The SOL journey begins . . .

Our first day was spent reflecting on where we are at with the four pillars of the SOL initiative and sharing with the other districts from across the country. We also heard from the founders of the organization the goals for the week and the format for the remainder of our time together.
The first thing that struck me was the composition of the district teams. There are eight teams participating with more students than adults on almost every team. Others include board members, teachers, administrators, and community members. Below, is a picture of Julie and Kaylie sharing some of our work with others at the conference.

The four pillars include organizational learning, youth leadership, system thinking/system dynamics, and education for sustainability. We are making progress on three of these foundation pieces with system thinking and dynamics being the one that continues to be the most difficult to embed in our culture. In our profession, we don’t learn about this work in our college classes and there is little focus on this content in conferences planned by traditional education organizations.

I believe that in our journey at this time, system dynamics has much to offer us. We have some of the system thinking foundation in place through our communication focus in teacher leadership work and with our principals, but little capacity to use system dynamics to influence our thinking and decisions. I have asked a team of three teachers and Ethan Smith to begin exploring the potential for building this capacity in our system for adults and students. Their work is focused on how to embed system thinking into the work on the state science standards and also to identify how we can develop capacity to use the tools with adults in our learning community.