Mindsets

We believe a school is only as good as the mindset of the people who run it — and the mindset that most powerfully determines student outcomes is one that genuinely sees every learner.

The Arbinger Institute’s research on inward and outward mindsets identifies a distinction that is simple to describe and surprisingly rare to find in practice. When you are focused inward, others become objects to you — vehicles to use, obstacles to blame, or irrelevancies to ignore. You see people in terms of how they affect your goals, not as people with their own needs and objectives. When you are outward, others matter like you matter. You see them as people — with their own needs, objectives, and challenges. You adjust your efforts to be more helpful and measure your impact on their success (Arbinger Institute, 2016). In most educational settings, the structures are built around objectives, timelines, and compliance — and without deliberate effort to counter it, an inward orientation becomes the default. Teachers focus on covering content. Administrators focus on metrics. Students are moved through a system that was designed around the needs of the institution rather than the human beings inside it. The result, as the Arbinger research describes, is that people — including children — are treated as objects, even by people who care deeply about them and would be disturbed to hear it described that way.

An outward mindset changes the fundamental question that drives every decision. Instead of asking “Did I deliver the lesson?” it asks “Did this learner receive what they needed?” Instead of asking “Did the student complete the assignment?” it asks “Did the student understand what was expected, have the resources to succeed, and encounter instruction that was matched to where they actually are?” This shift from outputs to impact is not a soft idea. In Finland, an ethos of shared leadership has led to a high level of ownership among educators, fostering a culture of collective accountability for student learning outcomes — with teachers given the autonomy to adapt their teaching methods, assess student progress, and design interventions tailored to individual student needs (Nadeem, 2024). The research on distributed leadership in schools consistently finds that when responsibility for student success is genuinely shared — when everyone sees themselves as accountable for the outcomes — the culture shifts in ways that no policy or incentive structure can manufacture.

Extreme Ownership, as articulated by former U.S. Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, takes this accountability to its most demanding and most clarifying conclusion. On any team, in any organization, all responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. The leader must own everything in his or her world (Willink & Babin, 2015, p. 30). Applied to education, this principle cuts through a great deal of comfortable ambiguity. When a student does not learn, the question is not what is wrong with the student. The question is whether the educator provided sufficient information, appropriate resources, genuine support, and instruction that was genuinely matched to what the learner needed. When mistakes happen, those mistakes are the leader’s responsibility. Extreme ownership is all about looking at yourself before pointing the finger at others — and when leaders take ownership rather than passing blame, it builds trust and respect with their teams. This is not a punitive framework. It is a liberating one. When educators own the outcome, they also own the ability to change it — and they stop waiting for students to simply try harder or be different than they are.

Willink and Babin also articulate a principle they call decentralized command: the recognition that large organizations cannot operate effectively through top-down control alone, and that junior leaders must be empowered to make decisions on key tasks necessary to accomplish the mission in the most effective and efficient manner possible (Willink & Babin, 2015, p. 183). At Wayfinders, every member of the community is a leader — students included. Students are not passive recipients of decisions made above them. They are members of the team with valuable perspectives, genuine authority over aspects of their learning experience, and a crucial role in the feedback loop that makes the whole community better. Research on distributed leadership in schools confirms what Willink and Babin observed in combat: teacher leadership — and by extension, shared leadership — became less about sharing managerial responsibilities and more about sharing responsibility for making change, opening opportunities for all stakeholders to help redesign systems, engage in problem-solving, and provide growth-oriented feedback (Shen et al., 2020). When students understand the mission, believe in it, and have genuine agency within it, they stop being objects of the educational process and become contributors to it.

None of this works, however, without what Willink and Babin call the most essential ingredient of all: belief. The concept of “no bad teams, only bad leaders” places the leader’s impact at the center of team performance — and the leader’s belief in the team’s capabilities is what makes high standards achievable rather than demoralizing. At Wayfinders, we hold an unwavering belief that every child is capable of genuine academic excellence. Not every child in the same way, on the same timeline, or along the same path. But every child. When that belief is real — not rhetorical — it changes how adults show up, how they design instruction, how they respond when something is not working, and how they see the children in front of them. Research on equitable leadership found that when leaders overcame deficit thinking by changing the culture and climate through distributed leadership, collective responsibility for student learning, and reflective dialogue, teachers worked toward finding a way to ensure success for every child (Leithwood et al., 2021). That is the standard we hold ourselves to — not because it is comfortable, but because the children in our community deserve nothing less than a team of adults who see them, own their outcomes, and believe in what they are capable of.