Tag Archives: international schools

Margriet Ruurs

GLOBAL BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

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Great board books, picture books and early-read novels can turn a child into a lifelong reader. Here’s a smathering of fun, enticing stories to share with young readers.

Cat Shapes by Aidan Cassie is a fun romp through a day of a cat and all the shapes it can take on: from a square in a cardboard box to an oval in the sink. There is a sneaky cat, a sunning cat, and a curious cat. But the best shape of all comes on the last page of this board book for the youngest readers. A cat fits perfectly into your heart…

After reading this with Your preschool or kindergarten students, see how many shapes the children can take on! ISBN 978-1-5253-1327-1, Kids Can Press

The Haircut, written by Theo Heras and illustrated by Renné Benoit, is a board book story of a first haircut for very young readers. The lovely drawings show a barber shop, a chair that can go up and down and a child whose’s curls are snip-snipped until there’s no more hair in the eyes. A nice story to prepare little ones for a real haircut. ISBN 978-1-77278-356-8, Pajama Press

Wait Like a Seed, written by Erin Alladin, illustrated by Tara Anderson, is a perfect picturebook to use with Kindergarten and early elementary students. Written in a simple rhyme, the story shows the life cycle of milkweed and its relationship with monarch butterflies. Waiting like a seed, reaching like a sprout – the words can be accompanied by movement games in the classroom. If your students hatch butterfly chrysalis in the classroom, this story will be a great text to use. ISBN 978-1-77278-359-9, Pajama Press

Love, Panda by Elaine Su, illustrated by Charlene Chua, is a wonderful picturebook for little ones, especially those who are a big brother or sister to a new baby. Panda used to be owned by Benny but he’s been left in the baby’s room! In a panic, Panda writes Benny a note asking him to come and rescue Panda. Each page is a new note written by Panda. At first he complains bitterly about this new baby who drools and burps. But gradually the notes get less urgent. Panda’s facial expressions change until he’s a happy, smiling Panda again who actually chooses to keep the baby company. ISBN 978-1-5461-7958-0, Orchard Books

Little Bee: The Buzz about the Party, by Danny Neville (who was a teacher at International Schools), with illustrations by Colleen McKeown.

This beginner’s novel is a fun, upbeat story about Bee and her best friends. When their teacher announces a special contest for the best plan to celebrate Mother’s Day, the students get busy making plans and crafts. But the idea also causes concerns for students who don’t have a standard family of a mom, dad and kids. Bee has two dads. Her friend Santiago lives with his grandparents. Another one has only a mom. How can all the children celebrate this special day without causing anyone hurt feelings? Bee and her friends come up with an all-inclusive plan that allows all the students to participate. Working together, even the most difficult child in class is happy to be part of the plan and the party.

A great read in which children of many diverse cultures and families can recognize themselves. This first book in a series will soon be followed by more titles! ISBN 978-1-83402-047-1, Annick Press

Margriet Ruurs is the author of many books for children. She is available for author presentations at International Schools.

www.margrietruurs.com

Lianne Dominguez

Helping Teachers Flourish: The Heart of School Leadership

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This summer, I had the privilege of teaching and learning alongside almost a hundred teachers and school leaders through two back-to-back courses on instructional supervision and evaluation.

They represented different schools, systems, countries, and stages of leadership. Yet despite their diverse contexts, I was struck by how quickly our conversations converged.

The questions they asked were not just about observations, evaluation rubrics, or instructional frameworks themselves. Instead, they revealed something much deeper.

How do we create schools where teachers continue to grow, so that every student has the opportunity to flourish?

That question stayed with me long after the courses ended because it challenged me to think more deeply about what it really means for a school community to flourish.

We often talk about student flourishing, but perhaps we don’t spend enough time reflecting on what flourishing really means.

To flourish is more than to achieve success.

It is to continue growing.

To be challenged while feeling supported.

To develop confidence through purposeful practice.

To find meaning in what we do.

To belong to a community that believes we can always become better than we were yesterday.

If this is what we hope for our students, shouldn’t it also be what we hope for our teachers?

Teachers do not and should not stop learning the day they enter the profession. Like every professional, they deserve opportunities to reflect on their practice, receive meaningful feedback, refine their craft, and continue growing throughout their careers.

