What is school for?

Imagine that you could gather everyone in a school together and ask this question.

I think it is an important question and it almost never occurs to those of us in education and learning to ask it.

So what we decided to do this year was to gather teachers, students, administrators and specialists in our educational program together at the start of each day and ask ourselves what school is for.

We asked the question this way,

“What is our shared purpose?”

Everybody was encouraged to share (and someone always shared) and in this way we created our shared purposes each day. Sometimes the principal led the meeting. Sometimes a student or teacher.

We created shared purposes together and then noticed if we were able to do things to move toward our shared purposes or if we got bogged down with internal distractions or other obstacles.

The process was messy. At times it was uncomfortable. We did it anyway (even when we didn’t feel like it) because it was important. Our students discovered they had a voice in the process which helped them hang in there when they felt like giving up (giving up is something that happens from time to time) and for the most part they kept going.

We all kept talking and moving toward our purposes.

So we are learning about how to do this thing called school differently. We are reinventing along the way how we see and do learning.

One meeting at a time. Discovering things together.

Asking the question gets the process of shared purposes going. Returning to it each day reminds us we are in this together and we can figure out what school is for each of us.

You can try it out and if you want, let me know what you discover.