“You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well, you might find
You get what you need
Ah, yeah … “
~ The Rolling Stones
Last summer, at the suggestion of a Park parent, I read Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Rosenberg puts forth a set of principles and practices to support empathetic, collaborative, and effective communication, allowing people to listen, to hear, and to work together toward solutions that support the needs of all. Pillars of Rosenberg’s work include understanding the difference between “wants” and needs,” engaging with authentic curiosity, and acknowledging the abundance surrounding us.
Since the summer, I’ve been thinking a lot about how “needs,” “wants,” and Park’s own “values” interact. Schools are inherently places where needs, wants, and values can blur together or compete for attention. In many circumstances — particularly those that involve supporting the growth and development of children — even distinguishing between our wants and needs can require purposeful attention and reflection. Needs are universal. Providing an environment where physiological and emotional safety, security, love, a sense of belonging, and sense of self is an absolute expectation. Meeting individual needs allows for each child to grow and learn steadily and in meaningful ways.
Wants are aspirational. They are tied to our sense of who or what we want to be or what we hope our children will be today or become tomorrow. Caregivers and teachers alike have wants for their children: they see the incredible potential and seek to tap into it.
As Head of School for a community of 556 students, 759 parents/guardians, and 160 faculty and staff, my attention first goes to meeting the universal needs of the community. Sometimes, balancing the needs of the community with individual wants has felt like it has required a challenging trade-off: who doesn’t want to be aspirational when it comes to nurturing and developing learners?
This is why I have continued to put a lot of attention toward emphasizing the definitions of our core values of academic excellence, diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, and social emotional learning. The values are the fulcrum point balancing the universal and fundamental needs of all of our learners with the aspirational wants. The values also provide a shared starting point for communication, allowing us to identify quickly and collaboratively when a need is not being met.
In communicating these values — both formally and informally, individually and community-wide – we endeavor to build understanding of our vision and values and the needs they support among Park families, so that families can know that meeting the needs of our community is critical to our mission. We know, also, that sometimes, needs can be expressed as “wants” – you want your child to be safe, known, challenged, and supported, but actually, these are what we define as “needs.” You need these things for your child, and that’s what we work to provide. We very much want families to come to us with a clear articulation of their needs and to partner with you in achieving them.
We also ask families to be mindful in understanding the difference between “needs” and “wants.” Consider, for example, in the lower division, the desire to request a particular teacher for a child’s placement in their next grade, a “want” often expressed in the form of a “need”: “My child NEEDS to have Teacher X.” Families may come to want a certain teacher based on a family’s familiarity with someone, or opinions shared by other families. In the upper division, accelerated placement is another point where “wants” are sometimes expressed as “needs”: “My child NEEDS to be in accelerated math.” Families may want accelerated placement because it is assumed to drive better secondary school outcomes.
The information feeding those wants, however, may have little to do with what a child needs, nor a complete understanding of the alternatives. In deciding placements, we listen to families talking about their child’s needs and consider the experience of current teachers who understand each child’s learning style and progress, with the goal of defining placement that supports each child’s essential needs and delivers for that child Park’s mission and values.
Rosenberg underscores the importance of mindful communication – an effort that requires each of us to listen, hear, and work together. The examples above are just two ways in which our wants, shaped by our devotion to our children, come to feel like needs. There are many more, large and small. By listening and leaning in with curiosity, we can center our focus on what children truly need, and trust the process that will support those needs.
At Park, in our partnership with families, we seek to build understanding of the human needs of this community, in alignment with our values. We seek to know, understand, and respect each other’s needs. And we hope to serve our families and our students well as we dedicate ourselves to that effort.
