 Welcome to ICF Insights. I'm Tony Marchese. Well, today we're going to continue our leadership legacy series, and with me I have Mr. Gene Wilhoit, who has been a significant contributor to education, both in the Appalachia region, but also in the nation. Gene, I'm really glad you're here today. It's my pleasure. It's good to be here. I've thoroughly enjoyed our conversation last night at dinner, and our little time slot we have today isn't going to do justice to what I'd like to cover, but I really want to focus today on your professional journey. This series that we do on our program happens, doesn't happen a whole lot, but every now and then there'll be an individual that will identify that really has made a difference, has made a significant contribution, either at the local level, the regional level, or even at the national level, and I think it's important to hear their story and those influences, those turning points, to hear about mentors, maybe a book that you read along the way that really shifted the way that you perceive education or leadership. So that's what I'd like to do today, and for those that might be watching today that aren't familiar with your background, let's kind of trace your journey a little bit in terms of some of the roles that you've served in education. My whole professional career has been in education. I still consider myself a teacher. That's where I began in the classroom at the middle school and high school level, stayed there for a short period of time, had some interventions in my life that I had not planned, that led me down some pathways and opportunities that sort of built my career over time, but I was a curriculum director in Indiana, a teacher in Indiana, and then after some graduate work, I moved into positions that are supportive of education. So on one hand, you lose that direct connection, the excitement that you get with youngsters, but on the other, the positive side of that is you can influence policy direct. So most of my career has been in the policy arena, either at the local district level. I served a short time here in Kanawa County, but in West Virginia and in Indiana and in Ohio are the three positions prior to moving into work at the State Department level. I have been in Indiana Department of Education. I was at the U.S. Department of Education for a short period of time. I ran two national organizations, National Association of State Boards of Education, before going to two commissioner positions, Arkansas first and then to Kentucky and then back to the national level at the Council of Chief State School Officers. So I've been an educator. I still consider myself that, even though I'm in the supportive role at the local, state and national levels. And then you retired and then you became... Yeah, in my retirement, we set up a center at the University of Kentucky at the Center for Innovation Education. We were working on some issues that sort of been in back of my mind, but because I was practicing at a local pace for many years, didn't have the time to reflect on, to write about and to work with others around. So it's exciting to be in that position now. I know one thing that's important to you is having that influence on student learning. Many people understand as a teacher how that might work. How did you maintain that in those higher level positions? I don't think I had a choice intellectually. I began as a teacher and as I look back on those years, I was in a way discontented in many ways. I was always trying a new way to get to children, to reach them. And some of my most memorable experiences with students were with those that were sort of disenfranchised and on the sidelines, and I for some reason was able to reach them or not able to reach them. And that troubled me deeply. So that struggle drew me into this study of curriculum, instruction, and I held on to that as a director of curriculum, but as I got into administration, I noticed that there was often an absence of this conversation around what is teaching and learning, what are the needs of students, how can we better inform the teaching and learning process, how can we build skills among teachers to help them, because after all, all the policies in the world mean to demean those, but none of those policies are going to have direct impact unless our students are engaged in learning in really exciting ways, and our teachers have the competencies to reach those students and have the support systems around them to make instruction a positive force in the lives of children. And throughout my career, we've had this sort of transition in society. That is, we are more and more experiencing children in poverty, children coming to school with major issues that teachers have to face. So it's even more important now that without some of those supports that existed in society prior to recent years, that the teachers have the skill base and the support structures around them. And when I got even to the national level, it was interesting that people began to gravitate to me because I was interested in these things and they had not had those kinds of conversations and I think that was an asset to my ability to influence others. Many people in education either at the teacher level, a principal level, district level, state superintendent level view you as a mentor and that didn't just happen, you know. Yeah, I think people consider folks mentors when they can develop a trust of those people and when you treat them with respect and you approach any interaction with them with that kind of deep respect for the job they're doing and with a desire to be helpful rather than dictatorial, sure, in terms of policies and there's too much, I think in public education today, there's too much top-down kind of guidance that folks are giving. I think they do it in good faith, but we're really teaching or treating teachers as consumers. Somebody else's ideas are long and we say this is the next program that's going to be helpful to you or this is the next kind of theory of work that we want you to implement and they don't have, in many cases, the kind of input into that those programming directions that need to be there and so sort of approaching folks with this idea that you are important. In fact, you know a lot more about teaching and learning than the folks who are setting policy in many cases. How do we build a relationship where we're getting information out of you and teachers are treated as producers of knowledge as opposed to consumers of other folks' idea and I've always tried to keep that in mind that in the field right now in an environment where people are very critical of our educators that I find people who are just masters at figuring this out and finding solutions to it. I think education generally has not taken advantage of those folks. We don't have a system that rewards those outstanding teachers. We don't put them in positions often enough to influence other teachers and administrators and we don't build support structures around them so that we can share knowledge. I think one of the biggest issues in education today is that we don't learn from our successes and we don't learn from our failures in a way that allows the enterprise to grow so I think it's essential that we treat people with that respect and trust and build systems around them that would build success. I've tried to do that throughout my relationship with them. One of the things I'm really interested in is your journey. Some of the turning points that you've dealt with because as I said you didn't automatically become this individual that's perceived as a mentor and sought after for advice. There had to be some things that happened in your life that really helped shape how you think, how you work and so I'd like to talk about some of those origins. I know that we talked last night about your experience in your graduate program and that was in the 60s I believe. I think that there are certain occurrences in life that sort of shape you I was a young teacher just beginning a career and there are two experiences that sort of shaped my early thinking. The first was how we treat a young teacher in those first experiences is so important and I had mentioned to you last night that I had a principal named Robert Mayhen and in an outward appearance was very stern sort of withdrawn from folks. It wasn't the kind of mentor that one would expect that would develop a really strong personal relationship so as a young teacher I was experiencing some frustration with students who had very limited knowledge. I tried some deep engagement policies with them in my classrooms. That was a little bit more engaging and more noisy than other classrooms and there were complaints from the traditional teachers about that. He called me into his office after school one day and said I've got to receive these complaints. I explained all of this to him and in the whole conversation there was no indication of his response to what was he going to do or was I going to have other positive conversations. At the end of that he just said I just have some advice for you. It might be difficult but keep doing what you're doing. This is reaching students. Well for a young teacher to get that kind of response and the reason I raised that is the experiences that I have at the beginning of your career with administrators, with building level principals are so important. Teachers need to know that there's a support base there and that there's somebody watching for them, somebody who's willing to mentor them. The same person then called me into his office a couple of years later and said you're leaving me. It wasn't as if I, Gene Wilhoit, had a choice. He had decided I was going to go to this program. He had pulled out a folder of a Ford Foundation program and 14 individuals were going to be taken into the Indian University program, graduate program for intensive study and that literally changed my life. It took me out of the realm of that sort of in classroom experience and I was exposed to not only high rigorous content acquisition, which you would want in a master's program, but a cohort process of thinking about change, strategy and agencies. We made some mistakes in the program. It was based on some foundations that we later learned could be improved but that experience of intensive interaction with a cohort of folks around strong support system made a tremendous impact on my life and I began to think about the world very differently. It is a system out there. We have components within that system that need to be addressed. It's so important to build high quality curriculum designs for folks to teach against and had some direct experience in writing some textbooks and assisting with that process experiences I wouldn't have had in a traditional way, so that influenced my life directly.