Students Need Us in Their Lives, Just Not in Their Faces

Superintendent Richard Spradling exhibited his playful side climbing ropes in the gym with his students. PHOTOS COURTESY OF RICHARD SPRADLING

During more than 30 years as superintendent of four different international schools on two continents, I regularly sought opportunities to break down barriers between my role and the students. I believed that interacting with students would provide me with a window into the professional lives of teachers as well as the daily experiences of students and school operations.

Wherever I worked, I greeted students by name at the door of the school most mornings and shadowed different students through their day’s schedule every few weeks.

A Friendly Competitor

While learning names, extending a morning welcome and spending a day in classes with students all have considerable value, I found interaction with students in non-academic pursuits to be especially powerful in building relationships and learning about school from a different perspective. Effective schools emphasize student-adult collaboration in co-curricular and extracurricular activities, with particular stress on cross-generational interaction.

School sports offer an excellent way for students to see a school leader in a different light. Like many administrators, I tried to be in the stands or at courtside cheering students in interscholastic competitions. When possible, I participated in friendly sports competitions, such as parent-student basketball pickup games or a faculty versus varsity warm-up or fundraising match.

I’ll never forget the look of horror on the face of a player on our varsity girls volleyball team after her powerful jump serve zoomed just over the net and smashed me right in the face. I fell down writhing, then got up laughing (and waving a white handkerchief), which left a lasting impression of fun and good sportsmanship.

I frequently joined our high school tennis teams for practice matches (with our high school principal as my doubles partner). The students were a bit surprised to be beaten by the gray-haired geezers employing guile and control over youthful power, but I was careful never to demean or undermine their confidence, taking it all in good fun. I have (foolishly) volunteered to play goalie on the soccer field and to take penalty shots from high school students as part of community spirit- and fundraising.

Stage Performing

Many administrators carry some “ham” in their personality. They can’t resist the lure of the limelight. When asked by students, I have taken minor roles in drama productions, playing characters somewhat related to my position of authority where it would not be too visually jarring to the audience. I’ll never forget the stunned reaction of the students when we were sitting on the stage in a circle and I ad-libbed my role as a slightly insane version of myself, complete with maniacal laugh, going all “mad scientist” with a fund-raising idea of having Lady Gaga mud-wrestle one of our respected senior faculty members.

Although I am not an especially good singer, I joined the students on stage in school musicals as well. When we put on “Jesus Christ, Superstar,” I was in the on-stage chorus with several other staff and parents and ended up holding and flogging the student playing Jesus. (One parent wag said to the kids: “Dr. Spradling told you that your final high school years would be brutal!”). Opening night, the students were amazed to hear my memories of the uproar “Jesus Christ, Superstar” caused at its debut when I was their age and listened with fascination as we told them that performances of the show had been banned in many localities.

Audiences needed a double take when Richard Spradling appeared on stage as a cast member in his school’s production of “Clowns.”

In “West Side Story,” I was asked to play the character known to the gang members as “Glad Hand,” who tries unsuccessfully to get the Sharks and Jets to play nice in the recreation center gym. In my printed program blurb, I said I had been typecast and well-prepared as superintendent to play the “well-meaning but ultimately ineffectual adult who actually has no idea how teenagers think and behave.”

These on-stage roles admittedly take time, and I certainly didn’t undertake something like this every year. It is neither appropriate nor appreciated to take high-profile roles that should rightfully go to students. But I found that if you work closely with the director and choose your role carefully, you can limit rehearsals to just a few sessions. The effect on students of this kind of shoulder-to-shoulder activity — including taking your bow alongside them — is inspiring and energizing to the cast and the students in the audience.

Cello Class

Perhaps the most powerful activity with students I undertook came from our instrumental music department. With my retirement looming in the not-so-distant future, I decided to take up the cello as a way of at least slowing the rate of brain cell decay. I had played piano as a child and clarinet in my high school marching band but nothing for decades and never a stringed instrument.

Our strings teacher suggested I come to visit his class on the first week of school when we introduced our 5th-grade students to instrumental music. I showed up, played a few notes with the students and thought, “Okay, this is interesting. Maybe I’ll start some private lessons.” But the strings teacher suggested, “Why don’t you just come to the next class and see how it goes?” I thought, “Why not?”

