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Many schools we have worked with at GenYES have a vision of students and teachers co-creating the learning environment. In such an environment, empowered students step up and take part in the effort to improve education, and tech-savvy teachers feel more confident about integrating technology.
Often, the stated objectives at these schools don’t adequately describe the full vision. There are unspoken wishes, hopes, and desires that go along with the hard statistics. Sometimes these sound “soft” and are hard to measure, yet they are often the most important goals of all. If schools can put these unspoken goals in writing, they can more effectively plan for and implement them, and more importantly, figure out how to measure them. Finding hidden objectives
To help schools find these hidden objectives, we encourage them to “say the change you want to see.” In this simple visioning exercise, we ask them to first imagine that everything they hope for comes true and then to write a fictional story for their community newspaper about “what happened.”
We ask them to make sure that the story is simple and clear, without academic citations, obtuse language, grant gobbledygook, or pages of distracting data. Requiring them to use the present tense and conversational language creates impact, and the quotes and anecdotes they come up with make the vision come alive. For example: After a year of participating in the TEAMS project, student excitement about learning is at an all-time high at Fallsburg Middle School. Mary K., a seventh-grade student, says, “I love learning this way! I was getting bad grades, but now I love coming to school.” Parents feel the same way and see the learning as being more “real world.” Before TEAMS, only 26 percent of FMS parents said they felt what their children were learning in school was relevant. After only one year, this rose dramatically to 87 percent.
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