Episode 9: Designing Purpose-Driven Schools with Dr. Shira Leibowitz of Discovery Village
We talk a lot on the podcast about finding ways to pursue your passion in education, but on your own terms, and today’s episode is no different. Dr. Shira Leibowitz is the perfect example of someone who believes that anything is achievable with the right mindset and vision. So, thinking about starting your own school? In today’s episode, Dr. Shira Leibowitz of Discovery Village, discusses designing purpose-driven schools.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz, like many of you, had a unique path getting into education, but once she did, she went full-steam ahead! Wanting more than a traditional and structured school system, she eventually started her own school, Discovery Village. Being a purpose-driven school for early childhood, Discovery Village’s primary focus is the well-being of their students for a well-developed life.
Believing that anything is achievable, Dr. Leibowitz is sharing her knowledge with others who are wanting to start their own school or programs based on purpose-driven learning. She has a lot of knowledge, advice, and the right mindset to help you achieve your educational visions. So if you’re ready to start your own purpose-driven school or program, listen to Dr. Leibowitz for implementation success!
Topics Discussed:
Dr. Leibowitz describes her journey in education and how she got to where she is today
An explanation how each program is designed based on the age group at Discovery Village
Why early childhood is the most impactful when it comes to human development
A big emphasis on the possibilities and how your dreams are achievable
What is was like for Dr. Leibowitz to start her own school
Resources mentioned:
The Coach Approach To School Leadership: Leading Teachers To Higher Levels of Effectiveness, by Jessica Johnson, Shira Leibowitz, and Kathy Perret
Havens of Hope: Ideas for Redesigning Education from the COVID-19 Pandemic, by Shira Leibowitz
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Meet Dr. Shira Leibowitz
Before opening Discovery Village Childcare Center and Preschool in July, 2019, Dr. Shira Leibowitz spent twenty years as the principal of early childhood through eighth grade schools. Always loving the early childhood space, Dr. Leibowitz saw opening a childcare center as an opportunity to design and lead a school reflecting her own vision for relationship rich, experiential, purpose-driven education.
The work has been so meaningful that she also opened Revabilities™ Educational Leadership Training Center, supporting early childhood leaders to deliver customized purpose-driven, profitable programs, without burning themselves and their teams out in the process.
While serving as CEO of both Discovery Village and Revabilities™, Dr. Leibowitz is also an adjunct faculty member teaching educational leadership and advising doctoral students in education at Northeastern University. She is co-author of The Coach Approach To School Leadership: Leading Teachers To Higher Levels of Effectiveness and Havens of Hope: Ideas For Redesigning Education From the COVID-19 Pandemic.
CONNECT WITH Dr. Shira leibowitz
Read the transcript for this episode:
Lily:
Before opening Discovery Village Childcare Center and Preschool in July 2019 Dr. Shira Liebowitz spent 20 years as the principal of early childhood through eighth grade schools. Always loving the early childhood space, Dr. Liebowitz saw opening a childcare center as an opportunity to design and lead a school, perfecting her own vision for relationship rich, experiential, purpose driven education.
Lily:
The work has been so meaningful that she also opened Revabilities Educational Leadership Training Center, supporting early childhood leaders to deliver customized purpose driven profitable programs without burning themselves and their teams out in the process. While serving as CEO of both Discovery Village and Revabilities Dr. Liebowitz is also an adjunct faculty member teaching educational leadership and advising doctoral students and education at Northeastern University.
Lily:
She is co author of The Coach Approach To School Leadership, leading teachers to higher levels of effectiveness and havens of hope, ideas for redesigning education from the COVID 19 pandemic.
Lily:
Welcome, I'm so glad that you're here with us today.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
I am so happy to be here.
