This spring, our MA Fellows in the School Leadership program will share blog posts about their coursework and learning journey. Interested in becoming part of a future cohort? Connect with us here.
By: Leslie Niessner
There is no amount of schooling that can quite prepare you for the unrefined sounds that drift down the hall from a middle school band room during the first month of school. Over the years, fellow teachers and front office staff with classrooms and offices adjacent to my band room have likened what they clearly perceive to be an auditory assault to flocks of angry geese and traffic jams in Times Square. Why anyone would choose to locate the band room by the front office in a middle school is beyond me, but that’s a question for another day. After twenty years in the band room, I have come to recognize each squeak, squawk, and blast as joy.
The Advantage of Being New
My office is nestled among the band, choir, and orchestra studios, close enough to hear the countless iterations of basic exercises, each one an opportunity for our beginners to struggle, risk, and learn from mistakes. It takes weeks before they are able to play a complete song with a characteristic tone and yet they exhibit an extraordinary willingness to persist through the mundane. I have discovered beginning musicians to be some of the most curious, eager, and resilient on our campus, and they are teaching me some valuable lessons about the advantages of being a novice.
In his book The Novice Advantage, Jon Eckert writes, “The novice mindset is the belief that we grow continuously through fearless, deliberate practice.” The novice advantage, then, is the benefit that comes from fully embracing the notion that we truly can get better with each repetition. Looking to their director as a trusted guide, beginning musicians persist despite not always knowing how long it will take before they reach their goal but remaining hopeful along the way that they will, in fact, get there.
When we as teachers and leaders in our schools adopt this attitude and invest time and energy in getting better at getting better, we unlock new potential to impact change. Leading for transformational change in our schools requires a focus on improvement over solutions.
Joy in the Struggle
The pertinacity of those beginning musicians reminds me of how the red fox uses a novice mindset in hunting field mice, relentlessly diving headfirst into snow up to three feet deep until finally making a catch. Scientists have determined that the red fox uses the Earth’s magnetic field to orient their pounce in a north-easterly direction where he is most likely to catch a mouse. Without concern for how silly he might look or how many attempts result in failure, the fox attunes to the Earth’s magnetism and rests in knowing that he will eventually find the target and catch a mouse.
We face challenges every day in education in our hunt for solutions that impact real transformational change. It can feel an awful lot like we are searching blindly for something tiny buried deep under the snow. Shifting our focus to improvement rather than solutions helps pave the way for adaptive change. Just like the beginning musicians and the red fox, developing habits for improvement will position us to get better at getting better. Cal Newport, author of Deep Work and Slow Productivity, teaches us that impactful growth takes place when we prioritize slow work done over time.
God is Faithful in the Struggle
Thankfully, we don’t have to go it alone. What a blessing it is that, with God as our true north, we can trust the path and timing he has for us. Paul tells us in Phillipians chapter 4, verses 8 and 9 that when we fix our thoughts on what is true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and worthy of praise, the God of peace will be with us. He teaches us that spiritual disciplines are a way of placing ourselves in the path of God’s grace. When we make space for God, we find ourselves being transformed into his likeness and strengthen the pathway for him to work in the lives of our students through us.
Be encouraged, warriors in the classroom, that education is the one profession that makes all others possible. It is an avenue to impact the culture for Christ, whether you teach in a public or private setting. When we pursue God with the fearless persistence, faithfulness and gritty optimism of a novice, we open our hearts to be filled with the same wonder, hope, and joy through struggle that our beginning musicians and the red fox experience. With God at the center of our lives, our calling to lead is fueled by the joy found in a life lived for others out of God’s abundant love.
About the Author
Leslie Niessner is an arts educator with 25 years of experience directing middle and high school bands in public and independent Christian schools and administrative leadership in arts education. A masters student and fellow in the Baylor University School of Educational Leadership, Leslie is a lifelong learner with a passion for pedagogy, mentorship, and growing
well through struggle. Leslie currently serves as the Director of Fine Arts at Charlotte Christian School where she is likely to be found repairing broken instruments and painting theatre set pieces between curriculum planning sessions and finance meetings.