward appreciating the more authentic and the less score-based, test-based types of knowledge. I think from the leadership perspective, when we can tie these innovations to who we are and the things that we value, I think that’s really key.
[00:14:45.940] – Jennifer
Another example on the inclusion end, when you think about most mission statements have something about all children, and every school has some set of policies around child protection. How do we connect new approaches to inclusion to those ideas of serving all children, to that idea of protecting all children? That can really help to, again, I hate to use the word justify because I feel like this shouldn’t have to be justified, but it does help to make the work less threatening for parents. When it comes to the teachers themselves, I think it’s the same thing in a lot of ways. When we can, as classroom educators, find ways to teach in new ways, but that still connect to that base of values that the school holds dear, and the mission statement, I think it leads to richer projects and experiences for kids. I think it creates much more sense of alignment across all levels of the given system. That’s something that comes up repeatedly in the book is this idea of working at multiple levels rather than just one. I’ve been in schools where teachers get it and the leaders don’t, and that’s a terrible position for the teachers to be in.
[00:16:09.720] – Jennifer
You need the leader to understand it just as well, and that leader needs their superintendent to understand it as well. I put a lot of focus, too, on this idea of leaders having the responsibility to protect teachers. If you’re asking teachers to do something that may garner some resistance, I believe that we, as the leaders, have to be the buffer, and we have to create the conditions for the teachers to feel like they can take risks and experiment and try something new without fear of losing their jobs.
[00:16:44.920] – Steve
I think that word, “all” can really be the driving force because almost every one of us as a teacher needs to change something we’re doing because it almost never is working for all the students.
[00:17:04.740] – Jennifer
Right. Absolutely.
[00:17:07.560] – Steve
Why am I changing what I’m doing? Well, because we’ve got all in our mission statement, and I may be I get 95%, but I still didn’t get to all. So I’ve got to be looking for a different key, a different way to unlock for that particular learner.
[00:17:26.840] – Jennifer
Absolutely. Well, I remember early in my career being told by my leader, by my principal, you can’t reach all of them. Almost a throwing up of hands. You can’t reach all of them. Don’t worry about it, Jenn. I, at the time, took that as helpful advice because I didn’t know better. In retrospect, wow, what a terrible thing to say to a young teacher, right? “You can’t reach them all.” The answer should be, “Oh, let me help you find creative ways to reach them all.” Why wouldn’t we try? There’s a wonderful story in the book about work that’s being done in Santa Barbara in California, where in the public high schools, they are detracking the English courses. What I love about this, so they had to track – they had the honors track that was headed toward AP and all of that, or advanced placement, and all of that. Then they had the regular courses, which were still college prep, but were… The leaders I spoke to said there was a very clear divide. You could see that there were children of color in the regular classes and more predominantly white, more affluent children in the honors levels.
[00:18:41.800] – Jennifer
But what I loved about this story was it was the teachers themselves who came forward and said, this isn’t working. We’ve got kids in that regular class who are capable of incredible things, and we have kids in that honors class who are totally not doing the work or not feeling motivated. It’s just not that simple. We should be able to learn how to reach a wide array of levels and needs simultaneously. It does mean personalization. It doesn’t mean delivering material the same way all the time. It really requires much more personalized work. It requires then that we understand who kids are. I would even argue that it might require us to reframe what we think of as success metrics as well. How do we define success? I don’t love writing about data, but I ended up writing a whole chapter on data that was really all about that. How could we reframe success? How could we do that through an asset lens, make things that matter to us, like empathy, a little less squishy so that we can observe them and see whether they’re happening or not? I just think there are so many opportunities there.
[00:19:59.360] – Jennifer
I agree with you. I think all is the key word. If our goal is to reach… Nobody has in their mission statement, we’ll reach most of the kids. We’re going to make sure most of the kids who graduate from here are… It’s never in our language. It’s always all. There are people in the world who think that all signals that we have a specific focus on a specific group. I think that’s where the controversy lies. When you say all, don’t you really mean all LGBTQ plus kids who are not going to be served well? Or does all mean including all students of color or all students from socioeconomic, lower socioeconomic levels? All means all. It really does mean all. It doesn’t mean singling out a specific group.
