Claude Steele stepped into his new role as the I. James Quillen Dean for Stanford University School of Education on September 1, 2011. Steele, who served as the twenty-first provost of Columbia University, is a preeminent social psychologist. Prior to assuming the position of chief academic officer at Columbia, he was a member of the Stanford psychology faculty from 1991 to 2009. On The Farm, he held appointments as the Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, chair of the Psychology Department, director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His research focuses on the psychological experience of the individual, and particularly, on the experience of threats to the self and the consequences of those threats. His book, Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do, examines his theory of stereotype threat, which has been the focus of much of his research for the past 20 years. Steele earned his doctorate in psychology from Ohio State University, and has received honorary degrees from the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, Yale University, Princeton University, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Education, American Philosophical Society, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Recently, The Stanford Educator sat down with Dean Steele to talk about his interests and goals as the School’s new dean:

What was your first reaction when you were offered the position of dean?

Claude: It took a little a while for it to seep in, to see how it would align with my interests, commitments, family. The first reaction was “I’m flattered to be thought of.” I loved Stanford even when I was provost of Columbia. I was here for 18 years before Columbia, so I have an identification with the institution. As time went on, the idea gained momentum. Our nation’s challenges in education have long been a central interest and concern of mine. So it’s a thrill for me to return in this capacity. At this point, this job is exactly what I want to do.

The Graduate School of Education is a tremendous school. The opportunity to lead it and to contribute to it is exciting. It’s been well-run, well-led, and well-resourced, relatively speaking. We are seen as a leader in the world, so what we do here can have a broad impact in the world. Few other schools enjoy that position. In education, Stanford is one of them.

That leads to the follow up question: What makes this the right time for a social psychologist to take the reins at a school of education?

C:  I’ll confess a bias in answering that. The importance of the social psychological aspects of our experience in learning and schooling, I believe, is underappreciated. I think it’s often as important, sometimes more important, to learning than strictly cognitive processes. Identity and the effects of social norms shape what kids become interested in learning, and how much they internalize the value of education. A fundamental goal of schooling is to help people understand the personal importance of learning, to become identified with education—in one or another of its forms.

As a social psychologist, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to unravel those processes. Now, I’m excited about the opportunity to see how well they apply to schooling and be part of an effort to get those things better understood by educators. I believe there is untapped potential here. A lot of people think that the frontier in schooling is educational technology, and I agree that great possibilities lie there. But we’re not just hard-drives on sticks. The slightest reflection on one’s own school experience tells you that we are full, social beings, and that learning and commitment to learning often grow out of our experiences with other people, in important personal and social situations.

What makes this a great time to explore new areas in education like this one?

As a society we’ve become frustrated and anxious about education. In answering the question of whether we’re doing a good enough job with it—that is, good enough to sustain our economic competitiveness and the kind of society we aspire to--the media gives us reasons for concern on a daily basis. But on the heels of this anxiety is a greater openness to new ideas in education. It’s an era of anxiety, but it’s also an era of exploration, experimentation, and innovation. All of the critical stakeholders in this era have had to become a degree or two more flexible. Nearly every dimension of schooling is up for reconsideration: pedagogies, models of school governance and financing, use of technology, and so on. The great schools of education, like ours, have the scientific, scholarly, and professional expertise to help lead education forward in this era.

This is why, I believe, it’s a great time to explore new approaches in education—like the one I just mentioned—and why an education school like ours is a great place to do it.

Can you talk about your priorities as dean?

C: My first task is to get to know the School and understand how I can contribute. To that end, I’ve talked to every faculty member and lots of students and staff to understand the community--their feelings, ambitions, needs, and challenges. It’s unquestionably a team with great players on it, so we don’t have a problem of having to build a strong faculty and student body. No education school in the world has a stronger faculty or student body.

By the end of the year, I’d like to take the school through a process of developing a mission and vision statement, strategies of implementation, and some timelines and metrics to help us evaluate how well we’re doing.

Our mission will likely focus on four things. First is maintaining and expanding the academic excellence of the School. We are among the best education schools already, with excellence in scholarship and research, and in preparation of scholars, researchers, and innovators. But it’s always important to continue building “steeples of excellence”--an old Stanford term--around strong programs so that we have maximum impact and remain leaders in the field. When I say “excellence,” I don’t mean excellence among education schools. I mean excellence in an absolute sense. We should aspire, as we always have, to hire real leaders in their area of work.

