The district’s mission statement is typical of many school districts. It’s usually one statement that is designed to attempt to capture the big picture or vision of what our purpose is as a public school system. Therefore, it has to be a lot of things to a lot of people, which leaves it open to a lot of interpretation. I don’t think anyone would argue that life long learning is an important goal, but as we’ve been reading, talking, thinking about brain research in the last year, it seems clear that we are always learning regardless of our circumstances. Which makes the transformation part really the key here. What are we learning? How do we learn best? How does our learning change us in significant ways? What do we do with the learning? If we as an organization are going to “transform” lives, we probably need to dig deeper into what our role is in helping our students become something more.
The good news is that we’re taking advantage of the opportunity to become stronger voices as leaders of learning in our schools and beyond. Each of us has studied and researched an aspect of innovative learning and now we have the chance to inspire others and hopefully get this big train moving forward in a way that will serve our kids best.