Lily:
Yay. Well, I love to start with a really broad question of describing your journey as an educator.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
My journey as an educator has taken so many twists and turns. And I feel so blessed for where I am now. And I imagine many of you listening also have taken twists and turns or are thinking about taking twists and turns.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
So I actually started out as surprisingly, a Rabbi. I was ordained as a Rabbi way back in 1993. And to support myself through rabbinical school, which was five years, I was teaching religious school and loved it. And so I started taking courses, the education courses in the school and they noticed me, the Jewish world at the time needed people to lead schools, there was a real lack of educators. So I got this offer I couldn't refuse that changed the trajectory of my career.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
I was actually asked if I would accept a fully funded scholarship for a PhD in education. Amazing. Yes. It was and looking back, I can't even believe like the blessing the luck. Yes, they had these four scholarships to give away they were given because they needed high level educators to lead Jewish programs, Jewish schools.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
The head of the Education Department asked me one day if you could take me to lunch, which I thought was the strangest thing, why would you want to take me? I went and he offered me this program. So it was amazing. It paid for my PhD. It also paid for other medical school courses, because I could take as many courses as I wanted. It gave me a stipend for rent amazing, lots of amazing circumstances.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
So the requirement was I had to lead Jewish schools for five years after that that was paying back. And I actually stayed for 18 years. So I'm more than pay back. I made it back. And through that time became much more engaged in education broadly than in Jewish education, specifically, and innovative education, and project based learning and purpose driven learning.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
And the last two years that I was an educator, I was hired to be the founding director of a project based learning school in lower Manhattan. And that opened up a whole world of possibilities. I had worked in nonprofit, but this was now a for profit school that was purpose driven. You know, everybody's heart was in the right place to improve learning and all kinds of ways which I had never thought of for profit education in those really positive terms. So it opened up all these possibilities in my mind.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
And throughout my career, I led Jewish schools that had programs from the age of three, so pre K and nursery programs up through eighth grade, mostly K to five. I've always loved the Early Childhood space. And so working in Manhattan, I saw these world class early childhood programs, and realized it was possible to start one was was meeting these entrepreneurial educators who started programs that were extraordinary, like world class extract. Oh, cool. So it was amazing.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
So I took the leap and opened my own school I actually was able to get a loan and purchase an existing program which was not doing well. So this was a program in an area where a lot of the schools had waitlists, and we were only half full.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
And the reason was because it was really poorly run. We revamped the entire program, pandemic happened in the middle, which was, you know, not good timing, I'm sure. And we were in the first and worst COVID hotspot in the country. So that that was a whole other twist in trying to the journey.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
And we learned a lot. And we revamped the whole program through that. So that has been, that's been where I am and feel blessed for, for all of the opportunities that have come my way.
Lily:
Yes, I love that. And I love hearing how it started out. And I love when I've been talking to people for the podcast, hearing a lot of us didn't start out knowing that we wanted to be educators. Yeah. And through different circumstances that we've been led that way. And I love hearing how that's changed over time for you too.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
I also found myself I started teaching in big public schools, and then found myself drawn to schools that were more project based and focused on kids and personalized. And just seeing all these different models of what could be possible. I feel like even now being outside of the classroom, like oh, and then this could happen, or this model is going on, and just being so inspired by all those different things.
Lily:
So I love that you saw it happening, and then actually made it happen on your own for a whole other group of students too. So with your school now, is it a preschool? Or what ages are you serving?
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
Yeah, we're early childhood. So we take children from six weeks. So from six weeks through up until they go off to kindergarten. So we have an infant program, a toddler program and a preschool program.
Lily:
Yeah, so neat. And what did you want? I know you spoke a little bit of like purpose driven, project based learning what did you see? And your school is called Discovery Village? Yes. What did you see Discovery Village is kind of setting it apart?
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
So the name was purposeful. And where we started is not where we are. And that's, that's a significant part of the journey. It's still grounded in where we are. It was Discovery Village, the care of a village, the creativity of an art studio in the discovery of a science lab. And it was very much play and project based, focused really heavily on the arts and sciences, literacy and math coming in through the arts and sciences, but everything was through expression and movement and creativity. And it still is in many ways.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
But coming through the pandemic, it deepened, and it shifted. And so our core focus now is on wellbeing as the primary purpose of education, and well being broadly understood. So wellbeing for people wellbeing, for the planet, wellbeing for our communities. The notion being if you can figure out how to find your way to well being: physical well-being, emotional well-being, financial well-being, spiritual well-being, whatever's happening around you, then you'll be okay. And that has shifted my views of what education is.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
And so financial well being matters, so having a career still matters. So all of those career readiness pieces still matter. But there's more than that. And so focusing on the social, emotional, focusing on relationships, focusing on everything that helps you design your own well lived life. So starting that from the itty bitty infants in terms of helping them validate and value their emotions and explore and really being intentional about seeing what it is that they want to know, like and developing their confidence is at core. So I'm so proud of the program that we've created and continue to be working on.
Lily:
Yeah, that's so interesting to me. I mean, I taught kindergarten for many years and you know, have had my own children go through early childhood experiences, but I've never really worked in early childhood myself. So it's so interesting thinking about what a gift that is for little tiny humans, to have this from the very beginning and have really intentional grounding and well being and what it looks like developmentally from a baby to toddler to a preschooler. So can you talk a little bit about how that changes from a baby thinking about how we can do this? And then as they get older, through their experience with you?