Perhaps this is where our work as school leaders matters most.

Our influence on student learning is rarely direct; it is multiplied through the teachers we support every day.

Throughout the courses, these conversations surfaced again and again through questions like:

  • How do we make classroom observations meaningful?
  • How do we ensure feedback leads to growth rather than compliance?
  • How do we balance operational demands with instructional leadership?

As I reflected afterwards, I realised they were all pointing towards the same question:

What conditions help teachers grow?

Four conditions kept emerging.

  • Clarity – Leaders create clarity by establishing a shared understanding of excellent teaching.
  • Trust – Leaders create trust by making coaching the purpose of supervision.
  • Evidence – Leaders strengthen professional judgment by grounding feedback in evidence.
  • Time – Leaders create the possibility for growth by intentionally protecting time.

Each of these matters on its own, but together they create the conditions in which teachers can continue to learn, refine their practice, and flourish.

Clarity

Teachers deserve a shared understanding of what excellent teaching looks like – not as a checklist to comply with, but as a framework grounded in research and the science of learning. Shared standards create a common language for professional growth and ensure that our feedback is anchored in evidence rather than individual preference.

Trust

Professional growth happens when supervision becomes a coaching conversation rather than a performance exercise. Teachers are far more likely to reflect honestly, take instructional risks, and refine their practice when they know the purpose of feedback is growth, not judgment.

Evidence

Professional judgment should be informed by patterns of practice and their impact on student learning and not isolated observations or personal preference. Evidence collected over time allows us to make thoughtful decisions about how best to support each teacher’s continued growth.

Time

Perhaps this is the condition we talk about least, yet it may be the one that determines whether all the others are possible.

Time to be present in classrooms.

Time to notice.

Time to listen before we speak.

Time to ask questions that provoke reflection rather than simply provide answers.

Time to coach.

Time to celebrate growth.

Time to learn alongside our teachers.

As another school year begins, I find myself returning to one simple truth: leadership is measured not only by the people we help grow, but by what we intentionally make time for.

After all, our calendars are often the clearest reflection of what we truly value.

Perhaps flourishing schools do not begin with programmes, initiatives, or strategic plans.

Perhaps they begin with leaders who intentionally create the conditions in which teachers continue to flourish.

So, as I prepare for the year ahead, I find myself returning to one simple question: What will I intentionally protect this year so that my teachers have the greatest opportunity to flourish?

Conrad Hughes

Parenting: The Difficult Art of Letting Go

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The other day, a parent described himself to me as a “Train Schedule Dad”, a term I was not familiar with. This is someone who manages family trips and daily life with the precision of a railway conductor. This can be added to the different descriptions of parenting in the 21st century that we have become familiar with over time: the snowplow (also called a lawnmower) parent, who endeavors to remove all obstacles from the child’s pathway; the helicopter parent, hovering above their child, checking every move and surveilling their every movement; and the tiger parent, fiercely driven to ensure their child achieves peak academic and extracurricular success.

As such, a strong paradigm of the 21st century is the overinvolved parent who wishes, perhaps understandably, to pave the path for their child, predicting every step, cushioning every blow, and intervening at the drop of a hat. However, how sustainable is this?

In 2019, Eli Lebowitz at the Yale Child Study Center developed the SPACE program, which focused on stopping “family accommodation”—the habit where parents constantly check on or rearrange schedules to soothe an anxious child. By teaching parents how to step back from this over-monitoring cycle, the study showed a dramatic drop in both the children’s anxiety levels and the parents’ own daily stress. It proved that giving children the space to navigate discomfort is often the best way to heal the whole family.

The point is that this study was not only about the child’s anxiety and also about the parent’s anxiety and how it could be reduced. In fact, when parents let go a bit, their anxiety levels go down and so do those of their children. It turns out that overinvolved parenting creates a huge amount of stress for both parties.

As we enter a particularly complex stage of history, with many “known unknowns” ahead and a pressing need to build up resilience and autonomy in young people, parents have to learn the painful but necessary lesson of letting go. This means allowing their children to fend for themselves, to find their own personalities, and to progress without constant intervention from the adults—who should be supporting them from the sidelines, while understanding the necessity of stepping back.

