A Neighborhood for Learning

I didn’t set out to have Mister Rogers be such a backbone of so many of my walks, but that was shortsighted of me. Of course these walks were invoking our loving neighbor who laced up his tennis shoes and donned his cardigan. It was after all a series of walks through my extended neighborhood – the people in my life who had taught me something… who are still teaching me something. It became a chance to give back to some of those people in the spirit of Mister Rogers, who understood that children – and adults – flourish when they feel genuinely seen and heard.

Jeff: When I first moved to Pittsburgh in 1994 as a grad student at Carnegie Mellon, he was, of course, still alive, and he was still making his show. He retired, I think, in about 2000, maybe 2001. I was by then working at Shady Side Academy, and I was invited by a student to his graduation party. His parents were both producers at WQED, the station that made Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. And in fact, his mother, like many of the people featured on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, was just someone who worked there, and was asked, “Will you play a part?” So she was the important, but little seen, Mrs. McFeely, So I go to this graduation party and I see Fred Rogers standing there. 

Liz: In a cardigan? 

Jeff: No, in a sport coat. 

I had grown up worshiping that show and I was feeling heart palpitations. Like, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, He’s here.” I thought, I’m not going to be that guy. I’m not going to go up to him. I’m not going to say, I love you so much. I’m going to give him his space. And then the boy’s mother, Mrs. McFeely, brought him over and said, “Fred, I need to introduce you to Jeff Suzik. He’s Michael’s favorite teacher.” And he said, “Isn’t that nice?” And then she, with intent, moved away. And I got to have a 20 – 25 minute conversation with him by myself.

A dream come true. A hero in his presence. A moment preserved not just in his memory but in the toys that grace his bookshelves in the office of Dr. Jeff Suzik, Director of Schools for the Cranbrook Educational Community.

Liz: What do you remember?

Jeff: That he was exactly the person who we saw on TV. He was the most authentically that. It wasn’t an act. He wasn’t talking down to children or being saccharine or anything else. That’s who he was. And it was just a wonderful, wide-ranging conversation about children and their needs, what they deserve from us, what developmentally they should expect, how to partner with parents. 

And then I said, just as part of the conversation, “So are you enjoying retirement?” Remember, this was like 2001, so a long time ago. And he  said, “Oh, yes, I am. But I would really not categorize myself, Jeff, as being retired. So I’m working on a lot of projects.” I wouldn’t have known this, but he was then on the cusp of early development of Daniel Tiger. And he said, “The most recent thing I’ve done is I just launched my website. And it’s www.misterrogers.org. And I do hope that you’ll visit me in this new neighborhood.” 

Liz: Oh, I love that. 

Jeff: And then I learned later when I returned to Pittsburgh to lead Falk, that Falk had been the school that he had chosen for his son.

Falk Laboratory School. The place that had drawn Jeff back to Pittsburgh to be its Director in 2014. How I wish we had a recording of that dialogue of two men who honor childhood as a distinct stage of life…and who share a vision for a better future created by the very children in whom they were investing their lives’ work: Mister Rogers through educational television and Dr. Suzik through independent education in some atypical settings. You see, Cranbrook comprises schools, plural, and an art museum, an institute of science and a graduate art academy all sharing resources on a 319 acre campus. Indeed, in his website neighborhood, Jeff offers visitors “an enthusiastic welcome to Cranbrook Schools, where we believe that a childhood and adolescence filled with wonder, discovery, and curiosity is the greatest and most enduring gift a person can receive in their lifetime.” Mister Rogers would like that.

Liz: What do you think Mister Rogers would make of Cranbrook?

Jeff: I think that he would…That’s a great question. I think that he would recognize the elementary school’s inherently child-centered way of educating, I think he would appreciate its long-standing, fundamental and foundational commitment to “specials” classes (art, music, movement, technology, drama – things like that) and to children being given a lot of hands-on opportunities to learn.  Because while the upper levels of Cranbrook are pretty traditional pedagogically, and that’s something I’m eager and committed to working on, the elementary school has always been more expansive and innovative in its practices.

