Contemplative Learning Solutions was born from our (Tom and Gary's) work as school administrators. As district-level leaders, we were responsible for designing and facilitating a range of professional development opportunities for teachers and administrators. Today we both work in university settings, where our primary responsibilities are the training and growth of aspiring teachers and school leaders. Through CLS, we've continued to serve practicing educators with a range of supports and services.
In both professional and pre-professional settings, we've found that educators long for reflective practices that help them know themselves (and others) better and create more authentic, meaningful relationships, which in turn helps enhance effectiveness as teachers and school leaders. The Enneagram personality typing system is one of the most powerful tools we've discovered for facilitating this process of self-discovery and professional growth.
According to the Enneagram there are nine basic personality types ("ennea" means nine), each of which is driven by a unique set of motivating fears and desires (for one of the best online resource on the Enneagram, check out the Enneagram Institute website). Understanding your Enneatype, as it is sometimes called, helps you identify your most common positive and negative patterns of behavior, and allows you to start letting go of unhelpful habits of mind so that you can lead, love, and live from the foundation of your core strengths.
Since our work began with school leaders and continues primarily to serve educators in leadership roles, in coming weeks we'd like to offer a series of reflections on how each Enneagram personality type tends to shape an individual's work as a school leader. While many books and other internet resources offer profiles of the nine types, none that we know of applies this information specifically in the context of schools.
And we believe that in almost everything, context matters a great deal.
Leading in schools offers unique challenges that have few parallels in other fields. Schools are generally considered to be "loosely coupled" systems in which individuals and groups operate with relatively high degrees of autonomy. The nature of classroom teaching, as schools in the United States have been traditionally been structured, leans toward high levels of professional independence and isolation.
The key implication of such structures is that relationships and communication occupy a far greater importance in the work of school leaders than power, authority, and control. The effective school leader must know and understand the great variance in individual personalities and motivations. Above all, the effective school leader must know herself, including her own habits of minds and potential blind spots in order to build authentic relationships.
We'll explore the important features of leadership in schools as we examine how each Enneagram type tends to function in such a role.
One important note: We'll use the term "school leader" fairly broadly. While many of the specific examples we'll describe refer to school principals, the profiles we'll discuss are intended to include other administrative types, including assistant principals and district-level leaders, as well as teacher leaders. Increasingly, research is revealing the critical importance of teachers as leaders of change and improvement in schools. To the extent that relational power is more important than formal power in schools, the role of teacher leader becomes far more evident.
Above all, we invite readers of our blog and followers of our work to join in a dialogue with us about the nine Enneagram types and the work of school leadership. When we "teach" the Enneagram (or anything else for that matter), the best lessons and examples come directly from the experiences of our students and participants. Feel free to post comments and write to us with your own thoughts about the Enneagram, self-reflection, and the work of school leaders.
We look forward to sharing this journey of discovery with you. Look for our first profile (starting with Type One) in coming days.
Update: Ennea-Type profiles for the following personality styles now posted:
Comments