Challenging the Status Quo:  with Dr. Rachel Roberts

Chief Ruckus Maker:
Well, hello, Ruckus Maker. Today we are joined by Dr. Rachel Roberts, who has served in various leadership roles in education for over 20 years as a teacher, instructional coach, assistant principal, and principal supervisor. Rachel is passionate about women in leadership and believes that relational leadership is key to high performing schools. Rachel lives with her wife Jules and a menagerie of pets and enjoys biking, reading, and fishing. Dr. Roberts, welcome to the show.

Rachel: Thank you, Danny. Thanks for having me.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
This is a pleasure. I’m really excited to have this talk today. And I know that you’re into challenging the status quo. And you’ve seen it yield great results, but it’s not always easy with teams. They might be resistant to change and that kind of thing. And so I’m just curious, when you approach challenging status quo, getting team buying, and ownership, what works for you in terms of creating that safety? People let their guard down just a little bit.

Rachel
I love that question, and I love working with teams. What I found when I was a very brand new principal is that I didn’t work really hard to build the team. I sort of had this mental model of leadership that I could come on board and have all the answers and not ask a lot of good questions. And so to get teams to that high performing place to help them sort of buck the system, it really takes that authentic relational leader who connects really well with their staff, who invites their staff in to have conversations and be part of the change. So few people want change enacted upon them. Anytime you’re just told, do something different, it’s sort of our human nature to say, whoa, I’ve got some agency here. I want to do my thing. And the success that I had over the years has really been closely related to my ability to let down my guard, to bring my authentic self to space, and to allow others to do the same. In any thorny challenge I have ever had, leading schools or working with principals, I bring that problem right back to the team because it’s our problem that we own together. I think that’s made me pretty successful, I should really say the teams were very successful.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
Absolutely. 100% on that. I’m sure you felt a shift when you were able to show up more authentically and that kind of thing, but do you have any specific examples just to share from your own personal leadership story that a Ruckus Maker listening might relate to and say, oh, that’s what it looks like to finally be real?

Rachel
For women, people of color, people in the LGBTQ community, it’s often really hard to bring your full, authentic self to spaces because some of those spaces aren’t designed for it. So that can make it really challenging. We’re also challenged with these notions of, like, mental models. We have these mental models of leadership, very Western, very white male centric. And so if you’re a woman, sometimes in those spaces, you’ll bring what you think is that version of that sort of decisive or heroic, whatever it may be. And it takes a lot of safety, both with the team and knowing yourself as a leader, to be able to fully bring yourself. I know I struggled with that a lot when I was first starting out and was sort of unsure of how much vulnerability I let my team see?

What happens if you go to a faculty meeting and you don’t have all the answers? What if you’re in a professional learning community and you don’t have the right answer for your team? I learned sort of the hard way my first couple of years. I don’t think I jived super well with my teams because I was sort of performing a level of leadership as opposed to bringing my authentic self. And what made the difference for me was really recognizing first that it wasn’t working. Right. I’m, like, wondering why everybody’s sort of bucking my thoughts and weren’t working together and then did a lot of reflection on how to bring my authentic self to space. And that comes through dialogue. Right. Getting to know the humanity of your team and letting your team see the humanity of you.

Rachel: And that can make just such a world of difference.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
100%. A lot of times I’ll tell leaders, often they’re told, right, keep that personal and the professional separate. You mentioned having a sense of how vulnerable to be. But I think if people are really afraid of being vulnerable, being real, the consequence of that is you are experienced. Like, you’re a robot. You’re not human. You’re alien in some respects, like, what is this? They don’t laugh at the jokes, they don’t come to the birthday things. I don’t know. But it builds walls, and that’s not what we want at all as leaders.

Rachel
I don’t think we can blame people for that because of these mental models. We are ingrained with these mental models of leadership. And so it does take your own reflection and learning as a leader to sort of how to break those models. How do you move away from sort of a Western notion of leadership and get to a more collaborative and community based and to know that vulnerability is really how you build the teams because it’s all about the relationship.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
And you mentioned already in this discussion that a lot of these mental models are sort of Western and white male centric. Part of that impacts your ability to show up as real. But in addition to that, are there any other impacts you want to share with the Ruckus Maker listening when it comes to systems that are led predominantly by males and white males at that.

