AISH COMMUNITY VOICES

        Woven Together: A Conversation with Chrissie Sorenson

        How My Mind Has Changed Series, TJ Coburn

There is something to be said for the confidence of putting one step in front of another without fully knowing where that next step may lead.

A willingness to move anyway.

Curiosity. Resolve. An openness to becoming.

Perhaps we carry with us the generations before us — the habits and principles of our parents, the emotional architecture of family, the clustered worlds of childhood and adolescence, and then the sudden catapult into college and beyond. Along the way, spirit may be earned. Confidence seized gradually. A sense of possibility assembled almost unknowingly.

And beneath it all, perhaps, a grace — a willingness to feel grateful, blessed, eager for what might still unfold. It was through my conversation with Chrissie Sorenson that some version of these thoughts rose more fully to the surface.

“Chrissie,” I asked, “where would you like to begin?”

She smiled gently and began not with herself, but with those who came before her. There were long lines of educators in her family. Her mother, German by birth, descended from generations of teachers whose roots stretched back centuries. Her father, Mennonite, carried Eastern European roots tied to Poland and Kyiv and had himself grown up as something of a third-culture child between Germany and Canada. Education, for both sides of the family, was notmerely a profession. It was an inheritance, an organizing principle, a way of understanding the world.

Her parents had met in Germany before eventually building their life in the United States. Both devoted themselves not only to education professionally, but to creating a home environment rich with intellectual curiosity, athletics, music, outdoor life, and broad developmental opportunity for their four children, with Chrissie the eldest. Learning was never narrowly defined in the household. It was expansive, lived, and deeply woven into family culture.

Her parents were also notably balanced in the way they approached family and professional life together, particularly for their generation. They followed and supported one another’s opportunities and modeled a partnership grounded in mutual respect and equality. And yet, as Chrissie approached adulthood, both parents quietly discouraged her from entering education herself. The reasoning was practical: salaries, sustainability, economics. They wanted their children first to explore the wider world and establish themselves broadly before considering educational life. So, like many young people searching for their path, Chrissie stepped elsewhere first.

She began at UC Davis as a Computer Science and Math major but ultimately graduated with a degree in German Language and Literature. Not knowing what to do with that degree beyond teaching, she earned an MBA from what is now the Middlebury Institute for International Studies in Monterey — a step that would begin to pull her toward international education and leadership. The timing would shape her life. Almost overnight, history accelerated around her. Following reunification, she found herself working with West German firms exploring investment and partnership opportunities in the former East Germany. Still early in her career, she was suddenly meeting directly with business owners, navigating uncertainty, helping organizations imagine futures that had not seemed possible only months before.

These were unusual responsibilities for someone so young.

But as Chrissie described those years, what stood out was not ambition in the traditional sense. It was confidence paired with curiosity. A willingness to step toward complexity rather than retreat from it. At one point in our conversation, she offered a phrase that seemed to capture something essential about the way she has moved through the world:

“Don’t tell me ‘No.’ Tell me how.”

The phrase would echo quietly throughout the rest of our discussion. I found myself thinking afterward that the statement was not rooted in defiance so much as orientation — a practical optimism, a collaborative instinct toward problem-solving rather than resignation. It reflected something I would continue to see throughout her story: an unwillingness to be immobilized by obstacles and a belief that difficult situations are best approached through engagement, creativity, and collective effort.

After years in Germany, marriage, and the birth of her first child, Chrissie eventually chose to return to California with her husband and young family. The move marked not simply a geographic transition, but the beginning of another phase of adulthood — balancing professional ambition, motherhood, partnership, and eventually the complexities and changes that accompany long lives and relationships.

Back in California, she worked in business, including language-services and communications organizations requiring extensive travel and coordination across cultures and systems. Yet education, despite earlier detours away from it, continued pulling quietly at the edges of her life. During these years, her family life also deepened and evolved — the birth of a second child, the eventual ending of her first marriage, remarriage, and the later arrival of a third child gradually shaping the fuller family life that continues to this day. Eventually she was approached by Robert Landau, an international educator helping establish what would become the International School of Monterey. Initially invited to join the founding board, Chrissie soon found herself drawn more deeply into the work itself. When Landau later departed for another leadership role overseas, the board turned to her — encouraging her to become the school’s first head of school. The school opened modestly: four classrooms, kindergarten through second grade, fifty-two students. It would become the beginning of an entirely new chapter.

Listening to Chrissie describe those years, I was struck repeatedly by the interplay between discipline and openness in her leadership style. Before she ever mentioned athletics, I found myself sensing the presence of an athlete beneath the surface — someone organized, collaborative, understated, and quietly resilient.

Then she began speaking about swimming.

Competitive swimming had shaped her from childhood onward. Athletics were deeply embedded in the culture of her family and sibling life, and swimming became one of the central organizing disciplines of her own development. At her high school, there had been no girls’ swim team, so she joined the boys’ team instead — becoming the first girl to do so. She continued swimming competitively through college and beyond, particularly as a distance swimmer. The sport, she explained, taught her discipline, endurance, resilience, and teamwork. But perhaps more importantly, it taught her how individual effort and collective effort coexist. A swimmer competes alone in the lane while simultaneously earning points for the team.

