Making Waves is about individually and collectively seizing opportunities big and small to positively influence the trajectories of young lives. Each year, the theme for MSC frames our overall thinking around this powerful event for educators-the focal point that we hope attendees hold in the backs of their minds while they’re learning in sessions, collaborating with new peers, and planning with colleagues. I’ve recently been contemplating this even more since our small but mighty conference team at ICLE identified our theme for the 2022 Model Schools Conference (MSC). But raising young children in the past several years has made me consider even more deeply and urgently how the world we want to exist in gets either built or dismantled in varying degrees through our very words and gestures. Living in the world with other human beings, we’re generally aware that our speech and actions affect one another, the ways in which we give and take energy, and how the cultures within any organization of people can either thrive or wither through these exchanges. But I’m in awe of Julian’s perceptiveness and sensitivity, and ultimately, I want my values and behaviors to inform his own in the best possible ways. In recent years, not only have I become increasingly self-aware of the energy and language I exude, but also how it is absorbed, interpreted, and synthesized into a young person’s morphing reality. If I casually say we’ll do something and then it doesn’t happen, he doesn’t forget, and it invariably comes up in conversation at some later time, like a perfect timestamp of my fallibility, delivered in the direct, unfiltered words of a young kid with a mind like a (selective) steel trap. He’s keenly aware of my posture, level of distractedness, and the speed at which I eat dinner. My 7-year-old son, Julian, reads my facial expressions very well.

Smallest wavemaker