In the last few weeks our team has been meeting to move planning for the new school forward. The walls of our new home are covered with dry erase panels, white paper, and stickie notes of ideas and timelines. And in the midst of all of this great thinking we have a challenge. How to create room for something new and not be tempted to jump on the monkey bar mentality that is so much a part of mechanistic thinking.
Recently we were in a planning meeting with other stakeholders and the acronyms were flying. While I feel relatively literate in educationese, I finally had to raise my hand and ask for some clarifications. The way we change our language into acronyms, soundbites, cliches, etc. is just another way to systematize our brains and miss the opportunities to change. There were many assumptions made in this meeting and there wasn't a single moment where the pace of conversation paused to ask, "Do we really need all these things we keep spending money on?"
So back to our planning room we went and then the volume of work was everywhere on the walls. I saw monkey bars everywhere. And our team has a way of looking at all of this and asking great questions. What is it we want for kids? Kids don't care about the majority of what we educators labor over. They want to know if their teachers care about them. They want to have fun and learn. So this all comes back to our reason for existing. Why School? To steal the book title from Will Richardson...
And in the moments after we ask that question, we need to pause, be silent, and think about possibilities. How has the world changed? What implications do those changes have for us? To stay off the monkey bars we have to stay focused on what really matters. And the goals we set better create space for something new. Otherwise we will be back in the factory mindset very fast.
If we want our children to think, dream, and change the world for the better, we have to do that same work daily. We have to stay off the monkey bars!
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