This will become increasingly vital as we enter a world where the ability to stand on one’s own feet and think for oneself will be critical to human flourishing. Letting go is not easy, but it is healthy, necessary, and par for the course.

Conrad Hughes

From Screen Time to Mindful Time: Reimagining Tech in the Classroom 

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The EdTech revolution that swept over classrooms some 20 years ago was a wave of uncritical implementation: whiteboards, cloud-based learning platforms, and 1:1 computing programmes unfurled in a tidal wave of widespread technology adoption with each school following the next eagerly.

There were always those anecdotes that threw up questions: was it true that the CEOs of the very same companies selling software and hardware to schools were sending their children to pen-and-paper institutions? Somewhere in the school community, you would find voices that stood up to questions of data privacy, but these were the exceptions that proved the rule. The essential idea was to go with the flow, which is what most schools did, and the intensification of networks, fiber optic cables, chargers, leasing agreements, charging trays, and the maintenance to supply this, proliferated exponentially. 

This has led us to a highly synthetic classroom environment: it’s possible to see students learning in an entirely paperless environment. Lessons are projected on a whiteboard and homework is done on cloud computing; we navigate learning from one screen to the next. And at break time and after school? Well, out come more screens of course: phones.

More recently, a different type of wave is rising above classrooms, one that calls for a dialling back on screens. From Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation (2021) to Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (2024), more and more voices are asking for schools to reconsider technology, in particular phones and screens. There are worrying correlations in the steepening drop of IQ scores (particularly from 2010) and, with the explosion of Artificial Intelligence on the market, the dangers of cognitive offsetting and deficit due to Large Language Models being available to replace research.

At the center of this is the feeling that we need to regain the community connection between us that is now spliced into separate, individual profiles, isolated yet simultaneously hypnotised by chemically stressed layers of carbon polymers, liquid crystals and rare-earth elements. It takes a concerned effort now to pull us away from screens, to shut them down, to appreciate each other rather than whatever’s happening elsewhere in the tiny prism of light held in the hand or propped up on the desk.  It’s got to the point where parents of a certain generation are nostalgic about watching television, which is somewhat depressing considering the virtues of the couch potato and how watching TV was viewed as a waste of time by many back in the 1980s.

We’ve reached something of a perfect storm with an increasingly widespread consternation that technology is not actually helping learning but getting in the way of it.

Of course, it’s much more subtle than this: AI tutors, adaptive online assessments, online courses, and the democratisation of knowledge through the internet mean that in many areas, learning has never been this available. It is also true that through COVID-19, and today in certain rural educational programmes, literacy rates have increased dramatically because of technology. It remains a double-edged sword, a two-sided coin, a Pandora’s Box with hope lurking inside it.

As educators, the question we should be asking ourselves today is a simple one: how is our use of technology advancing learning? Rather than giving assignments on cloud computing as a reflex, stop to ask why and whether it wouldn’t be better to ask the students to handwrite in the classroom? Rather than rushing to the next PowerPoint presentation or whiteboard lesson, stop to think whether it might not be better in an analogic setting, through a discussion, without screens. Given what we know about the cognitive benefits of reading and writing, how are we as educators ensuring that these practices remain strong in the classroom?

At the International School of Los Angeles, we have laid out our position starting next year. It’s in four parts:

  1. We will be phone-free right the way through the school.
  2. The 1:1 programme will be staggered, starting in the Middle School with a “computer at school only” policy, then computers at home but with a curfew (we will programme the computers to black out at 21h00). Seniors use computers as before, but we will have scaffolded the way there.
  3. A very specific AI programme on tutoring in one subject using a protected semantic field (not the World Wide Web) carefully curated by a resident specialist with an opt-out possibility for parents. This sits over our school AI policy.
  4. A special course on social media for our students for them to understand the way information is distributed and curated.

We will track this carefully and, most importantly, accompany it by discussions and training with our faculty on how to use technology intentionally, with a sense of genuine innovation, but also trepidation and skepticism.

What will your approach to technology be next academic year? 

Works Cited

Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin Press.

Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine nation: Finding balance in the age of indulgence. Dutton.

