Saturday, November 29, 2008

Schools That Learn: Community

On November 20th, I had a great conversation with Diana, Keri and Bette regarding the community section of Schools That Learn. The discipline described in the book was very meaningful to me as I believe increased community involvement would really benefit my school in particular. After having our conversation, I realized that every school can be empowered and and do better work when there is a strong link between community members, parents, administrators, teachers and schools within a district. When void of a relationship or sense of community, a school will and the people within the school (both employees and students) will be void an important element.

I do believe, especially after our conversation, that it is important to make an effort to focus on the positive elements of a school environment and that will enable individuals to take action and steps in the right direction; as well as motivate others to make change. Schools That Learn offers many rich examples of how schools and and groups of people have accomplished such change and community linking. One section describes how the school determined what goals they wanted to achieve and they would then periodically come together to report and describe how they were doing (even if the goals proved challenging) with out judgment from administrator or anyone for that matter. This would allow all to brainstorm and offer support as the book also points out that good ideas can come fro anyone and anywhere; not just leaders.

Reading this section of the book and my conversation with classmates made me clealy realize more than I had before the relevance of community as it pertains to the success of any school.