Five Strategies for a Successful School Year
Source/Author: Nancy L. Spencer, Head of School
August 21, 2020
Welcome back to the 2020-21 school year! Like many of you, I have been waiting for this moment for many, many months. It has been wonderful to see the campus come alive with activity and also to watch the joy of students interacting with each other and their teachers online through the Flexible Learning Program.
As we embark on this new school year, I want to refer back to the five guiding principles that will shape our thinking. These essential pillars are:
- Health and safety of the school community
- Financial sustainability of the School while preserving jobs
- Continuity of the Shorecrest educational experience
- The importance of diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice
- Support for faculty and staff, families and students
Everything we do this year will revolve around these five principles.
I also want to offer some strategies about approaching this year. These ideas have their genesis in a recent article in the "New York Times" by Dr. Pooja Lakshmin who is a professor at the George Washington University School of Medicine. She identifies five key strategies to help orient ourselves and face the world today.
First, accept uncertainty. It’s harder for some of us, who are planners, but the reality is that right now is a time when we must learn to accept the gray areas. Many people want definitive answers and we simply don’t have them.
Second, distinguish between productive and unproductive worry. Productive worry incentivizes productive action: getting work done because a deadline is approaching. Unproductive worry is waking up in the middle of the night and perseverating about something you can’t do anything about, thus working yourself into such a state that you can’t fall back to sleep. I’ve done both. It helps to acknowledge that some worries you can address and some you cannot. And while it’s tempting to believe that if you worry about some things long enough and strongly enough, you can actually affect the outcome, it simply isn’t true.
Third, cultivate compassion. Our core values include compassion, along with responsibility, respect, integrity and knowledge. Practicing compassion is going to be crucial this year. Compassion and understanding are vital in a time when anxiety and uncertainty affect different people in different ways. I include compassion for yourself as well. We are all going to try our best. And some days, our best may not be pretty, but it’s still our best, and we need to be compassionate to ourselves and to each other, especially on those days.
Along with compassion, it’s also important to acknowledge the loss and grief that we are all experiencing. Throughout the past five months, some of us have experienced the passing of family and friends due to the pandemic. Many of us have had to forego important milestone rituals and celebrations. And all of us have experienced the loss and comfort of our daily routines, as we have suffered a blow to our overall sense of security.
Fourth: practice flexible thinking which can lead to improved resilience. Realize that being flexible means accepting changing circumstances as they unfold. Dr. Lakshmin suggests that “psychological flexibility is a skill worth honing.” She suggests one way to nurture flexibility is to reflect on other situations in your life when you’ve been faced with uncertainty and unexpected change. Think through what helped you get through those times and what you learned about yourself. After those situations, often people experienced a new-found sense of resilience.
And the last strategy, number five: focus on your values and find sources of meaning.
In her book "A Paradise Built in Hell," the celebrated nonfiction writer Rebecca Solnit studied human responses to some of the world’s worst natural and man-made disasters — deadly earthquakes and the September 11 attacks. “The history of disaster,” she writes, “demonstrates that most of us are social animals, hungry for connection, as well as for purpose and meaning. Even in a moment of darkness, it seems, there are countless moments of light — gestures of compassion and connection that allow people to show who they are, how they want to live, and what matters to them.”
What matters to me, and I think to all of you, is this Shorecrest community. We are lucky that we have already defined and articulated our mission and core values. And for me, the source of meaning always comes back to our students and doing what is in their best interest.
It’s going to be an important year in the history of Shorecrest. My goal is to do everything I can to make this 2020-21 school year the best one that we can possibly have. I want us to look back on this year and reflect with pride on how much our students have accomplished. Infused with flexibility and compassion, an acceptance of uncertainty, and fortified by a sense of humor, I encourage all of us to approach the year focused on our values and mission, with positivity and optimism.
I am so excited to be here and I look forward to the year ahead.
All the best,
Nancy