Lianne Dominguez

We Talk About Peace – But What Does It Actually Look Like in Classrooms?

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Article Series: Education, Identity, and Peace in Kazakhstan

What does it actually mean for education to contribute to peace?

Not peace as an abstract idea or something we reference in mission statements—but as something lived in the everyday interactions between students, teachers, and communities.

We are living in a time where uncertainty feels constant. Across countries, there are tensions—political, cultural, and social—that shape how people see the world and each other. Schools sit directly within this reality.

So the question becomes more immediate: How do we help young people not only to succeed, but to live alongside difference—with understanding, with respect, and with care?

Over the past two years living and working in Kazakhstan, I’ve started to notice that this question is not always named directly—but it is present.

I work in an international school, and many of our students come from different educational and cultural experiences. Some have grown up in systems shaped by the legacy of the Soviet era – structured, academically rigorous, and grounded in discipline. Others are part of a more modern Kazakhstan – globally connected, multilingual, and outward-looking.

What stands out is not the difference between these experiences, but how students learn to navigate them.I remember sitting in a classroom discussion where students were exploring a global issue. What struck me was not just the range of opinions, but the way students approached each other’s ideas. There was disagreement, but it was measured. Students listened, paused, responded carefully. Some shifted between languages to clarify meaning. Others adjusted their thinking as they heard new perspectives.

It wasn’t a lesson about peace.

But it felt like one.

And over time, I’ve started to realise that moments like this are not incidental – they are shaped by something deeper.

What I’ve also started to notice is that this way of interacting does not sit in isolation from the wider culture. Kazakhstan is often described as a country made up of many nationalities, languages, and traditions. There is a strong emphasis on unity – that people of different backgrounds are part of one shared community. This is reflected not just in formal narratives, but in everyday interactions and in how identity is held.

There is a clear respect for cultural and religious diversity, alongside a sense of belonging that does not require people to set aside who they are.

I noticed this most during national and school celebrations, where traditions are not treated as belonging to one group alone, but are acknowledged more broadly – shared, recognised, and valued across communities. It creates a sense that identity is not something that needs to be reduced in order to belong, but something that can be held with confidence alongside others.

At the same time, like any society, there are also layers of complexity. But perhaps that is also part of the point.

Students are not growing up in a perfectly resolved environment. They are growing up in one where difference exists—and where they begin to make sense of that difference, gradually finding their place within it.

Kazakhstan’s history is present in its classrooms. The post-Soviet legacy continues to shape values around discipline, respect for teachers, and the importance of education. These are not abstract ideas – you can feel them in the way students approach their learning and in the relationships within schools.

At the same time, the country is actively shaping a modern identity. Students are learning in multiple languages – Kazakh, Russian, and English – and engaging with ideas that extend beyond their immediate context. They are growing up connected to both local traditions and a wider world. These are not viewed as isolated experiences, but worlds students learn to hold at once.

Working within this context, I’ve become more aware of the role of teachers in shaping not just learning, but relationships.

One of the things I have come to appreciate most is the warmth and care that Kazakh teachers bring to their work. There is a strong sense of responsibility toward students, rooted in values that feel deeply embedded – respect, community, and a genuine commitment to supporting young people.

Students are expected to work hard, to persevere, and to take learning seriously. But this is often held within relationships that feel steady and human. There is a sense that education is not only about achievement, but about how students learn to exist with others.

This is where the idea of peace becomes tangible.

It is not something separate from the classroom.

It begins in classrooms where students learn to listen before responding, where they learn to hold more than one perspective at a time, and where they learn to navigate differences without losing themselves.

In that sense, what I am seeing in schools here feels significant.

Students are not being taught about complexity as a concept. They are living it everyday.

I am still early in my experience here, and I approach this thought with curiosity more than certainty.

But what I am beginning to see more clearly is that there is something important happening in places like this – contexts where history, culture, and change intersect in everyday learning.

This is why I’m starting this 3-part series.

To explore more deeply what it means to educate in a space where multiple worlds meet, and what that might offer to a broader global conversation.

Because perhaps the work of building a more peaceful world does not begin with just policy or strategy alone.

Perhaps it begins in classrooms like these –  where students learn, every day, how to live with difference, how to listen, and how to hold multiple perspectives at once.

