K-12 Leader Development with Dr. Chris Rehm and Joel Wright

Dr. Chris Rehm is passionate about developing leadership capacity from younger ages, rather than waiting until college or adulthood. His early work in schools propelled him into educational administration and consulting, where he gained experience with curricular and organizational alignment, intentional learning outcome design, strategic planning, program evaluation, and technology implementation. Chris is currently Head of School at Wuhan Yangtze International School. 

Joel Wright is a leadership architect, social entrepreneur, innovator, and facilitator of leadership and organizational development. For over 20 years, he has focused on the question: what would the world look like if all people had access to leadership development? He has pursued this mission through the Center for Creative Leadership, the YMCA, Sri Lanka YMCA, Habitat for Humanity, and corporations. While at CCL, he led a team that worked directly with youth through Rotary International, Ravenscroft School, Charlotte Latin School, Milton Hershey School, SMU, and UNC-Chapel Hill. Joel is currently a consultant and the President of the Leadership Forum Community. 

A Few Quotes From This Episode

• “Leadership is a muscle. The earlier you exercise it, the stronger it gets.” 
• “Teachers don’t need another program. They need a different lens.” 
• “Everything can be leader development. But that’s overwhelming unless you simplify it.” 

Resources Mentioned in This Episode 

• How to Unleash a Billion Leaders: The New Building Blocks for Youth Leader Development by Rehm and Wright
• Expanding the Leadership Equation - by Ellen Van Velsor and Joel Wright
• Developing a Billion Leaders - by Gergen, Wright, and Rego

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Attend The Global Conference in Toronto, October 28-31.

About  Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: Practical Wisdom for Leaders

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

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Transcript

Scott Allen: [00:00:00] Okay, everybody, welcome to the podcast. We have a really fun conversation tonight. Today tomorrow. If you're in the future one of our guests is in the future. We don't know where we are right now, but we're gonna have a good conversation. I have Joel and Chris with me today. Chris is in China Joel is in North Carolina.

Scott is in Chagrin, falls, Ohio. And we're gonna talk K 12 Leader Development. It's a conversation we haven't had on the podcast, so I'm super excited to learn a little bit more about how these two are thinking about this work. But Chris, I'm gonna turn it to you, our friend in the future. What what do listeners need to know about you, sir, before we jump into the heart of the conversation.

Chris Rehm: Great. Thanks so much, Scott. We're really excited for this conversation and I've been a fan of your podcast for pretty much its entire existence. So a lot of people I admire and read about their work have been on this podcast, so I'm a little bit odd and humbled to be here myself. So I've been in education for my career [00:01:00] in a variety of settings.

Mainly. Private schools. This is my third continent I've worked on. I've been in America, been in Europe, and now I'm in China. So six schools across my career, a variety of styles and shapes. But what I became passionate about pretty early on was the side of schools. That's not often focused on, so you might think of dean of students roles.

Now we're getting a lot more attention for social emotional learning, which wasn't as popular earlier in my career, but I've always had a passion around that. And that kind of stemmed into research and a doctoral program focused on leader development where I was exposed to this whole world in the adult space that I didn't know existed.

And so I've been particularly interested in translating that. To the K 12 space and in advancing this work so we can increase the leadership capacity for all students everywhere. 

Scott Allen: Love it. Love it, sir. Okay, Joel, tell us a little bit about you, sir. The Tarheel. [00:02:00]

Joel Wright: Yeah. Thank you. Pleasure, Scott. Good to be here with you both and have this conversation.

Yeah, so I've taken a different path than many people in the field of leadership development. In high school and college I actually taught tennis and taught skiing. And so early on I got exposed to helping people learn and grow. And when the season came to an end. I found myself actually even at a younger age, wanting to help people grow on a deeper journey, like the sport wasn't enough.

Yeah. And then I fell into the field of leadership development when I pivoted from the corporate world and went into the YMCA. And so I was at a Y-M-C-A conference and training center, and I started really being introduced to the field of leadership development through a community there that's called the Leadership Forum Community.

And it's a. 107 year old community now, it was started by the YMCA the Center for Creative Leadership had [00:03:00] history in it. But it introduced me into the field and through that I found myself being a part of a group that went to Sri Lanka. So actually it was my wife and I in that group. So we went to Sri Lanka with the YMCA.

And we were world service workers there. 