One thing led to another, and I kept attending class just like the 5th graders, as often as I could. Of course, some days I had other appointments, but I tried to block out the classes on my schedule, probably managing about 75 percent attendance (in conflict with our class attendance policy, I admit).

After just a few sessions, the students didn’t really think anything was odd about my being in class with them, but they were surprised to find out that I was doing the same homework, submitting assignments, getting a grade and even that I would perform with them in the first concert. I wore the required white shirt and black pants, and I’ll never forget the murmurs from the audience when we walked on stage (“Who is the big bearded 5th grader?”). In subsequent years, I got “promoted” with the other students, though sadly I hit a plateau and was “red-shirted” in grade 8.

The benefits of joining the music class included a deeper understanding of being a student than any other activity. I saw one teacher’s classroom instruction, management style and student assessment closely, day after day. I experienced technology from the student’s perspective as we began using an online music theory program, and I got firsthand experience with virtual learning plat-forms as we used Google Classroom to post and submit assignments. It helped that the strings teacher was a mature and experienced educator who was comfortable having the Big Boss watching nearly every class. Indeed, as a master teacher himself, he chose one year to have me conduct his performance evaluation by giving him direct feedback on specific instructional goals we developed collaboratively.

I also could observe departmental collaboration up close, and I would realize, firsthand, that some of our performing arts spaces were inadequate, information that eventually folded into our long-range campus improvement master plan.

Richard Spradling, while working as superintendent, took up cello with 5th graders to better understand the assignment of work to students.

Integrating Adults

Most of all, the students saw an adult who was not one of their parents taking personal risks and modeling (not just mouthing) the concept of being a lifelong learner. My aging fingers are not as quick and supple as those of the students, and I am far from being a “front desk” cellist. I struggled to find time to practice, but I didn’t give up, and the students and I supported each other during our learning challenges.

In my final years at that school, I joined before-school practice with our school’s budding symphony orchestra. I was one of a handful of adults performing with this group of students from grades 3-12. What I did in terms of adult-student connection was not at all unique at that school. A hallmark of the school was the integration of adults (whether staff or parents) and students in a great many activities, including arts, sports, service learning and sustainability.

Ultimately, the entire school community — students, staff, parents and board members — demonstrated that adults can model the school’s core values of responsibility, respect, communication, empathy and integrity, and that the descriptors of the school’s profile of a graduate (resilience, team player, lifelong learner) apply to all of us, regardless of age. The students see you in a different light, however subtly.

During one cello class session, the regular teacher was absent, and the substitute failed to show up on time (another useful discovery for an administrator). So the class went ahead and practiced, led by students. At the end of the 90-minute period, one student mused, “Wow, we went the whole class and no adult ever showed up,” to which another pointed out I had been there. The first student said, “Oh, yeah, I guess we had an adult in class after all.”

I am not completely sure what that means, but I will take it positively that I had become a bit invisible. Listening to the flow of un-self-conscious student conversation around me also gave me better insight into the world students inhabit, how they think and what is important to them.

Mutual Trust

My experience with close student interactions was the result of an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect between students and staff that I have seen in other highly successful schools. I am convinced that the school’s positive and mutually supportive atmosphere — where each student can be an individual and where trying hard and doing your best are applauded by peers at all ages — is one of the most valuable outcomes of students having non-parent adults in their lives on a regular and supportive basis. Not to be their buddies, not to act like a kid, not to pretend to know all their music and pop culture, and not to constantly hover over them critically, but to show students they can have friendly and respectful relationships with the adults in their lives.

Students benefit from being treated as individuals and independent human beings by adults other than those who gave them life and a roof over their heads. I observed that the result of this frequent low-hierarchy interaction with students was the near-absence of the sullenness and withdrawal that can characterize student behavior in many schools.

Before I retired from full-time school leadership, the board’s search committee spoke with students to develop the profile of the next school superintendent. The students said quite directly, “We want someone like Dr. Spradling who knows us as persons.”

RICHARD SPRADLING, a former superintendent, is international liaison officer with the Council of International Schools in Leiden, The Netherlands, and resides in Pasadena, Calif. Twitter: @rickspradling