Second, I think the nation wants and deserves schools of education to contribute solutions to our nation’s major educational challenges. These challenges have become more on our minds as Americans than in decades past. They want us to not just storehouse knowledge, but to find ways that our knowledge can help improve education in general, to help build a school system that delivers quality education to all sectors of society. I would like our education school to play a leadership role in producing knowledge and research that influences school policies and practices. Many of our faculty and students are involved in doing just this; they consult everywhere, from Singapore to Finland to Washington, D.C. I would like to see a more programmatic focus on this kind of activity in the education school as a whole. Maybe even develop training programs, clinics, or incubators that are specifically focused on applying knowledge to schooling problems.

Our partnerships with urban school districts, including San Francisco Unified School District, are very exciting to me. With S.F. Unified, we have a director, Laura Wentworth (PhD ’10), who coordinates between the district and our graduate school. The district gets research focused on the problems that it cares about, and we’re entrained to focus on the most pressing issues that a real urban school district faces. It’s not just research for research sake. Research developed in this way—that is, bringing our research strength to bear on a school district’s major problems—may well improve the performance of an entire school district. We’d like to have that ambition, at any rate.

Third is maintaining and expanding our high-quality programs for preparing teachers and possibly extending that commitment to preparing school leaders. Our impact here won’t be in terms of training large numbers of teachers and leaders, but in doing it well enough to create national models for teacher and leadership preparation. STEP is a leading teacher preparation program that benefits from being part of this rich, academic, intellectual environment. I think we can do the same with school leaders. That would be a wonderful extension of our mission.

The fourth addresses different dimensions of our community. One is building community within the school. One of the things I heard about in the search process was that our larger school community is less than the sum of its parts. We are a school with great programs, great faculty and students, great centers, but we could have a more cohesive community. This is immensely important to me. A strong community can amplify the impact that a school can have, both on the faculty and student members of the school and on the people whose work is affected by it. When you pull together and form an intellectually stimulating environment, the work gets richer, and the impact increases.

I’d also like the School of Education to be a much bigger part of the Stanford community.  A lot of people on campus are interested in education: people in business, law, humanities and sciences, engineering--think on-line learning and learning technologies, for example–and even medicine. And I’d like them to think of the School of Education as the place to go when they need the perspectives, expertise, and collegiality of educationists, people who know about Pre-K through 20! We’re experts in the human technology interface, in understanding achievement gaps, in schooling policy, and so on. I’d like us to be a more visible forum for discussion of national education policy and practice.

As you think about these four priorities for the School, how can alumni and friends help you in this process?

C: They already are of tremendous help in many ways as part of our community. But I hope we’ll become a more salient part of their lives, where they’ll think of us as a resource and help us become a resource to a broader set of people. We are planning more talks and forums on major educational issues. Participation of the alumni and friends of the school in these efforts is critical to their success. Being vigorous members of the School of Education’s network and community is an important way to help. We will be expanding opportunities for this kind of engagement.  Also, as we develop a formal mission and vision, we’ll be looking to our alumni and friends for feedback, a process that will unfold throughout the year.

Last but not least, let’s talk about running because that’s been a big part of your daily life. You run almost every day. Now that you’re several months into your tenure, what kind of similarities do you see between running and running the School of Education?

C: (Laughs). Running has been a lifelong habit. I like that there’s a consistency to running. It anchors your life and your consciousness if you get into the habit—as so many people have discovered. Maybe that’s as important as the physical gains, although those are important too, especially as you get to my age (laughs). It’s a habit, something you don’t think about, like brushing your teeth. It stabilizes you. I try to approach writing like that too—everyday a little, or at least something relevant to writing.

There is some transfer to leading a school. You want to be patient and steady and listen, and have your visions and ideas grow as you learn from the community. Basically, what a dean does is try to be helpful and fashion something that will help people make their best contributions. A steadiness of effort and attention helps. It’s not like it’s an explosive thing that you do and then you can forget about it. You have to keep tending the garden all the time.