[00:20:44.260] – Steve
It doesn’t mean opportunity for all. It means success for all. Success for all. That’s the clanker that I run into. Well, they had the opportunity, and they didn’t take the opportunity. I can Step aside, I’m safe. They made the decision not to use the opportunity I gave them.
[00:21:05.520] – Jennifer
Absolutely, Steve. Actually, that was something that was really core in the writing of the landscape model. Capono and I kept hearing perfectly wonderful educators talking about ensuring access for all students. We’re going to make sure there’s access for all students. One of the leaders in this book had a child with severe cerebral palsy who unfortunately died in her childhood. But her mother was saying that access, what that looked like in the public system was we make sure that your child is wheeled into the room. She and her wheelchair are in the room. She has access. That’s all we have to do. Access is really different than success. To really engage, to ensure success for all kinds of kids means that it’s not just one bar. I still handle arguments from people who say, how is that possibly fair that learners have different bars? I would say, that whole fair thing – just think about your own child. Is your own child getting what they need? Well, good, because this child is also getting what they need. You don’t have to compare kids and exactly what success looks like. Do you know what I mean?
[00:22:22.580] – Jennifer
Tests like the SAT made us start to really think that they all had to have the same intelligence. I just had great conversation with my younger niece about… She is brilliant. She pulls in the most incredible grades, and she doesn’t do all that well on the SATs. Why should a brilliant kid who’s getting five department awards at the end of every year feel like she’s failing somehow because that particular measure doesn’t show her off well? Kids are human just like we are. They’re incredibly varied.
[00:22:56.760] – Steve
So part of personalized is defining success.
[00:23:00.000] – Jennifer
Absolutely so. I do lean on this idea of street data that comes from Shane Safier’s work. I think that’s a really interesting way of thinking about it because it’s not just what we see when we look more closely at the individual, it’s also an invitation to an asset lens, which I think is really important. In an indigenous education, I mean, imagine these schools in regions. Hawaii was where I got the most, but I also had some interviews with indigenous leaders in Washington State on the West Coast of the United States who were talking about how that very thing we were just talking about, that normalized, standardized, all children must reach this bar, and some won’t, so they’re going to be failures, right? How that goes against so many of the values and norms within indigenous cultures, and that success could look like a success successful voyage. It could look like a successful planting and harvesting. It could look like learning the songs that the elders gifted to me to have the right to sing. We’ve gotten so narrow-minded, and maybe there’s the dichotomy again, right? We’ve gotten so narrow-minded in how we think about what success looks like that it’s just missing so much that’s rich and important as well.
[00:24:30.520] – Jennifer
I would say it’s just as important, if not more important, because it gives learners that sense of self and community that’s so incredibly important to their well-being.
[00:24:42.420] – Steve
There’s another phrase that I pulled from your text that caught my attention. I’m going to quote it: “Even when the forces of resistance are beyond our control, change work requires that we engage from a place of courage, not of fear. So we can bring our whole selves to the work and ensure our staffs can do the same.”
[00:25:06.500] – Jennifer
Yeah. Well, I often find myself reflecting. I really wish we didn’t have to include a word like courage in that list. I really do think, I don’t know, I really do believe that educators have to be courageous right now. We have to have an active sense of hope, meaning not just sit back and dream of what’s possible, but actually work toward what’s possible. That’s part of why I really hope that this particular work, this new book, will provide some solidarity in that sense, because it’s really scary to be courageous on your own by yourself. There are so many forces that are beyond our control. As a school leader, you can’t go change legislation by yourself, although you can impact policy. There are some educators leaders in that book who are absolutely trying to. But we’re in such difficult times. We’ve seen leaders lose their jobs over this work. There are a dozen leaders in the book who are anonymous, either because they’re afraid of losing their jobs or because they have, and they don’t want it to be evident that they’re talking about what happened. I’ve even got a couple of people in there who have NDAs who went ahead and shared their stories anyway.