This is the first in a three-part series exploring education, identity, and peace in Kazakhstan. In the next article, I take a closer look at what it means for students to live and learn between different educational worlds.

Conrad Hughes

Risk management: the frog and the bat

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There’s no shortage of metaphors for leadership, often using sports, which is not always helpful since running an organisation is not playing a game. Nonetheless, using a metaphor for elements of leadership can help distill values, concepts and skills.

Managing risk is a core part of leadership, in particular in schools since the stakes are high and there is an intertwined network of human emotions, expectations, beliefs and stories to contend with. What sort of leader should we aspire to be to manage risk deftly? The answer is intuitive and not surprising: proactive rather than reactive, systemic rather than improvised, collective rather than alone.

About two years ago, the coach and workshop leader Robert Dilts took me through a powerful metaphor to which I have referred ever since for it exemplifies foundational principles. It’s a dichotomy, perhaps a slightly false one as there is a degree of caricature in it, but I believe it is a helpful schema to use when considering how to manage risk.

The frog

The frog is a cold blooded, fairly solitudinous amphibian, heavily dependent on the specifics of its ecosystem with a short life span (2 to 10 years). Frogs tend to conserve their energy, sit for hours, motionless, until an unsuspecting insect happens to wander by and then, only when very close, will they react. To reproduce, frogs lay massive amounts of eggs on the off chance that one or two will survive and their defence mechanism is essentially camouflage or, in some cases, poison. Frogs only see insects when they move, they are essentially incapable of detecting a stationary presence.

Frog leaders manage risk poorly, by sitting (in their office) and waiting for something to happen. They cannot pick up weak signals and will not survive for long outside of their comfort zone. They have a capacity to disappear in times of crisis.  These leaders act alone, and are therefore prone to mistakes and incapable of focussing on any root cause analysis. Unsurprisingly, they do not last long. 

The bat

The bat is a warm blooded, highly gregarious creature that flies at high speed across large distances. It eats roughly the equivalent of its weight every day in a high energy cycle. Bats are famous for their extraordinary perception, using echolocation to detect extremely subtle and minute objects in darkness. They use hearing to see. Bats live for up to 40 years and will have one pup per year, investing time and effort into the upbringing of their young.

Bat leaders have their ear to the ground and listen carefully. They can pick up very weak signals and pre-empt crises rather than waiting for them to happen. They are present all over the organisation, moving energetically and passionately from point to point. They know how to work in teams. The bat leader invests in people and builds up successors and future leaders (what we could call “metaleadership” – or leading leaders to lead). Risk management is not only done collectively, but using talent and skill from within the group. These leaders stick around.

If you’re a leader, ask yourself these questions to know if you are more of a frog or a bat:

  1. Where do you spend most of your day? Sitting down in your office or moving about? How many different people do you interact with every day?
  2. How would you grade yourself on ear-to-the ground alertness? Do you know what is happening across your organisation and are people confident telling you and unearthing warning signs?
  3. Do you have a solid action and communication plan for crises or do you have a long written risk matrix which is unspecific and is only pulled up to review when there is a problem?
  4. Do you recruit people who are better than you in something and do you learn from them or is your team full of “yes” people”?

As we pre-empt and manage risk, let’s keep these metaphorical representations of leadership in mind and keep asking ourselves tough questions.

Lianne Dominguez

Staying Human in the Age of Infinite Minds

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Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, used a phrase recently that stayed with me longer than I expected.

He spoke about a future where our work is not simply to manage systems or organisations, but to learn how to manage infinite minds. Minds extended by AI. Minds with access, speed, and reach far beyond what we had at the same age.

Hearing this, I took it as a quiet challenge to us as adults—especially those of us in schools.

Working in international education, I see this every day. Our students are already navigating multiple languages, identities, value systems, and expectations. They cross borders physically and cognitively, often before they’ve fully figured out who they are.

AI doesn’t introduce complexity into their lives—it amplifies what was already there.

And that amplification has made me pause, not to ask what more we should teach, but what more we need to be.