Chris Rehm: Wow. 

Joel Wright: And having been introduced to leadership development, I started doing leadership development over there. My role was to bring it to the 38 YMCAs that were there that year that my wife and I started our life together. Over there, the tsunami came through, so that was 2004, 2005.

And. What I learned over there is we were offering leadership development to young people, was the incredible hunger for that. Wow. And over there, the question really started to emerge around, boy, what would the world look like if all young people had access to leadership development?

And interestingly enough after I returned and ended up at the Center for Creative Leadership as a part of this group to [00:04:00] launch Leadership Beyond Boundaries. I returned early on in my time to CCL and interviewed some of those young people about what helped them respond to the tsunami. And they all pointed back to that opportunity where they were exposed to a little bit of leadership development that enabled them to step up.

And so then while I was at CCL we were talking to senior execs and people and we kept hearing from people saying. I wish I got this when I was younger. 

Scott Allen: Yeah. 

Joel Wright: And so you'd hear these, 40 year olds going through CCL programs and saying, I wish I got this when I was younger. The funny part about this, Chris, is actually I have talked to 14 year olds going through like a rotary program and one of them was just like.

Man, if I only got this a couple years ago, I could have done so much more. And so interestingly, Ellen Van Veer, who we talked about just a few minutes ago before the podcast started we we were talking and Ellen and I did a little fun study [00:05:00] there and reached out and had 462 people that we surveyed through CCL system globally.

And it was somewhere over 90% of them said that. All students should have access to leadership development. And in fact, everyone under 95% of the respondents said that before the age of 21, everyone should have access to leadership development. So this message of, I wish I got this when I was younger, and getting it to people earlier can just provide dividends on somebody's lives.

Scott Allen: Oh, and society. A hundred percent. I'm really excited for this conversation because I think, to show my cards early and listeners have heard me say this before, I think one of the Achilles heels as a ski coach or as a tennis coach or Chris for you in education we've scaffolded the learning around, let's say mathematics or we've scaffolded the learning around teaching someone violin.

Now it might be the Suzuki method. There's other methods, but at least the learning has been scaffolded [00:06:00] in certain paradigms, and I don't know that we've done that. I feel like we're at such a youthful state in our understanding of how to do this work. So I am onboard excited and just in, when it comes to this conversation, because I do think even some of those really.

Kind of simple mental models that people are fed. You have to have a title or a position to lead. If we can break some of those realities down in people's minds when they're young, I think that does a great service. So how are the two of you thinking about this? Joel, why don't you start us off and then Chris, we'll go to you to 'cause I love the fact that we have this combo here and you all have been working on this topic, so let's jump in.

Joel Wright: Yeah. And so just to continue a little bit of the thread that I was talking about, because a couple of other steps in my career took me through growing the work at CCL, growing this line of business working with a number of schools and universities to develop frameworks. I then ended up going on to UNC [00:07:00] here.

At Chapel Hill and I got a Master's in Educational Innovation, technology and Entrepreneurship. That's a mouthful. It's called the Mighty Program. Really cool program. And then I've spent time in the corporate world and executive coaching and such. Yeah. With the work that I did at CCL in particular I've found a couple of things to be really important, and you've talked about these things before, is that, there's a lot to explore around differentiating, leading self or leader, and leadership. And so that noun and verb, if we want to talk about it in that way, that people have referenced it. And how do we break some of these concepts down to simplicity? Oliver Wendell Holmes, the quote, I wouldn't give a fig for simplicity or, simplicity on this side of complexity.

But I would give, my arm, anything for simplicity on the other side of complexity. That was a mantra that we used as we started to [00:08:00] learn and explore how do we do this in schools? Because what we found out when we did some work with Ravenscroft, is we actually went through rounds of research.

With getting input from the school around what they wanted when they wanted to develop this citizen leader framework down there. And, we got input from teachers, from parents, from students. We did all of the discovery work and we presented this framework to them, and it had four components to it.

And. The teachers were like whoa. That is way too complex. And so we said thanks for that feedback. And we went back and we made it a little bit tighter and better so that they could have a common language. Grounded in some common beliefs. And so the simplicity of thinking about leadership and leader and then having a consistent language and framework enables the adults in the eco ecosystem [00:09:00] to really support uniformly and develop everyone.

There's a lot more to share about some of this, but let's start with that. 

