Gavin Roddy - Educator
Welcome to my educational website. I have a committed educator with a passion for closing the achievement gap. Below you can find some of my thoughts and experiences in supporting students and facilitating a love of learning.
View my biographical website at GavinRoddy.com!
My Experience at the Waddington Fellowship
Introduction
This paper serves as a reflection of my time as a 3rd year principal in the Waddington program as part of Cohort 17 during the 2025-2026 school year. Participation in this program involved participating in a summer retreat in Greensboro, North Carolina from July 22nd - July 24th, followed by two follow-up sessions in Chittenden, Vermont from November 5th - November 6th and then from February 10th - February 11th. During this time, participants explored various components involved in the major aspects of leadership including problem-solving, team work, data-driven decision-making, and the different styles used for management, addressing change, problem-solving, conflict management, and organizational politics. By participating in this program, I made personal discoveries about my leadership style and experienced growth that will guide my leadership style throughout my career.
Discoveries
The first part of this journey started in Greensboro, North Carolina where participants learned through their involvement with the Center for Creative Leadership that leadership is not a quality but rather a skill that must be developed. As an educator this resonated deeply with me as it supported the notion, “Leadership skills are learned and developed over time. Unlike traits, which are relatively fixed, skills are what people can do or can learn to do” (Mumford et al., 2000, p. 12). As a leader, I found that at times I was looking at leadership as a fixed trait that was a direct reflection of who I was as a person. As I progressed through the program, I soon realized that leadership was rather a set of skills that I could develop and grow.
As the retreat continued, we reviewed a series of surveys from our faculty and staff as well as students. This was a truly sobering moment for me as a leader. I looked through comments such as, “Gavin is more concerned about pleasing the superintendent and the board than helping students,” and “Gavin tries too hard to make people like him.” I saw statistics that showed that faculty, staff, and students questioned my competence, expressed a lack of confidence in the school’s direction, and even stated that the school was not a place they were proud of. I remember reading these statistics and speaking with my wife about what an exit plan might look like. The exact line I used to the teachers at Waddington was, “I have now been to three professional development conferences over the past 6 weeks and I feel like a little less of me has come back each time.”
Then I met with my instructional coach Palma Robinson. She had me review the surveys again, but this time looking at both the positives and negatives. She helped me understand that some of my biggest worries were completely unfounded and detached from data. She helped guide me through the fallacy of using personal fears and opinions as opposed to real data to determine one’s effectiveness. This aligns to the notion of evidence-based management which asserts that leaders do best when they make decisions “through the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of the best available evidence from multiple sources” (Rousseau & Barends, 2011, p. 222).
Palma Robinson then helped me achieve one of the greatest breakthroughs I ever had in my professional career: having a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed one. This distinction is described by Carol S. Dweck as follows, “When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world—the world of fixed traits—success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other—the world of changing qualities—it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself” (2006, p. 15). Essentially, I was judging each decision, good or bad, in terms of whether I was good or bad. This meant that every time I made a mistake, I failed. Every time that I was wrong, I failed. Every time an idea that I developed did not succeed, I failed.
Such a loop was not only exhausting but also self defeating. As I spoke with Palma more and more, she helped me understand that a beneficial way of looking at my leadership would be through the lens of skills. Mistakes, poor decisions, and failed ideas were not reflections of me as a leader, but rather opportunities to grow and improve. This was liberating as I now realized that I did not need to fear unflattering data but rather take it and grow from it. As one of the facilitators of Waddington said, “Take the feedback. It means that people have not given up on you.”
Moving into the November session, I entered once again during a period of struggle at our school. There was a pretty substantial rift that had developed between our faculty and behavioral support team, and student behaviors had spiked. The school was in a state of transition as we were rolling out our first year of PBIS; teachers were struggling with implementing it, our behavior support team was struggling to properly support it, and students were struggling with holding themselves accountable. This was also a time when I myself was experiencing friction. Members of the behavior support team felt I was not doing enough to hold teachers accountable for following their ideas to every last minutiae, while teachers felt as if I was blaming them for struggling with extremely high level behaviors. Parents were paradoxically angry that I was being both too strict and not strict enough.
