Now that we have a critical mass of teachers involved in transforming our school, the need to get a critical mass of other stakeholders involved is imminent.  As I began my sabbatical this year, this issue was at the forefront of my planning.  The three groups of people that I have been thinking about are students, community members, and parents.

I have been struggling to keep students engaged in this work as they are extremely busy people.  Students are committed to sports, drama, work and so many other activities.  Many of these students will have to wait until they have their own children to enjoy the benefits of these changes.  Despite that, I have several that are consistently involved.  At the beginning of October, two students joined the rest of my steering committee for a planning session run by Eagle Rock School Professional Developers and organized by the Rowland Foundation.  I was proud to have the most student representation of any other team.  I was also so impressed with the level of participation and articulation that these students were able to exhibit during this day of training.  We spent the day, as a steering committee, articulating our goal and creating systems for planning and communicating.  While we need far more student involvement, the opportunity for students and teachers to plan collaboratively was powerful.  I will be working on creating systems that will allow this type of teacher student collaboration.  It is clear that the system is an essential component of this interaction because time is a huge barrier for both teachers and students.

During another student event, a colleague and myself took six students to a training offered by Up for Learning, an organization that focuses on increasing student voice and ownership of learning.  The training focused on the need for growth mindset as we make these changes as well as how to market this message to the appropriate stakeholders.  The goal was to equip students with information about growth and fixed mindsets and why these ideas are so important to personal and proficiency based learning.  The impression I got from the two high school students that came from our high school was that the information itself was a review.  This makes a lot of sense because we have been hammering the kids with these ideas for the past two years.  Their “boredom” with the ideas (no reflection on the training at all) actually led to some really interesting work on giving the ideas a fresh look.  During the session on marketing, they came up with some great ideas for interactive art installations, social media campaigns and collaborations.  I came up with some great ideas about how to engage parents (more on that in November).  Finding the time to make all the amazing ideas a reality is another issue.  Again, it became clear to me how we need systems in place to allow students to follow through on their creative innovations.  The connection to personal learning is clear.  I fear that student schedules are so filled up with structured time, that all the time needed to develop their more creative sides is not prioritized.  I know that everyone worries about the unmotivated students not being able to use unstructured time wisely; just last week I had to request that one of my more academically unmotivated students refrain from doing research about a project for automotive class; another student was researching the building of a bike racing course.  I’m not convinced that the students who are unmotivated by traditional coursework wouldn’t be motivated if they were able to pursue their own interests.  Interests that have plenty of potential to be purposeful ideas.

I acknowledge how difficult it is for students to collaborate with teachers.  So many times, we shoot down their ideas because we have more experience than they do despite the real need for us to hear where they are at so we can meet them there.  So many times, we become defensive because we have such an investment in our ideas and the transformations we are talking about.  Many times we may feel we know what’s best or know more than our students. While this all may be true, we need to create systems that allow us to become partners with students in a way that gives us the much needed time that doing this well requires.  It is so important that students do not feel that their voices are “token” but that they are true student collaborators and have power over their learning.  In order to do this, we need to begin to trust that students will use their time wisely and we need to provide real opportunities for them to practice this type of self-directedness.  If your school has a system for student collaboration, please share it in the comments.