I keep coming back to the idea that infinite minds don’t actually need tighter management. They need steadiness. They need adults who are grounded enough not to rush to control, correct, or compete with the technology. Adults who can sit comfortably in uncertainty, who don’t confuse authority with having all the answers, and who trust that learning can be shared rather than supervised.

Trust feels foundational here—not just trust in students, but trust in ourselves to let go of being the central source of knowledge.

Curiosity feels just as important. Not the kind we design into lessons, but the kind we live out loud. The willingness to wonder with students rather than ahead of them. To ask better questions instead of faster ones. In a world where answers are instant, curiosity becomes an act of care. It slows things down. It reminds students that thinking is not about efficiency, but meaning.

I’ve also been reflecting on critical thinking—not as a skill students demonstrate, but as a stance we model. With AI, the challenge is no longer access to information, but discernment.

What do we trust? What do we question? When do we pause?

Students learn this less from rubrics and more from watching how we respond when we’re unsure, when we disagree respectfully, when we choose not to rush to conclusions.

There’s a subtle wellbeing dimension here too—because constant acceleration, even intellectual, can be exhausting.

And then there’s creativity. AI can generate endlessly, but it cannot decide what matters. That decision still sits with humans. In schools, creativity now feels less about performance and more about agency—about giving students space to shape ideas that reflect who they are, what they care about, and the communities they belong to.

What I’m noticing is that this moment isn’t asking educators to become more impressive or more technologically fluent. It’s asking us to become more human.

To shift quietly from managing learning to stewarding it. From directing students to walking alongside them. From certainty to discernment. That feels especially true in international schools, where students are already learning how to navigate complexity, difference, and change.

Right now, I don’t have a conclusion to this wondering —just a question I’m learning to live with.

If our students’ minds are becoming infinite, perhaps the work is not to contain them, but to strengthen the inner parts of ourselves that help us hold them well.

And maybe that work begins not with new tools or frameworks, but with how we show up—calm, curious, and willing to wonder alongside them.

Conrad Hughes

The pedagogy of music and song

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One of the most effective ways of communicating a message is through song and music. It breaks down barriers held by language, can evoke strong emotions and internal reflection, and also opens avenues for collaboration. 

For Arthur Schopenhauer, music is the highest art form because of the ineffable and pure form of its expression. Unlike plastic art, music has no materiality; it breathes a miraculous existence into being from sound vibrations, so mysterious a phenomenon that it features as a central part of trance and prayer across many cultures: it speaks to the unconscious, the subliminal, the spiritual dimension of our being.

For years as an English teacher, whenever we discussed the Romantic movement, I would play Wagner for the students and ask them to share what they heard. I found the experience of hearing the music brought across some of the emotions and key concepts in Romanticism much more than a verbal explanation would.

A workshop leader I know plays music at the beginning of each session as people are coming in, to create an atmosphere and get people to connect with the environment emotionally. I started doing the same in my philosophy classes, playing something related to the philosophy we were studying as students came into each lesson (a Raga for Buddhism, Chinese Guoyue for Confucius, South African choral music for our lesson on Ubuntu, Mozart for Kant, and so on). This creates a unique setting for the lesson, contextualising the learning culturally and historically.

Then there is songwriting, a form of poetry that can distill a message powerfully and musically, not only connecting with students in an emotional fashion but allowing for the whole class to sing together. What a wonderful act of pedagogy, harmonising the same message together.

Recently, I did a string of assemblies for our Primary students across the different campuses of the International School of Los Angeles. I wanted us to reflect together on some educational questions. So, instead of making a speech or doing a PowerPoint, I took my guitar and we sang Bob Dylan’s timeless “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The song is full of questions and only one answer, which we don’t know, for it is blowing in the wind.

I started with the lyrics, asking the students what they thought they meant. What do you think Dylan means when he says, “How many times must the white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand?” And what might he mean when he asks, “How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?” The students gave various responses, ranging from the literal to the symbolic. Everyone had an idea of what the lyrics might mean since the allegorical structure of the song makes it at once accessible and challenging, as any elegant pedagogic structure should.

Then we sang the song, with the students joining me for the chorus: “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind; the answer is blowin’ in the wind.”

Music and song together bring joy and emotion into learning; they bring communities together and allow us to enter the world of ideas through some other avenue than the logical and exclusively linguistic framework that dominates so much of what we do in education. 