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
Yeah, absolutely. So you know, there's so much research about the importance of attachment, the importance of those early months. And so being highly responsive and attuned to babies and seeing how much personality they have really from them when they come into me at, you know, six weeks, but you know, from birth, how much personality they have, how connected they can be and how deeply they feel. So validating those emotions.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
And you know, one of the things that you hear in early childhood that we've stopped here, but I heard it a lot when I first came in is when a child is crying saying you're okay And it's a well meaning emotion to reassure a child. But if a child is crying, they're telling you that they're not okay.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
And so validating is saying, I'm with you, let's figure out how to help you be okay. And it's a subtle shift. But it means so much, it's validating that you don't have to be happy all the time, you can be angry, you could be sad, you could be scared. And all of that helps you be a person who's confident in what your own emotions are telling you, and confident in communicating those.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
So those are the infants, it's giving them room to move and explore giving them lots to touch and feel. And you know, art projects and science discovery from there of just touching and moving and shifting. And then into the toddlers much more intentional, giving them materials to play with them to explore it, and the arts and sciences are still so much part of what we do, all used very heavily language rich, but again, helping them use words to talk about what they like, what they don't like, what they feel without judgment.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
So often, kids want to please, and parents and teachers more than anything, and it's well intentioned, want their kids to be happy. So their kids learn my teacher, my parent wants me to be happy. So I'm going to be happy, even if they're not. So helping create an environment where they can be. And where adults don't freak out or stress out if a child cries or if a child gets angry, you know, really showing them to navigate that.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
Up until the preschool where we have real immersive, amazing learning that you could see at much higher level. So right now my preschoolers are really intrigued with the human body. So you know, we have all kinds of visuals and skeletons and you know, pull apart the body and what's inside the body. And how does the body work and learning the body parts playfully, and all, you know, following their interests before that they were really into robots. So we brought in the robotics and they were building robots.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
And, you know, the kinds of projects that you see in project based learning schools at the elementary age, just tweaked for the younger ones. And it's amazing, expansive learning, with still always a heavy focus on relationships between the kids with the teachers, but really relationship rich and helping them be connected to others as something that's so core, again, to our core, which is well being
Lily:
So beautiful. And I love that through line of well being. I mean, it really from all the things you're talking about connects. And that's what I think we all want for all humans, is a sense of well being in all the ways and so starting that very intentionally from the beginning is so powerful.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
It's really been powerful in it. And it struck me through the pandemic, because, you know, I had really been focused on in early childhood, Reggio inspired learning, which developed you know, in the years in Italy in the days following World War Two, as a response to preparing kids to stand strong against injustice and equity oppression, area that had been hit hard during World War Two. And that remains powerful.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
And looking at that moment of this school being formed in crisis and this movement being formed in crisis, the crisis that was the European crisis or world crisis of World War Two, going through a pandemic, and a different kinds of crisis, motivated me inspired me to think about, well, if what people following World War Two felt was needed was to be able to stand strong against fascism. What do we need today 2020 2021 2022, where we're still fighting fascism, but the fights, we fight continue, we still stand. So important.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
We're also fighting climate change, we're also fighting mental illness and trauma. And that's so close to where we are. So how do early childhood educators stand as warriors for the causes that matter most by building that foundation from the very start. And that's been the history of great early childhood education. And we continue and expand and build on it today, looking at the challenges that we face today.
Lily:
Yes, so, so important. And I think thinking about building capacity and people too, that if we want to raise these changemakers, who can speak out against injustice and all the things we want to change, we also need to have folks who are taking care of themselves. And so I see that like from the teacher side, from the activist side, like all of these things of people who want to make change and want to support others to make change. It starts with you, too. So giving kids those skills of just, hey, I need to be a well rounded human being to be able to make my biggest difference and live to my purpose.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
Absolutely. I had never quite been able to articulate what I believe in that way. And in the past year, really two years, it's become so evident that to be powerful in whatever way you choose to be powerful, you have to be able to care for yourself, and then you can make the impact beyond yourself.
Lily:
Yes, beautiful. Well, tell me a little bit about your journey of just starting your own school. What was that like for you personally? What have you learned or struggled with?