My experience in November helped me deal with this existential worry about being not enough and too much all at once. The primary way was through learning about how leadership, particularly educational leadership, is a world of polarities. Polarities is based on the concept that two things can be true at once yet appear to be diametrically opposed. For instance, accountability and mercy is a prime example. If a student is showing highly disrespectful behavior, the pure accountability response might be to issue a stiff consequence. The mercy response might be to have a conversation with the student to help them understand why the behavior was harmful and how to do better going forward. Somewhere in the middle of these polarities would likely be restorative justice where the student receives a consequence but also the lesson and skill building necessary to do better going forward.
Looking at this one example helped me to identify all of the polarities I was balancing: student-centered learning vs. teacher-centered learning, discipline vs. restorative justice, academic-focused learning vs. whole child learning, etc. The liberating part of learning about this concept was that I was able to see that much of the source of my anxiety was trying to fix the polarities at my school as opposed to managing them. As I mapped out the different ones that I was facing in my building, I learned that “Polarity management is the skill of identifying and managing unsolvable problems—tensions that are not 'problems to be solved' but 'complexities to be navigated' through a both/and mindset” (Westher & Caniëls, 2018, p. 323). This meant that instead of looking at these competing visions as an issue, I needed to instead see the value in both notions and navigate the school through both concepts to find the right balance.
November also was a chance for me to review what my change style was, something highly relevant as my school was in a state of change. This session taught me that I was mildly conservative when it came to change, often approaching it with an instinctive level of skepticism. Furthermore, through learning about the Kirton Adaption-Innovation theory and the ViewPoints framework, I discovered that I was a clarifier when facing it, often defaulting to wanting to first vet the ideas and really pick them apart to determine whether they were viable. Learning these things about myself was important as leaders must “recognize their preferred cognitive style and develop the 'coping behavior' necessary to work outside that preference to meet the needs of a specific problem” (Jablokow & Kirton, 2009, p. 503). This allowed me to realize that if I only relied on approaching everything from a clarifier perspective, I was going to approach each change slowly and methodically, but sometimes change required quick, decisive action. Furthermore, not all stakeholders share my viewpoint and I needed to be able to adapt my change style to fit their needs as well.
The final session in February provided the perfect capstone for my growth in leadership. The two biggest areas that we explored were conflict and politics. When examining my style for addressing conflict using the Thomas-Kilman Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI), I found that I had a strong tendency to fall back on accommodating, which is both unassertive and cooperative and essentially means neglecting my own needs for the concerns of the other person (Thomas, 1992, p. 268). This aligned strongly with how I have approached conflicts with others, trying first to offer solutions that can help assuage the person’s needs while also attempting to have them meet the school’s expectations. Although I have always found this to be a useful skill, I also learned, “Accommodating is a useful skill when the issue is much more important to the other person than to yourself, or when you want to build social credit for later issues that are important to you” (Thomas, 1992, p. 269). The realization I came to was that there are going to be issues that are equally important to me and that social capital cannot always be my main motivator when addressing conflict. This helped me to understand that although accommodations in education are important, there must be times when I hold the line.
In regards to the actual politics of leadership, I was found to have a strong inclination for negotiating. This style is described as having high political awareness and high integrity, who seeks to find win-win outcomes for everybody (Baddeley & James, 1987, p. 14). This notion of trying to make sure that every stakeholder feels as if they are getting has been one of my primary goals as a leader. I have always felt as if it is better to ensure that all stakeholders can walk away feeling like “winners” having been heard and supported. I have also resisted having stakeholders feel disenfranchised or unheard because when that happens, a partnership is broken that can have ramifications going forward. At the same time, examining the political leadership styles helped me understand that although my most comfortable mode might be being the negotiator, there are also times when I cannot negotiate and must adopt a firmer stance. This has helped to understand how to utilize different lenses of leadership.
The one final piece I wanted to touch upon in this section was the Key Leadership Commitment I had made back in July. At the time I realized I was very good at speaking to teachers and scheduling meetings, but the purpose of those meetings was not always clear nor conducive to action. Being given the chance to reflect on the feedback and using it to make changes to my approach, I made the commitment to start deliberately planning each meeting with clear next steps. Doing so allowed me to ensure that meetings going forward were built around clear goals and action steps, and allowed for us as a school to collectively pivot towards meaningful change.