Scott Allen: Awesome. Awesome. Okay, Chris. You're on the front lines every day doing this work. What are some things that you're thinking about that maybe build upon what Joel just said? 

Chris Rehm: Yeah, absolutely. I. So I've always had this interest in this side of schools.

I was put in charge at one of my school of training, the leaders, they called them prefects and proctors at this school. And I didn't know what I was doing and I'd never taught this before. And so I said, okay, let me call around to some schools that have leadership or leader development in their mission statement.

So I started calling these schools and I got these answers that just. Baffled me in terms of what do you do? Oh we focus on critical thinking and public speaking. Shouldn't every good school do that? And so it didn't go very far. And I was a little frustrated at that time. This is mid two thousands, late two thousands.

There was one book that was done by Josie Bass in 98 called Youth Leader [00:10:00] Development, and it was okay. But my I was entering a PhD program at the time at James Madison University and gratefully, Susan Murphy just arrived at the same time I was starting. So she was head of the program and that's right about the time she started, coming out with great publications. She did a book Early Development and Leadership. And then this paper, which kind of outlined some of the early influences in leader development. And that research has grown a lot over the last 15 years. Now there's some people I admire, they all seem to come out of there's a couple different threads, right?

CCL does incredible work. A lot seems to go back to Claremont McKenna. Oh yeah. And Riggio. And day. And there's this guy I admire Marco Leo. He's at Jiang University in China. He did a great paper to outline some of these early, early signals or developmental, the appropriate things that we can do.

This research has grown a, as I've been an administrator in education and I think that's really [00:11:00]exciting. We are, were at an interesting point. When I started, we had a few off the shelf products that were really good. You've got leader in me and you've got the leadership challenge and I have no problem with those, but what I learned is kids get tired of them.

You run 'em once and they understand it. That's probably good enough. The ideal is what Joel was doing, and I got to join him on some of his projects with these public school systems or individual independent schools, and they were fantastic to be able to create a customized framework for that institution that incorporates the values of that institution.

Yeah. And the resources that they have in that community. The problem is there's a big gap in price between what most people can afford to pay the ccl l on. And that's on the one end of the spectrum. And the other end of the spectrum is this off the shelf product that's plugin, more plug and play, but limited in what you can do with it.[00:12:00]

So Joel and I started talking a lot about how we could create a customizable translation of some of the research that teachers and parents and educators could pick up and run with it. We realized pretty quickly teachers are pretty busy and we know this, they don't need another thing, they don't need another program.

But if they can have a blueprint to think about leader development in their classroom. Using what they're already doing and viewing it through a different lens that ends up being really powerful. So we created a blueprint that we've been testing out in different environments. I've gotten to share it with my staff and students and so far successful.

So that's how we started. We came to this point, we started thinking about leader development and we're particularly excited about the next stage and the next evolution of this work. 

Scott Allen: We'll talk a little bit about that. So what. What are you all thinking about right now based on some of the work that you've done initially?[00:13:00]

Chris Rehm: Sure. So there's two parts to the blueprint. I would say we call the one slope and it won't be mind blowing to any of your listeners who are well steeped in this. But again, the idea is translating the really good research. For educators and having them being able to hold onto something that they can incorporate into their classrooms.

Yep. And so this can be as, as simple or as complex as they want it to be. And we think of it as five buckets of slope. There's self. Which understanding and improving how to lead oneself. There's learning, which is bifurcated into kind of continuous learning across all categories of slope. This would be like growth mindset type stuff, and then functional learning for a task specific application.

If you don't know about a particular area, you're not gonna be able to. Do as much in the leadership world about it. And kids intrinsically get this, Scott, because you'll get kids who are very willing to step up in an English classroom or a certain classroom setting, but very reticent on the sports field [00:14:00]and quite the opposite.

You'll have a kid who knows, oh, okay. I can try a leadership on the lacrosse field a lot more quickly than I'm comfortable doing that in a science classroom. Self-learning, others enhancing one's abilities to understand and manage relationships better. Interact, and collaborate and lead with others.

This is huge. Practice is one of the most important things that we highlight because we feel like, it's this muscle, right? This is a quote that gets used. It's a muscle, and the earlier and more you exercise this muscle, the stronger it's going to get. So how can we get kids, these reps in the gym earlier in their careers so they can start.

