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SCHOOLS exist to help ensure the success & well-being of learners, now and in the future.
At its best, a school is a purposeful community in its own right:
- A school is purposeful in choosing its goals and how it achieves them. The purposes and processes are both important and require considerable judgement moment by moment. This makes teaching a profession.
- A school is a community in that people spend considerable time together contributing to, and benefiting from, the school itself and each other.
A common error is thinking that the community is what surrounds the school. While this is true it is also common for the best local community to be operating on a daily basis within the school.
Generally schools are greatly undervalued. Most schools have the following characteristics. Schools are usually
- supportive
- purposeful
- forgiving
- generous
- efficient
- well organised
- courageous
- ....
There are, of course, organizations, institutions, and enterprises that easily 'out-perform' schools in any one or two of these aspects. At the same time one is hard pressed to think any other situations in our communities that offer all these qualities, simultaneously, better than schools. Families are perhaps the most common other situations with all these qualities. On the other hand families do not match schools in terms of scale.
Schools are frequently the largest, most complex organizations in their communities. Over 700 people turn up for work each day at RPS. The same is true for the local high school. No other organizations in Riverside even come close.
The CORE STRATEGY that schools should adopt is to focus on
- making it as easy as possible for
- teachers and learners to work well together to
- maximise the learners' education
At RPS this means we continuously ask ourselves
- What knowledge, skills, systems and culture are required to make our strategy (above) as effective as possible?
Quality has much to offer schools in meeting these challenges. Some schools have taken advantage of this offering. (more...)