First Semester, In Draft
I wrapped up my first semester of my doctorate program last week, and I keep coming back to just how good the learning feels—how applied it is, how much it fills my cup rather than drains it. I expected to be stretched, and I have been, but in ways that feel deeply connected to the work I do every day. It has been grounding and energizing all at once.
One of our final assignments was to record a short video articulating our biggest takeaways from the semester. Boiling everything down to three ideas was harder than I expected, but once I started, the same themes kept resurfacing—across readings, discussions, and the lived experience of headship.
The first big idea that stayed with me was the romance of leadership—the very human tendency to over-attribute both success and failure to whoever happens to be sitting in the leader’s chair.
It’s been clarifying, and honestly a little liberating, to name this dynamic out loud. Leaders are often cast as heroes or villains, depending on the day, the moment, or the headline. And stepping into a leadership role after someone who carried a great deal of attribution—positive or negative—creates its own set of complexities.
The question becomes—how do you help an organization understand the collective nature of success and failure while still taking responsibility as the head?
There’s both humility and courage in that balance. It’s the everyday work of helping people see the team, the system, and the shared dynamics at play—without deflecting ownership of the role you hold.
The second idea centers on identity. We talk about identity so often in personal contexts that it’s easy to forget that identity is also a professional muscle—and one leaders are constantly using, whether we’re conscious of it or not.
We all hold multiple identities at once, and leadership often requires shifting among them quickly—the strategic thinker, the pastoral presence, the decision-maker, the caretaker, the boundary-setter.
In schools, this feels especially true. There’s the part of me who is the “head of school”, responsible for budgets, HR, policies, and decisions that have real consequences. And there’s the part of me who is the “head of school at Advent”—a distinction I’m learning to name—where personal relationships, community ties, and the daily proximity to students, faculty, and families all create additional layers of meaning and emotion.
These identities aren’t in conflict, but they do stretch in different directions. Understanding which one I’m holding—and which one others may be projecting onto me—has been one of the deepest pieces of reflection this semester.
The third idea is storytelling. Not storytelling as in marketing or messaging, but storytelling as a leadership practice—how we connect the past, the present, and the future in ways that help people understand where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.
Schools are layered places. We have current students and future students, alumni and parents of alumni, new families and multi-generation families, faculty who just arrived and faculty who have been here longer than I’ve been alive. But what ties everyone together is narrative—how we talk about our work, how we articulate why it matters, and how we help people make meaning across time.
The stories we tell about the organization are inseparable from the stories we tell about ourselves as leaders. And the inverse is also true.
When I put all of this together—the romance of leadership, identity work, and storytelling—it feels like a larger picture of what organizational leadership really asks of us—clarity about who we are, curiosity about how systems work, and the willingness to communicate the “why” again and again.
This semester gave me frameworks for ideas I’ve felt intuitively but didn’t always have the language for. And it gave me the space to reflect—not just on the work itself, but on how I show up in it.
I’m grateful for that. And I’m excited for what comes next.