Jon Eckert

Transcript

Derek Smith:
Hello and welcome to Baylor Connections, a conversation series with the people shaping our future. Each week, we go in-depth with Baylor leaders, professors, and more discussing important topics in higher education, research, and student life. I'm Derek Smith. And today, we are talking educational leadership with Jon Eckert. Dr. Eckert serves as professor of educational leadership and the Lynda and Robert Copple endowed chair for Christians in school leadership. Eckert came to Baylor in 2019 and serves as co-executive director of the Baylor Center for School Leadership, which cultivates effective school leaders through programming, networks, research and scholarship, graduate programs, and more. Eckert served as a teaching ambassador fellow in the US Department of Education during both the Bush and Obama administrations and taught at Wheaton College prior to joining the Baylor faculty. A widely published author and researcher, his research interests include collective leadership, teaching effectiveness, evaluation, and strategic compensation to enhance that effectiveness, and science education. A lot of topics we could discuss today, but, Dr. Eckert, it's really great to visit with you. Thanks for coming on the program today.

Jon Eckert:
Good to be with you again, Derek.

Derek Smith:
Well, you said again, you're right. We had you on the program in 2019. At that point, you were new to Baylor, this programming was new to Baylor, and it's really grown a lot in the years since. How long ago does 2019 seem to you when you think about how far things have come here?

Jon Eckert:
Right. It feels like we need to measure everything in pre-COVID and post-COVID. So I was here a whole eight months before COVID hit, and so I would say, since 2019, it feels like a long time ago because the Lord's just given so many blessings to the work that we're doing, and it's so different than when we were here in 2019. Mostly what we were talking about in 2019 is what we hope to do, and now we have years of work that has been done by amazing leaders all over the world.

Derek Smith:
Well, yeah, from vision to reality, where are some places that you, your colleagues, people that you work with, we might've found you all in recent months doing that work?

Jon Eckert:
Right. Well, we have this great impact map where it shows the 45-plus countries in the 50 states that we've worked in since 2019. But then just last year, I got to travel all over the world seeing amazing schools, speaking at conferences and being an encouragement because our goal is to be the most influential Christian leadership catalyst for schools worldwide. And so 2023 felt like we were finally realizing that because we were able to travel and get places. So I was as far away as Hobart, Tasmania. I was a keynote speaker in Tasmania, not something that was on my radar in 2019, certainly. Traveled all over Australia. Was in England, at schools all over England. Ended up in a meeting at one point in Windsor Castle in this room called St. George's Room. It was a room that was built in 1408, and they think that Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I were in that room for the first performance of the Merry Wives of Windsor.
So it was this crazy... And the King was there that day. So the castle was all shut down except for our little group of 25 educators from around the world. I've been all over Canada and the United States. So I was gone from home over 100 days last year. So my wife pointed that out that maybe needed to trim back on that a little bit this year. But the amazing work that's going on around the world is exciting. And so that's been an amazing opportunity that I think only could have happened at Baylor University because of its status as a Christian Research 1 university. The work we get to do is just different. And so it's exciting to be able to be a part of that.

Derek Smith:
So speaking, interacting with other educators, what are some of the opportunities that have taken you to places like Tasmania, England, or elsewhere?

Jon Eckert:
So there are large networks of schools doing amazing things. And so in 2020, we started capturing those stories, and that became the book that just came out last year, which was Just Teaching: Feedback, Engagement, and Well-Being for Each Student. It proved to be a bestseller for the publisher because we were telling stories of the work going on in classrooms that regardless of how you're delivering education, everybody pivoted in 2020 and was trying to do anything they could to meet the needs of kids, and some schools did that more successfully than others. And so my work largely takes me out to study those schools, identify those things, and then I speak on those things. So my whole role is to elevate the amazing work that educators are doing worldwide. So the work is either going out and learning from them or sharing about what they're doing. Because at Baylor, we are here to collect those stories, elevate those stories, and make sure that that expertise spreads.

Derek Smith:
Well, you just helped paint that picture a little bit. Let's dive into your role and some of the names that we're sharing here on the program so people can understand a little bit better. So your particular role is the Lynda and Robert Copple endowed chair for Christians in school leadership, your academic role. What all goes into that? Why was that created?

