The Thread He Follows

Chip Wood speaks about his journey and the importance of Courage to Teach

It’s a Monday morning in January at the Sheffield Elementary School in the village of Turners Falls, Massachusetts, an impoverished former mill town reawaking with hopes for an arts renaissance, nestled in the hills along a bend in the Connecticut River.

Sheffield’s third, fourth, and fifth-graders are all in class now, and the lobby and halls are quiet, calm and bright, and decorated with students’ colorful posters saying “peace” in more than a dozen languages--part of a contest to pick the best designs for t-shirts to be printed later in the spring.

But this apparent calm belies the reality of Principal Chip Wood’s morning. He has just met with a mother seeking his help, distraught over her daughter’s behavior at home over the weekend. And before he can sit down to talk, he needs to put in a call to the probation officer of one of his fifth-graders, who is headed to court the next day. “Monday morning,” Chip says, dialing the phone, “often feels like Friday night in the emergency room.”

On the table in Chip’s office is Naomi Shihab Nye’s Come With Me: Poems for a Journey. A Courage & Renewal facilitator, Chip brings poetry and reflection into the day-to-day life of his school community. In response to recent incidents of bullying and exclusion, Chip has created a worksheet inspired by Nye’s poem “Envelope,” inviting students to create their own poems to explore and share their lives and dreams with each other.

On the wall near his desk are the Sheffield School rules, developed in a “constitutional convention” by student delegates from every grade level. Rule number one is, simply, “Enjoy.”

A long and eventful personal and professional journey first brought Chip to Courage to Teach ten years ago, and to Sheffield today, but the threads of Chip’s deeply-held values are easy to see all along the way. “As a student in the 60s,” Chip recounts, “I was fire and brimstone, along with lots of others of us who were in college at that time, around breaking barriers and civil rights, and picketing, and marching, and going to court…. I went to graduate school at Howard University on a Carnegie Fellowship and got my MSW in Community Organization right at the time of the Black Power movement, ’65-’67. I was married, we were really young, and Washington was a very, very exciting place to be.”

When asked what is was like to be a white student at that time at Howard, a historically Black university, Chip replies, “At the graduate school at Howard, there have always been people from all over the world and white students. In the School of Social Work I would say maybe 20% of the students were white. But I remember doing theatre. I was the white protagonist in Blues for Mr. Charlie at Howard—it’s a James Baldwin play. It was an extraordinary experience being the white protagonist and the audience being 100% African American night, after night, after night. It was just really something. It taught me a lot.

“It was a little too heady for someone in their twenties, really. I did my second year placement at the Washington Urban League and was immediately made the person who did most of the PR. When I graduated, I was hired as Assistant to the Director. I wrote his speeches, his testimony for Congress, went to all the meetings behind the scenes, kept his calendar, and when he moved to the offices of the National Urban League in Washington, he brought me with him. Then I was asked by Whitney Young, who was head of the National Urban League, to come and be his assistant in New York.

“I had extraordinary admiration for Whitney. I believe he would have been the first black President. He drowned in Africa while at a conference, under somewhat mysterious circumstances. I did a lot of the legwork around his burial in Kentucky. That sort of did it for me. I was personally spent. Dr. King had been killed and Bobby Kennedy, and there was a sense of despair and hopelessness that everything had been taken.

“I felt like, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ And my friend who was running the MAT program at the University of Massachusetts said, ‘Why don’t you come up here and teach.’ I was thinking about it before Whitney died, and he had actually written a reference letter and all of that, so I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to do it now.’

“The MAT program was cross professional, for nurses and social workers too, not just teachers, so that schools would become places where all the professionals who worked in them had a common vision. Sort of like circles of trust. We did all kinds of experimental things, so it seemed like a really exciting thing to come into, but my position was funded for only a year and then I had to look for a real job. A principalship came up in Gill, MA, which is just across the river from here. The superintendent at the time said, 'Cut your hair and put on a tie and we’ll give you the job.'

“Gill was a very parochial, Yankee community. So when I built the Wampanoag Village on the front lawn of the school, it was in the local paper with people up in arms about what I was doing to the lawn, as opposed to how exciting an educational adventure this was for the kids. It was a K-8 school with two buildings five miles apart that I consolidated into one building. We became K-6 and the 7th and 8th grades moved to the regional high school. And I was a teaching principal—I had a half a day off for administrative duties. So that’s how much education has changed! I taught sixth-grade full-time and ran a school, no problem. It was 120 kids. We had mixed-aged primary and brought out all those summer camp traditions. I’d worked in summer camps as a kid and saw the power of tradition and ceremonies, the things that kids did year after year in camp were exciting to them. The kids adored it. It was a good time to be in education at the beginning of the ‘70s, but it got progressively worse as the decade went on in terms of mandates, rules and requirements.

