The challenge for the school embarking on innovative
practice is to communicate clearly and concisely what it is they are doing that
sets them—and that will set their students—apart from the crowd. In the first
part of this series, back in early September when summer’s glow was still upon
me, I suggested that colleges are actually pretty smart about appreciating
educational practices that differ from the mainstream; they want to understand
what secondary schools are up to, and they are looking for factors that
differentiate students within applicant pools that, viewed from a certain
distance, tend to look pretty homogeneous in terms of programs and numbers.
Last time out on this topic I addressed the matter of
getting faculties on board—perhaps focusing as much on what not to do as on approaches to take.
Embed the new practice in a positive, encouraging vision of how it will make
teachers more effective and student learning authentically deeper.
If colleges and faculties may seem like toughest audiences
for innovation, the toughest of all may be “the marketplace”—current and
prospective families.
Throughout much of Greater Red Sox (and Yankee and Dodger)
nation, four years at an independent school can cost well in excess of a
hundred large; a full 14-year stint at a PreK–12 can run into some real money,
even in markets where annual tuition levels are less likely to induce vertigo.
The long and the short of it is that schools need to present themselves to
families—those they have as well as those they want—as offering excellent value
(or an excellent “value proposition,” in the business-speak educational leaders
seem to favor): that combination of cognitive, social, emotional, creative, and
civic learning that gets students to the best place they can be, the best and
most engaged versions of themselves at any developmental point.
Of course, what every school must do in order to thrive is
to provide a reality—that is, an actual student and community experience—that
matches the claims or implications made in its promotional and self-descriptive
materials, from the mission statement to the “Head of School’s Welcome” to the
viewbook. It needs to deliver on its “brand promise,” whether that promise is
of all-innovation, all the time, or a stately traditionalism.
There are a handful of descriptors that schools already use
to explain themselves in ways that most audiences understand, or at least think
they understand to the point where explanations are generally regarded as not being required: the
words Montessori, “Quaker” (the Religious Society of Friends, of course),
Waldorf, and a few names relating to orders within the Roman Catholic
tradition—Jesuit, Sacred Heart—telegraph essential values that tend to clarify
and differentiate aspects of the kind of experience that students are likely to
have in schools featuring these terms in their names or other identity
messaging. Many St. Somebody’s schools, whether they remain so or not, started
life with a certain relatively traditional faith-based program and still
communicate in their names a kind of Old School-ness that is comforting to some
(and perhaps off-putting to others).
Other terms are more fraught with the possibilities of
misunderstanding. “Country Day” schools, a term that initially described
location and (more or less) schedule and program, has come to imply in some
places a kind of informality bordering on “progressive” and often, again by
region, schools for younger students only. It ain’t necessarily so, but the
schools must explain what they mean. "Progressive" itself can be even more confusing.
By the same token, schools need to explain to prospective
families what they mean when they propose to deliver educational programming that doesn't look quite like their father's school. There
are buzzwords a-plenty these days—design thinking, student-centered, STEM and
STEAM, project-based learning, flipped classrooms, to name just a few—that mean
varying things even to those of us in the biz; how parents are supposed to make
sense of these, I don’t know.
Or rather, I sort of do know, and so do you. We help parents
make sense of practices that weren’t around in their own day either by not
employing them, or at least not relying too heavily on the terms alone, or by
providing concrete, real examples of what they mean, what they are actually
like, when they are lived by students in classrooms. Stories, authentic stories,
preferably told by students themselves, are what will allow a school
undertaking an innovative or at least novel practice to explain itself.
Recently I heard Australian educational guru Bruce Dixon say that
people will embrace change if it is presented in ways that are congruent with
the way they see the world and if the change has meaning for them. What parents
want for their kids is an educational experience that validates them and
fortifies them to move forward in life, in ways both concrete (they learn
things that will help them succeed in their next educational experiences or in
other aspects of civic and vocational life) and abstract (they learn how to
create conditions in their lives that bring happiness and meaning to themselves
and those around them). This is a parent's framework for understanding the school,
and this is the meaning they seek. Since this is more or less what schools,
including independent schools, purport to provide, the narrative of schools’
stories should focus on how the new
practice will meet these two goals. Evidence is good—even anecdotal
evidence.
A last thing I would urge upon a school seeking to present a
new approach to its constituencies, including families both current and
prospective, is confidence. A school that is doing well and has amassed a pile
of market capital by virtue of a long record of success should consider (as I
have written here before) the benefit to be gained from using its reputation to
leverage innovation: not just “It’s a good idea, so we’re doing it” but “It’s a
good idea because we’re doing it.” A
school with less market clout will need to be a bit more circumspect, but a thorough
understanding of the practice and its implications for kids’ success will help
communicate the value. Good stories that specifically and confidently address
anxieties can help. Pretending that everything will be just fine or stonewalling (or obfuscating) will not.
It’s not a sign of weakness to put serious thought into how
innovation is to be presented to its audiences, especially as we enter a time
(John Seely Brown calls it The Big Shift)
when innovation will become a kind of norm as we learn to respond to the
possibilities of education in our time and build what Bruce Dixon calls Schools
for Modern Learners.
The real weakness will be not to innovate, or not to seek out and incorporate new practices
at all, protesting that the school’s “markets”—colleges, its own staff,
families—will never accept change. Educated properly (and that’s what we do,
isn’t it?), they will.