Rachel
It’s sort of hard for us to even imagine what it would look like if we weren’t in a system that was sort of dominated by white male culture. Right. We just don’t have a lot of examples of that. Our schools and our school districts are really majority led by white men nationally. I think that’s sort of a challenge for us to sort of even imagine. But what a great possibility for all of your Ruckus Makers to think about as they’re building their schools and to really both educate themselves on other models of leadership. What does authentic leadership look like? What does relational leadership look like? Can true transformational leadership be built from the ground up instead of the top down? So often we think it’s got to be this magical, heroic moment.

But really, it’s those little moments of leaderful moments that happen where your teachers are the leaders, right. They can actually, when empowered, do the act of leadership probably more powerfully than any of us that are sitting in the chair.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
There’s a Laosu quote around that idea. And essentially, basically, when you empower people so much, right, and they say, look at what we accomplished, look at what we did, without realizing you were there, helping, supporting, empowering, that kind of thing, that’s a mark of true leadership. And it sounds like something that you’re talking about here.

Rachel
For sure. And imagine if that happened. Imagine if we sort of decentralized that position of power and could reimagine what it really means for that participatory. It’s phenomenal and it’s really exciting because it’s very unchartered in the way that we approach K-12 or pre-K-12 education today.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
And pulling on some threads and connecting some dots here. We were talking about sort of safety within a system earlier in our conversation. I know you’ve done some programs at Harvard, and they like to use a lot of case studies. I don’t know if it was an epiphany from one of those case studies, something you learned or whatever, but you are able to get people to tell you when your thinking might be flawed. And when you are not spot on. And I think that’s what we’re talking about, ground up sort of leadership. But it’s also a mark of excellent leadership as well, because often people just laugh at the jokes that aren’t that funny, right. They tell you’re thinking like, wow, you Danny, you are a smart guy. And that’s all you hear. You’re in this echo chamber.

What did you learn from the case studies and how did you get people to tell you?

Rachel
Well, I love it. The case study is such a great approach to learning about things because it tells a story. And it actually gives you an opportunity to examine almost like a cube, a three dimensional cube, and you can look at a problem from all different sides. So I’ve really become a huge fan of reading case studies. There’s this great one in particular about Mount Everest in 1996 when there was a failed expedition with these two climbing guides, Rob Hall and Scott Fisher. And the interesting thing is, first off, it’s a tragedy. Both Hall and Fisher, the leaders of the Know, perished on the top of Mount Everest, but so did a couple of their clients in a Sherpa. So the people that were part of the team didn’t make it. And it’s an excellent opportunity for us to look at a case where ego got in the way. So, first and foremost, the climbing guides rushed the climb. They didn’t get their team ready. They also didn’t get their teams to a place where every person on the team knew their role, could give feedback, could call out things when they were going wrong, and then finally, they didn’t do their legwork to check on some things. And so the fatal part of it was they didn’t check to make sure that between the Hillary Step, which is one of the last places on Mount Everest before you get to the summit, they didn’t check to see that the ropes were going to be there so that people could get up safely and back down. And that turned out to be fatal.

And when you look at how the clients reflected on this tragedy, they talk a lot about not being able to speak up. They had a couple of moments where they felt, and they used words like uneasy and unable to tell Rob Hall that he was sick, and they didn’t think that he should be leading, but he was in charge. So they followed what he said, and it turned out to be a real tragedy. So when I read that case, I thought, how can I apply this to my work as a school leader? We had just come off of getting a very low state grade. Despite the hard work that we had done, my team was really down in the dumps, and what we had been working on didn’t really pan out.

And so we started our pre service training all around the story of Mount Everest. And I talked deeply to my staff about how important it is for them to speak up, to have a voice to everybody, to know their role, and that nobody’s role outranked anyone else’s. So if you’re somebody whose job is primarily cafeteria safety, maybe you’re a lunch monitor, or if you’re a custodian, we all have the same value and have the same level of voice. So you’re empowered to speak up when things aren’t going well in the cafeteria, which , and I think everybody that listens to your podcast knows what a rough cafeteria can look like with systems that aren’t in place and kids are kind of out of control. And that was really powerful. And then we kept that story thread going throughout the whole year.

And so we would check in, like, are we checking our ropes? Are there blind spots? Do you see? Where are we faulty in our thinking? And we structured our meetings to be much more about the Rope team coming together as opposed top down. So professional learning communities were focused more on what are we missing here? Where aren’t we hitting the depth of a standard, where could other things be getting in the way and really sort of empowering the entire team? If Carloop’s not going well, it’s not Dr. Roberts to solve it. It is the team. Let’s bring it back to the team. And that turned out to be pretty successful.

