ACADEMY OF INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL HEADS: October Newsletter, 2025
Timothy Kelley: How My Mind Has Changed-By TJ Coburn
When Tim Kelley speaks, there’s a sense of centeredness that comes from a lifetime of integrating disparate strands—family, creativity, and a grounded inward steadiness that would later shape his approach to leading. He grew up in Boston, the son of two educators, and as a boy found identity both on the ice rink and on the stage. Hockey gave him discipline, community, and the will to compete; theatre, imagination, empathy, and the capacity to see through another’s eyes. Those two worlds—discipline and creativity—would later define not only his approach to schools but his understanding of what it means to educate.
During his junior year at Bowdoin, in the middle of the hockey season, Tim made a decision that still resonates forty years later. He stepped away from the team to direct the college’s play, Godspell—a choice that might have seemed impulsive then but, in hindsight, marked a turning point. “When I chose to direct Godspell, I was really saying, ‘I want to do what feels authentic to me.’” It was a quiet act of courage—leaving behind the validation of team identity to pursue something interior and self-authored, the kind of choice he would make again and again as a leader.
That instinct for authenticity shaped his later leadership. As he told me, “Theatre taught me how to collaborate, and hockey taught me how to fight”—by which he meant the discipline to stay in the struggle, to take the hits and keep moving. It’s a compelling pairing—the empathy of the artist and the resilience of the athlete—both of which would define his life in education. In his leadership, that balance between imagination and resolve became a signature—creative enough to invite others in, steady enough to hold the line when needed.After college, Tim began a career in film and advertising in Boston before feeling the pull toward what he calls “the family business”—schools. Graduate study led to his first post at Culver Military Academy in Indiana, followed by years that carried him through the Noble and Greenough School in Massachusetts. Eventually, he would spend seventeen years as Head of School at the International School of Stuttgart. Few international heads remain nearly two decades at the same school, but Tim’s tenure there reflects something rare: the ability to build community and sustain it through change, guided by a style of leadership as steady as it was humane.
Reflecting on his unexpected path to headship, Tim said, “When I look back, I see certain things that I regret and could have done better. I have always stood for empathic leadership and sought to build schools from that perspective. I never intended to be head of school; I was the Director of Admissions at the Leysin American School in Switzerland when the head departed, and I was asked to step in. They told me, ‘Give us your response by tomorrow morning.’” He accepted—but rather than adopt the mantle of authority, he carried what he calls imposter syndrome with him—an inner modesty, a self-questioning humility that shaped his leadership style. “I never took myself too seriously. It kept me humble. I wanted to lead from the inside, never assuming I knew what I was doing. I think that allowed me to lead within the community—faculty, staff, parents—rather than above it.” That stance—humble yet deeply relational—would become the hallmark of his educational philosophy.
That humility aligns with the Deweyan thread that runs through his thinking. Dewey saw education not as the transmission of knowledge but as the cultivation of reflective experience—the linking of learning with lived life. He also believed learning to be not only reflective but communal. In that spirit, Tim sees empathy not as sentimentality but as a disciplined practice of seeing from another’s point of view—the foundation of what he calls empathic leadership. Such leadership, he believes, “seeks to understand before acting, builds trust across difference, and recognizes that schools thrive when people feel known.”
Grounding his reflections in that same spirit of empathy, Tim spoke about the changes he’s witnessed across international education—the shifts in who schools serve, what parents expect, and what communities mean. “International schools used to be defined by a globally mobile community,” he said, “but what’s happened is that more and more local students are attending. The demands are shifting.” The transition has brought a kind of stability, yet it has also weakened the transient but deeply bonded communities that once defined international schools—a shift that would become even more pronounced in the isolation of the COVID years.
Tim’s concerns deepened during and after COVID-19. “During the pandemic, education became isolating. It stripped away the relational and communal models schools depend on. Coming out of COVID, people wanted to go back to where things were before—but you can’t simply go back. Our identity and purpose have changed. Education is struggling right now—with what it means to be human.” In the wake of that reckoning, Tim began asking what kind of humanity schools now reveal—and what kind they still make possible.
