Jennifer Abrams

The prolific author, education consultant and workshop leader from Palo Alto has just completed a new book entitled ‘‘Stretching Your Learning Edges’’. We wanted to find out more.

Jennifer, after the highly successful releases of ‘Having Hard Conversations’ and ‘Swimming in the Deep End’, we would like to find out more about your new book. But firstly, do you see patterns that will help schools emerge from the current crisis?

I am working with some wonderful educators who have been 'swimming in the deep end’ through this last year. They have worked tremendously hard to make sure students and families had the support and provided resources and instruction through new means. They helped keep schools together and beyond just a functioning community, but a supportive community. And now, there is a time to pause and reflect on the essential learnings as we move forward into the upcoming school year. One of them is how important it is to have healthy adult to adult communication within and amongst the staff and faculty and families. In the midst of crisis, we move back into survival mode and cannot access our bigger selves and our communications aren't our best. I think that we have recognized we need to make sure we come back better in our communications with each other. With more clarity, more empathy.

I also see middle-level leaders, department chairs, and team leads who as teacher leaders are having many of the day to day communications with their colleagues. They asking for more skill building in this area and they are being heard. I work with many heads of schools and organizations who are a bit surprised by the comments and requests they get as they might have forgotten that we have credentials in how to teach students and we don't have credentials in how to talk effectively with adults and from where they sit they don't immediately see the need for support and development because it is what they do all time - not so for teacher leaders. So the leadership development of these teachers in leadership positions is becoming ever more important. 

Can you tell us more about your new book ‘Stretching your Learning Edges’ which has just come out?

I wrote it because our work in education has become so much more complex and we are challenged to be our best adult selves to manage that complexity with more agility and grace. This work asks working those in schools to think about both child development and adult development. As Felipe Fernandez-Aremsto said in Humankind: A Brief History, “If we want to go on believing we are human and justify the special status we accord ourselves—if, indeed, we want to stay human through the changes we face—we had better not discard the myth (of our special status), but start trying to live up to it.” So in that spirit, through the book and the workshops, I am facilitating, we look at strategies for how we can all, learn, mature and develop as the adults in school and look at five different facets of being our best selves – know our identities, suspend certainty, take responsibility, working with reciprocity, and build resiliency. It is in these ways we need to be stretching and engaging with our growth edges – developing ourselves to become better educators and better human beings.

Thanks, Jennifer!

Keep in touch with Jennifer and her work: www.jenniferabrams.com