A few weeks ago during another advisory gathering (this time a joint session with my colleague Laura Bradford), I ended up with something close to 30 kids in my room. Several were playing Ping-Pong, others were snacking on Alex’s brownies, some were circulating and talking, a few had wandered in from up the hall. There was music, energy, laughter, spontaneous applause; Laura and I did our celebratory pushups; the college counselors dropped by; three or four kids took turns recording the action with the flip camera; we all lost track of time. It was 9:45 am on a gray Friday morning in early October, but it could have been anytime/anywhere. We were fully engaged in the wonder of living and learning together. We had stumbled once again onto the magic of community.
I have taught for 21 years, 15 of these in independent schools. When I think about what makes a school a community I think less about the daily schedule or the academic program or the quality of the facilities or the strength of the administrative team (though all of these are important), and more about specific moments of profound connection and spontaneous joy. I think about my seventh grade softball team in South Miami, which lost every single game, but were such good sports and such true friends that they sang on the bus all the way back to school. I think about the faculty retreats at Delray Beach and the things I learned from my veteran colleagues about how to work and collaborate as a team. I think about the scrappy young men who played basketball for a packed and cheering house on all those chilly Friday evenings in Lexington, Kentucky. I think of a memorable day a few years back when one of my colleagues here in St. Louis sprinted along the bleachers in the north gym, leading the entire upper school student body in a spontaneous wave during a disaster drill gone wrong. And I think about that truly special 18 months when meetings became electric, during a self-study that took on a life of its own.
When I consider what transforms a school from a list of names and a collection of buildings into a genuine community, I remember thousands of such moments: moments with kids, moments with colleagues, moments of growth and discovery and excitement: moments when work felt like play and school felt like home. These moments, elusive but possible to engineer, crowd for me around three distinct pillars: shared endeavor, scrambled roles, and a spirit of celebration.
Shared Endeavor
It was as a young teacher at a small Episcopal school in Miami, Florida, that I first witnessed the power of shared endeavor in creating community. Late in my second year, a wunderkind colleague helped launch a daylong Renaissance Festival that featured student and faculty performances, an educational “quest,” the entire school community decked out in period costumes, and parents taking pictures and serving food. Three months of planning and a mountain of coordination culminated in a single six-hour event, but the payoff was profound, and I never forgot that lesson: I learned that when many people (students, faculty, administrators, staff members, parents, trustees) work together toward achieving a single challenging goal, community is built.
From April 2005 through April 2007, my current school participated in an ambitious global question based self-study. The process, involving hundreds of people from all facets of our JK–12 community, was nearly overwhelming in its complexity, but truly unmatched in its intensity. As folks embraced the head of school’s charge to use the study as an opportunity, not just to collect data and/or take the curricular pulse, but genuinely to transform the entire school, the process took on a whirlwind-like momentum. Cross-divisional subcommittees met for week after week, conducting research and engaging in discussions that led to the production of hundreds of documents and to palpable schoolwide improvements. After the visiting team left and the study was officially put to bed, more than a few of us missed the intensity, missed this initially “dreaded” process that had helped even the reluctant among us become true collaborators, and hence a true community.
Last August, we began the year with three days of Integrated Studies in our upper school. Teams of students and teachers went on field trips, conducted research, learned new software platforms, put together presentations, and came to know each other well. The process was months in the planning, and some complained about the added work, but whenever I say hello to ninth graders on campus who I do not teach (and may never teach), but who were part of my integrated group, I am reminded of why these events are important.
Mini-terms, service-learning projects, department retreats, field trips, schoolwide celebrations, evening classes for parents, literature festivals, science fairs — I have come to believe that the shared endeavor required to launch and sustain any and all such events does far more than enrich teaching and learning. It fosters community.
Scrambled Roles
A few years ago during our opening full faculty and staff meeting, the administrative team donned aprons and served all of us lunch. The director of admissions ladled out chili, the head of the lower school handed out cobs of corn, the director of communications poured iced tea. A tiny gesture, this, but powerfully illustrative of the second theme — the bonding impact of scrambled roles. During another Friday advisory session last month, the members of the upper school English department challenged our science department colleagues to an impromptu volleyball match. The energy in the gymnasium during those 20 minutes, as our 100-plus advisees crowded the bleachers to cheer for their willing but aging teachers and our exuberant attempts to keep the ball in play, was likewise linked to scrambled roles. These students won’t forget the image of Mr. Kamper, senior dean and chemistry teacher, going for a spike in his dress shirt and tie, or the image of Mr. Dlugosch, veteran English teacher in his early 60s, diving for a loose ball. They won’t forget the feeling that comes when the roles are flipped, and they become the sport fans and the encouragers.
Some of my most successful classes happen when my students become the teachers. We all learned more when Anthony spent 45 minutes teaching us about Emily Dickinson and when Devon and Lauren led us through a chapter of Song of Solomon. When the head of school picks up a hammer and joins the crew traveling to Texas to build houses with Habitat for Humanity, when one of the maintenance staff writes an essay for the school newsletter or helps little ones plant a community garden, when a science teacher and a theatre teacher team up to offer a mini-term course in furniture building to a dozen 9–12 graders, we all transcend our scripted roles, and a real community unfolds.
A Spirit of Celebration
A colleague once wrote me a note expressing his disappointment that the school where he was newly an administrator “did not want to change.” Your school does want to change, I told him, but change is difficult and exhausting. Sometimes, as Einstein and others have taught us, the most powerful answers are the simplest. I suggested that he model joy. Few things, I’ve discovered, propel forward momentum and build vibrant communities like joy. Schools that actively cultivate a spirit of celebration meet with all kinds of success. Ask any fifth grade teacher what happens when you make a game out of the test review. Ask any 12th grade teacher what happens when the robotics class is put in charge of inventing a greener leaf removal system. What happens when the spring musical is so powerful that it gets held over for another weekend? The majority of independent schools are steeped in rituals and ceremonies and thoughtfully organized traditions — most of which help build community as well — but nothing fuels excitement at our schools like a spirit of celebration. The difference, I think, is that traditions evoke the past, while celebrations embrace the new; traditions deliver the expected, while celebrations make room for the unexpected; traditions provide security, but celebrations take us all somewhere we haven’t been before, and that place is a kinetic one that beckons and invites. It is a place where we can all belong: young and old, faculty member and lunchroom crew, new kid and lifer.
One of my early mentors suggested to me that teaching is not a job, it’s a way of life. If that’s true, then our schools should be less like workplaces, and more like second homes. Our colleagues less like coworkers, and more like family members. And our students less like paying customers, and more like our own children. When Tucker transfers his jeopardy confidence back to pre-calculus, when the energy of a special self-study infuses the ordinary faculty meeting, when the joyful vigor of the volleyball match reappears in the ongoing vertical and horizontal curriculum dialogues, our sense of community will grow.