Strategic Human Resource Management (MNAE 60412)
University of Notre Dame
June 13th, 2026
Modeling the Way: A Personal Best Leadership Story
I did not set out to lead anyone that October morning. I set out to survive it — to show up, despite the grief and the moving boxes, our furnature situated still in California and the asthma that made crowded rooms feel like a dare. That I stumbled into something sacred was not my doing. It rarely is. Indeed, God, it seems, had other plans for that Monday morning. He usually does.
On October 11, 2021, my third graders and I were smack in the Fruits of the Spirit for our catechism class: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. We had been exploring what these fruits look like in real life, in real classrooms, with real eight-year-olds who were still figuring out how to share a gluestick without a diplomatic incident. It was inside that sacred conversation that I asked the question that changed everything, “Is it okay to lose your patience?” The answer was immediate and unanimous. Oh, no. No, no, no. Then I leaned in and asked the question that made them go quiet, “What if I told you that Jesus lost his patience once?”
It was a school year still shaped by prolonged uncertainty. I had recently returned to brick-and-mortar teaching after months of pandemic-era disruption, having moved cross-country from California to the Midwest to help care for my mother-in-law. I was navigating grief from losing my best friend and her mom to COVID-19, managing my asthma in crowded classrooms, and quietly processing a new ADHD (Inattentive) diagnosis I had received during the pandemic. I was also navigating a novice principal who had written me up the week before for not following my lesson plan. He was the first principal, I ever had to submit lesson plans to. I tried to explain that sometimes the Holy Spirit would nudge me in another direction from my original lesson and I would follow the nudges. All the while, he kept reminding me, with great conviction, “Mechelle, you are not teaching in California anymore.” He was not wrong. Queen of Peace Catholic School in South Bend, Indiana was decidedly not California, a truth I had come to appreciate, even as I quietly renamed our school in my heart Queen of Chaos. I was humbly hoping that Mother Mary would not mind. We talk, and she knows my sense of humor.
Each day was a careful negotiation of endurance, patience, and self-compassion. What unfolded with my students that morning became one of my most meaningful personal best leadership experiences, and a living embodiment of Kouzes and Posner’s first exemplary practice: Model the Way..
Kouzes and Posner describe Model the Way as the practice of clarifying one’s values and setting an example for others by aligning actions with shared principles. Leaders who model the way do not merely instruct, they embody. Leaders bring their whole selves to the work, even when that is difficult, and lead from a place of authenticity rather than authority. That October morning, I did not stand before my students as a teacher who had it all together. I stood before them as a human being who had chosen, deliberately and faithfully, to show up anyway, and to teach them that sometimes the most courageous act of leadership is knowing when enough is enough.
I designed the classroom so that students sat in table teams, each named for a patron saint they had chosen themselves. Above every table hung banners they had created, uneven, colorful, earnest, making saints feel like tablemates rather than distant figures. They chose St. Lucy, patron of vision; St. Francis, patron of care for others; St. Anthony, patron of persistence (also very importantly patron of lost items); and St. Michael, patron of courage. One group selected St. Monica, whom they promptly nicknamed St. Moni, as if she were a familiar aunt rather than a fourth-century mother remembered for endurance. When I joked that my teacher’s desk patron saint was St. Jude, patron of impossible cases, my students laughed and the designation stuck.
I had prepared shallow tubs of sand and small branches at each table. These were not decorations. They were waiting, literally and metaphorically, for the lesson that was about to unfold. After guiding students to reflect on Jesus’ patience, with doubters, with children, with those who asked the same question again and again, I introduced the harder question: When is losing your patience good? I then read from Matthew 21, where Jesus enters the temple and overturns the tables of the money changers. I translated it simply for my eight-year-olds: They turned the temple into a flea market.
What I offered was not irreverence, but discernment, the idea that authority and intention do not automatically make something right. Patience has a purpose, and therefore a limit. I told the class that sometimes we have to draw a line in the sand. Then I invited them to do exactly that.