Jon Eckert:
Yeah. So we can start with Lynda and Robert. They were the vision behind the position that I have. I sit in that endowed chair. They gave $2.5 million. It was the largest gift ever to the School of Education. And that brought me here to serve in this role to support Christians in school leadership, wherever they're called. So that was a vision that they had. Lynda was an amazing educator for 14 years in Arlington ISD, and Robert was the CEO of Cinemark. And so they've been blessed in these amazing ways. And so their vision was that there would be a professor here that would work in tandem with the Center for School Leadership. So when I talked to you in 2019, it was just Matt Thomas and I.
And now, that work has expanded. Matt's moved on. He's the head of school in Virginia now, and doing amazing work there, but now we have a team of Jill Anderson, Sahira Kodra, Bill Sterrett, Erik Ellefsen. They work full-time in the center. Bill serves as our department chair in the Department of Ed leadership, but we're able to build programs that support Christians in school leadership. We now have the largest master's program in the School of Ed that supports anyone that wants to be a leader in either public schools or private schools. So in a world that's becoming increasingly polarized, we're bringing leaders together around this meaningful work. This was the ultimate vision of what Robert and Lynda Copple wanted to have happen. And so that work continues in the master's. I also am the program director for the EDD, which is for people that want to become superintendents in K12 educational leadership. And our PhD program just got approved by the Board of Regents this past fall. So we'll have PhD students full-time in the fall of 2024.
So the research capacity increases, the service capacity increases. We've done events all over the country. One of my favorite events that we get to do the work that we get to do is funded in large part by Andrew and Nina Brenneman. They've contributed to the Center for School Leadership each of the last four years. And this last year, they sponsored events. One of them is called The Culture of Joy. So building on Coach Drew's idea that we build a culture of joy. He came and spoke to 180 educators in the new Hurd Center, the Welcome Center, and then we did a half-day-long professional development where we brought educators from all around the area to lead breakout sessions to facilitate these things, went to dinner, then went to a women's volleyball game that night just as an encouragement to educators because the great work they're doing needs to be elevated, supported, and encouraged in these ways that catalyze even better work moving forward.
So that's a little bit of the story. I could go into more detail on any of those things that you're interested in, but that's some of the work that we've done that in 2019, that was what we hoped we would be doing. But to think that the work has been catalyzed by $5 million in gifts by these donors that come alongside and say, "Hey, we want to invest in the kingdom in this way," has been pretty powerful.

Derek Smith:
Visiting with Dr. John Eckert, and, John, the Baylor Center for School Leadership, how does that play into what it is that we're talking about as well?

Jon Eckert:
Yeah, so that's where Jill Anderson and Sahira Kodra, they spend their time there. Erik Ellefsen is also our director of networks and improvement communities. So there's another good example of amazing Baylor connections. Tiger Dawson is a Baylor grad who started a group called Edify that supports Christian education for low-income students in Africa and Latin America. We got connected to him through a variety of channels. But then Jay Brown, who's a regent here at Baylor, he's given a gift to endow a chair to help with the center, with the research end of things, that'll sit in ed psych in the School of Ed, he's good friends with Tiger Dawson who founded Edify.
And so that work has become these networks of leaders all around the world. Some of them are going through the Just Teaching book that I just finished with Erik Ellefsen, others are working on their leadership development, they serve 27,000 schools worldwide through Edify, and that's their work. But we're coming alongside and helping accelerate that through the Baylor Center for School Leadership because the whole point of the center is to provide encouragement to educators. That's where the Culture of Joy event takes place. So it works alongside the Department of Ed leadership where we bring teams of leaders together from schools to do work that's on an ongoing basis. So it's not just a one-day professional development exercise, it's how do we improve year over year over year. And so there are Zoom check-ins every month where we bring leaders from all different schools and they report their progress toward their goals, and then they reset the goals every 90 days. "Okay, what's the next goal?"
And so that's where I think the Center for School Leadership is different than a lot of the other centers you might find on another campus. A, we're bringing together Christians from all different kinds of schools. B, we're building on that work in ways that we're identifying what is working, what isn't working, and what we can change to move forward. And we do that in these facilitated tools that help move it forward. So the center is largely about catalyzing the work of teams. That's where the collective leadership piece comes out. It's not about one person. It's about what the team can do to improve outcomes for each kid. And so that's where the center plays a nice part in developing teams across a variety of campuses.

Derek Smith:
When you think of the faculty with whom you get to interact all over the country, what does meaningful encouragement look like to you? What does that look like when they're back interacting with their fellow faculty or students in the schools they serve?

Jon Eckert:
That's a great question. The work has been hard since COVID. So we see learning loss. You see huge dips in the national Assessment of Education Progress in both reading and math. You have chronic absenteeism that's almost tripled since, and that means kids are missing one day out of every two weeks. That's consistent. That's gone from about 11% to up to 33%, even up to 50% in some districts. And so it's this idea that we still serve in this amazing profession, this profession that makes all others possible, that there's deep joy in engaging with each kid, but when kids aren't present, it's so hard to make progress. So how do we make this place a place that's engaging for kids, a place they want to be, a place where they feel safe and respected and that they can move forward, not safe in the sense that they wait until they feel safe to share. No, we celebrate the risk taking that students do, that educators do.
And so that's become the primary work of the center is to say, "Hey, regardless of how you're delivering education, how do you make sure each kid's well? How do you make sure they're engaged and how are they getting feedback to improve?" And so that's been the work that we've been doing over the last three years. I think that's the work that's going to move ahead, because I don't think the job's getting any easier, but I think it's become clear that we need Christians leading in these ways because we know there's a deeper meaning for what we do. We're helping serve created beings as they become more of who they're created to be, and that's a tremendous blessing that we get to do every day.