And at the end of that year, we ranked in the top 3% of schools in the state for growth, which was really phenomenal, and we led our district in double point averages, and then we sustained that growth as a team through COVID and everything else. The power of taking a story or a case study and bringing it back.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
That’S an excellent example, too, of using story to motivate, inspire, right, get people to move. And it wasn’t a slide deck with a million bullet points and that kind of thing. It was a story that people could sink their teeth into and it had metaphor, right, the rope checks and this kind of stuff that you could loop back to throughout the year. So I appreciate that, too, because it’s not about saying it once or even like 510 times. You got to say it a lot until you’re sick of saying it. I appreciate so much how you communicated to everyone from my vice principal to the custodian, there’s equal value, all the voices matter equally. And then you brought up the Carloop example and how that’s not Dr. Robert’s problem to solve, it’s our team. So think about that for a second. Ruckus Maker.

If you build a culture like this, everybody’s not necessarily looking to you for the answers. I’m sure they still do a bit because of the title, but they start to have the ownership. Like, these are our problems to solve. And that, to me, just seems like a more easy way of leading a school versus I gotta figure it all out. So I really appreciate that. My follow up question, though, was like, saying everybody has equal voice and value, right is one thing, but people have to believe it. And that’s not going to get everybody to participate. One of my assumptions, so correct me if I’m wrong, like, the first time that person who hasn’t spoken speaks up, it really has to be celebrated in that kind of thing, in a spotlight. So you get more of what you want.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
But what am I missing in terms of saying it but people doing it? There seems to be a bit of a gap at least in my mind.

Rachel
For sure. And that’s because you’ve led groups of people. We’ve all of your listeners, all the Ruckus Makers have led groups of people. And it’s not Pollyanna by any means, but it’s intentional. And I think the intentionality of one of the tricks that I’ve learned over the years is the power of having protocols. So it’s not just a free for all, but you might have a consultancy protocol where everybody has three minutes to think and then respond so that you don’t have that dominant voice, because we’ve all been in those meetings where everybody else is ready to leave and one person talks. So I would definitely say the intentionality. I would also say there is so much to be said about the informal check-ins that your leaders can do on a daily basis. Leaders that live in their office aren’t making those relationships.

Rachel
So it’s being very intentional about taking 2 seconds with somebody in the hallway before everybody arrives. At the beginning of the day, you’re doing your rounds and you intentionally seek out somebody that you might not have talked much to that week. Hey, Mrs. So and So, tell me what you think about this. Oh, bring that up with your team and really start to make those sorts of connections. I think that those are really important pieces, too, to get everybody on board.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
Good examples there and giving it time. But I like the idea of protocols too, because then you rely on that structure and people probably start to rush a bit more, too, because like, okay, this is how we do it. Let’s talk about the ropes, what’s not working, and so on and so forth. Rachel, I am loving this conversation. We’re going to take a quick pause to get some messages in from our sponsors. And on the flip side, I want to start digging into your research.

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We’re back with Dr. Rachel Roberts, who has some very unique research. And I think one of the things you found and again, always correct me if I’m wrong, I think 70% of the workforce that holds Edd a doctorate in education, that’s held by women, 70%. Yet only 26% of superintendents are women. What’s going on there?

Rachel: Well, how much time do we have, Danny?

Chief Ruckus Maker: We can take some time. This is your show.

Rachel
Fantastic. Isn’t that surprising? So both the workforce so if you think about the number of educators that are female, it’s about 77%. And then the number of women who hold terminal degrees outrank men almost three to one. And then on top of that, if you look at women of color, that’s the fastest growing demographic right now for terminal degrees. So that’s pretty fascinating. When I started to think about my dissertation and what research I wanted to do, I reflected for a while on the fact that throughout my 20 years, I had only one female superintendent that I worked under. And I started to think, why is that? Why is the top position in our districts typically held by white men? I wanted to know more. And I also felt like you couldn’t use the argument that women didn’t want the position when you had so many women getting those terminal degrees. So that sort of led me to look at women in the superintendency.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
And there’s that huge gap that exists. I’m assuming they’re applying, right, that women are applying to the position, yet still not getting the job. Is that just a function of overt racism and sexism, or what are you seeing?