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
Absolutely. So it was a really freeing moment to realize that I could still be an educator, still be an educational leader, on my own terms. And so being a principal was amazing for me until it wasn't. And you know, we we hear from principals today a lot about how little control sometimes principals actually have you think they're in charge. But there are so many pressures and demands, and things that you're told, you're required to do, when you may not really believe that that's the right thing to do. Teachers feel that principals feel it too.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
So realizing that there was a way to be able to replace my salary as a principal, and still be an educational leader, and create the kind of school that I believe in, was really mind blowing. And it is achievable. And I also learned through this process, because coming from the nonprofit world, to anything that use the terms for profit, we thought was inherently greedy.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
But realizing that it's just an operational structure, nonprofit organizations pay the people who work there, for profit organizations pay the people who work there, nobody enters this because well, very few people enter this because they want to be multimillionaires, right. That's not what we're going for.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
We're going for financial freedom and security while doing what we love most of us in this field. And that's achievable. And so whether you call yourself as a as a structure, a nonprofit, or you call yourself as a structure, a for profit, you can do that. And for me being for profit mattered, because I don't need a board. It's my program. And it's my vision. And I can run it in the way that I believe in my heart, my school can be and should be, and it gives so much creative freedom.
Lily:
I love that I totally resonate with that, too, I think as teachers and yes, principals, and as anybody really involved in a bigger school system, we don't have as much say, and there is a lot of bureaucracy and things we have to go through. And I just remember my biggest struggle was always that I wanted to teach in a way that I knew would work for my students, but felt that I couldn't, and I couldn't fully do what I knew they needed. So being able to cut through that.
Lily:
And I love how you were intentional of being like I want it to be my vision and not have to be always proving or explaining your vision to other people to get approval to implement your vision just to be able to do it. And yeah, I think that distinction, too, is interesting of the for profit versus nonprofit, that also both can be positive or dysfunctional, right? Like it's, it's not by virtue of being for a profit or nonprofit, it's how the actual organization is structured and run.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
It really is a financial model. That's all it is. But you can be for purpose, whether you're for profit or nonprofit.
Lily:
Yes, I love that distinction. And I know some of your work now is also helping other people who want to start their own similar ventures. Can you talk about that?
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
Yes. So when I started this school, and saw how possible it is, how achievable it is, and how much more fulfilled I am doing it, I really wanted to share this with others. And I do have a doctorate in education. And I do also teach at Northeastern, I'm an adjunct faculty member. So I teach educational leadership. I teach curriculum design, and I advise doctoral students. So I've taught adults, I've done a lot of professional development.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
And so I wanted to start a program to be able to help educators create their own purpose driven schools or businesses, and most of the folks I work with now, early childhood, or the Early Childhood people are they're so amazing, and they don't always realize how amazing they are. So feel like I just want to shout it out all the time.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
I've worked with, you know, from infants to doctoral students and great early childhood education is bar none the best education. So feel like these are people with so much to give, who often just haven't thought that it's possible for them to do something with a broader impact. But I've worked K to five, I've worked K to eight. And I love all of it.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
So the folks that I'm working with are creating schools or training programs that are intentionally purpose driven. Some of them are for profit. Some of them are nonprofit. But they're they're creating nature schools, they're creating schools focused on social justice, on leadership, on well being.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
And training other educators as well, looking at social impact programs, from working with families in high needs areas with kids from birth to five, you know, really honing in and looking at intergenerational trauma at this very pivotal moment, to try to help a whole family move on to a healthier trajectory. So I am blessed to work with some visionary, heart centered educators who are absolutely incredible, and had been building that program out along with Discovery Village.
Lily:
Wonderful, yes, I love how you're using what you've learned to really empower others too and I think teachers, especially Yes, I agree early childhood teachers, and home teachers, you know, I feel that's a core part of what I do too is really getting teachers to see that they have all these applicable skills.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
Number one being that we're experts in learning, so we can really figure anything out that we want to learn, but the wide variety of experiences and skills that we have, and really empowering them to be the ones that yes, great early childhood educators should be the ones running these innovative purpose driven schools. Absolutely. So I love that you're not only running your own, but sharing what you've learned there.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
You know, for so many years in K to eight education, or pre K to eighth grade education, I was trying to pull the play and project based immersion curriculum learning up through the grades, and there are so many obstacles to doing that, we were able to do a lot, but not as much as I do believe is possible. So I do feel that early childhood has so much to teach, you know, all the way up through graduate school about how learning happens in a really human centered way.
