Vision

There were a lot of thoughts around this and we looked for a lot of commonalities. We need to have education that accommodates the various abilities and needs and roles in society. We have to get away from grade-based and 9-week sessions. We need to get away from performance-based products but have deep understanding of areas.

Our students need to be personally prepared on a global basis, maybe exposed to different languages and situations.

Our role as teacher will change. We’ll have to be helicopter teachers. Education will be based in the past and future focused and related to the child.

We also looked at extracurricular activities. We will have community-based opportunities. We need to prepare students to teach and facilitate students in the future, but we cannot forget the teachers who are in there now. We want professional development built in.

We need a broader communication and responsibility base. We have to a system change and not just a high school change. We need to look at primary through 16. We questioned whether the “no child left behind” was a good thing for education.

Manifesto

We want all students an opportunity to be successful. We want to change because the system is not working for everyone. Schools are trying to keep up with society and everyone benefits.

Some challenges we have are poverty, change in demographics, how you fit school into all the other activities, resources, time, money, and people. We need to have a shared common vision. Right now our vision is a challenge for us. We need student ownership and participation. A high level of competence depends on who you talk to.

style="font-family: arial; font-weight: bold;">Process

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We wanted to come up with a plan that everyone can use. We want to look at our communities and we came up with some steps. The first step is what we’ve always done. You need to understand that this is not just sequential. We’ll go back and forth between the steps.

Maybe we should send an email to President Bush and the Secretary of Education. We need to make sure we get our leaders involved. Our goal is 100% buy-in and we know that we may not have that all the time, but we will try.

We think learning communities will look differently depending on what community you’re in. We need to research what other people are doing. We need to hold people accountable and give them permission to try.

We need to implement and with this we need commitment to give it a good chance. From there, we need to develop a network so that we can stay in touch with what is happening in other parts of the state and the nation. We want to be able to share what we’re doing with these other communities too.

It’s important to collect all the data and be available to share the data. We need to be able to tell people when something doesn’t work very well. We want to evaluate and reevaluate.

Most importantly we don’t want to wait 15 years to start this, we want to do it in 2 weeks.

What to Change

Each one of the things we listed here is individualistic. So we want to be clear that we understand each community is very different, so some may not apply and that is okay. When you look at the national

We’re the tip of the sword in some of these initiatives.

Each one of our school boards and faculty are different. So some things will get buy in more in one place than another.

We need to understand that teachers have not only been teaching in their way for a long time but they also learned how to teach that way.

We looked at the school day. There’s a lot of research in circadian rhythms. Maybe we could take that into account. We looked at school year also.

Just because a student gets an A, does that mean they have mastery of the subject? We want to redefine teaching and learning. Kids learn differently because they are wired differently. Because they’re so exposed to audio and video learning, do they learn differently than we learn?

We talked about team teaching and relevance. This stems into career clustering. We want to have some focus on the practical.

Do we want 15 year olds in college? Are we prepared to put in safety nets?

If you make a mistake with kids you have higher stakes than if you make mistakes in business. We need to take that into account.

Michael Kaufman: Were there any themes or insights that you had in your conversations? Do you see any patterns?

We need to send our governor a letter on not having exit data.

It depends on how you define exit exam. It’s not as important what a student can prove with a pencil and paper.

Education needs to be personalized.

We looked at extracurricular activities. We wondered what role that plays in the future. If it helps build a connectedness, what does it do?

MK: What if all of education was extracurricular activities?

I think we need to change the term of that to co-curricular activities. Then we understand how that fits together.

If you embed and connect them to academics, then the definition of curriculum changes.

One of the most outstanding comments from your expeditions was that the important thing for the students is the social activity.

This process of educating human beings is one of the hardest things of all the social systems. You don’t know if you’re successful for 10 or 20 years. How do you measure the impact of anything you do?

High school is one small slice of a system that prepares people for life. We can only change high school, but will it be enough if we can’t change the rest of the system? When we talked to middle school they don’t even look at standards, all they look at is test scores.

What does a resume tell you? Companies are finding out not that much. There is a lot of experiential data going on in HR departments these days. This is related to what you’re talking about.

Without new information, most of us design what we already know. We have an exercise coming up that is going to give you some of that in order to perturb your thinking.

I like the idea that you’re going back to your local communities and having a dialogue about the purpose of education. There may be a right answer for right now, but maybe there’s another one for later.

One thing that stood out for me in high school is my Latin teacher who said that Latin never changes. That’s because it’s a dead language. We have to be careful that we do think like that about our other subjects.