Rachel
I had this reflection on our lack of representation at the top, and I had this sort of hunch that it’s not that the women didn’t want the degrees. So when I started to look at what the literature had sort of said about it, there was a lot of literature written about barriers to women’s leadership and the superintendency. There was also a lot of information about, like, women are mothers, so they don’t necessarily always want or have the ability to make that kind of leap and take on that kind of role. But I still thought that was just way too generic and way too easy to dismiss such a huge gendered gap up in the role.

And so I interviewed 18 women who had made it to the final round of superintendent search and selection, but didn’t get the role, because I wanted to know, they’re getting to that final interview, but they’re not getting the job and what could be happening there. And I was really surprised, Danny, at what I found. I found in their stories examples of overt sexism. And this occurred in 2021. So I did my research in 2021. They were very recently in the interview chair, and some of the examples that the female candidates shared with me were things like getting feedback that they didn’t smile enough during the interview, or they should wear lipstick, or they should maybe tone down their personality a little bit, or maybe wear something different. And then what was even more surprising were moments of this notion of gendered and racialized gendered sort of communication. So it was the intersection of both gender and race. One woman who I interviewed, she was a woman of color, was asked by the school board during her interview if she could lead on behalf of all children or only children of color. And that was in 2021.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
I wish I could say I’m surprised. It starts sort of like this righteous anger inside me, right. And I don’t necessarily always know what to do with that. So what would you say to a Ruckus Maker listener who wants to challenge a system 2021, even 2023? And in the future, as people listen this episode, people will still be saying stuff like that. What can we do?

Rachel
Well, I agree with you. It should make you angry. And I’m glad that you’ve got that feeling because I do too. And I hope that folks that read my work get that. And we also know that we’re challenged I sort of talked about this at the beginning. We’re challenged with these mental models and the folks that are in the position of power. So typically, it’s an elected school board. They’re making decisions based on their mental models. And one of the things that the women that I spoke with said was that they’d have great first round interviews and then their second round interviews, the school board got a little bit more business-like and tough, and then it didn’t go their way. So for your Ruckus Makers, first, just knowledge is power.

Even if we can’t change the system today, if we know that the system exists, we can slowly start to dismantle it. I think that’s the first thing. So the knowledge the second thing is, I’m sure everyone who’s listening to this podcast knows somebody that’s under their purview and on their team or in their building or in their network that could use a little lift and could use a little opportunity and could really benefit from seeing themselves in a different light to sort of challenge those mental models. So marginalized team members who might not see themselves sitting in the principal chair need to be invited. Those are the people we need to seek out and put on our leadership teams.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
What I hear you saying is sort of like calling out their gifts, right. The aspirational future that they might not be seeing potentially, who knows? But by you speaking that into their life, it might change a little bit of their trajectory, potentially. Is that.

Rachel
And then also be aware of your bias so that you don’t miss their gift.

Rachel
Because sometimes we have those mental models and we don’t even know it. And so really challenging am I always seeing gifts in a certain subset of my team? Are they people that look like me and think like me, or are they people who are completely divergent? And again, I think that’s intentionality. You have to approach that intentionally because we all have blind spots, and those blind spots are still going to be there. We have to be working actively to dismantle those as well.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
Got it. I know your work talks about highly qualified female leaders going into the interview process, confident and then experiencing some drift right from who they truly are. And we’re back to this, like, showing up real and authentic. Again, what can these leaders do to combat the drift?

Rachel
That was one of the most fascinating sort of storylines that emerged from my opportunity to talk to so many women who’d been through this experience. And it was pretty universal, which was interesting. First off, the women were smacked in the face with this notion of meritocracy. We’re given this storyline through our whole lives that if you work really hard, you’re going to get what you deserve. We’re the land of the free, the home of the brave. With hard work you can achieve things. And really that doesn’t take into play all of the systems that prevent it. And there are a lot of systems that actively work against people, especially women, people of color, LGBTQ. And so as the women were going deeper into their experiences with interviewing, they found themselves drifting from their authentic self to try to see what energy was being put out by the school board members during interviews. And I think it’s applicable also probably to the principal interview. I mean, they’re all sort of breaking through that. And as they drifted from themselves, they got a little bit more business-like and a little bit less relaxed. They would sometimes meet the level of energy. So they’d have these great I think I talked about this earlier, those great first round interviews. It’s community based, people are loving, they do all those things. And then that final round, when the interviewing may get a little tougher, they found themselves not being themselves and that impacted future interviews.

