Melinda Bihn, GRD’14

Melinda Bihn, GRD’14, a graduate of Penn GSE’s Mid-Career Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership, has overseen a transition to virtual learning as head of school at the French American International School in San Francisco. She writes, “We developed a remote learning plan, created a set of tools and competencies that every teacher would need, and put short, practical workshops in place to ensure that teachers were prepared. The day before we launched the program, we spent the day in (small) teams, getting ready—and then we were off. We’ve been learning intensively ever since. One of the most challenging aspects of crisis leadership is knowing how to think. We often know what to do, but real leadership lies in framing a crisis and our response to it, for ourselves and for the teams we lead. Penn GSE’s Dr. Peter Kuriloff speaks powerfully about this in his course on leading teams. Leading by framing allows people to make meaning of what is happening to them, to make decisions about how they respond, and to prepare for the future with purpose. The leadership team at French American International School needed a framework for the challenges we were facing, the actions we needed to take, and the planning we needed to do. Framing this work with ‘now, next, and later’ allowed us to categorize and sort the issues facing us, implement our Remote Learning Plan, and establish a communications cycle for our community and a meeting cycle for our faculty. Now, we needed to take our bilingual international school of over 1,000 students, over 800 families, and over 200 educators online. Next, we needed to think about the admissions and advancement events scheduled for the weeks right after closure. And we needed to create space in our leadership and board meetings later—for the implications of this unprecedented situation on our budget, hiring, marketing, and programming next year. While nothing about COVID-19 has been easy, we’ve been helped by having a shared framework for our efforts now, next, and later.”