Of course many, many elementary schools are like this, because they can be. But the elementary here was headed from its beginning, and then for 39 years, by a woman who was plucked out of the lab school culture of Greater Chicago in 1922. Her mark on this place is indelible. And so I think he would like all of that. And I think he would like the other major thing that I like here, which is the fact that this whole campus and the resources here, the other institutions that we are a part of, create this opportunity for learning for children and partnership that is just unparalleled. The potential here has been tapped in some ways, and in other ways, it hasn’t. And that was really why I came.

Jeff: The closest comparative models, I think, are schools that are part of universities like Falk. And so that prepared me well for being here.

Picture an independent school that operates almost like a living laboratory for education – it’s where theory meets practice in the most dynamic way possible – that is a university-affiliated lab school. I often compare it to a teaching hospital – but for education – where future teachers learn their craft in a real classroom setting with actual students, not just theoretical scenarios, and experiment with new educational materials, curriculum designs and pedagogical methods. In working with local colleges and universities, Wheeling Country Day School had been an informal lab. It allows me to understand what draws Jeff to such profound potential. There’s this incredible multiplier effect happening on your campus. Every innovative technique you develop, every breakthrough moment, every creative way you make learning come alive – it doesn’t just impact the children in your classrooms, it ripples out in ways you will never fully appreciate through the college students and guests that grace your campus as well.  

Jeff: I came to Cranbrook because I could see so many tremendous, open opportunities for innovation and growth. I had so loved being at the lab school, and I loved the opportunity there to collaborate with other units of the University. So we’d be working on NSF grants with the School of Engineering that involved showing a commitment to translating the research into activities for the K-12 space. So we would get written into those and then they would do it. And those were fabulous. Or just working with School of Ed colleagues on new pedagogies and practices.

Liz: For K-12 and Higher Ed to consider because you’re where the rubber hits the road. 

Jeff: Correct.

Cranbrook is different, wonderfully so. While there is no university affiliation, Cranbrook boasts a history museum, a planetarium, an observatory, a contemporary art museum, architecturally significant historic homes, outdoor sculptures and one of the oldest Japanese gardens in the US, with fountains, lakes, trails, and more. Indeed, it is an

Jeff: …amalgam of school spaces and nonschool spaces, but all of them are educative spaces, and all of them are, with some form of intent, built to elicit reaction.

This might be the only place in the world that I would choose to work, except for Falk. And so when approached about it as a possibility, even though I wasn’t looking for a job, I explored it, and there were aspects of it that were just so enticing. And I thought, the things I am engaging in here at the University of Pittsburgh could be done on steroids here, and with more ready partners in some ways, or rather with some more obvious partners, like an art museum, an institute of science that has a planetarium, and natural history specimens and a T-Rex and whatever else not.

What if the walls of a classroom could expand to embrace a larger community? This is the vision we had at  Wheeling Country Day School which Jim Denova captured when he described it as “a constellation of learning spaces.” No longer confined to its original two-acre campus in Wheeling’s Woodsdale neighborhood, the school bloomed across the city—taking root on the branch campus of West Virginia Northern Community College and flourishing within the green spaces of a municipal park managed by the Wheeling Park Commission.

This expansion wasn’t about real estate; it was about reimagining where authentic learning happens. The seeds of this thinking were planted years earlier during a tour of the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh with its Executive Director, Jane Werner. As a line of preschoolers wandered past us, I remarked on what seemed like a perfectly timed field trip. Jane’s response stopped me in my tracks: “They go to school here.” What?!? How had I not given my daughters such a rare opportunity? An idea was born. 

Place influences culture. Context matters. Place-based learning doesn’t just expose children to new people and ideas—it dissolves the artificial boundaries between school and life, transforming every corner of a community into a potential classroom. When learning spills into museums, parks, colleges, and downtown spaces, students discover that education isn’t something that happens in isolation, but something they actively participate in as members of a learning community. Their larger neighborhood becomes their school. Just as Mister Rogers suggested.

Cranbrook has all of this available within the 319 acres that it calls home, but such access sometimes becomes a logistical dilemma.

Liz: The students actually shuttle between the campuses?

Jeff: They do, yeah, the Upper Schoolers, that is. There’s 15 minutes of passing time between their classes, which is a lot. It cuts into the day a lot. So we’re looking at the daily schedule now to create longer blocks of instruction, which I would like anyway, but it will also minimize those disruptions.

