Dr. Tracey Severns, who will be a speaker at Workshop 2024 in Atlantic City, was a special guest on a recent episode of “Education Matters,” a New Jersey School Boards Association podcast hosted by Ray Pinney, the Association’s chief membership engagement officer.
On the program, she highlighted lessons from her book, “Mistakes, Missteps, Missed Opportunities: Lived Lessons from the Real World of Educational Leaders.”
As someone who has held numerous jobs in education, including an aide in a classroom for students with special needs, vice principal, principal, superintendent, chief academic officer for the New Jersey Department of Education and more, she has long thought about writing a book.
But she struggled with the idea because she found it difficult to write a book striving to teach others to be better leaders through portraits of perfection, as she knows she’s flawed, and she’s witnessed flaws in others throughout her career.
“The real world is messier than that,” she told Pinney, referencing the idea of providing lessons only through the lens of things going right.
During the podcast, she highlighted three types of errors: missteps, which are often made when someone is new to a position or role; mistakes, which are different than missteps because you should have known better but you made the wrong choice; and missed opportunities, which could be something as simple as declining an invitation.
Severns shares 62 stories in her book.
One insight she shared on the podcast with Pinney is that often, school leaders are not provided with incentives to share what works with others, even those in the same district.
For instance, many districts have multiple elementary schools and a leader at one may not be eager to share what is working. “They know there will be four graphs comparing the four elementary schools.”
In such a scenario, that leader may actually feel incentivized to stay at the top, which is one of the inadvertent effects of competition.
Glean more insights by listening to the full podcast with Severns.
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