“There will always be more good ideas than you and your teams have the capacity to execute.”
~ From The 4 Disciplines of Execution
A team of directors, administrators, teachers, and school leaders from FRCS have spent the last two days trying to identify and target improvement goals for the upcoming year. This is a regular rhythm around here. At the end of each school year, Mr. Cooper assembles an expanded leadership team from the school, and we spend time in reflection over the past year and in forward planning over future years. We look at the responses from the annual parent survey (thank you, to those of you who completed this), we dialogue about what worked well and what continues to need improvement, and we spend time together in reflection, prayer, and community.
Chasing improvement in education is rewarding and difficult. Education seems infinitely complex. It feels as if there is a constantly shifting landscape around student development, societal pressures, our own institutional needs, and the academic needs of individual students. This makes seeking improvement in education an incredibly challenging and rewarding enterprise. Schools are often very quick to identify good ideas. I am convinced this is because teaching is a profession composed of some of the most skilled, creative, and adaptable individuals on the planet. We like challenges. We, by the nature of our profession, love to chase growth. And we are a creative bunch. It is usually easy for this group to come up with incredibly good ideas. It is often much more difficult for us to find ways to effectively measure, sustain, and implement these ideas.
I have come to greatly appreciate the thinking behind the science of improvement, and it is clear (as in the quote above) that developing good ideas is different than thinking through all the steps, structures, resources, and personnel shifts that would be necessary in order to enact those good ideas. I am grateful to work in a place which allows us to move slowly in order to act quickly. We move slowly as we seek to understand problems and as we carefully consider the impact that proposed solutions may have on the young people we serve. But then, once identified, Mr. Cooper enables and empowers us to act quickly to chase improvement and bring ideas to life. I am thankful for this school culture around improvement.
The teacher in me likes to chase it.