Learning, trying, failing, growing from experiences. And that's how leader development happens. And then the last is environment expanding awareness about the possibilities and challenges of leadership in different contexts, cultures and systems. We have opportunities, we're shaped by our environments, and we have.

Depending on how you contextualize environment, we have [00:15:00] opportunities to shape it. We're also offered opportunities by our environment and limited by our environment. Some of the opportunities my kids have in China, my students in China look very different than an opportunity that they would have in the United States.

And I quickly learned a project that I might assign someone in the United States. Is not appropriate in China because of the context and the culture. So you have to regardless of your age you're offered, constraints and opportunities by your environment. So we call those that slope and we think of them as buckets.

And the basic contention to answer this early question I had of what is leader development, right? What is leader development in schools? What am I doing? Because Susan Murphy had a great quote in her work where she said, pretty much everything can go into the category of leader development because it's human development.

And that's completely overwhelming to an educator. So I can do anything and it's leader development. Okay. Or I have do everything and it's leader development. And so [00:16:00] actually what is it? So our contention is if you're filling each of these five buckets, you are engaged in the process of leader development.

And these buckets are never totally full across your lifetime. You can't have an overflowing bucket. You're always learning and growing in each of these areas. But if you are filling each of these buckets, then you are indeed engaged in the process of leader development as an educator or a parent or as an individual.

Scott Allen: Love it. Joel, you're you're itching to jump in. You're smiling like Yeah, did just Chris, he was into it, man. In that little, that, that segment. I loved it. Okay. So Joel 

Joel Wright: What I need to do is I almost need to take you back to. Chris and I sitting in my house around an old wooden table, and we're having this conversation around, how do we think about scaling this?

How do we take what we know and what we've learned and really get it out there so that it can get to, all students everywhere. And so Chris said. I think we need a framework, and I'm like, the last thing the [00:17:00] world needs is another damn leadership framework. I'm like no, and he talks me into it.

He's just, okay. I'm like, all right into it. We'll go through the thought exercise, right? Let's. Let's go down that road. And so to his credit, as we started going down that road, I thought about, the work that I'd done, I'd built out frameworks in multiple different schools from SMU to UNC, chapel Hill to Ravenscroft, to some public schools from private schools.

And you know what I really started to process, and even when I brought some of this to Habitat for Humanity over in Asia is. Okay. Leading self. Leading with others were standard elements. It maps to emotional intelligence. There's so many other things that you can do around mapping that.

And so we're like, okay, leading, self leading with others. And there needs to be an element of learning. And so we're like, okay, those were the earlier iterations that used to be in there. Understand self to lead, self, understand others to lead. So we need to have some of that learning [00:18:00] built in.

And Chris just explained some of the other ways that we started to frame it. And then I started to process, I said. You know what something that young people always say on every single evaluation is. Can we have more experiential activities when we're doing this? 

Scott Allen: Yep. 

Joel Wright: And it's just oh my God. We're like, okay.

And when I was ramping up facilitators to train and scale this work through habitat's youth build work over in Asia I. We had to ramp up these facilitators and we pushed them into practice early to facilitate some of the content. And that quick little feedback loop helped them start to use the language, helped them pull their own life experiences into how they'd explain this, and it just supercharged the learning.

Scott Allen: Yep. 

Joel Wright: And so as we started thinking about all of this, Chris said. Practice. He's we need practice. And what we were doing too with the Habitat YouthBuild, is we were looking at the, strategic [00:19:00] sustainable development goals from the un. And there's 21 that are out there and we're like, you know what?

Young people get involved in this. They will start to think of themselves as a leader when it's relevant to them. And so how do we have them look into the environment and find something that they might be passionate or at least interested in, or one of their friends is doing this and say, Hey, come on along with me.

And then what happens with a young person is they start to, and this happens with adults too, is you find something that's motivating you. And you're like, oh wow, this is interesting. I want, I wanna do this better. I want to create more of an impact. And then they start backward stepping actually through the framework if you want to use slope.

So it's like you're looking in the environment, you're like wow, this is really cool. I need to do this better. So I need to practice it more. And then it's oh crap. I need to do this with other people better. And so it's now I'm talking about leading with [00:20:00] others and oh, I might need to learn some other stuff to partner with people, but also about the topic we're talking about.