Derek Smith:
You mentioned coming here to Baylor just a few months before COVID. Does the growth of this work seemed timely in light of the fact that COVID happened right at the beginning?

Jon Eckert:
Right. We could have looked at it as, "Oh, this is devastating. I've only been here eight months." But COVID opened up so many opportunities because we took what we thought would be a relatively regional thing where we'd serve a lot of Texas schools. And it became an international issue because we started these improvement communities around feedback, engagement, and well-being for each student in 2020. And we had hundreds of schools joining those networks because schools were honestly desperate for anything. And so we would spend a month with them making plans for how they were going to welcome students back. So all that summer, I was like, "Hey, how are we going to be ready for the fall? How are we going to be ready for the fall?" So we were this organizer for that. And so it's been an amazing opportunity. Well, COVID was an unmitigated tragedy. There were some opportunities there to bring people together because there was an urgency to do something different.

Derek Smith:
This is Baylor Connections. We are visiting with Jon Eckert, professor of educational leadership and the Lynda and Robert Copple endowed chair for Christians in school leadership. What are some of the moments that are most meaningful to you and your colleagues as you talk about interacting, whether it's virtual, whether it's in person? What are some of the moments that most invigorate you as you either come back or turn off the Zoom meeting or what have you?

Jon Eckert:
We had an amazing tour of a small, small Christian school last year in England where these three British school kids took us around on this tour of this school that was a relatively humble school. The facilities were not overly nice. They needed a door handle on a door, and they'd used a toilet paper holder as the door handle. And they needed a school library, so they'd taken an old airplane fuselage, they put it in the front lawn, and they had steps that went up into it, and that was where their school library was. But just seeing them light up as they showed you their writing from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, how much it had changed and grown and the excitement they had in the growth, that was the powerful moment of, "Hey, we're supporting leaders that are helping kids like this."
I will say the other piece I would connect is the way grants and donors have come alongside the work in order to make it possible. So I should have mentioned Bill Sterrett, who's our co-executive director, he just came back from Pakistan last month where he was doing a state department grant where they were helping women integrate more into sports. So he's doing this work in Pakistan. It's an amazing thing. I wasn't even there, but just getting to see that come back, and then to see Marc and Rowena Trietler, they gave us $450,000 to do work in Mississippi with these five rural districts where they're having huge issues with opioids, to try to build thriving learning communities where kids are drawn into something more. To see donors come alongside and do that in ways that...
They live in California. They had a son at Baylor and they gave to Baylor to help these kids in Mississippi. That's a powerful thing to see the way the body of Christ and the Baylor Nation come alongside and help all these places that they're not even aware of. It's like, "No, the work is there," and that's pretty powerful to see that in play.

Derek Smith:
That's really cool. And how important is that when you think about people, the Baylor family joining in with what you're doing to continue the work? I mean, how much do you all rely on that?

Jon Eckert:
It's huge because as much as energy as I have for the work... I mean, again, my wife always gets on me. I can work 80 hours a week and be totally happy, that does not make me a good father or a husband, so I have to check the hubris sometimes. But we can't do the work without resources. So grants and donors have been so key. We had another donor family, Marc and Janis Kurschat, they gave a significant portion of money to just help the center get up to speed with the positions we need so that we could bring in people to create digital materials that can be shared worldwide where we don't have to be there, but those things can go. And without those kinds of partnerships, it doesn't work.
I'll give you my favorite donor story, that's our chief investment officer, Dave Morehead. Dave and Sarah. Sarah is a former educator, and Dave is a brilliant investment guy. Our endowments outperformed almost every endowment in the country, I think other than Brown University, in the last four years. And he decided that the most efficient way to invest his money was through the ed leadership department at Baylor. So he funds the masters in school leadership because he thinks the most efficient way to impact kids is through their leaders. Because for each leader, you're impacting hundreds if not thousands of kids. And so every year, he gives more and more money to make it possible for students to be able to afford to come to Baylor.
And again, we have a great and amazing program. Like I said, it's the biggest one in the School of Ed. But without those kinds of resources, Baylor is an expensive university and educators just don't make that much money. And so by Dave and Sarah investing their money that way, it makes it possible for us to support those leaders when we couldn't do it, honestly, if we didn't have that support.

Derek Smith:
Visiting with Dr. Jon Eckert here on Baylor Connections, and I want to shift gears just a little bit. You talked about the book, Just Teaching. There's a Just Schools Academy, a Just Schools Leadership, little bit of synergy between all that. Can you tell us a little bit about that, the motivation behind it and how it's growing?

