Dear Building School Culture Trainers: 

Thanks to those of you who could participate on October 29th’s call. Our numbers were rather reduced, which is a concern, but hopefully those of you can gain ideas from this summary. A recording of the session is also available on the web site, click here.

If you have ideas for how to increase participation for the next call, please let us know.

Four Building School Culture Trainers were on the call. They ranged from former superintendents to classroom teachers, and hence our discussions were a terrific blend of leadership levels from direct contact with students to administration of systems.

 We discussed prominent examples of the following concepts and findings from IGE:

• Moral perimeter: 
  • One way to look at “perimeter” is that it’s the limit of your comfort zone. School leaders need to become aware of their comfort zone, and commit to a continuous expansion even when it may be challenging and leave you feeling off balance.
  • Girls especially – but young teenagers generally – need to explore this idea and become aware of it. They often find fault with behaviors outside their perimeter that are perfectly acceptable within their clique!

• Driver and Connector:
  • We discussed the big opportunity here to strengthen higher order thinking skills through ethics.
  • We discussed how, in a system where it’s difficult to “get beyond the day by day” because of too many demands, we tend to get stuck at the lower end of Maslow, just trying to keep things controlled and safe but not proactively modeling and promoting critical thinking.
  • The irony being that, if we could reside further up Bloom’s taxonomy, we might actually build awareness and appreciation for ethics.
  • We discussed the perennial dilemma that seems to pit academics against safe schools, and how ethics and IGE’s approach can bridge or fuse this polarity.
  • Tone at the Top:
    • We discussed the ongoing importance of school leadership: “how goes the principal, so goes the school.” 
    • Classroom teachers have a similar opportunity and influence at the classroom level

After these discussions, we talked about the Building School Culture (BSC) format and purpose.  Those on the call agreed that we should perhaps begin our workshops by putting the dilemma of academics vs. safety on the table, but then facilitate into the Barometer activity with care not to factionalize or derail the discussion. This may mean a very brief slide depiction that we return to at the end of the BSC.  (I will experiment with that soon and report back!) We also discussed promoting the workshop by mentioning all the areas of Education these activities and tools are continuing to effectively address:

• Anti-bullying:  Buy into core ethical values through discussion and concensus; how to demonstrate them in all walks of school life.
• Critical thinking/21^st century skills:  Embracing gray areas and building competency around complexity.
• Global Education:  Learning about our common ground and the universal nature of ethical challenges – human challenges.

We concluded that this work increases the life chances of all students and more people need to know about this important work!

 As a result of this call, I feel more empowered and confident about the good work we are all doing. Thanks for your efforts in this regard. We will be back in touch with you in a couple of months regarding a conference call for the Winter.

Meanwhile, keep up the good work and please let me know how we at IGE can support your activity.