Building a Community of Inquiry and Service
As a fitting finish for a productive year, last night's final Borgia and Beyond meeting of 2015-2016 produced ideas that could have students thinking differently in 2016-2017. Borgia and Beyond is a piece of our school's continuous-improvement effort. It involves monthly meetings where stakeholders gather to address essential questions regarding the school. Last night, we used an "Affinity Mapping Protocol" to get at two key questions: 1. How can St. Francis Borgia become a community of inquiry, where students collectively question, reason, connect, deliberate, challenge, and problem-solve? and 2. How can St. Francis Borgia for its spirit of Catholic Heritage through the teaching of ethics and service? Importantly, the Affinity Mapping Protocol is a product of the National School Reform Faculty's Critical Friends Group trainings. Their protocols are designed to generate ideas from the unknown. So, I did not know what clever ideas our stakeholders might generate to