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 answer these questions. As it turned out, the ideas were more so brilliant than clever!
When the meeting began, I had the two questions charted on large Post-It paper. In the protocol, individuals had four minutes to write down responses to each question on Post-It Notes. The participants then placed their Post-It Notes on the questions, somewhat randomly. Then, the fun began. As a group, we read each response and tried to assign them to actionable categories that we created as we went.
In response to Question #1, our group first identified the importance of having students involved in the decision-making of the school. They identified multiple events that parents usually plan and recognized that students would add an important element to planning, while allowing them to learn to problem-solve at the same time. We then discussed the importance of project-based learning. However, we noted that this is done best when students have the freedom to decide what the project is going to look like. For instance, we discussed the importance of being part of projects such as building Habitat for Humanity homes...but we know that these blueprints are already designed. We need activities where students can choose, design, and implement an annual community project.
Similarly, we generated several ideas around encouraging students to address the problems that compose our world's current reality. For instance, if we had a topic for the week or month that the whole school was encouraged to discuss in Advisement - so long as the students were encouraged to debate and challenge one another - school would be guaranteed to be a place where students learn about something that is affecting them today. We also discussed the power of having a school-wide Twitter chat (at an organized time) about an important topic, teaching students to connect with others with purpose on social media. We also discussed the idea of having students participate in a "Big Read" so that the whole school might be talking about the same book.
No matter how we engage students around questioning, reasoning, and problem-solving, we have to make it clear that debating the world around them is a good thing! We are teaching the students to be open-minded to the ideas of others, so listening with a willingness to engage in positive debate is a piece of this.
Our second question, regarding the teaching of ethics and service, generated conversation around the difference between "Christian" service and "being helpful." We identified this as a key piece to the education a student receives at a Catholic High School. Some of the ideas generated here included having the students generate four-year plans for fulfilling the school's service requirement (including what type of service would be done so that students are mindful of stretching themselves) and requiring service separate from school events. If we truly want to teach service as our Catholic heritage would want it to be taught, we must help students to differentiate between these two types of service.
Lastly, we determined it would be important for students to be involved in the process of identifying and approving service work as worth of Borgia's Mission. Right now, the Campus Minister and school leaders do this. However, if we can involve students in making these decisions, their understanding of this concept will be all the stronger.
While I am reporting many of the ideas generated at this meeting, these are just the tip of the iceberg. Many more great thoughts were shared by stakeholders who care very much for Borgia in the present and "beyond!" I hope we can all get excited to see how these ideas are implemented in the coming school year.
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 answer these questions. As it turned out, the ideas were more so brilliant than clever!
When the meeting began, I had the two questions charted on large Post-It paper. In the protocol, individuals had four minutes to write down responses to each question on Post-It Notes. The participants then placed their Post-It Notes on the questions, somewhat randomly. Then, the fun began. As a group, we read each response and tried to assign them to actionable categories that we created as we went.
In response to Question #1, our group first identified the importance of having students involved in the decision-making of the school. They identified multiple events that parents usually plan and recognized that students would add an important element to planning, while allowing them to learn to problem-solve at the same time. We then discussed the importance of project-based learning. However, we noted that this is done best when students have the freedom to decide what the project is going to look like. For instance, we discussed the importance of being part of projects such as building Habitat for Humanity homes...but we know that these blueprints are already designed. We need activities where students can choose, design, and implement an annual community project.
Similarly, we generated several ideas around encouraging students to address the problems that compose our world's current reality. For instance, if we had a topic for the week or month that the whole school was encouraged to discuss in Advisement - so long as the students were encouraged to debate and challenge one another - school would be guaranteed to be a place where students learn about something that is affecting them today. We also discussed the power of having a school-wide Twitter chat (at an organized time) about an important topic, teaching students to connect with others with purpose on social media. We also discussed the idea of having students participate in a "Big Read" so that the whole school might be talking about the same book.
No matter how we engage students around questioning, reasoning, and problem-solving, we have to make it clear that debating the world around them is a good thing! We are teaching the students to be open-minded to the ideas of others, so listening with a willingness to engage in positive debate is a piece of this.
Our second question, regarding the teaching of ethics and service, generated conversation around the difference between "Christian" service and "being helpful." We identified this as a key piece to the education a student receives at a Catholic High School. Some of the ideas generated here included having the students generate four-year plans for fulfilling the school's service requirement (including what type of service would be done so that students are mindful of stretching themselves) and requiring service separate from school events. If we truly want to teach service as our Catholic heritage would want it to be taught, we must help students to differentiate between these two types of service.
Lastly, we determined it would be important for students to be involved in the process of identifying and approving service work as worth of Borgia's Mission. Right now, the Campus Minister and school leaders do this. However, if we can involve students in making these decisions, their understanding of this concept will be all the stronger.
While I am reporting many of the ideas generated at this meeting, these are just the tip of the iceberg. Many more great thoughts were shared by stakeholders who care very much for Borgia in the present and "beyond!" I hope we can all get excited to see how these ideas are implemented in the coming school year.
Comments
Post a Comment