The question of what it means to be human sits at the heart of Tim’s reflection. If Dewey once framed learning as the interaction between the individual and society, Tim sees today’s challenge as restoring the human middle ground between hyper-individualized education and collective belonging. In his view, that loss of middle ground reflects not only demographic change but a deeper erosion of shared purpose between home and school. “The chasm between educators and parents has never been wider,” he said. “People value schools as communities, but parents often approach them now through a personalized lens: ‘solve my issue first.’”
He recalled encounters familiar to anyone in school leadership: a parent upset about a classroom displaying a rainbow flag; another angered by a teacher’s “safe space” sign; and, in contrast, a student struggling with identity and suicidal thoughts. These moments, he suggested, reveal how fractured school communities can become—and why spaces of gathering matter more than ever. “We need schools that feel more like pubs,” he said with a smile—“places where people gather, where different folk share a table.” The metaphor is disarmingly simple yet profound: a pub is a democratic space built on familiarity, ritual, and belonging. In that sense, the school as pub becomes an antidote to the atomization of modern educational life—and a reminder of our shared need to be seen, known, and welcomed.
Building on our earlier reflections about leadership, Tim returned to that same foundation—community and belonging—but from a more spiritual and interior place. “People are often afraid of the word spiritual,” he said, “but it has to do with an inner sense of devotion or belief. For heads of school, it can mean embodying the spirit of the school—being part of something in your heart.” When leadership carries a spiritual dimension, he believes, it enables confidence and trust—it draws upon the goodness within.
Every good leader, Tim suggests, encounters crises—moments that test conviction and reveal character. The question is not whether they occur but how one survives and reflects upon them. “You need to go to that place where you’re uncomfortable,” he said. In discomfort, a leader broadens context and reimagines possibilities. He lived that principle during the height of the COVID pandemic, when Stuttgart’s campus was closed and classes were remote. To keep the community connected, Tim began creating three-to-five-minute videos—storytelling combined with music and reflection—shared weekly with students, faculty, and parents. “Each week, putting together those videos—woven with story, humor, and familiar songs—inspired me to be the leader everyone needed me to be.”
Through those acts of storytelling, he found a way to minister to the school without sermonizing—to reach across isolation and remind people of their shared belonging. Those small weekly offerings reminded him that leadership is, at its core, an act of service—listening, connecting, and keeping the human thread intact. That experience deepened his conviction that leadership is shared—that every voice, every story, has a place in sustaining community.Rooted in that same belief in shared humanity, Tim sees leadership as inherently collaborative. He resists hierarchical thinking, believing that schools thrive only when everyone understands themselves as leaders in some capacity. “Teachers often don’t see themselves as leaders,” he said. “But they are—they lead every single day, all day. If you think about it, you realize leadership is everywhere in a school.” It’s a vision that dissolves hierarchy, inviting teachers and students alike to see themselves as co-authors of the school’s life.
But when that shared sense of agency falters, authority quickly becomes brittle. “The head can fault the board. The head and board can blame parents. Faculty can feel dismissed. And in each case,” he said, “they’re a little right.” What Tim meant was not that the impulse to fault others is justified, but that each perspective usually holds a fragment of truth. The task of leadership, then, is to create frameworks broad enough to honor those fragments and find truthfulness in each one. “A school needs the capacity to absorb many thoughts,” he added. For Tim, leadership must be generous enough to hold dissent without fragmenting—decision-making big enough to hold all views.
That way of leading—anchored in empathy, humility, and service—leads naturally to the question of what endures. When asked what has remained constant across all his years, Tim paused and said, “I believe in the model of a school as a village—a place central to the lives of its constituents, a place to call home. A school should be somewhere you return to, through the days of a month, a semester, a school year, and beyond.” He lingered on that idea of return, describing how students grow to become more of themselves; how faculty teach and teach again, shaping and reshaping their craft; how parents turn and return as their children progress. “The village, the home to return to, becomes a place of promise and hope.”
At the heart of that vision is Tim’s enduring conviction: to serve what is best for the child. “Never swerve from this conviction, never muddle or drift from it,” he said. “To give one’s heart to serving what is best for the individual child is to set the course that directs one’s energy. There can be nothing greater.” It is a simple creed, and in his telling, it feels both timeless and hard-won.
In that conviction lies the compass of Tim Kelley’s life in education: to hold compassion and accountability together; to build communities that honor all voices yet never lose sight of the child at the center; to believe that leadership, at its best, is an act of faith in our shared humanity.
Theodore J. Coburn AISH Newsletter, October 2025