October 2017
A Call for the “Coalition of the Willing”
As our students prepare to be 21st-century citizens, are our schools providing them with the knowledge, skills, and mindset they will need to thrive in an unpredictable and ever-changing world? Is our current model of teaching and learning, with roots in the agrarian and early industrial eras, readying them for current and future challenges, which range from the stress of a 24-hour news cycle fed by disaster to the workforce AI revolution? Whereas compliance, competition, and conformity served earlier workplaces, we now need and crave creativity, compassion, and the ability to explore and grasp complexities. How might we reimagine school—keeping what works well while exploring ways we might improve?
What if our schools took into consideration all that is currently known about learning and brain development? What if our schools reflected the richness of our local communities? What if our schools were designed by the kids and teachers who use them on a daily basis? What if our schools reflected the myriad of activities, flexibility, multi-disciplinarity, and ways of learning that today’s jobs demand? What if our schools focused more on process than outcome? What if our schools focused on wellbeing and collaboration instead of competition? What if a healthy person who knows how to care for herself and those around her were more important than an SAT score or a winning team?
Often, our schools seem “good enough,” and so it’s easy to let them remain as is, even when many of us have a nagging feeling that we could do better. After all, we produce a large number of National Merit scholars and send kids to some of the top universities in the country each year. It’s also easy to point to schools that are struggling much more than ours (“There are schools in New York City without any books!”). But let’s imagine beyond this outdated model and believe that our community has the right combination of resources to be a leader in the inevitable and much-needed next iteration of School. All of our students, including the top performing ones and those who are struggling to graduate, are losing out by not being challenged in more creative, hands-on ways, and by not having their whole selves addressed.
Why now? Why is this the perfect moment to consider what we want our schools to evolve into, to dream up how we can respect and challenge our kids, and to imagine how we can attract and value our educators? Because …
- We are on the heels of one of the largest turnouts ever for an Iowa City School Board election that brought in a slate of candidates interested in equity, collaboration, and project-based learning.
- The passing of the bond will fund our buildings and bring to rest some disagreements that have taken time and energy away from conversations about the content of school.
- The Iowa City Area Development group has made K-12 education one of its leading priorities.
- A UI class that proposes to invite the city to school is selling out the Englert Theatre each week.
- Given the morass at the national level, it feels like an especially crucial moment to dig deeply into the local.
- At the recent Iowa IDEAS conference—a conference intended to help Iowans become more curious about their future and the possibilities for growth and transformation—Trace Pickering, Vice Superintendent of Cedar Rapids Schools, started the conference with a set of slides that challenged the current model of education and invited a wholesale reimagining of education.
So, what do we want our schools to look like? A dialogue is needed to consider this question with open-ended curiosity. This dialogue needs to be like a rich stew—cooked over time with patience and with an array of ingredients. To bring forth multiple perspectives and ideas that range from wonderfully outlandish to the practical solutions that seem too obvious, these dialogues need to:
- Cut across the community—east and west; high and low income; white, beige, brown, and black; lifelong residents and newly arrived immigrants.
- Be organic and circular, not top-down.
- Be open ended—there cannot be a product or end result already in the organizers’ minds before conversations have even begun.
- Empower individuals so that there is as much possibility for individual differences to thrive as for group decisions to be made.
- Occur over time and not be rushed so that people can gradually come to the table and experience the conversation as it grows and changes. This slower speed and mindful connection making is the balm to the angry silos and lack of trust that has come to be normal.
- Involve experiences and voices from outside Iowa City, highlighting knowledge and successes from other educational systems. Guests to Iowa City, including via Hancher, The Witching Hour, ACT, The Green Room, and other UI entities, as well as special guests brought in just for this process, should be invited to participate.
- Allow for large and small endeavors to evolve—finite projects are just as welcome outcomes as larger scale change.
Initially, this conversation needs “a coalition of the willing”—a group of people dedicated to the above principles who can hold space for and build a container for the process of exploration, who are willing to make a time commitment to meet as a group and form connections. Business leaders. Teachers. Mechanics. Environmentalists. Neurologists. Poets. Students. Designers. All have a seat at the table.
The writer/historian Rebecca Solnit has said, “I want better metaphors. I want better stories. I want more openness. I want better questions.” The intention of this group is to form the nucleus of just that—an open, curious container that is moving toward a new story for our schools.
Does this idea excite you? Do you have a combination of wisdom, patience, community rootedness, and curiosity to share? Reach out – I’d love to talk!
Jennifer New
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