What music do you play with your students?

Conrad Hughes

Beyond Servant Leadership

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In the 1970s, the American businessman Robert Greenleaf coined the term “servant leadership” meaning that leaders should be at the service of those they lead. On the surface, this seems like a good idea, counteracting the paradigm of the domineering, micromanaging, and self-centered leader who crushes others and takes all the credit. But let’s deconstruct the concept of the “servant” first.

To be clear, a leader who drowns others out is not a good leader; this is an unsustainable way of operating that kills creativity and creates despondency within a team. No one wants a leader who lacks respect for them or refuses to give them space.

But is the idea of a servant leader the best antidote to this and what exactly is a servant? Essentially, a servant is someone who is there to tend to the needs of another person, perform chores for them, and complete tasks that the person being served does not wish to do themselves. Is this what a good leader should be doing?

How do we move out of our comfort zones? How do we become better versions of ourselves? How do we do excellent work that makes us proud? Is it by one person being the servant of another?

The term “servant” implies an overly simplistic, dichotomous relationship; it is a short-termist approach that offers initial gratification to both parties (the self consciousness of serving others and the satisfaction of being served) but ultimately leads to stasis. We should not be afraid to look to become something much more ambitious: respectful but exacting interlocutors, creative business partners, and dynamic collaborators in an ongoing quest that lies beyond our egos.

A good leader is a coach who asks the right questions, knows how to listen, and empowers their team by challenging them, encouraging them to set inspiring goals, and providing guidance; not simply someone who serves others and creates learned helplessness but someone who creates a vibrant culture of coextensive professional excellence.

Ultimately, the world of work, particularly in education, is a place where we bring our passion to the higher service of our mission. Leaders should strive to create other leaders within their teams. This is called meta-leadership: the idea that you do not simply lead people, but rather lead others to become leaders, ideally, even better leaders than yourself.

So, while the intent behind servant leadership may be positive, and while it is vital to put people first and work for the greater good, true leadership requires something more subtle and more valuable than being a servant. I think the essence to retain from the idea of servant leadership is less the act of being a servant and more the position of humility: respecting those you lead and serving them in that sense. One of the greatest ways leaders can nurture humility within themselves, and truly be of service to their team and the organisation, is to empower others and, in doing so, nurture growth from within.

Matt Brady

A Better Way to Do IT in 2026: Synergistically

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For 2026, I propose a radical change for EdTech provision in K-12 Schools— actual, sustained collaboration between IT, Admin, Teacher and Integration teams.

Even more outlandish? The work has nothing to do with “thought leadership”, “growth, now!” or “coaching/fixing” people.

The space I’m working to change is the shadowy side of things where the “tech bro and sister” sun doesn’t shine because of the absence of deliberate, collaborative work in:

  • Cultivating collective cross functional efficacy across the community, the #1 correlate of student achievement growth.
  • Moving beyond “problem solving” to building collaborative, “problem finding ” culture instead.
  • Identifying and removing gumption traps and bottlenecks that drain teacher time and energy
  • Illuminating the rube-goldbergian, internal systems yak shaving on administrative systems that create shadow work for teachers.
  • Building computationally kind infrastructure that delights in its consistency of function because its design was aided by those who need to use it, up front.


Interestingly, none of these are really “technology problems” at all, and they’re not solved by the approaches “Tech Coaches” typically use as they’re not about “tool training”– they’re collaboration challenges wearing technology masks. 

The Synergist Project is a deeply human, context flexible protocol and set of role-defining resources for transforming how individuals and teams within educational communities collaborate and learn together to build collective cross functional efficacy. The work defines the “how” of digital transformation work regardless of the “what” of objectives, goals, platforms, devices, & software.  

Drawing on established systems frameworks (ISTE, MIT Center for System Awareness, Senge’s 5th Discipline @ learning organizations) the Synergist Protocol makes an original contribution by organically integrating and applying these “elements” to the specific archetypes & challenges in the K-12 technology integration space.

You can further convince yourself of the need for a better way in solving the “EdTech value delivery problem” at synergistprotocol.com.

You get the free resources to begin implementing the work at edtechsynergist.com.

Happy New Year!