The Westridge campus came alive as students, families, and employees gathered during Convocation to celebrate the start of the 2024-2025 school year on August 28. Convocation, held on Herrick Quad, included remarks from ASB President Kayla A. '25 and Ms. Kassar and introductions of new faculty and staff joining our community this fall.

Ms. Kassar discussed Westridge's focus on deep listening—to and from both students and faculty—and how it shows caring, encourages a culture of participation, and affirms our humanity. What follows is a transcript of her remarks.

Convocation Remarks, Andrea L. Kassar, Head of School
August 28, 2024

Hello and welcome everyone! Happy new school year! A special welcome to all of our new students, to new families, to our new 4th graders, and to our seniors! Class of 2025—we are so excited for your senior year! I know that you will be wonderful leaders of our school this year!

I have a question for our Lower School students—did any of you read any good books this summer? Yes? 5th graders, would one of you want to tell me the name of a book you read this summer that you enjoyed? I can’t wait to hear all of these book titles from all of you—and please make sure to tell your friends and teachers too!

Did you know that your teachers and the adults who work at Westridge share good book suggestions with each other all the time too? We do that in June as we are heading off to the summer; and when everyone is back in August, I can’t tell you how many little conversations I overhear between teachers and other adults who work at Westridge about good books. I had a lot of these conversations with colleagues too. And now I have a bunch of good book suggestions that I hope to read this fall.

Now, I have another question for you. Do any of you like having someone read aloud to you? Maybe a parent or a teacher? Do any of you like audiobooks, maybe you listen in the car or just around the house? I always loved to be read to as a child—either by my mother or listening to a record—and I really enjoy reading aloud to my own children too. But I hadn’t really listened to audiobooks that much as an adult—until this summer. For some reason, I decided that I would give audio books—both fiction and non-fiction—a real try. And I really liked them because I could listen while I was walking, unpacking, or cleaning up.

All of this listening to audiobooks made me think a lot about the act of listening in general. About what makes good listening, deep listening. As a student of literature and an English teacher, one of my favorite things to do is to find meaning-within-the-meaning of a key quotation. When you stare at a certain text passage, and you read it again and again for long enough, often it will whisper some new truths to you—some meaningful subtext. I have so many memories of myself in high school and in echoey college libraries doing just that. But when you listen to a book, it’s different. You don’t have the visual quotation in front of you to stare at. So, when you are looking to go beyond plot and understand a deeper meaning, it requires a real listening, a deeper listening. And, in fact, while I was listening to my audiobooks, I sometimes noticed that I was trying to do too many other things at the same time, and so deeper listening wasn’t happening—even if I was absorbing the basic plot. And so, I had to go back a few minutes to listen to that part again. Then, I would understand it on a much more profound level.

Deep listening is really important, I think. Can you tell when someone is listening really deeply to you? Or when you are listening really deeply to what someone else is saying, as opposed to just kind of listening? It’s different, right? Your teachers actually spent a lot of time last week during our meetings practicing deep listening too. It’s pretty interesting that adults, even teachers, can benefit from practicing deep listening. We had an all-day meeting with a wonderful group that came to campus called The Stanley H. King Institute, and they led us through lots of workshops on the skill of listening deeply when someone talks to you—which is really a muscle that takes continual time and practice to develop.

And the way that The Stanley H. King Institute describes deep listening is listening in a way that centers curiosity, that centers the speaker rather than the listener. That is not about listening out of a need to respond or jump in and solve right away or to judge, but out of a genuine desire to allow for the full feelings and full story to emerge. This isn’t easy for many reasons—one of which is that the world often seems to want us to be loud and fast and urgent. That’s why it’s important to really think about listening… to try to be intentional rather than reactive listeners.

And deep listening is really important for a number of additional reasons. For instance, it is a way of continually learning and having genuine curiosity lead you. It is a way of prioritizing curiosity over “already knowing.” An education group I like called Leadership and Design recently advised that our goal should be to be the ‘Most Curious Person in the Room,’ rather than the ‘Smartest Person in the Room.’ (Because sometimes being the ‘Smartest Person in the Room’ can be a way of closing off curiosity and deep listening.) Can you remember that quote from the musical “Hamilton” warning against thinking you are the ‘smartest person in the room’?

Why do you assume, you’re the smartest in the room?
Soon that attitude will be your doom.

Of course, deep listening also shows caring. When I was speaking with a group of student leaders last week, a senior said something that has stuck with me. She hopes we can model and celebrate “chalance”—a term that is on the internet, though not technically a real word. It means the opposite of “nonchalance.” What a great idea. Chalance means that it is cool to care; it’s the opposite of being “too cool for school.” Being engaged and excited about a culture of participation (in the ways Westridge students so often are in everything they do) is real confidence, is real caring. And listening deeply to each other is one way of demonstrating that.

Deep listening also affirms someone’s full humanity. A quote I love that I have shared with all of you before is by philosopher Iris Murdoch: “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” You may think at first… what? I know other things are real besides myself! But if you really think about it, it’s a truly loving thing to understand fully that someone else’s humanity is just as full as your own. That their subjectivity is just as much subject as your own. And perhaps because of our many discussions about AI [artificial intelligence] or because English Department Chair Ms. [Tarra] Stevenson gave a wonderful presentation about putting the ‘human’ back into the humanities at the International Coalition of Girls’ Schools conference this summer, I have been thinking all summer about the word ‘human’ and how it relates to Westridge and to our overall school mission.

In a letter I recently wrote to your parents, I mentioned that our Westridge Leadership Team spent time recently discussing what the word ‘human’ means to them. Lots of different free associations came up: feeling, not-robotic, imperfection, honesty, inclusion, wholeness. We also discussed the importance of human-centered leadership. It is a leadership that aims to affirm others’ full humanity and our own. And as a girls’ school, this feels particularly meaningful. Westridge’s very founding in 1913—and therefore its ongoing legacy—is an insistence on the full humanity of people no matter what gender. Striving to rise to full education, to full citizenship, to full humanity.

And as renowned psychologist Carol Gilligan argues in her most recent book “In a Human Voice,” that full humanity is the both/and-ness, the wholeness, of mind/body, of thinking/feeling, of self/relationship. The fracturing of these only happens because of systems of gender (and other) discrimination. Systems that try to disrupt our full humanity. And deep listening allows us to recognize and cherish these layers, these nuances, this wholeness in all of us, so that we can really know that someone else is just as human as we are… which, according to Iris Murdoch, is love.

Carol Gilligan states that, ultimately, “Among the deepest insights (she has) come to in the course of (her) work is that the requisites of love and the requisites of citizenship in a democratic society are one and the same. Both depend on having a voice, the ability to communicate our experience, and on our desire to live in relationship, not alone or walled off in silence.” (104) This feels like really forward-thinking-girls’-school-stuff to me—insisting on and championing our full humanity – democratic, whole—really human love. Deep listening allows us to access all of this.

In addition to “chalance,” our student leaders told me last week that they are hoping to lead the school this year with a sense of stability, a sense of unity, and taking important things in. And, of course, all of this also comes through genuine curiosity, genuine caring, a desire to cherish each other’s full humanity, a desire to listen deeply to each other.

Ok wow, 4th graders, that was a lot. Thank you for your deep listening—I am proud of you.

And to everyone—students, parents, faculty, and staff, trustees—happy new year to all of you. Our Westridge community provides so many of us with hope for the present moment and for the future. There are so many immense joys every day on this campus, in this work, and in this special community we have together. Here’s to a year of curiosity and deep listening inside of classrooms and outside of them.

One more special shout out to our seniors! One more special welcome to all of our new students! Let’s have an amazing school year.