Michael B. Horn - From Reopen to Reinvent

Once you have defined the end, the next step is to state how you would know if your school was successful so the school can learn and improve. What are the metrics that allow you to know if the school is fulfilling its purpose, and how will you measure them?

After you have done that, then you can start to think about the scope of activities it will take to get your graduates there. That's the topic of the next chapter.

The purpose of schooling isn't a straightforward topic.

Schools suffer when they don't clarify the purpose as they seek to balance different priorities or struggle because of a lack of clarity.

Beginning with the end—defining the destination—is imperative for each schooling community.

Constructing a portrait of a graduate can be a powerful way to enter this conversation at a state, district, and school level.

1 1. For a sample of the different views that parents prioritize as being the main purpose of schooling, see “National Tracking Poll #210362 Crosstabulation Results,” Morning Consult and EdChoice, March 11–23, 2021, https://edchoice.morningconsultintelligence.com/assets/140102.pdf, pp. 16–43.

2 2. There are sometimes disagreements over that history.

3 3. Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008), Chapter 2.

4 4. Some of these desires were fueled by racist, xenophobic, and anti-Catholic sentiments, for example.

5 5. “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform,” United States National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983.

6 6. Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (Miami, FL: Mango, 2017), pp. 131–138.

7 7. Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design, 2nd ed. (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2005).

8 8. See, for example, “Portrait of a Graduate,” Battelle for Kids, https://portraitofagraduate.org/.

9 9. “Utah Talent Mastery Autonomy Purpose,” Utah State Board of Education, https://schools.utah.gov/file/bccb96eb-e6a6-47cf-9745-cf311675ad8b.

10 10. The Utah State Board of Education is working to implement competencies around the characteristics. Toward that end, Utah has broken down the competencies underlying the characteristics at different grade spans. “Utah Portrait of a Graduate Competencies,” Utah State Board of Education, September 22, 2021, https://schools.utah.gov/file/4b9d1341-ddaa-47bc-8052-f029e794d513.

11 11. “Board Approves Statewide ‘Portrait of a Graduate’ Model,” Utah State Board of Education, May 2, 2019, https://schools.utah.gov/file/91dfa870-3b06-4ef5-a60a-c1c02079595e.

12 12. “Portrait of a Graduate,” Juab School District, https://www.juabsd.org/33-jsd/dgi/3404-board-approves-portrait-of-a-graduate.html.

13 13. The notion of purpose can feel like a grand exercise in self-importance and the stuff people talk only about in Ivory Towers, uppity cocktail parties, and professional sports. But it does not have to be abstract, grand, or erudite (yes, we just used that word). The point is to understand what you want to prioritize and make sure you will not live in violation of any deeply held values. This will also help you know what to prioritize when you need to make trade-offs between the things that you want more of in your life that you identified. Purpose can also be dynamic and a combination of one's goals and how one achieves those goals, which can evolve over time as circumstances change. Victor Frankl, a neurologist, psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and the founder of logotherapy (a form of therapy based on the idea that people live in order to find meaning in life), wrote a famous book, Man's Search for Meaning, that addresses the topic of one's purpose as well. Frankl suggests that a person's purpose changes over time as a result of one's circumstances, and that we can discover our purpose at a given point in time in three different ways: “(1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.” For high schools, there is an entire course built around helping students create and clarify their current purpose that IDEO built. Called the Purpose Project ( https://thepurposeproject.org), the course helps students clarify their purpose by focusing on a few questions. These questions derive from the earlier exercises we suggest in this section. What are you doing today? What do you like doing? What can you do so that you can get more clarity around what drives you, what you like, and what you don't? Action, in other words, and not talk, clarifies one's purpose. This overlaps with the first way that Frankl says people can discover their purpose.

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