Monthly Musings for November 2009

Dear Team,

I continue to find wonderful lessons about leadership, facilitation, and education in music and the arts. Recently, I read Wynton Marsalis’ Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life (great for anyone interested in the academic language of jazz—although it may be a bit introductory for the jazz aficionados among us). I have been particularly focused on Marsalis’ treatment of improvisation, especially as it relates to our efforts at co-facilitation. In this book, Marsalis discusses how various players in a jazz improvisation group will take subtle cues from each other, understand when to speak (play) and when to listen, and know how to listen to co-improvisers. Listening is one of the most important improvisational skills, and probably one of the most important leadership skills as well.

Marsalis’ take on jazz improvisation made me think about how we achieve our best at facilitation/improvisation when we listen to the participants, when we listen to our co-facilitators/co-improvisers, and when we stay fully present in the moment while we are listening, rather than thinking about the next thing we might say, judging what someone else said, or going over what we previously said. If we can stay fully present, we are better able to pick up on the cues and clues about where the work needs to go next in order to meet our ultimate learning purpose. Combining clarity of purpose and presence brings the group’s learning to higher levels.

For example, we can plan like musicians do when they write out charts for the head (the first and last chorus of a tune, typically played without improvisation), and in between we can let the learning take form. This stance allows for learning that is customized to the individual and responsive to the group, which leads me to the questions I’d like to pose in this month’s musings:

What if classrooms, schools, workshops, and all of our programs were organized around the single principle that once a learner masters a skill (meaning that she/he can perform it effortlessly) or commands content knowledge (meaning that she/he can recall it effortlessly), she or he moves on to something else. Starting with our domain of influence (our programs), how would we organize differently around that one principle? How would honing our improvisation skills bolster our ability to model this type of learning environment for school leaders? As always, I’m interested in your thoughts.

Here are links to two videos from the TED website (www.ted.com [1]) that I find relevant to our work: Mae Jemison on teaching arts and sciences together:
http://www.ted.com/talks/mae_jemison_on_teaching_arts_and_sciences_together.html [2]

Itay Talgam on leading like the great conductors (Thanks to Ilene Friedman for passing this along): http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/itay_talgam_lead_like_the_great_conductors.html [3]

Happy November,
Sandra