Liz: Isn’t it nice when logistics are the Trojan horse to get something programmatic?

Jeff: That’s right.  It can prove challenging to get people to think critically and differently about the “boring” logistics when they are so deeply devoted, oftentimes quite rightly, to the perceived way that things have “always” been done. And always done well. This has been true, in some way or another, everywhere I’ve been, at every school where I’ve worked.

Liz: Is that a fear of change?

Jeff: Yes, I think it is. We humans seem, more often than not, to prefer continuity over change. It’s safe and it’s comforting. All of us love the rituals and the traditions that make our lives meaningful. But tradition can sometimes be a tricky concept to navigate. I have found for some it can mean “back off.” This is a tradition. So please look elsewhere in your quest to evolve things or contemporize them. We all run the risk of declaring rudimentary things, say, like daily schedules, to be traditions. And so for a long time now I’ve been on an educative journey to remind the people with whom I have worked that some things are just not sacred enough to be considered traditions; they’re practices. And practices should be continually interrogated and reinterpreted for contemporary use, while true traditions are to be celebrated and jealously guarded.

Liz: Practice in and of itself is a word that is a journey. 

Jeff: Correct. 

Liz: You’re getting better at something.

Jeff: Yes. And it’s unfinished, right? Because it’s a practice. And so people stare at me quizzically sometimes when I say this. And then they might go right back to like: oh, no, but having lunch at noon is a tradition. No, it’s not. It’s just a practice. But having mid-year exams is a tradition. Again no, it’s just  practice. And step by step we’re getting somewhere with all of that.

The uniqueness of this place, the unicorn nature of it, is a significant part of its incredible charm, but it’s not helpful in every circumstance or situation. We sometimes can’t seem to identify any benchmarks because no one is quite like us. Why would we look to see what other people and places are doing, for instance, with admissions? Or with advancement? We do our own thing. Because there’s clearly no local peer, right?

Liz: Right.

Jeff: Then when people think about it, there’s just no peer anywhere so all the more reason for us  to interrogate our practice.

Liz: Michael Fullen says it takes 5-7 years for a change in education. It’s true.

Jeff: It is.

Liz: Which scares me because so many of our heads are 5-7 year heads. It is very interesting. 

Jeff: So true. And I think that one of the things that’s inevitable in those transitions, well, maybe not inevitable, but often part of them, is when whatever committee, board, group is creating the plan for finding a new head, whatever that happens to be, they end up prioritizing things that are the opposite of the things that the person brought to the table because they’re so focused on finding “fresh.” So if the last person was a very business-minded person, now we need a kid person. And if they were a kid person, now we need somebody with business and admissions and advancement acumen. Really, though, all of us have to be all of it. I think that that’s a tricky transition for institutions. I think sometimes it’s the thing that leads to these unlaunched tenures. 

Liz: In other words, there is a problem of governance in our industry?

Jeff: I suppose there is, yes. And there’s the problem of the rapidity of change and the challenges that schools have faced, I would say since the financial meltdown of 2008, and the reworking that came with it of what people thought about their discretionary income, that the stakes are now so high for so many of our schools. I mean, this is something you learn through accreditation, right? When you go on teams and the school says, well, our hope is that we’re going to increase enrollment next year by 25%. That’s how we’re going to deal with our budget deficit. But hope isn’t a strategy. You can’t hope for something. But I think that boards sometimes do that. When I took on my first headship in Minnesota years ago now, the board in my initial contract tried to write into it that I would have a bonus only if I did X, Y, and Z. And I said, “No. I want you to give me that bonus if I spend five successful years here and you haven’t fired me. Then you should give me the bonus. I don’t know now that I can do these things. I don’t know this market. I don’t even know if they’re rational asks.”

Jeff might be talking about a governance concern, but he’s manifesting a bigger issue about the context necessary to make decisions, especially in the company of strangers. And make no mistake—despite shared mission statements and common purpose, board members and heads often remain strangers to one another in the ways that matter most for decision-making.

