Questions

As so many Americans did on Inauguration Day, I watched with anticipation and listened eagerly to the words of our new president. I felt the motivation of his speech as he called each of us to service. Change always seems to be an ambiguous term that makes many people uncomfortable. Personally, I like the idea of change as long as it is not change solely for the sake of change. Our president suggested to us all that we are not asking the right questions about our government. As such a suggestion, I would inquire if we are asking the right questions about our students, our school districts and our educational system as a whole.

The question is does our educational system work? Are we preparing students to create their own future, or are we deciding for them what that future will be and preparing them for it. If we are the ones deciding what the future holds, then I propose it is no longer the future, but the present.

Becky Cowan
Cambridge Elections Strategist

Leadership

No two Strategic Thinking sessions are alike. The success of each depends on the participants. Our most recent program was extraordinary because the participants were extraordinary. So I learned as much or more than I taught.

In our discussion of the current misguided definitions of “leadership” (that is: skills, behavior, principles, mysterious combinations), the questions from the class reminded me of a fairly extensive study we did years ago involving primarily corporate employees – mostly middle management and line workers. When we asked them who (what attributes) they actually followed the answers were (in order of importance):

· Character: moral; can be trusted
· Competence: knows his/her job better than anyone else
· Commitment: present in the most difficult time
· Concern: sees others as fellow human beings – not as statistics

I think those answers say more than all the books on leadership combined.

Cheers!

William J. Cook, Jr., Ph.D.
Cambridge President

What is the purpose of education?

What is the purpose of education?

This seems like a simple question for each of us to answer, especially if we are in education. Over the past 20 years, I have been a teacher, curriculum director, consultant, assistant superintendent for instruction, and associate superintendent. I have facilitated a number of initiatives in a number of districts that have purported to have positive impact on students. More recently, I have worked on a number of projects spread across the globe that are also expected to have a dynamic impact on students. I felt like I knew the answer to the question of the purpose: to help each child reach his/her own full potential …to free them to create their own future… or something like that.

Can we talk?

For the past two days, I have had the great pleasure of sitting in a room with about 20 other educators thinking and having honest dialogue about the educational system. I recently read a piece by the president of NSDC in which she distinguished dialogue from other types of conversation (e.g., discussion, debate) by stating that dialogue is a conversation in which you learn and, therefore, it changes you. So, I feel it is appropriate to call this interaction over the past two days a dialogue in this sense of the word. I am changed because of it. I have discovered that even though I thought I was working toward the purpose of preparing students to create their own future, I have been thinking like, and therefore, talking like (or vice versa) I was preparing them for the future.

You say tomato…

Is this a simple matter of semantics? I have learned it is actually bedrock philosophy. I have listened to, read, been depressed by, and shared the sentiments of all the futurists. I have helped build curricula far and wide based on the idea of a skill set for the 21st century. All in the name of preparing students for the future which means presupposing what their future will be. It is liberating and intuitively healing to confess we don’t know their future and don’t have the right to decide or predict what it will be. It is even more exciting to understand that each one of them, each one of us, possesses the power to create the future! …and that is the power of strategy!

Shannon Buerk
Cambridge Senior Strategist
Reflections on Strategic Thinking Course January 12-14, 2009