Lily:
Yes, absolutely. I know, it's interesting to hear about, it's like babies, right, we have to respond to them, right people are they're loud, they're cry, we're gonna respond to them. And that as people get quieter, and as kids get quieter, or maybe they learn those skills, we're less immediately responsive. And so I think that's interesting to thinking about how we can kind of thread that.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
Well, it's a challenge to the school system. There was a study done by NASA, after a series of disasters with the Apollo program, to try to figure out who were going to be the engineers who could think most adaptively on their feet when crises happened, as crises were happening. And so they created this test, genius test, which was really a test of divergent thinking, to figure out how you could creatively figure something out.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
And what they found was a very tiny percentage of adults had the divergent thinking skills. But almost 100% 98% of five year olds did. The five year olds were doing better on this divergent thinking test. And they tested people at age five at I think age seven at age 12, as adults, and it decreased step by step over the years.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
And what they determined was that the environment, schools and homes, were teaching us to not be creative. And so what if we could just sustain that creative? Not only we could grow it right? More? There's no reason people can't get more creative as they get older. They need the experiences to be able to do that.
Lily:
Yes, so powerful. Absolutely. And I think that is something that I have seen both being a teacher and being in, you know, the school system. And also as a parent, you know, one of my biggest concerns when my kids started schools, was losing that innate part of them, you know, where so much of their lives as a preschooler were climbing trees and coming up with crazy ideas and being imaginative and just being themselves. And so being able to continue that on and seeing it as something that we want to foster not shut down is so important.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
Which you know, is also a lot of what early childhood can teach to the grades and a fight worth fighting all the way through as educators both within the educational system and an outside of the educational system, to keep thinking about what really serves kids what really serves humans as experiences to support our growth and our learning and our development.
Lily:
Absolutely. Yes, so powerful. So I know you also in addition to all this amazing work are a published author. So can you tell us about your books?
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
Absolutely. So I have two books. The first is The Coach Approach To School Leadership: Leading Teachers To Higher Levels of Effectiveness. And that is how a school leaders can use the techniques that instructional coaches use to support teacher growth. And professional learning was something that I worked hard on when I was a principal in terms of having professional learning being very customized and focused on teacher self chosen goals and directions in which they wanted to move. So that was one book.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
And then the second book was just recently published Havens of Hope: Ideas For Redesigning Education From the COVID 19 Pandemic. And that was documentation of what we as a field, were going through through the pandemic, as we were going through it. It was written in real time. It's about my program, and 24 other programs, early childhood and K to 12, public and independent, some alternative community programs, but how programs not only navigated through the required changes that were happening to us, but got better through it.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
And it was important to me, you know, from the very beginning, I felt, we're not going to remember this intensity, once it's over, we're not going to really be able to recapture what it is that we're experiencing. And so I wanted to document it while it was happening.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
What also struck me is, you know, education, for the longest time has been accused of being really slow to change, and being in a fast changing world and being so slow to change. And people say that, but I don't think it's warranted anymore. We changed overnight. Within days, we had moved learning online, we had moved learning outside early childhood programs became essential.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
And we wrote our COVID health and safety protocol three months before New York State did. So we were changing and figuring things out in days, not years, not decades. And so what what also struck me as a lesson is that if we did that, because we had to, we can do it again, because we choose to.
Lily:
Yes, so important to realize and yeah, to reflect on. And I love that too try to capture this moment in time that we hope, you know, have gone through. And it's hard to just take a moment to pause and reflect on what we've learned and what we can carry through.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
Right.
Lily:
Wonderful. Well, last question is that knowing that you've done all these amazing things and thinking about other educators who might be out there feeling like they have something else to give to the world of education and maybe want to start their own business or a new venture. What advice would you give them?
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
Open your mind to the possible. Just look around, find out, you know, we spoke about NASA divergent thinking, do an exercise in divergent thinking like don't worry how crazy it sounds, come up with as many possibilities as you can think in and then kind of hone in and highlight the ones that you would actually want to do. Do the research on how to do them. Find the support and trust that it's possible. It's achievable.
Lily:
Yes, I love that. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for sharing with us and sharing all about your journey. And I'm so impressed and inspired by all of your amazing work. Can you share where folks can find out more about you?
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
Absolutely. So my website, well, you can see Discovery Village, but the website for the training educators is Revabilities.com. Revabilities is a word that I made up as a framework to describe what we went through through the pandemic. There's free resources, there's paid resources, there's all kinds of things that you can see and learn more about the work. Across social media, pretty much every platform, I'm @shiraleibowitz so you can find me or you can email me at shira@revabilities.com.
Lily:
Wonderful. We'll put all this in the show notes too. Thank you again Shira, it was so nice spending this time with you.
Dr. Shira Leibowitz:
So great to speak to you.