As a new school administrator, I am faced with the same question; what should we as a school do? The answer, in my eyes anyway, is clear: now is the time to take stock of where we were and plan for where we are wanting to be. In my thinking, this is the opportunity of a lifetime and we should grab it. It is 2016, and it is time that our educational system changes to better equip our students to move into the 21st Century.
Interestingly, working in an independent school system seems to afford me with arguably more freedom in how to implement this new curriculum (this comes from talking to other administrators around the area), but just as interestingly is the fact that, in my experience, private or independent schools tend to stick to themselves and, therefore, do not change a lot (this comes from experience). I need to be clear though, we not only need to be keeping up with the educational trends as other schools are doing, but we must be on the cutting edge - we must be beyond and better than public system schools. Why? Because, at least in BC independent schools, parents are paying tuition and, if I am not mistaken, that means they are expecting to get more (or at least a largely different) educational impact than they would at a public school.
The independent school I work at has made this decision: we are going to work towards becoming a forward thinking, 21st Century focused school that utilizes and creates its curriculum around cutting edge teaching strategies which are based on best practices and research. To do this, however, we need a plan, a framework, to make it happen successfully. For those readers interested in a good look at what 21 Century education is all about, I would encourage you to visit the P21 website.
From the admin perspective, I decided to incorporate a strategy called Appreciative Inquiry. In essence, we are going to follow the four processes of AI, those being Discover, Dream, Design, and Destiny. As a staff, we first got together and discovered what we are (the best of what was and is). This then becomes the core of our school (the centre area that makes us different and that grounds us as we move on from there). The key here is to make this core full of the positive aspects of what we are only - these are the things we want to keep.
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| AI Core with 4C's |
Next, we came together and worked on the Dream stage (what can we become). To do this, we met during our last pro-d day and used the four C's of 21 Century learning as our headers and asked a simple question of each one: what would our school look like if we wanted to become the ultimate school for each of those four C's? The brainstorming was incredible, exciting, and created a new vision of what education at our school could look like. Staff came up with multi-grade, multi-subject teaching based on project based learning concepts, bigger learning areas, more student-driven input into their own curriculum choices, and a need for a global rubric / assessment program that will guide students, parents, and teachers through knowing where they are in their educational goals and achievements.
These are all very large brainstorming ideas to say the least, but they are needed. The next step will be to design a pathway and a framework to make the ideas that we are going to implement happen. My biggest concern right now is building changes: which classrooms and which areas will we need to change to make these dreams a reality? Also, can we get the right pro-d to aid our teachers in implement these changes correctly? As recently stated in a recent podcast with Andreas Schleicher, the Director for Education and Skills in Paris, there is no point putting 21st Century teaching or technology into a classroom run with 20th century teaching practices.