And all of that points you all the way back down into, okay, how do I lead myself better to do all of this? 

Scott Allen: Yep. 

Joel Wright: And what we've also learned with young people, and this plays out too with young boys, I think a little bit more, is that young people often don't wanna raise their hand to be a leader.

Because they don't wanna boss their friends around. 

They don't want to wear the kind of yoke of responsibility, not all of them. And so there's just a lot of reasons why they don't want to step into that. But here's the other secret that we learned, and I learned this, because of ccl, l's great work research and work.

Is the DAC framework, direction, alignment, commitment. 

Scott Allen: Yep. 

Joel Wright: And what that does for young people is it helps them think about, oh yes, I need to lead myself, and how do I apply DAC to my context, my role, and everything else? [00:21:00] But then it also peels it out into leadership as a social process. 

Scott Allen: Yep. 

Joel Wright: And so by having people think about, especially young people think about, oh, I don't need to be the leader, but I can contribute to this.

It turns it more into that team sport of which then there're a player in there and so that all of a sudden invites people in just like a cause or a motivation that I can do something here and oh, I can do this with other people and I don't need to be the boss. I'm contributing to it. So there's multiple layers in there that said, okay, how do we package this into slope so that it can be a blueprint that gets out there to educators as a simple way that they can use and modified or to the buckets that Chris is talking about.

It's what, within my class or my school, or as a parent, what do I, what buckets do I need to fill? Fill, excuse me. For my young person, or does my program need [00:22:00] to make sure that they're hitting? 

Scott Allen: Yeah. You all are. I co-founded an organization in 2015 called the Collegiate Leadership Competition.

And the whole purpose of that was can we, why can we get students to practice leadership? Can we create a practice field? Why do people practice? My, my daughters are at. Rehearsal right now. They're in Sical this weekend. So to compete or to perform, and so can we create an excuse for people to get together and practice?

We actually had a few independent schools, high schools in on the East Coast participate for a couple years, but. Yes. How do you create a context where people can practice this and actually reflect on it, get to know themselves a little bit better under stress, see how they behave, see how the team behaves.

Create an environment where we can give one another feedback in an authentic and constructive way. And yes to all of these self. Connecting with others, the social aspect of all of this learning [00:23:00] as just a through line for life and practice. And then of course, yeah, we're doing this in a context and there's in many ways purpose behind it.

But also how do and Chris, you said it beautifully, some of these contextual shifts impact how we do the work. Chris, what else do you want to add, sir? 

Chris Rehm: Thanks, Scott. Yeah. Loving this. I think we also added kind of elements that amplify your program's success and as another part of this blueprint for educators and parents to think about because this really came out of a lot of Joel's work at the CCL and his learning as he worked at institutions what we call it best.

So if you want slope, you got slope, you got your buckets, you gotta fill them. But if you want it to be the. Best slope, right? There's this, these four elements you think about, and that's beliefs about leadership. So you can have, someone like I I'm still shocked, Scott, like you said about the mental models that [00:24:00] adults have around leadership and how they think some kids have it and some kids don't.

And I see that as toxic. We want our work to be open source. We're not interested in like making a profit off of branding this because we really think everybody needs this. We don't believe that. Like some kids have it and some kids don't. We think it's part of the, part of everybody's learning journey.

But if you are a teacher in a classroom. You're doing your best to raise everyone and develop them as leaders, but the teacher next door is giving a different message about, oh, some kids got it and some kids don't. And by the way, who's the authority on that? That teacher, they know. They know who has it and who doesn't, which is totally a different kind of loaded thing.

But it's the beliefs about leadership across the organization, across your family that need to get examined. So that's the b. That e is ethics. I think it's really important that we practically speaking, we incorporate ethics into our leader development, but a lot of times in the models they get intertwined.

And I [00:25:00] think that it's worth calling out ethics as a separate component as something that you need to develop. And then intertwine on the programmatic level and how I think we can be clearer about where our ethics come from and how we're getting to that point. I'm excited to see that kind of shift in society.

People more willing to talk about that. But if you're not doing some sort of ethical development along with leader development, just stop. Because we can make the wrong types of leaders than and for a world we don't wanna live in. The S is strength. You have assets in your family, you have assets in your school or your community, how can you utilize those?