Inspired by my training in art therapy and the prepared environment philosophy of Maria Montessori, my birthday buddy and kindred spirit, I had arranged shallow tubs of sand and small branches at each table before the students arrived. These were not decorations. They were an invitation. Drawing on both traditions, I knew that the hands, the sand, and the branches would do what words alone could not: give children a way to make the invisible visible, to draw their convictions into the world. At each table, students picked up small branches and made their mark. Some lines were careful and straight; others were jagged, forceful, or tentative. No two looked the same.
This was Model the Way in its most elemental form: I had not simply told my students what courage or justice looked like. I had created the conditions for them to discover it themselves, and I had done so by living it alongside them.
What unfolded that morning also reflected something deeper than a leadership framework alone. Carol Gilligan, in her landmark work In a Different Voice, argued that moral reasoning is not only about justice and rules, but about relationships, care, and context. Where Kohlberg saw moral development as a ladder of abstract principles, Gilligan saw it as a web of human connection. My third graders began the lesson at Gilligan’s first stage, protecting the rule, no, no, you cannot lose your patience, because rules feel safe, and 2021 had already asked them to surrender so much safety. But as the lesson unfolded, they moved into her second stage, extending care outward, what about when someone is being hurt? And finally into her third and most luminous stage: the recognition that caring for oneself and caring for others are not opposites. They are the same sacred act. A boundary, we discovered together that morning, is not a wall. It is a form of love. Gilligan would have recognized what happened under those patron saint banners, moral reasoning born not from a textbook, but from a sandbox, a cardboard table, and the Gospel of Matthew.
What I did not say to my students that day, but what shaped every decision I made, is that I am neurodivergent. My ADHD diagnosis during the pandemic, combined with the grief, relocation, and health challenges I was navigating, made me more attuned to how physical, emotional, and cognitive limits interact. When I reminded them that their Circle of Grace was not just a bubble to keep germs out, but a boundary God placed around their belovedness, I was acknowledging something I knew firsthand, that some spaces deserve to be protected, not just endured, and that time and patience are experienced differently by different brains. When I offered sentence starters rather than vague expectations, I was building scaffolding I once needed but did not have.
As I am writing the second edition of my book, Kiwi Teachers: Cultivating Inclusive Catholic Classrooms, One Fruit at a Time, I am starting to see that true leadership in education is not about performing strength, it is about faithful presence, even in seasons of difficulty. My presence that day, whole and honest and rooted in faith, was itself the lesson.
Then came the tables. We built them carefully, each cardboard rectangle a stand-in for what we might need to challenge: bullying, cruelty, dishonesty, things masquerading as right but not truly so. One by one, the students marked what did not belong, naming it boldly. And then, carefully, with intention rather than impulse, we flipped them. Just a little. Just enough. Jesus flipped tables not because he lost his temper, but because something sacred had been compromised. My students understood instinctively: patience has limits, boundaries matter, and standing up for what is right can be a gentle yet powerful act. Through it all, they engaged with a version of patience that included discernment, justice, and self-advocacy. I had modeled every bit of it before I asked them to try. though I cannot claim the idea as my own. The oldest leadership text I know begins not with a framework, but an invitation: “Follow me.” Jesus never asked anyone to go where He had not already gone, and He never wrote a memo. He simply said, “Follow me,” and meant it with His whole life. Kouzes and Posner gave it a name. Jesus lived it first.
Kouzes and Posner remind us that credibility is the foundation of leadership, and that credibility is earned when leaders do what they say they will do. That morning, I said, with every choice, every scaffold, every sandbox line, that I believed my students were capable of moral reasoning, that their experiences mattered, and that faith calls us to act, not merely to endure. I did not say these things with words alone. I said them by showing up broken and hopeful, by drawing my own line in the sand, and by flipping a cardboard table with thirty third-graders who would carry that lesson far beyond my classroom. That, I believe, is what it means to Model the Way.
In the end, I did flip a table, just one, under a doc camera, which was just enough, to show them how it was done. And then my students did too. Perhaps that is the truest thing I can say about leadership, that its finest moments are not the ones where we shine, but the ones where we step aside just enough to let something holy move through.