[00:26:27.580] – Jennifer
So I think we have to be whole humans to be able to cultivate whole humans. We have to find a way to be courageous, to lean into the difficulty rather than leaning away from it. If we just acquiesce to the forces, we will not be doing right by kids, by learners. We won’t be doing right by our teachers. We have to protect our staff for them to be able to do the same. There’s a whole line of thought in the book, too, around self-care and self-work. We all, within educational communities need to do some self-work. We need to understand ourselves and what we mean, even by whole selves. What are our experiences and strengths and challenges? What are the values we were raised with? What are the things that matter to us? We need to make sure that our teachers do the same. Then I think that we also really have make sure that we are taking care of ourselves along the way. I think that’s actually one of the things that leaders don’t do very often or very well is really take time to take care of ourselves. I quote from a woman named Karen Waldron in a book called, “The Lightmaker’s Manifesto,” which is a really lovely book.
[00:27:50.900] – Jennifer
She talks about how those of us who are trying to lead and who are trying to create light or to make light for others have to make sure that we feed our own light as well. Otherwise, we’re going to burn out. So this phrase captures a piece of it. And thank you for pulling such a powerful quotation. I’m always glad when people find something like that. I wish we weren’t in this time. I wish we weren’t facing this backlash. I wish that people who had not studied education would stop talking about what they think we should be doing. I wish that legislators on the local and national and international level would spend a week in the classroom sitting next to kids and find out what it feels like when it’s not working and when it’s working. I think we have to confront this. If we don’t confront it, if we don’t try to unban the books, if we don’t try to make sure every kid is protected, even if we’re in a state where we’re supposedly not allowed to, then why are we in education?
[00:28:56.380] – Steve
You’ve got me focused now that perhaps the definition of success is courage. We’ve got to create leadership with the courage for the school staffs to have the courage, for the parents to have the courage. Most importantly, that’s what kids to walk into the future, we’ve got to be building what kids need for that courage.
[00:29:22.000] – Jennifer
Absolutely. Well, and I think, on that note, one of the things that did not come up from the leaders, but which I brought up in the second chapter, among the things that I value as important is that question of the future that the kids are facing. It’s actually someone from your region, a leader in your region, who shared a post with me about, our kids will hold us accountable, and they should, if we don’t teach them about what’s happening in the world right now. There is so much conflict, so much difficulty. Of course, Steve, I have a background in global education, and it is breaking my heart How many leaders and teachers are leaning away from things like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the war? I’ll call it what it is. Even Ukraine and Russia. I’ve talked to educators who said, I’ve had the same problem trying to teach Chinese and Japanese students in the same room. We have to prepare them for that pluralized society. Again, it goes back to that dichotomy. If they think in dichotomous ways when they leave our schools, they’re just going to cause more of difficulty, right or wrong, left or right, et cetera.
[00:30:33.220] – Jennifer
If we can teach them to lean in and really be courageous, understand other people’s perspectives, not see them necessarily as a threat to their own, but as a different set of ideas that come from simply having had a different set of experiences. Yeah, I’d love to prepare them for that. I think you’re right. I think success, I think it’s a great way to frame it, that success is, in fact, that courage. I love to envision young people going into the world knowing how to lean into all of this controversy. And yet right now, that’s why no leader talked about it, right? Because nobody feels safe talking about these conflicts in the world right now. If we ignore them, we’re not setting our kids up for well-being and success.
[00:31:18.680] – Steve
Well, Jennifer, I knew you were going to stretch me, and you did. So thank you. I hope the listeners find the same. What’s the best way for listeners to follow up with you be able to follow your work and find your new book?
[00:31:34.440] – Jennifer
Absolutely. Thank you for asking. And thank you – this was a great conversation as always. People can find me through my website, which is Principled Learning Strategies. That’s principled as in to have principles, not to be a principle. The website address is principledlearning.org. There is a page there for taming the turbulence, and the pre-sales are up, and I would certainly invite people to take a look. My other books are there as well. It’s a great place to keep up with me. Then, of course, follow me on LinkedIn. That’s really where I’m doing the most of my professional sharing. It’s a great place to connect with me.
[00:32:12.800] – Steve
Well, we will post the link to your website in the lead-in to the podcast for folks to find.
[00:32:20.340] – Jennifer
Excellent.
[00:32:21.080] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks again. Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.