So then they would go to their next interviews a little bit more business-like and sort of be in this sort of Iterative feedback loop. But one of the things that people listen to, especially if they aspire to lead a big district or a small district or they want to get into the principal chair, is that knowing that this will happen helps empower you to sort of fight against it. So what to expect, you can plan for it. It doesn’t mean that it’s not going to happen, but you’re going to have maybe some tools. I’ve coached a lot of folks into, especially a lot of women, into leadership positions. And during that time I really work with them on the power of having the story, being able to take a question and make it relatable. And that helps fight the drift.

If you go prepared, ready with some stories about things that truly have happened, as opposed to trying to give the textbook answer or the business-like answer, or thinking back to your master’s in leadership, what should I talk about with budgeting? Or what should I talk about with facilities management but really have a genuine story that helps you stay more authentic and relatable? Because unfortunately, we can’t change the system yet. But what we can do is help the people gain access.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
Here we are talking about the story again for some of these leaders. They’re obviously very successful interviewing for the superintendent position, that kind of thing. And this might be one of the first no’s. A rejection that they haven’t experienced before. That could be tough. I can only imagine. Do you have any tips for leaders in that position in terms of how to bounce back?

Rachel
And when you reflected a couple of minutes ago about that sort of feeling frustrated with the system and your knowledge then builds it, in some ways, it’s really unfair that folks have to bounce back. Right. But also, it’s the way we learn. We learn from failure. We talked at the beginning about the case study with 1996 Mount Everest. That’s a great story of failure. Right. Because we can learn so much from it. And so I think helping anyone that’s heading into a high stakes sort of job interview process, first off, knows that it’s going to take time. For the women that I interviewed now, this is not fully generalizable, but they eventually did get to a superintendency, but it took like an average of 5.5 tries.

Rachel
In each try, you sort of learn to do better and you learn a little bit more about how the system is created. And so having that resiliency to bounce back and sort of recognize that it’s going to happen is really important. And while it’s unfair that our systems are built the way that especially more often than not, women, people of color, LGBTQ folks are going to get more no’s than a white male, it doesn’t mean that they’re never going to get a yes. And just knowing that sticking it out can get you there.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
Thank you. Rachel, if you could put one message on all school marquees around the world for a single day, what would your message be?

Rachel
I love this question and thank you so much. I would definitely be welcome here. I am about inclusive leadership, and I’m about inclusive schools. I want every child to be able to come in the door and fully actualize their authentic self. That goes from children who have non binary gender identity. That means that children wouldn’t be worried about pulling out their lunch at the lunch table because they might eat kimchi, right. Like, all of the different things that you could bring that are fully you, I would definitely oh, we all are welcome here.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
And how about building your dream school? If you had no constraints in terms of resources, your only limitation was your ability to imagine, how would Rachel build this dream school? What would be your three guiding so.

Rachel
The marquee would know we’re all welcome. , it would be a school that very much challenged the status quo and empowered everyone to be a learner, so everyone would be empowered to learn, to question. And finally, I think it’s really important for us not only to build schools where we bring knowledge to students, but that we co create and that every learner and every person on that campus is seen as somebody who has value, who has unique cultural identities, and who helps us make a tapestry of learning in a way that sometimes we’re just especially right now, in today’s day and age, we’re not necessarily valuing that. And that would definitely be my ideal school.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
You mentioned a Ruckus Maker reading your work. Where could they find out more about you?

Rachel
They can find my work on Antioch.edu. That’s where I did my graduate work. I’m on LinkedIn, so I’ll make sure that I give you those links and , so I’d love for folks to do that.

Chief Ruckus Maker:
Brilliant. And we’ll have them linked up for you in the show notes. So we discussed a lot today, Rachel. It was a really great episode, and thank you for having the conversation with me. Of everything we discussed, what’s the one thing you want a Ruckus Maker to remember?

Rachel
Oh, that’s a great question. I think that the most important thing for your Ruckus Makers out there is to never stop learning and to find those stories that align to their authentic selves, and to also recognize that every one of your staff members needs to be able to bring their true, authentic self. And they can only do that if you do that. And so that takes that intentionality, and that takes a lot of thinking on your part around who I am and how can I intentionally connect with everyone to make a school, to make a community, a place where they can do that themselves? The recording has stopped.