Thoughts Between Class – Page 3 – Mike Ehrhardt's Cary Academy Blog

Excellence

It is written on nearly every hallway and classroom; our Discovery Magazine highlights how it comes to life, and any Cary Academy employee, student, or alumni can recite it full or shorthand form:

“The mission of Cary Academy is to be a learning community dedicated to discovery, innovation, collaboration, and excellence.”

Of course, these are merely words unless we have a shared understanding of what they mean for our school. During last year’s strategic planning process, we took considerable time to revisit how we define these words. We found ourselves coming back time and time again to the word “excellence.” We asked ourselves some tough questions:

What exactly what about this concept is important for us at Cary Academy?
What organization doesn’t want to be excellent?
What school doesn’t want its students, employees, and alumni to be excellent?
How, exactly, does our understanding of excellence differentiate our school?

At the end of that exercise, we re-defined what excellence means for Cary Academy.

Cary Academy recognizes excellence as meaningful growth resulting from dedicated pursuit of individual and shared goals.

This view is not meant to discount what might be traditional measures of excellence such as our number of National Merit finalists or state championships in Cross Country. Instead, we want to dig deeper, to recognize how excellence is defined by individuals or groups depending on a host of factors.

In her August 24, 2015 article in Harvard Education Magazine, Lory Hough writes about the dangers of using “averages” to define excellence in student achievement. The design of school, says Harvard professor Todd Rose, is built around a mythical “average student,” with the result being that systems, textbooks and curriculum don’t fit about 80% of the students sitting in the classrooms — we end up treating students in one-dimensional terms.

“Imagine two young students have the same IQ score of 110,” writes Hough. “One has great spatial abilities but poor working memory, and the other has the exact opposite.” To rank them by IQ means they are the same, but if we really want to understand them and nurture their potential, we can’t ignore the ways they are different and define different strategies for success.

In thinking about examples outside the classroom, I am often drawn to the world of competitive speech. At a tournament, students compete against each other in rooms of six competitors. They are ranked against each other by a judge, with the best student getting the low score (1) and the worst getting the highest (6). At the end of four rounds of competition, where they speak against a random set of five other students from the full pool, everyone gets an aggregate score — low score wins. Two students who get identical scores of 10 could easily view the results very differently, with a novice to the event being ecstatic and a seasoned and successful vet being disappointed. In one way, they both stood at the podium to accept the same award. In another way, the vet would in no way define her tournament as excellent.

At Cary Academy we are dedicated to helping discover and unlock known and unknown potential in all our students. We help them understand standards of individual (or discipline-based) excellence and to develop the self-awareness and skills to achieve realistic goals. We also work to develop the group and social skills necessary to achieve in interdisciplinary, artistic, and athletic endeavors.

In this way, we can say that we are all constantly striving for excellence at Cary Academy. The target is moving, and we are excited to be on the journey.

Structuring for Success

There is a tremendous amount of positive energy around the launch of our new strategic plan, and we have begun to pivot from the work of forming a compelling vision to fulfilling big goals.

The path from idea to execution can trip up many a well-intentioned strategic plan. The CA Leadership Team has been thinking hard about how we need to organize ourselves to get this important work done, and we’ve been informed by Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation and John Kotter’s work on change management.

We are organizing our thinking around three aspects of innovation — sustaining, disrupting, and diffusing — and calling this our superstructure. We’ve chosen to focus on the word innovation in part because it is one of the core components of our mission, but also because we believe that innovation captures the forward-thinking, entrepreneurial spirit of Cary Academy. We want our students to be prepared for today and have the tools to tackle unknown challenges in the future.

Our superstructure provides an organizational framework to hold ourselves accountable for different parts of the strategic plan. Below, I will break out each area of this superstructure in a bit more detail.

Sustaining innovation at Cary Academy means focusing on the core of what we are all about: excellent teaching and learning. This part of our superstructure can be thought of as a hierarchical approach to continual school improvement. We have a current system in place to get this work done, through our dean of faculty, our principals, and our department heads. We are now exploring the process of design thinking as shared language for developing ideas and solving problems. In our first year, a new sustaining innovation will be to launch our first-ever cross-divisional curriculum review cycle, starting with math, science, and health.

Disruptive innovation at Cary Academy means having a system to allow for smaller-scale research and development and the willpower to foster new ideas. This part of our superstructure can be thought of as a bottom-up way to nurture creative thinking. To make this happen, we have hired a new director of technology and innovation, who sits on our Leadership Team. In our first year, we will be launching a Research and Development Team to provide support for the incubation of ideas and prototypes.

Diffusing innovation hits at a core founding vision for Cary Academy: to be a lighthouse school that collaborates within our wider communities. This part of our superstructure can be thought of as a hub to foster engagement. We currently do not have a single individual in charge of this area, but operationally engagement falls into the lap of our director of diversity and inclusion, our service learning director, and our entire advancement team. In our first year, we are conducting a communications audit and experimenting with the ways that proximity might foster new collaborations (by physically moving people next to each other).

Our future is bright, and we believe this new superstructure will give us a way to take our inspirational goals and make them our new reality.

Charting our Future

Dear Friends of Cary Academy,

In a relatively short period of time, Cary Academy has established itself as a premier independent school in the Southeast, serving the diverse and future‐forward population of the burgeoning Research Triangle area. The school is excelling on nearly all benchmarks used to assess independent school strength: strong admissions demand and low attrition rates, prudent fiscal management and solid cash reserves, creative and inspiring teaching and high student and parent satisfaction levels, and a remarkable track record of student success at a broad pool of outstanding colleges and universities.