You don't need to do something incredibly different, right? The idea is make this easy for people. You don't need to say, oh, I need to go to China on a trip to have the experiences that Chris's students have. No, we happen to be in China for a variety of reasons, so we will utilize the strengths of our [00:26:00]community and our environment at.

Every, every community and environment has those strengths and those opportunities. So how can you lean into those to enhance what you're doing with slope? And then the last thing, the T might be the most important, Scott, we call it threads. Threads of intention. So how can you pull intentionality? Into what you do.

I see teachers in a classroom who are able to take an activity that they've taught for a number of years and it hasn't been a leader development exercise, but then they look at it through an intentional lens of leader development and it becomes a leadership development activity. And that's great news for teachers because they don't want another program.

But they can talk about Lord of the Flies. Through a leader development lens and they've already been teaching Lord of Flies for the, for years. And so that's really helpful for educators. And ultimately it's intentionality we think will lead to leader [00:27:00] self-efficacy in kids. This'll lead to motivation to lead.

This'll lead to practice, which will lead to increased capacity for leadership to solve the complex problems of our world. And that's our basic premise for the work. 

Scott Allen: Again, whether it's the tennis team or the ski team or theater or Lord of the Flies or gaming, my son is a gamer at times, and there's all kinds of lessons that if we were to look at it through a certain lens, so many conversations, so much opportunity, history, political science it's all around us.

Literally, if we look at it through that lens. I love that. I really do. Joel. 

Joel Wright: Yeah. Scott, I loved your podcast a little while ago when you had John McGuire and Chuck Paulis on about vertical development. 

Scott Allen: Yeah. 

Joel Wright: We 

Chris Rehm: love Chuck. 

Scott Allen: Yeah. 

Joel Wright: And so many mutual friends here, but, vertical development is also really critical to weave into this conversation.

So we have [00:28:00] to think about the adults. There are so many good teachers in the world, and how do we make sure and help them continue to learn and grow on their leadership journey? Because, we have an interdependent world and we need to help. People be prepared for that interdependent world, but sometimes in different spaces, whether it's a coach or whether it's a classroom, or whether it's a parent, these mindsets that sometimes adults have if they are in that dependent continuum.

Across Bert's, seven Logics, they are not gonna be able to help somebody grow to have the skills or mindsets for the interdependent world. And that same at a manager level in a corporation, right? Yep, 

Scott Allen: yep. 

Joel Wright: Or a leader. So it's like we have to integrate the vertical leadership development approach here for the adults.

So earlier when I was talking about, how do we have a framework and a common language, it's also how do we have those. [00:29:00] Common belief structures that Chris has talked about in that best approach. So I've really taken an organizational development approach to some of the work in schools because we have to think of that entire ecosystem.

So what I loved about the work that we did at Ravenscroft is pre-K through 12 CCL, and a team of us went on in there to train and develop the capacity of. Every adult in that system. We spent time with board members, we spent time with educators, we spent time with some of the facility staff members and everything so that everyone in there was learning and growing so that any interaction that was happening was hopefully being modeled as a way to think about how can somebody lead from here, and that's the name of their.

Framework, but that vertical component of helping people be able to go from me to we 

Scott Allen: Yep. 

Joel Wright: Is the biggest challenge we face [00:30:00] in this world, these today. And so how do we get that to people younger and how do we get it to everyone? 

Scott Allen: Yeah. And I think if you design it well, wrote a paper with Dave Rush and it went into the Journal of Leadership.

Sorry about that. And if you design it wrote a paper with Dave Rush a while back and we were exploring this whole notion of, some, I know that people like this language and don't like this language for listeners but for simplicity we're gonna call it vertical and horizontal so I can be teaching you some content.

About leadership, but we can also help design in a way where your cognitive complexity is also elevated, right? So we can build in critical reflection, we can build in opportunities where I'm being challenged just outside of my comfort zone, that old challenge and support. And so we can design it in a way where, gosh, we create that holding environment as Heifetz would say, that.

Facilitates both. And how cool is [00:31:00] that, right? I think that's wizard like design, that's what we should call the model here. Wizard like design. Yes, Joel. 

Joel Wright: Yeah. And when we think about, some of those teachers that we've loved or hated, some teachers will help us. And teach us how to think, right?

Yes. And others want, others will tell us what to think, right? Yeah. And so we wanna think about how can teachers help us? How to think, because that helps us learn and grow. 

