When School is More Than a Grade

It was time for our 10-year accreditation. The groaning had already begun: early morning meetings, lots of box checking, recommendations that would gather dust . . . This time, however, it was different.

The year was 2011, and McDonogh School, where I have worked for the past twenty years, was getting restless. Restless how? Well, there was a lot of chatter in the air around that time. Sir Ken Robinson gave a Ted Talk that was, for awhile, the most-watched video on YouTube. Jossey Bass seemed to be publishing books on learning and the brain left and right, and everyone was talking about 21st-century skills.

The question was this: could McDonogh shake up the old approach to accreditation and make this the start of a strategic plan for teaching and learning? At that time, McDonogh’s Associate Head of School was Tim Fish, and Tim—who left McDonogh to be the Chief Innovation Officer at NAIS and is now the President of his own consulting firm, two chairs studio—called the accreditation director at the Association of Independent Maryland & DC Schools and asked if we could shake things up.

The anwer was, “yes!”

What did we want to shake? Well, we certainly saw value in the accreditation process, but we were hoping the self-study portion—at least the section dedicated to the academic program—could be more of a generative exercise than merely a reporting one. And so a colleague of mine and I were asked to chair the effort, and started with a blank page. What could we do?

A lot. To cut to the chase, we drated five fundamental questions that we planned to ask of each discipline in each of the three divisions at McDonogh School:

• What are the strengths of your program?

• What are the concerns about your program?

• What will success look like if you address these concerns?

• What are your short-, medium-, and long-term action items?

• How will you know if you are successful?

Not rocket-science, to be sure, but these questions (which had a bunch of sub-questions, if we’re being honest!) got our faculty thinking about a curriculum and approach to pedagogy that hadn’t been the focus of attention in a long time.

We were so fortunate that McDonogh supported a year of retreats with each subject area. We asked that chairs and team leaders be in attendance, and we asked for a few other colleagues to join. We spent day-long, off-site retreats digging into these questions, and we learned a lot. In fact, we haven’t stopped asking these good questions.

But what did we learn? We’ll answer this in the next installment of the LifeReady Hub Letter.

Thanks for reading!