Imagining Our Way into School Improvement

Jayden Hardacre on July 26, 2011 in School Stories

Last week I was lucky enough to participate in a gathering called America’s Imagination Summit convened by the Lincoln Center Institute (the education arm of the Performing Arts Center), and held at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.  The Summit was the culmination of a series of Imagination Conversations that had been conducted around the country to bring local leaders together to consider the role that imagination and creativity can and should play in improving the education experience for all our children in a variety of settings.  With a few notable exceptions, the Summit avoided the now popular activity of bashing public schools and the professionals who work in them. Instead it concentrated on the role that imagination, i.e.” the capacity to see what is not,” plays in problem solving and how that approach can support our working together to ensure that a rich educational experience is offered to all our students, regardless of their social or economic station in life.

What follows are a few of the inspirational and thought-provoking moments from the speakers and panels:

  • Sir Ken Robinson affirmed that imagination is the fundamental capacity of humans that sets us apart from other life forms; that is we can conceive of a past and imagine a future.  The gift of foresight is the height of the human condition. The challenge is to put imagination to work to solve problems.  Imagination is what we use in the face of facts; the ability to see alternatives and act on them.  Sadly, our education system is still locked into the past and sees creativity as on the margins.  The challenge is to ensure that we develop a culture (he defines as communities of meaning) that puts imagination to use across the system and curriculum to improve practice and student learning.

  • Admiral Mike Miller, superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy, stated that the nation’s future leadership is predicated on imagination…the ability to see what our nation can be.  He sees the Naval Academy as a leadership laboratory that encourages students to consider a mixture of desperate elements to produce something novel.  In this quest, failure is more important than success; failure can lead to perseverance, resilience, and motivation to learn from those mistakes.  The Naval Academy strives to instill a sense of life-long learning and creativity in its aspiring officer leaders.

  • Judith Kaye, former chief judge of the State of New York, said her focus after leaving her post as chief judge was to “keep kids out of court and in school.”  She stated that we know the problem and are drowning in data; now we need to work on solutions to keep kids in school and make sure those schools contribute to their success.  During her tenure as chief judge, drug courts were established to keep offenders out of prison, where they were successfully transformed into hardened criminals, and instead in an interdisciplinary program that brought a variety of services and professionals into the offenders’ lives to return them to being productive citizens.  Developing this program as an alternative to incarceration took creative thinking and a collaborative approach.

  • John Deasy, new superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, asserted that without imagination we can’t have empathy, which is crucial if we’re going to make sure that school districts, particularly large, urban ones like LA Unified (second largest school district in the US) are to be successful in reaching the students they serve.  The biggest challenge to moving a school or district forward is getting a school team to “look up” and see the possibilities for all students and not “down” at what has been in a student’s past or family situation.  He also asserted that we as a society tend to see race and poverty as “deficit issues” instead of assets to be built on, and that we need to involve students in the discussion of those assets.  He also said that educators should be held in an iconic position and those who stand in front of our youth should be the most dedicated professionals in whom we invest a supportive and continuous learning environment.

This is just a taste of the richness of the conversation at the Imagination Summit, but it was a reminder that the conversation around providing powerful education experiences for our students and the professionals who work with them too often centers around acrimony and finger pointing….blaming the evil “other” for the failure of all of our children to thrive and grow and learn.  Participating in this summit was a reminder for me that this dynamic has to end…now.  As Eric Liu stated in his closing remarks, “Talent is the new oil.”  We need to nurture it and make the economic case for educating all our students as well as the social case.  All of us need to think deeply about what are the things we can do to change moments of inspiration into action and work across fields and areas of expertise to ensure rich opportunities for young people that will ultimately serve us all.

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