Create
Creating a school from purpose
A new school can end up being building + curriculum + staff + technology, or it can first be built as a coherent educational architecture.
The starting point
Creating a new school makes it possible to work without some of the organisational inertia that conditions an existing institution. The opportunity is exceptional: being able to decide from the very beginning what school you want to build.
The initial questions in these processes are the ones there is almost never room for in a running institution:
- What purpose will it have?
- What kind of people do we want to help develop?
- What traits should characterise a graduate?
- What does learning mean here?
- What role will teachers have?
- How will time be organised?
- How will disciplines and experiences relate?
- How will we assess?
- What role will the community play?
- What culture do we want to build?
The tension
Creating a school comes with very concrete urgencies: works, licences, staffing, enrolment, technology. Under that pressure, the project can end up becoming the sum of its operational parts:
building + curriculum + staff + technologyAll necessary. None sufficient. Because none of those pieces, on its own, defines what a student will live through on any given Tuesday at ten in the morning.
The question changed
The systemic opportunity consists of first building a coherent educational architecture, and the question that orders all the others is:
How do we make every institutional decision coherent with the person we want to help develop?
When that question presides over the process, the timetable stops being logistics and becomes pedagogy. Teacher recruitment stops being hiring and becomes culture. Technology stops being equipment and becomes criteria.
What began to connect
In these processes, the work consists of keeping connected the decisions urgency tends to separate: purpose and the organisation of time; graduate profile and the design of experiences; the culture that is declared and the culture practised from day one; assessment and what the school says it values.
An idea that transcends this case
An educational model is not a document. It is a set of interdependent decisions that ends up determining what students live every day.
This story shows the same systemic logic I apply to the transformation of higher education institutions: the layers change scale, not nature.
Systemic Learning Architecture · dimensions of this story
- Purpose
- Educational model
- Graduate profile
- Culture
- Organisation
- Technology
- Community
- Assessment
● central dimension of the process · ○ secondary dimension
Explore the Systemic Learning Architecture →Confidentiality note. This story has been anonymised: it contains no names, countries, dates or data that could identify the institutions or people involved. Observed patterns synthesise learnings from different processes, never from a single institution.
More transformation stories
Create
Designing a new degree without starting from the subjects
Creating a programme from scratch allows the usual sequence to be inverted: purpose and graduate profile first; the subjects, at the end.
Integrate
When experiential learning stops being peripheral
An institution with good active-learning experiences discovers the challenge is not running more projects, but bringing the experiential into the core of the educational model.
Are you facing a similar transformation?
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