Nurturing Communities of Trust

Today, we're going to be talking a little bit about some thoughts that I had started, and then I'm going to invite Sandy and Mel to the conversation a little bit.

So for those of our listeners who follow me on LinkedIn, you may have noticed that I actually put out an image of what I'm calling communities of trust.

And I think it's part of my own thinking a little bit to try to hash out what it is exactly that is important in schools.

And we often talk about, okay, well, The curriculum comes and goes and people focus on it for learning.

But really, it's about something bigger.

Right.

And so I have been trying to kind of hash out in my own mind, going through reflective activities personally and with others and kind of talking it through, trying to figure out exactly what is it that makes communities stick and tick.

Maybe that's a good that's a good wording right there.

Anyway, so I think essentially what I came up with was, OK, I work in service learning sustainability.

A lot of times I view personally that sustainability is kind of the context for which schools need to kind of focus on doing good work.

And doing good work from a standpoint of giving to others, right? Creating that kind of service mindedness within students, but also, of course, our adult community and kind of using skills to do that.

So to become bigger and better at what we do.

And my stress with schools a lot of times is that we envision students to be basically the recipient.

So I get the information, I get the skills of the student, and then I walk away because I've shown you that I've gotten the skills and the information.

But I haven't done much with it.

And so my thinking was, OK, well, really, the impact piece is an important piece of the conversation.

We really need to think about the kids from a perspective of being a change maker.

And so what really needs to be in place for that student to be seeing themselves effectively as a maker of positive change in their community? And so what I jumped into was a little bit of stealing some thoughts and ideas from my own experience in coaching and also from my own experience as a parent in spaces really where, yes, there's learning going on, but the learning is not complete.

predefined entirely.

And it's not so concrete that here's the grade because you showed me this, or here's the grade because you did that.

So basically, if we were to eliminate grades, what really makes good communities thrive? And it took me back to when I was getting my master's degree at the University of Minnesota in kinesiology.

I was focusing on sports psychology specifically.

And so I was really into team cohesion.

And so a lot of my research went into team cohesion.

What makes teams successful? What's the relationship between performance and cohesion? And what are those elements of cohesion that really matter? And I think what I really got out of it is it turns out we don't all have to like each other.