Future Applications
Although I have now come to the conclusion of the Waddington program, the Waddington program has not come to its conclusion with me. By this I mean that many of the concepts, strategies, and skills that I have learned over this past year will continue to inform my work for years to come. My involvement in this program has reshaped me as a leader in ways that will continue to influence me in years to come.
The first way is through my radical adoption of accepting a growth-mindset. This has been a personal struggle as I have rooted myself in perfectionism for years. This has at times made me insecure and even hostile towards constructive feedback. Because of this, I have deliberately avoided survey data in the past, dismissing it as anonymous venting. Although I still prefer to get feedback through face-to-face conversations, I now understand the notion that when people stop giving you feedback, it means they have given up on you. Due to this, I now have shifted towards understanding that mistakes are the only way that we truly learn and that I must be open to feedback, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me. Instead of chasing perfection and achievement (the former being impossible and the latter being highly subjective), I should instead be chasing growth. And just as a flower needs water to grow, I need feedback that can challenge me and inform me whether my decisions were effective, so that I can adjust and grow accordingly.
The second major way that my involvement in Waddington has transformed me as a leader is in my approach to change. As mentioned previously, I learned that I was conservative when it came to change but only mildly. This came as a relief as it helped me realize that I am not as afraid of it as possible, revealing an inner flexibility that I did not realize was there. Furthermore, I now understand that my default approach to change is clarifying, meaning that I will often want to stop change to vet it first. Although I do not believe that this approach is inherently wrong, I also now realize that I must be both self aware and aware of the circumstances surrounding change, meaning that I must also be willing at times to shift my mindset for action when the situation requires it.
Perhaps my personal favorite way that Waddington has changed me is through teaching me about how to manage polarities. Since attending the program I have viewed every aspect of my work through polarities. I am now aware that uniformity does not equal strength and that diversity of opinion does not mean division. Rather, true leadership comes through groups of people with disparate opinions or beliefs being able to see the value and drawbacks in each other’s ideas. By doing this, we can then as a community develop the strongest possible responses and interventions to support the learning of our students.
The final way that Waddington has fundamentally changed my leadership style is in how I now approach both conflict and organizational politics. It came as no surprise that accommodating and negotiating were the two prominent styles of addressing conflict and politics, as both indicate my strong desire to find middle ground with stakeholders and help meet them where they are at; this is particularly the case when working with students. Although I believe that this is the heart of inclusive education, I can now realize through Waddington, that there are also times when I as an administrator must be able to step outside of these frames of thinking and draw clearer boundaries as to the expectations of our school so as to ensure accountability and organizational integrity. After all, if I continue to accommodate and negotiate with stakeholders blindly, at some point the purpose of the school begins to erode.
Conclusion
Participation in the Waddington program was a profoundly impactful experience for me both as a human being and an instructional leader. It required me to step outside of my comfort zone and have the courage to look at myself through a number of different lenses in order to identify leadership not as a quality but a series of skills that can be developed over time. Through my involvement in this program, I now have a number of research-based tools that I will be able to use going forward in order to be a more responsive, effective, and data-driven leader at my school.
References
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Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.
Jablokow, K. W., & Kirton, M. J. (2009). Problem solving, analytics, and planning: The search for maskless excellence. Journal of Management Development, 28(6), 501–508. https://doi.org/10.1108/02621710910959683
Mumford, M. D., Zaccaro, S. J., Harding, F. D., Jacobs, T. O., & Fleishman, E. A. (2000). Leadership skills for a changing world: Solving complex social problems. The Leadership Quarterly, 11(1), 11–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1048-9843(99)00041-7
Rousseau, D. M., & Barends, A. J. (2011). Becoming an evidence-based manager: Leveraging the quality of decisions through the practice of evidence-based management. Human Resource Management Review, 21(3), 221–235. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2010.10.015
Thomas, K. W. (1992). Conflict and conflict management: Reflections and update. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 13(3), 265–274. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.4030130307
Westher, J. J., & Caniëls, M. C. J. (2018). Polarity management: A skill for the 21st-century leader. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 25(3), 321–334. https://doi.org/10.1177/1548051817747750