“Finally a number of us in the area thought, let’s create a different sort of school. It was sort of a charter school before charter schools even existed. Low sliding scale tuition, with the idea that if we had a foundation and gave workshops, we could help support the school. We were able to do that for almost 25 years. I made that transition at a time when education was exactly where it is today—assessments, back to basics, pushing the curriculum to younger and younger, developmentally inappropriate ages. The Responsive Classroom© (www.responsiveclassroom.org) grew out of that, and eventually the school and the Northeast Foundation for Children became separate organizations. When people ask me about how Responsive Classroom started, I always tell them that the basic idea is that we took summer camp and dropped it down in the middle of public school. People who know about summer camp understand right away.”

Eventually, Chip left the classroom and became the executive director of the Foundation, a lead trainer in its Responsive Classroom approach, and a figure on the national stage in education reform. He would come home Friday night and leave again Sunday afternoon, heading to one place or another around the country to lead workshops and attend national meetings. He also found time to write two influential books, Yardsticks: Children in the Classroom Ages 4-14 and Time to Teach, Time to Learn: Changing the Pace of School, whichreflect thedevelopmental focus that is at the heart of his work in education—paying attention to where kids are, age by age, and to what they really need to thrive.

As Chip worked to transform education, he continued to experience transformation in his own life. “In the early ’80s, I made a big shift in the way I thought of my spirituality and the time I devoted to contemplation. I began thinking seriously about training to become a spiritual director, except that I couldn’t figure out a way of making it work financially for my family.

“Around that time, I was invited to a program at the Fetzer Institute. So I went, and on the table at that meeting was a working paper for a program called ‘The Courage to Teach.’ It was just a Xeroxed copy of a paper. I had read To Know as We are Known, so I read this paper and I was like, ‘Alright, if I can’t keep my family afloat with spiritual direction, this certainly resonates with me.’ The long and short of it was that I applied to the facilitator preparation program. I realized it was the same work in many, many ways.

“During this time, whenever I was at Fetzer, I think three times I was a focus person in Clearness Committee, trying to figure out what I should do when I grew up. What was the next step in the rest of my life? Even in the first two-year Courage to Teach group I facilitated with Pamela Seigle, when we needed an extra focus person, I would grab it. And I just kept realizing that I needed to be centered in one place, to be centered in myself. I just couldn’t be doing a hundred different things, which has been one of my big problems professionally. I was also getting to the place where I felt like—this is now the late 90s and I had my first grandchild—it was time to figure out a way to slow down and certainly to get off the road.”

Then one day, Chip learned that a district near his home was looking for a new principal. He expressed interest and was offered this new role. “This is my fifth year.” But Chip remembers, “The year I came in, 27 teachers were let go from the district because of massive budget cuts. And it’s only a little teeny district, you know, 1500 students. So now it’s big classes and no services and then being declared underperforming by the state—pull yourself up by your bootstraps even though you don’t have any boots. We’re continuing to battle with that. We have about 25% special education kids, which is way above the state average. And we have 60% free and reduced lunch, which is not as high as some places in the cities, but tends to be undercounted here I think, because it’s hard to get a lot of people to apply. We also have lots of domestic violence in the community—highest in the state. Our dropout rate is in the top ten state-wide and double digits. Nothing to be proud of.

“We were talking earlier about this boy who’s going to court tomorrow morning. These stories just repeat themselves. There are lots and lots of them. And one thing I’ve really come to understand is that this job is as much about supporting the adults in the community, like the mother I met with this morning. And I have 30 year veterans in this building, many of whom live in this community, who know what goes on in this community.” Chip also lists the number of his teachers facing serious illness this year, their own or of a loved one. Chip says, “I imagine this is true everywhere, in every school community, but we don’t talk about it. It’s just a lot, in a Courage sense, to ‘hold,’ and I’ve come to find that a remarkable part of the job is about Courage work. I know it at the core of myself.”

Chip’s commitment to Courage & Renewal is in K-12 education, and he looks forward to having more opportunities to serve this community in collaboration with Courage & Renewal Northeast in the coming years. He and Pamela Seigle are currently facilitating a group of Massachusetts public school leaders as part of the Courage & Renewal for School Leaders program supported by the Rainwater Charitable Funds and The Angell Foundation. As he reflects on the challenges he faces as a principal himself, Chip says, “In the principals’ group, that ‘holding’ of the adult community has to be raised up. It’s something I’m really eager to address, because you have to find the time and space for it and see it as more important than the next memo or MCAS prep or whatever you might be asked to do in this straight line vision about what being a principal is about these days. It has to be the work that we do in order to do the work. I don’t think it’s the work before the work. I think it’s the work in the work.”

Last Updated: Sunday, July 06, 2008