Jon Eckert:
Well, that's the strategy. We even have our own podcast, the Just Schools Podcast. And I don't think it has anywhere near the reach that Baylor Connections has, but it's had 14,000 people download episodes in the last year. So that's a way to get that information out there.
So the whole point of it is if we're going to lead schools for justice and flourishing, it doesn't have to be increasingly complicated because educators are stretched really thin right now, and they can't add more. Even if they're super talented, they can't keep adding more things to their plate. So how do we simplify the work that we're doing? At the beginning of the book, I tell this one quick story, which I think is always entertaining. I was in the Bush and Obama administration, and we were preparing for a meeting with teachers and administrators at the time, and I had a senior official in one of the administrations say, "Hey, we've got these educators coming in. I think we just need to decomplexify things for these educators." And I paused for a moment. I was like, "Do you mean simplify?" And she's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah," I was like, "Because decomplexify is not a word."
So the irony of a federal bureaucrat complicating the word for simplify, and then doing it in a condescending way, that's the introductory story of the book, Just Teaching. How do we do this in a way that simplifies for educators with educators to benefit students? And if we do that well, we're leading just schools, so no more of this, "I'm just a teacher." It's like, "No, I'm a just teacher. I teach for justice and flourishing because I believe this kid can become more than he or she imagines he or she could be." And that's what we do each day. And so that's why you have this Just Schools, Just Teaching theme running through everything because we're trying to be encouraging to educators without piling more on their already overflowing plates.

Derek Smith:
And you have a leadership academy coming up, correct? Or a leadership event? What's that going to be?

Jon Eckert:
Yeah. So on February 12th, we have the Just Leadership Academy. We have leaders from all over Texas and some from all over the country coming. They're actually going to hear from Jay Brown. I mentioned him, one of our regents. He's going to speak on leadership from his perspective because he's a Fortune 100 CEO, and he's going to talk to them about what that looks like. So we have principals, superintendents, assistant superintendents, instructional coaches, assistant principals, all coming in to the new Hurd Welcome Center, which is a great facility for hosting these things, and they're going to speak to these things. It's been tremendously encouraged by President Livingstone. She's a big proponent of this Christian leadership, obviously, because she's one of the best Christian leaders that I've seen, and then our dean, Shanna Hagan-Burke, has been a huge promote proponent of this work.
So they'll be here on campus for a day to do that work and hopefully leave with some deeper networks to continue that work, which then flows into an event we're doing right outside of DC, which will be our Just Schools Academy. So we will do the same thing on a Friday and a Saturday, but bigger with teachers and administrators together. So we'll broaden it beyond just the administrative leadership component on that Monday. So really excited about that work. Again, largely possible through the support of donors. Schools do pay to be a part of it as well, because we want them to have skin in the game, and then stick with the work over the course of a year. So, hopefully, both of those events will be longer-term engagements other than just the day.

Derek Smith:
Well, that's exciting. Hope that's a successful event. Actually, events pluralize as you grow that. And final question for you, if people want to get involved, if they're intrigued, if they want to learn more, what's the best way for them to do so?

Jon Eckert:
So on the website, you'll see the Baylor Center for School Leadership, and they're all the connections of what we're doing, what we would love to do. If you have ideas of things that are needed, share those things. If you want to come alongside and support, that's amazing. Jill Anderson's our senior director, she's a great contact. I'm always happy to talk to anyone. Feel free to just email me. It's fairly easy with Baylor. It's just J-O-N_eckert@baylor.edu. But most of all, we just hope that you continue to represent Baylor well in everything that you do, because Baylor's name continues to grow. We feel like the Lord has blessed that, and then pray because there's so much good work out there. It's just that we would say yes to the right work and not get distracted by things that aren't as much on mission. But again, huge blessing to be at Baylor. And I get to share this every summer with all incoming students, so I get to speak to all of them. So I'm always excited to talk about the amazing work happening all over Baylor's campus.

Derek Smith:
That's great. Where enthusiasm comes across for sure. And if people want to look that up, probably the easiest way probably is just to really go ahead and Google, right? Baylor Center for School Leadership, it's going to pop right up. That's what I did the other day, so I know it's going to pop right up there. But, Dr. Eckert, really appreciate the work you do and appreciate you taking the time to share. Thanks for joining us on the program today.

Jon Eckert:
Great to be with you. Thank you, Derek.

Derek Smith:
Dr. Jon Eckert, professor of educational leadership and the Lynda and Robert Copple endowed chair for Christians in school leadership, our guest today on Baylor Connections. I'm Derek Smith. Reminder, you can hear this and other programs online, connections.baylor.edu, and you can subscribe to the program on iTunes. Thanks for joining us here on Baylor Connections.