PROFILEd

What do we want for our children as result of their having been in our schools for 12 or 13 years?

What do we want them to know? What do we want them to be able to do? How do we want them to be able to think? What behavioral practices will serve them and their community for a lifetime? What kind of citizens do we intend to shape?

Those are questions any school community should have. Those are questions that are best fleshed out by ALL the stakeholders in that school community.

Choosing to ask those questions is a bold step. Attempting to answer those questions is a messy and challenging process. Posing those questions and chasing the answers is ideally a process led by the school leaders of the learning community.

For those of us who serve in school leadership, some additional questions follow:

How willing am I to undertake the task?

How well have I prepared myself to lead this process?

How well have I polished up my skills of engagement?

Only when we clearly articulate the aspired PROFILE of the learners we serve can we begin to put some meaningful plan of affectation in place. Without such a plan, we and our learners languish.

It's only the futures of our children, and our communities, at stake. (Time's a wastin'.)