Rooting Yourself in "Team School"

Connect your values to the mission, vision and values of your school

Lessen the exhaustion from emotional labor and decision fatigue by getting in touch with where your personal values connect to your school’s

Back in March, I wrote here about burnout and emotional labor, with some ideas about how to combat it in our school workforce. It was inspired by a long article about burnout in the medical field by Susanna Crossman that appeared in Aeon magazine.

And in this post, I want to explore the idea of becoming a “deep actor” where you don’t “put on the mask” of a calm face but you have a genuinely calm face in more depth. Despite summer becoming busier and busier in the time I worked in schools, there is still more space for reflection and an opportunity to productively prepare for some of the messaging chaos and big feelings coming at us in the world in the fall of 2024.

The definition of emotional labor was a term coined by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild* as:

… ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display,’ inspired by sociologist’s Erving Goffman’s work on the different roles we play, Hochschild built her case by looking at jobs in the service industry and in care work that requires people to control their feelings and exhibit emotional responses that meet the demands of their role. 

“Hochschild distinguishes two kinds of emotional labour. Surface acting, or adjusting visible expressions and tone of voice while inner feelings are not changed; and deep acting, where we embody and adopt the emotional role required of us,” Crossman writes. “How do staff discover how to help and yet not try to save the world; to create boundaries, but not build impenetrable walls; to assume a role, yet be authentic? What happens when staff don’t feel anything, or feel too much?”

This is a really hard line to walk and it’s not all about your inclination, temperament or personality. And sometimes surface acting is exactly what we need to do. But when faced with the fear that this fall, we will be going weeks at a time pivoting in response to various complaints, conflicts and emotional upsets at school, to be able to be a deep actor, where the empathetic approach is authentic and almost automatic, creates less internal dissonance and exhaustion.

And here’s where the connection between who you are as a person and where you most authentically connect to the school’s mission, vision and values comes in.

I spent twenty years at a school whose mission was (to paraphrase) to educate young artists to become highly skilled craftspeople with intellectual curiosity and caring hearts. I spent seven years running a school whose mission was to empower young women to lead lives of consequence. Both missions deeply resonated with me. I believe the arts are essential to help humans make meaning. And I believe women are navigating a quickly evolving world while both carrying and subverting long standing societal norms and obstacles.

Both schools were founded around the beginning of the twentieth century, in very different contexts, and had evolved very different cultures. Both schools’ missions dictated bold and very different visions about how a successful mission could impact our larger world. The combination of the mission, vision and the cultures of the school dictated certain values. Both schools had stated institutional values, but there are also the values that drive the culture.

One example of this is that people were often surprised when I would tell them that “creativity” was not the top value in the Walnut Hill arts programs, at least when I was part of that community. The foundational driver of every arts program was for talented and dedicated young people to develop the skills and techniques of their arts discipline to then use in service of their creativity. So honestly, the bottom line values were focus and dedication - “she gave me everything she had in the tank” was the kind of high compliment an arts faculty member would give. 

And it took me years to figure that out! Sussing out the day-to-day values is a long term project! But once I had fully internalized, it did make it somewhat easier to have a conversation with a distraught parent about a casting disappointment. I wasn’t internally grappling for responses when faced with angry and frustrated accusations. The goal and value at work was for students to hone their craft and that is the reason to attend the school. They could get an A in their acting class and not be cast as the lead in the musical. They could be beloved by their teachers and not get the lead. There can be many worthy, focused and dedicated students and only one lead. It was not an assessment of a student’s talent or a predictor of future success. Tuition money had not been “wasted.”

In a smaller way, life was much easier doing course scheduling when the registrar and I landed on our values - we would prioritize a course change if it was necessary for a student’s education - to meet a requirement, for example. Or if they had done work over the summer and the department head gave permission to take a different math course. We would not prioritize a course change if you wanted a different teacher, or another section met at a “better” time or if you wanted to be in the same section as your friend. 

The more you think about and understand how you as a person relate to the mission, vision and values, institutional and otherwise, of your school, the more you can take a truly integrated approach when managing a complicated, emotional parent or student situation. You are not putting on your “school mask” as you bring your powers of empathy and problem solving to the task. And in a time of polarization, grounding how your values relate to the school’s values takes away the worry that you might be escalating a situation by revealing personal values that can be seen as aligned with Team Blue or Team Red and create more divisions rather than connections with the upset parent. Of course, you can have personal values that align in a politically partisan way, but as a professional, you can align firmly with Team School - and Team Cares About What’s Best for the Student.

Skill building takes time and practice but the more you understand the values connection, the more you can have a genuinely calm face. Put the calm face mask in the closet, close at hand because undoubtedly there will still be times you need it, but if you lessen how often you need it, you are building resilience. Navigating conflict and sensitive, emotional situations is always taxing but we can make it more manageable.

The other benefit of taking time this summer to really reflect on the connection between your personal values and the mission, vision and values of your school, is that when confusing, emotional situations arise, another aspect that feeds into the exhaustion of it all is decision fatigue. The more you truly understand how you, the mission, vision and values of your school connect and how mission, vision and values are enacted through your policies and procedures, the easier it is to navigate these highly emotional situations as the road map is at least partially laid out for you. You can more quickly discern both the bottom line of what’s going on beneath the surface and better envision a mutually beneficial outcome for the good of the student if you have spent time developing the skill to be deeply familiar with the values architecture that supports the school community in achieving its mission.

Here are three practical steps to fuel your reflection.

Gather and study whatever documents exist that convey the school’s mission, vision and values and try to revisit them with a fresh eye. What do you notice? What stands out to you? What resonates most? What questions does it create? 

Do some writing. Using the material above, reflect on how the mission and values show up in your life inside and outside of school. Where are the strongest connections? Where are the gaps? As you do this process of writing, do any ideas arise that surprise you or contradict your assumptions as to how you might respond to your connection to the mission and values of your school?

What are the values that have been most frequently challenged in the past few years in your school community? What have been respectful yet effective responses? How can important school values be emphasized in ways that put the well-being and experience of the student in the center? And what important school values might need to be challenged?

Enjoy. There’s a lot to explore. And I guarantee you will come out the other side at least a little bit better equipped to manage what is sure to be yet another complicated academic year.