Scott Allen: Yep. Yep. Gentlemen, as we wind down our time together today I think I would love to go to each one of you, Chris, maybe we'll start with you.

What's the practical wisdom in this conversation? What stands out for you? What do you wanna leave listeners with when it comes to, and I know that at the end you all, both of you have a little bit of a plug too. But let's talk about the practical wisdom for right now. 

Chris Rehm: The practical wisdom is leader development doesn't need to be overly complex.

Start start with what you have [00:32:00] available. We hope that we provide best slope as a blueprint, a way to think through these things. But the key is to have kids start and start early and start practicing, and it's okay that they mess up. This is a journey for all of us.

It's never complete. And so don't hesitate for having all kids, and try leader leadership in some form of another. 

Scott Allen: Love it. And I love the fact that you all are experimenting as well. That's just it's invaluable. Joel?

Joel Wright: Yeah, I think, a lot of this comes back to beliefs, drive behaviors, and we're on a journey for young people and for adults. And so how do we keep that in mind, whether we're the ones working with a young person or whether it's a young person that is still on their development journey. So it's like we're all still learning and growing and our hopefully our beliefs continue to mature and grow on our journey.

And how do we [00:33:00] play the long road with all of these young people, plant the seeds that, that help them germinate and do that with our colleagues too, because it does take an ecosystem. 

Scott Allen: A hundred percent takes an ecosystem. I like that. I like that a lot. I know that the two of you have a little bit of a call Chris, what do you think?

Chris Rehm: I'm really excited for where leader development research and practice can head in the future. I think we're at a really unique time. I came into this from K 12 education. I knew a little about the field, which had been focused on adults and then trickled down to college. But as I listened to your podcast and heard your guests, I think we're at a really critical inflection point for the field, and I'm excited by what.

I hope we can build out for K 12 because we are incredibly focused on pedagogy already in K 12, and we're already attuned to developmentally appropriate stages for kids and that spans into adult, so I [00:34:00] think. If we can get this right, like those building blocks of a leader development and the different constructs and what they look like at different life stages and how to best teach that.

And that's not as big of a challenge in K 12, I think as it is in adult or college because we've got kids for 12 or 15 years theoretically in our system. Yes. So if we come with this lens of, okay, we can. Build this developmental journey for a kid. I'm excited if we can get some help on that.

And people who are willing not to make it a branded item, but willing to just share and have the mentality that we want this to be open for everyone. Everyone has the ability and access to leader development. If we can do that, I think it can in turn inform the adult and collegiate research spaces, which we've learned so much from.

Scott Allen: To, to your point, it's the closest thing to the military that we're gonna get. And by that I mean we have [00:35:00] time. We have time. There's a luxury of time here and the military has a period of time to develop these people into generals or into colonels, whatever it is. And of course, there's developmentally appropriate education that's happening there.

Not that the military is perfect, not that they do it perfect, but they've got time. And in a lot of these programs that we're doing in colleges, and especially once we get into corporate, which is where a lot of my. Time is right now. You get a half day, you get one day, and that's like literally sending me to a cooking class for a day or a course on piloting.

Do you want me to fly a plane after that day course on piloting? No, I am not a pilot. So I think that is one of the. Most precious currencies in how you all are thinking is that time? And if we scaffold that if we prioritize that, and I love your notion also of aligning with, [00:36:00] I don't know that it has to be an add-on, but Lord of the Flies is a beautiful book to examine some concepts and through, through the lens of leadership, right?

So whether Absolutely, and we go ahead. 

Chris Rehm: We, we'd love help. I'd say on that, I lead a school. I'm a head of school. I'm passionate about this topic, but I, you have practical things you have to do as well. So if we can if people are interested and willing to engage, we would love to partner with others to advance this work in the PK 12 space.

Scott Allen: Awesome. I'm gonna put your information in the show notes so people will know how to connect with you and maybe we can put the paper in there as well. Is that a possibility? You all? Okay, perfect. So we'll have the, a link to the paper as well. And, if you all are interested in exploring a space that's a very important space.

A space that's ripe for innovation and discovery. These are two gentlemen who are partners in that endeavor. [00:37:00] So gentlemen, thank you so much for stopping by. Appreciate you. 

Chris Rehm: Thanks Scott. This was great. 

Joel Wright: Thanks Scott.

Scott Allen: Okay.