On Friday we held an unusual admin meeting. What made it unusual, besides the fact that the meeting was held from 3:00-5:00 pm on Friday, and besides the fact that this was the first time every administrator at the school had gathered together since the new school year had begun, was what we did during the meeting.
Our meeting began, as they always do, with a check-in. However, the day's check-in was not a rundown of tasks and projects; it was an opportunity to name how we were feeling on both a professional and personal level, using some metaphorical vehicle to communicate our status, include equations, song titles and first lines, drawings, and haikus. As a former English teacher (and ongoing poet), my choice of form was obvious:
Have you ever seen
a cheetah racing across
the Serengeti?
Besides honoring the two components of the haiku form (the famous syllabic lineation, and the lesser-known tradition of capturing of a moment of natural beauty), I was aiming to convey the sense I have that right now life is racing past, both personally and professionally. Every day is jam packed from before I even walk in the door, and every evening when I return home, so much is or has happened for my family as well.
Mitch then presented the restructuring of the administrative team that he has developed, in conversation with others, over the summer. Last year's model consisted of three groups that met regularly - the Admin Team (all admin except Registrar and Associate Business Managers), Educational Leadership Team (Head, ECC Director, Associate Head), and Business Office (Business Manager, Associate Business Managers, and Accounting Assistant). In the new, reconfigured approach, at the center of the team is the Senior Admin Team, consisting of the Head of School, Business Manager, and Advancement Director. A slightly larger group is the Director's Team, consisting of all Directors - Head of School, Financial Aid, Business, IT, Communications, Advancement, Admissions, ECC, and Elementary Division. Other groups include CAD (Communications, Admissions, Development), Front Line (CAD + Office Registrar and Assistant to the Head), and Site Team (Business Manager, Associate Business Manager for Site, Custodian),while the Business Office and Educational Leadership Team continue their work. There's a nifty diagram that shows the relationships of the group, but I don't have it yet (I'll post it when I do). The point that matters is that by meeting regularly, with clearly defined (and overlapping) realms of foci, these various administrative teams will be assuming responsibility and authority for issues, such as marketing and site maintenance, that formerly fell in murky areas of individual positions, rather than collectively onto a team.
The second half of the meeting was a reprise of the activities through which Mitch led the full faculty in the first faculty meeting of the year, back during fall work week (which most admin had not attended). He began by having us read, and discuss in pairs, the poem A Martian Sends A Postcard Home by Craig Raine. This is an exercise in interpretation and description designed to lead one to question assumptions about the meaning of what one sees. From there, we were asked to respond to 10 statements about what it means to be learning-centered, identifying the one with which we most and least identified. Then we shared which one of the statements we find ourselves actually doing most often, in our daily work. The 10 statements about learning were the following (areas in bold were in bold in the original handout we received):
1. Learning is fundamentally about making and maintaining connections; biologically through neural networks; mentally among concepts, ideas and meanings; and experientially through interaction between the mind and the environment, self, and other; generality and context, deliberation and action.
2. Learning is enhanced by taking place in the context of a compelling situation that balances challenge and opportunity, stimulating and utilizing the brain's ability to conceptualize quickly and its capacity and need for contemplation and reflection upon experience.
3. Learning is an active search for meaning by the learner -- constructing knowledge rather than passively recieving it, shaping as well as being shaped by experiences.
4. Learning is developmental, a cumulative process involving the whole person, relating past and present, integrating the new with the old, starting from but transcending personal concerns and interests.
5. Learning is done by individuals who are intrinsically tied to others as social beings, interacting as competitors or collaborators, constraining or supporting the learning process, and able to enhave learning through cooperation and sharing.
6. Learning is strongly affected by the educational climate in which it takes place; the settings and surroundings, the influences of others, and the values accorded to the life of the mind and to learning achievements.
7. Learning requires frequent feedback if it is to be sustained, practice if it is to be nourished, and opportunities to use what has been learned.
8. Much learning takes place informally and incidentally, beyond explicit teaching or the classroom, in casual contacts with other beings, in family interactions, in active social and community involvements, and in unplanned but fertile and complex situations.
9. Learning is grounded in particular contexts and individual experiences, requiring effort to transfer specific knowledge and skills to other circumstances or to more general understandings and to unlearn personal views and approaches when confronted by new information.
10. Learning involves the ability of individuals to monitor their own learning, to understand how knowledge is acquired, to develop strategies for learning based on discerning their capacities and limitations, and to be aware of their own ways of knowing in approaching new bodies of knowledge and other disciplinary frameworks.
What I like about this activity is that it acknowledges that if we are to be a learning-centered school, the administrators need to be thinking in and working with the language of being learning-centered, just as the teachers, students, and parents are and will. It both honors the way in which our work is so different from that of most adults in the school (the faculty), and also holds us responsible for engaging in the same thinking routines as the faculty.
Having read these 10 statements, what jumps out at you about what it means to be learning-centered? If you had to pick ONE to characterize the learning experience that you would wish for your child, which would it be? And, which ONE is the one that you most experience in your own professional workplace?
The meeting closed with some brief logistical housekeeping, and a round of genuine appreciations. This was an atypical meeting in the sense that it was designed to get us thinking and sharing together, not commenting on reports or having a working meeting on a specific topic. Those are the sorts of meetings to which we are much more accustomed, and frankly, the kind that are much more boring, and do far less to develop collegiality (constructive congeniality centered around doing good work) than an meeting such as this.
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