"Thinking big" needs powerful aspirations. What does that mean for schools?
Any international school has a vision and mission. But why do many of us not believe in their value and do not support their periodic modification, although their purpose is to shape any educational decision, including the unit planning process, as backward planning "in big"?
Because they often have not evoked from the school's DNA to furtherly allow all school community members to flourish and contribute to collective growth through them.
1. Embracing powerful aspirations and Nurturing Student Creativity
Students like having a vision and love to think about "What if...?"- the younger or less normed they are, the bigger their aspirations and inspiring their creative outcomes are. Pablo Picasso desperately longed for the retrieval of the innovative capacity children have. Now, we certainly must not maltreat our youngsters to inspire us as Picasso's children had to suffer; instead, we ought to change or eliminate any inventive kills within our systems, including our minds, to foster this ample potential and chance become genuinely independent learners that innovatively bring all of us further and more so face and solve sincere global problems. We, therefore, must nurture their creativity and protect students' healthy naivety as we gradually keep losing both on the way to adolescence. Idealism is a vital generator for students creating the most intriguing work with a fresh and admirable style of expressing pure and big ideas. Schools that manage to give students the lead in this and listen to their voices benefit from their visionary ideas. They create mission and vision statements on a partner level to have living ones that inspire all aspects of school life. Learning from students' aspirational ideas is vigorous; thus, it needs skills development among all stakeholders and, above all, it requires breaking hierarchies between the educational authorities and the student body, among educators and between teachers and leadership teams. Besides the students themselves, their teachers know students' needs more than anyone else in a school. Listening to their voices, trusting in their expertise and genuinely allowing them agency will sustainably enhance the momentum of change. Many school realities look different.
2. Overcoming Fear and Resistance
Besides power-driven egos, supremacy thinking and micromanagement, fear is the actual causation of withholding innovative energy. Do students fear ChatPTG? They don't - we do! We fear losing power, and control, wanting to maintain the known while, at times, over-valuing the traditional forms and structures. Loss of control triggers fears that have a destructive effect on every learning process, especially if we project them onto our learners and try to compensate for our fear through normative regulations and pedantry regarding form and format.
It breaks my heart to see my sons prioritize their fearful diligence and attention to the format and fulfilment of normative expectations in their school tasks over pursuing their natural curiosity for everything new.
Whenever I related a normative task to a context that was relevant to them, often linked to project-based learning, they became long-term motivated and exceeded the standard. However, it often appeared to be challenging to separate the form- and expectation-focused feedback from teachers in their minds or encourage them to share their learning outcomes in the classroom at all.
At all rates, we instead should prepare our students to keep their intrinsic drive and idealist courage to face the uncertain and unknown future. So we must not cause fear in them by projecting ours onto them. If we do not overcome these creativity murderers, we will not create a culture of trust essential for growing as a learner community.
3. Moving Forward by Transforming School Structures
Even architectural principles foster communication and collaboration among all stakeholders and teams in high-end research centres like the Max-Planck Institude of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, Germany, to nurture a necessary creative flow and democratic decision-making purposefully.
So, how does our school architecture support innovation? And how do other structures and systems as the student council, help increase students' innovative and aspirational contributions to authentic learning and school development?
The conservative and hierarchical design of a student council manifests hierarchical thinking. It only empowers some students to access or amplify their creative potential and to step up as a leader that we need. Thinking big, as Helsinki International School impressively did by following their values and replacing their student council with student voice committees, mandates a growth mindset which contradicts the traditional consensus that avoiding mistakes equals preventing failure. Any school system that serves the national educational codex on the globe has the ultimate goal of teaching students how to avoid mistakes by memorising, and if transfer skills are in focus, applying in a particular format is mandatory. Students measure their learning outcome by how well they have followed the prescribed and pre-taught norm. They eventually fear failing and avoid divergent thinking, eliminating our vast opportunity to develop a culture of innovation and empower students.
Breaking hierarchies changes structures and is essential for embracing powerful aspirations, nurturing student creativity, and transforming school structures to create a learning, trust-building environment that encourages collaboration and divergent thinking.