Responding to Crisis with Creativity and Character

A message from Parchment: It’s been a challenging time for everyone, especially for learners and educators. So, there’s never been a better time to talk about moving forward in a positive way. That’s why we created a 3-part blog post series about hope and innovation. (You can’t have one without the other.) See the links to the related posts below.

Responding to Crisis with Creativity and Character

Reflecting on the year that has been and looking across the horizon at the year to come, the challenges facing student success have been plentiful and hope is sometimes fleeting. As an education activist, Wintley Phipps, offers the direction needed to navigate those challenges and describes our role in ensuring ambition to students. 

According to Phipps (founder, resident, and CEO of The U.S. Dream Academy and 2021’s AACRAO closing plenary speaker), his passion is to empower and equip people to live out their full potential. “All here have spent our lives helping young people build brighter futures,” he said. “This awesome responsibility requires that we become effective leaders as we provide guidance to the precious lives we serve.”

Applying Character to Crisis

Phipps’ personal definition of leadership: responding with effective inspirational creative solutions to the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of people is. “Every crisis or challenging situation and circumstance provides the opportunity to demonstrate leadership and character,” he explained. “We must respond to a crisis not with criticism but with creativity, guiding, equipping, uniting, and supporting people.”

His dream is to use technology to provide every disadvantaged child in America access to excellence in corrective instruction, using grades for diagnosis, not ranking purposes. “Equal access means equal preparation means equal opportunity,” said Phipps. “Vision is that you can look farther than you can see.”

7 Dimensions of Leadership

Phipps believes there are 7 dimensions leaders demonstrate:

• Compassion for self and others
• Courage to see as a certainty what you can’t improve imperially
• Conviction to believe yourself
• Creativity because imagination is more important than knowledge
• Competence comes from experience and reflected in organization
• Character is essential for leadership
• Love what you do and the people you serve

“You have in your hands the power to shape the future, and the greatest source of joy and adventure your life is watching others live out the future and destiny they have envisioned for themselves,” Ridley concluded. “You never know whose life you will touch as you nurture dreams and provide leadership.

What’s Next?

• Read the related blog post: “The Freedom to Innovate” with Matt Ridley, author of How Innovation Works.
• Read the related blog post: “The Road to Innovation: 5 Steps to Empower Your Learners with Credentials” 

Contact Parchment to start the conversation about innovating YOUR credentials.

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