As she spoke, it became increasingly clear that many of the collaborative instincts that later defined her leadership had been forged long before she entered administration. Distance swimming, in particular, seemed to shape something quieter but equally important: emotional steadiness. Patience. Self-regulation. The understated confidence that often accompanies years of disciplined preparation and internal endurance.

“Chrissie is a people person,” I found myself writing in my notes afterward. “Collaborative to her core. ”

The phrase continued lingering with me long after our conversation ended.

And perhaps that collaborative instinct was not accidental. Growing up as the oldest of four children in an active and highly engaged family, Chrissie learned early about shared responsibility, collective activity, support systems, and the rhythms of working alongside others. Later, these same instincts would become foundational to her leadership philosophy.

Years later, when she began applying for headship positions within international schools, those instincts would be tested again.

At the time, her experience leading a small charter-based international program in California was often misunderstood within international school circles. Many schools simply did not know what to make of charter-school leadership experience, particularly from a woman candidate entering a field that remained heavily male at the senior leadership level. Application after application led nowhere. But once again, Chrissie kept moving forward.

Eventually, while pursuing the position at Dresden International School, she tracked down Richard Tangye of ECIS, who was advising the search. She made the case directly that her blend of business experience, international exposure, and school leadership deserved serious consideration. Tangye agreed and urged the board to add her to the finalist pool.

She became the sixth finalist in what had originally been a five-candidate search. And ultimately, she was selected.

“It made all the difference,” I found myself thinking afterward. Not simply because she secured the position, but because the story revealed something deeper about the kind of leader she had already become: resourceful, persistent, unafraid to advocate for herself, and unwilling to quietly accept closed doors. And after a number of years, with her husband and young family, Chrissie returned to Germany — to build the life that would carry her through the years between then and now.

When I asked about her earliest years in Dresden, she did not describe herself as arriving with authority already established. Instead, she spoke repeatedly about listening.

Listening to the board. Listening to faculty. Listening to staff.

Trying first to understand the circumstances and priorities around her before imposing direction. She focused carefully on the school’s most important priorities while building relationships with board chairs and trustees one by one, recognizing that leadership required helping others become effective as well. Again and again during our conversation, she returned not to control, but to collaboration. At one point, she described periods of enrollment uncertainty in which financial pressures might easily have led to staffing reductions. Instead, she worked with her leadership team and board to avoid cuts wherever possible, believing that institutions should not solve every challenge at the expense of individuals who had committed themselves to the life of the school.

At another point, she reflected candidly on mistakes she had made over the years and on her growing belief that punitive or heavily top-down leadership models rarely produce healthy communities.

“No heavy hands,” I wrote afterward.

Instead, she spoke about widening circles — bringing more people into conversations, seeking broader voices, creating shared ownership. The older she became as a leader, the more important vulnerability became to her.

“Super important,” she said quietly at one point. I found myself thinking afterward how rarely vulnerability is discussed honestly in educational leadership circles, where certainty and control are so often mistaken for strength. And yet much of Chrissie’s leadership philosophy seemed to rest on something else entirely: evolving courage. Not mastery. Not performance. Not command.

But the willingness to keep stepping forward, to keep listening, to keep learning, and to keep widening the circle. Underlying her leadership was what felt to me like a deeply rooted ethical structure — one shaped not only by professional experience, but by family, athletics, international life, collaboration, discipline, and a long-developed belief in the dignity and capacity of other people.

Her leadership style seemed grounded less in dominance than in trust. Less in certainty than in attentiveness. Less in personal authority than in shared responsibility.

Near the close of our conversation, Chrissie reflected on something more personal.

“Sometimes when I take things too seriously,” she said, “it’s written all over my face.” She laughed softly.

Over time, she explained, she has learned the importance of lightness — of carving out space for silliness, joy, and human connection amid the demands of leadership and family life. When her children were young, the family would put music on the jukebox and dance together in the kitchen while dinner was being prepared. The image stayed with me long after our conversation ended. Perhaps because it revealed something essential. Leadership, in the end, is not only strategy, resilience, or endurance. It is also presence. Warmth. Rhythm. The ability to remain human inside systems that constantly pressure people toward performance and control.

As our conversation concluded, Chrissie reflected on the fact that she is now nearing the close of nearly twenty-five years serving as head of three international schools.

“I feel incredibly fortunate,” she said. There was no boasting in the statement. Only gratitude.

And perhaps that, too, is part of what changes over time. Not certainty. But perspective.

Or perhaps something even deeper: the gradual assembling of a life shaped not by any single influence, but by many — family and migration, discipline and collaboration, uncertainty and resilience, leadership and vulnerability, motherhood and professional life, ambition and humility, all woven together over time into something steadier, quieter, and more human. By the end of our conversation, I found myself thinking less about accomplishment than presence. About the kind of leader who widens the circle rather than narrows it. Who listens before acting. Who resists heavy hands.

Who understands that authority need not announce itself loudly in order to be deeply felt. And who, after decades of leadership, can still speak with gratitude, curiosity, and openness toward whatever may still unfold.

TJ Coburn, Theodore.coburn@gmail.com