Malcolm Gladwell’s exploration in Talking to Strangers reveals just how poorly we actually understand people we don’t know well, even when we think we do. We fall victim to what he calls the “transparency illusion” – the dangerous assumption that we can easily read others’ intentions, motivations, and character. Without asking good questions and being explicit, we assume meaning and intent.  As another walker told me, “I might be thinking of a doberman while you conjure a chihuahua – very different animals although we are both thinking of dogs.”

Gladwell’s concept of “coupling” – how behavior is inextricably linked to context – becomes particularly relevant here. A goal, achievable in another city or even in a different school across the same town, might be impossible based on context. Place matters. Keeping Gladwell’s theories in mind, how are boards and heads who are just getting to know each other best able to navigate decisions?

The industry warns that we don’t want a board of parents or friends—that creates different problems of proximity and blind spots. But if effective governance requires strangers to make complex decisions together about institutions they care deeply about, how do boards and heads create the conditions for understanding each other well enough to disagree productively and decide wisely?

 In my history, a friend becoming board chair 

Liz: …was the best thing that ever happened to Country Day. 

Jeff: Oh, I bet. 

Liz: He was able to call me on things, but he also was able to hold the board back to say, “No, we’re going to let her try this thing.”

Jeff: Well, and look what happened. You tried some pretty impactful and out-of-the-box things….

You sold a progressive, expansive way of thinking about children and school to people who would not normally be predisposed to like it, but in ways that made it meaningful to them, because education should be meaningful to everybody. 

For me, everybody is the key element in that last sentence. I knew an independent school could pilot new theories and incubate fresh ideas, but I wanted it to serve more students directly than just those who walked through our doors.

Take Cranbrook’s HUB (Horizons Upward Bound) program, which serves the greater Detroit community. Through a 6-week summer residential component and Saturday academic series, this program prepares students with limited opportunities from the Detroit metropolitan area to succeed in post-secondary education. The program doesn’t just help those students – it enriches the entire school and transforms faculty lives too.

WCDS created something similar with the Edge program. We leveraged technology to transform our on-campus tutoring center into a virtual reading solution for afterschool programs like Boys & Girls Clubs – at no cost to the families served. That program reached far more people than just the children being tutored directly.

Liz: I was thinking earlier when you were talking about HUB, that that’s your Edge for Boys & Girls Clubs. I really think independent education needs that thing that is for public purpose.

Jeff: 100%. And I think a lot of us have thought that for a long time because it was something that I think I remember Pat Bassett popularizing eons ago. But I really think that that’s valuable. 

We agree, it actually helps all of us with trying to change the perception of our schools as just, oh, fancy rich enclaves. When that’s often simply not what they are.

Jeff: Because one of the things that drew me to Cranbrook along with the uniqueness of the universe and the collaborating units, was that Cranbrook as a whole, not just the schools, is a major cultural force – or can be – in this region. And as this region reimagines itself, which is really what is happening right now, we should be a main partner in that. We should be helping the greater region to achieve that goal because we can be a place that is a draw for people, that is an example of what life can be like if you relocate to Greater Detroit. Not just if your kids go to school here, but all these things that you can do here. This is a publicly-facing place. 

I love this idea of a school as a leader in a community. In my mind, the heart of a neighborhood is the education of its children—the very future of each community. This isn’t just educational rhetoric; it’s the lived philosophy that Fred Rogers understood intuitively and shared freely.

When Mister Rogers invited us into his neighborhood each day, he wasn’t just creating children’s television—he was modeling what happens when a community organizes itself around the care and development of its youngest members. His neighborhood worked because everyone had a role in nurturing children: King Friday, Mr. and Mrs. McFeely, Lady Aberlin, and many more. The neighborhood thrived because children’s growth and learning weren’t relegated to one building or one set of adults, but was a shared responsibility that connected everyone.

Schools have the unique opportunity—perhaps the obligation—to be the Mister Rogers of their communities, the convening force that reminds neighborhoods of the purpose of their existence. When a school sees itself as community leader rather than community service provider, it transforms from an institution where children must attend into a living demonstration of how learning happens everywhere, all the time.

Our schools are perhaps the only institutions with both the reach and the missions to ask the essential Mister Rogers question of their neighborhoods: How can we love these children well together? 

If we could get that sorted out, so much else would fall away. I got the sense as I walked the Cranbrook campus that Jeff Suzik was in the right place, asking the right questions to find such an answer.

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