Welcome to the Learning Action Team

“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.” ― Gloria Steinem

Welcome to the Strategic Planning Learning Action Team Blog

The Learning Action team has been given a grand and exciting task: to imagine a school that fulfills the mission, student learning objectives and core values of AISC.  As we struggle with ideas both large and small, no stone should be left unturned.  Our only boundaries are to honor the previous work and abide by the strategic delimiters.  Each of us are making sense of this task in our own way.  In honoring our team's operating agreements or norms, let us engage in a spirited and lively discussion of what matters to us, and the school community.  The intention of this blog is to brainstorm, investigate, analyze, and dream of the possibilities that will allow AISC to transform from a good organization to a great one.

The dynamic nature of the blog lends itself to all sorts of media.  Here we can post the words, links, presentations and videos as resources for our ongoing investigation of what learning is, and how the best thinking about education fits into our goal of envisioning learning at AISC. In order to stay abreast of the postings to the blog, you may consider subscribing using the RSS feed.  I can assist you with this if needed.

As I work to make sense of the task ahead, I have considered some of my own organization of the process.  I share it here as a beginning of the exciting and challenging conversation we have ahead of us.  In addition to the questions we asked earlier (and I am hoping we can either add the questions as additional posts here or wait until they come back to us from Kim), I have begun to think of others. My hunch is that the more we dig, the more questions will arise.  Eventually, we will have to prioritize, but for now, let's just put it all out there.

On Friday, I began to think of the work at three levels:

• The larger systems level- this, for me, is the view from 30,000 feet.  

• What does AISC need to create in order to meet the needs of learners and fulfill the vision?

• What are schools doing that is "blowing the top" off of a model that has existed essentially unchanged since the late 1800's? 

• How does change occur with the quantum leap that the Planning team articulated during their visit? 

• Here is the Did You Know/Shift Happens You Tube video that was referenced in our conversation.

• The "best practice" level- this might be the view from 10,000 feet

• What style or attitude of pedagogy can best fulfill the vision?

• What philosophy do we hold concerning EAL learners and is it consistent with the vision?

• How are we creating experiences for students that go beyond the walls of AISC?

• The "programmatic level- this is the view from 2,000 feet 

• Does the current World Languages program fit?

• Are we a school that uses Readers/Writers workshop and are we implementing the program consistently? 

• Do Humanities and the combined Math/Science classes at the middle level meet the needs of all learners? 

• Is the middle school schedule equitable?

There are many ways to approach this topic and I look forward to seeing how each of you makes sense of the task ahead.  Our team is full of experiences, and has access to resources, that literally span the globe.  I am honored to be working with each one of you.