The adventure of grafting Teaching for Transformation (TfT) into our school culture, while intimidating, is at the heart of the work we are called to do as leaders in Christian schools. That work is summarized well in one of the commands from Micah 6:8: “Act justly.” By choosing to implement TfT, we are inviting, nurturing, and empowering our entire school community to create a more just world. We are inviting parents to see biblical justice as essential to an excellent education. We are nurturing students who not only think about justice seeking but also are empowered to be justice seekers. We are equipping teachers to create more just classrooms, curricula, and learning experiences, for justice is at the heart of the gospel. It is not optional. And so as school leaders, we must also heed the command and act justly.
What Is Justice?
We are inclined to narrowly define justice around concepts of material poverty or lack of social freedoms. In The Justice Calling, Hoang and Johnson point out, “God calls his holy people to seek justice on behalf of those living farthest from his vision of shalom so that all in the community might flourish” (27). Justice defined broadly is about creating space for all God’s creation to thrive. Any work Christians do to steward the world toward shalom and into order brings justice and righteousness. Most specifically, creating space for all humans, each made in the image of God, to flourish is the work of acting justly.
Last year I was vacationing in California near a state park along the ocean, and every morning my walk led me to the end of the park where I turned around at an ivy covered wall and headed back. The last morning among the ivy on the wall, I saw a gleam. I pulled the ivy back and in the wall was a bronze sculpture of a hand doing half a high-five. Someone thought this park that ended in a big block wall needed this little sculpture so that there was something more than a wall when you turned around. This art was a simple act of justice because it allowed people’s lives, for however brief a moment, to be more like God intended. We all, including our students, have a call to bring justice to the world.
How Do We as School Leaders Act Justly?
Effective school leaders create an environment where the people around them thrive and flourish. By seeing our role as creating a more just school where people are encouraged to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God, we are nurturing meaningful, life-giving work for teachers and students to do. We are allowing them to climb into an epic story and have the adventure God created for them. Here are five key principles for creating a more just, righteous, and flourishing environment in your Christian school and, by extension, the community around your school.
Set Time for Regular Reflection. Regular times of reflection on our work as leaders will create flourishing. In Reaching Out Henri Nouwen says, “When we live with a solitude of heart, we can listen with attention to the words and worlds of others” (38). In this desire for flourishing, TfT incorporates specific practices that encourage students and teachers to reflect on their role in God’s story. These same practices are vital for our leadership. We need to slow down and ask questions of ourselves: What have I learned? Does what I am doing as a leader create space for flourishing? Is there a new path that I need to explore in my leadership so that I act justly?
Second, leaders need to spend time in solitude and silence, much as Jesus modeled in retreating to the mountains. “The central disciplines of the spiritual life, as taught by generations of Christian saints, have stayed the same for twenty centuries now: solitude, silence, and fasting” (Crouch, 36). The TfT training process invites the Spirit, through practices of solitude and silence, to blow through our faculty and student community as we wrestle with our deep hopes and our place in God’s story. School leaders must also give the Spirit time in our hearts as we consider how we invite, nurture, and empower our school communities to be places of justice and thriving.
Be Curious. Being a leader who is a curious learner will inspire others to thrive. The main way that we can do this in a TfT implementation is by being part of the process. We as school leaders participate in all the training, fully and without reservation. I try to be the first to put my mobile device visibly away. I participate in the discussions without dominating them. By doing so, I trust other voices, voices more powerful and influential than my own, to raise critical points. I try to listen more than I speak. I learn. TfT asks teachers to “commit-to-try” and we school leaders need to do the same. As a curious TfT school leader, I make presentations of our TfT work. While this is challenging because the tools of TfT are designed for teachers and students, adjusting and adapting them to the work I do to lead and support doesn’t go unnoticed. More importantly, I notice myself seeing the world with new eyes and seeing new possibilities for our school to act justly.
Model and Commit to Try the Practices. Modeling the practices and protocols of TfT increases growth in our ability to lead justly and to enable flourishing among our school community. Throughout the TfT training process, a lot of practices were new to us, or we had never applied them to leadership. We added learning targets to faculty meetings and other professional development sessions. We use learning protocols extensively in our faculty learning sessions and staff meetings since starting TfT. As an administrator, I use the throughlines to guide my public prayers and in that way introduce these biblical practices to the community. Just as utilizing these practices and protocols allows our teachers and students to engage in a more just and flourishing learning environment, building our leadership toolbox allows us to create a more just and flourishing working environment.
Invite New Voices to Your School. TfT uses the tagline “See the Story, Live the Story.” Inviting new voices to share our leadership adds richness to the story. In preparing for our faculty discussion about what the Beauty Creator throughline means to us, I asked three community members to come in to talk about their work as beauty creators. One of them was a plumber who had designed, with our art teacher, a beautiful new sink for the art room. His presentation was about how he had been formed at our school many years ago, and how the foundation of grace and faith that we had nurtured in him had created a beautiful life, his own. I asked him to talk about a sink, but he demonstrated the beauty creating that Christian schoolteachers do every day. His presentation completely changed our idea of beauty creating.
Inviting someone you trust to be part of your journey and to share their story in God’s story will add to the flavor of your whole community and augment your TfT implementation. Understanding and embracing a broader community freed many of our teachers to begin to make their own connections so that they could practice acting justly with their students where our community has needs.
Be a Maker. School leaders must model a growth mind-set by taking risks and embracing change. In our case, we made a totally unique school calendar to accommodate the training days and to align these days across five independent schools. This was no small task. We are also working to create the structures needed to make changes together in the future and yet maintain our historical independence. Change and growth are part of the TfT process. Everyone involved in TfT knows that new work, new stories, new learning experiences are expected of them. To make room for the new, some old things will be lost. School leaders, too, will have to let go as we make room for the new stories in our TfT journey. This is part of the ebb and flow of growth, and it is a sign that new life is coming.
Tend Your School to Grow Justice. My favorite metaphor for the Christian school is a garden. Just as a gardener can’t force a bean plant to grow, teachers can’t force students to learn. But like a gardener, there are all kinds of influences, nudges, and environmental designs we can make that encourage student growth. We till the soil, remove the rocks and weeds, make sure the trees nearby do not shade too much or too little, and water so that conditions are perfect for growth. And then we wait. And we watch amazing things happen. So it is as we work to lead a school to act justly. We must find the areas of chaos and restore them. We must steward areas that need attention, even our own hearts, so that the Spirit, who causes all true growth, can move in the hearts of our students to act justly.
Works Cited
Crouch, Andy. The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2017.
Hoang, Bethany Hanke, and Kristen Deede Johnson. The Justice Calling: Where Passion Meets Perseverance. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2016.
Nouwen, Henri J. M. Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. New York: Doubleday, 1986.
Spencer, John, and A. J. Juliani. Launch: Using Design Thinking to Boost Creativity and Bring Out the Maker in Every Student. San Diego: Dave Burgess Consulting, 2016.
Jim Peterson has worked in Christian schools as a science and math teacher and as a technology coordinator. He currently serves as head of school at South Christian High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