Operating from this position of strength, the time is right for Cary Academy to take the next step and become one of the leading schools in the world.

With the launch of the school’s new strategic plan, we seek to re‐capture that entrepreneurial, can‐do spirit of our founding – unlocking the next wave of big thinking and creative energy within our community. We aspire to create learning opportunities that are flexible, personalized, and relevant – cultivating self‐directed and bold life‐long learners who make meaningful contributions to the world.

To do this, we will reimagine and redesign our curriculum to help students engage with interdisciplinary concepts and new ideas in both innovative and practical ways. Further, we see exciting opportunities to refine our facilities, providing more mixed‐use, flexible spaces that are oriented towards the technology‐rich ways students and teachers interact with content and with each other. Finally, we aspire to be a leader in the development of outstanding teachers, building programs and connections that have a positive impact in our world.

The Challenge

The world of education is in the middle of an epic transformation. Technology is giving rise to new ways of accessing knowledge, creating meaning, and sharing ideas. Brain science is giving us a deeper understanding of how to consider learning in a singular local context but within a wider, more complex and interdependent world.

As visiting Harvard professor Pasi Sahlberg notes, today’s students need to be “innovation ready.” Students must be able to direct their own learning. Creativity has replaced compliance as an essential outcome of our educational system.

Cary Academy is uniquely positioned to support the development of students for this dynamic future. We believe we can and we must fulfill this vision.

Learn More

You can learn more about our strategic plan from our newly launched website at http://blogs.caryacademy.org/ca2020. On that site you can see the full vision for the next five years, including action items that were drafted as part of the original planning process.

A web site is the most appropriate place to publish our plan, as this is very much a “living document.” While our goals and strategies will remain constant, we expect our action items could adjust to reflect changes in circumstances or new realities. As such, please do feel free to check back on the website periodically to see what we’re up to.

An Invitation

We also invite all Cary Academy parents, grandparents, and alumni to join our employees and students on November 6, 2015 for a day-long Celebration of Creativity and Innovation.

This celebration will take place as part of our traditional “Grandparents and Special Friends Day.” As usual, we will have an exciting program for grandparents in the morning, but we have extended the day to include a mid-day “speakers showcase” and an afternoon of hands-on, creative projects being designed by our visual and performing arts department and technology and robotics faculty.

Look for more information on our website and through email, including a link to a downloadable application for your phone that can serve as your personal guide to all the exciting plans for the day.

Own Your Learning

As I eased myself into the teak rocking chair, I heard a creak. I think it was the chair, but it could have easily been by knees, or my back, or my neck. I lifted the glass lemonade to my lips as I rocked gently back and forth. I was sitting outside the Cary Academy library, looking down the Quad. Beautiful. The smell of newly trimmed grass and the peacefulness of the scene made me happy. A butterfly floated past, the nearest thing to an interruption of the bliss.

It was the evening before school started. And it was calm, and peaceful, and quiet.

By the next morning it could have been another lifetime. The first day of school brought kids, and booming voices, and kids, and muddy shoes, and more kids. Each one tracking dirt into the buildings … and walking … All. Over. Our. Lawn.

Let me start over.

I haven’t been myself over the past few weeks. I’m feeling a bit grumpy as we start the 2015-2016 school year. Some recent headlines have me acutely feeling the passage of time.

You may have heard the news, too. LOL is dead.

After analyzing posts for a seven-day period, Facebook said that the most common form of online laughter during my youth, LOL (Laugh Out Loud), was dead. It has been replaced by haha or hehe (50% + of users) or an emoji (35%). Fewer than 2% of us still use LOL.

I was in high school in the mid-1980s when LOL first came into existence, part of the first online chat rooms. When texting began, pre-smartphone era, I remember the fun that was had when parents, wanting to be hip but demonstrating their cluelessness, tried to use LOL as a stand in for Lots Of Love. This lead to wonderful texts like: “Dear son, you are kind, and good, and talented. LOL. Mom.”

After almost 20 years working its way from chatrooms to text messages, LOL finally hit the big time in 2011 when it made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. Four years later, gone.

That’s got me feeling my age. And I’m not the only one.

Earlier this summer, I came up to the quad to celebrate with the class of 2005 at their 10-year reunion. They wanted to know what had changed at CA. I talked about how classroom and collaboration work has evolved with the use of laptops, the cloud, Haiku, Veracross, and OneNote. Whoa, whoa, they said. Laptops? Seems like a whole lot has changed since they worked on desktops tethered to tables by lots and lots of wires.

When I shared these observations with our upper school students during convocation, I suspect that many of them put them down to the rantings of a typical out-of-touch old person, somebody who still doesn’t get Snapchat. Like really doesn’t get it.

I guess that’s the point, I told them. My mom didn’t get LOL. She just got her first smartphone this summer. Now LOL is gone, a word lost before its time. Will our current students look back in 10 years and laugh at the way they used to communicate by sending pictures, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pictures. All. Day. Long.

Like I said, I don’t get Snapchat.

Change is really the point, though.

According to the most recent Shift Happens video originally created by Karl Fisch and updated by Scott McLeod (and seen more than 10 million times online), the Department of Labor says that an average adolescent today will have 38 jobs in his or her lifetime. For those in elementary school, 65% could have jobs that don’t even exist yet.

How do schools that were conceived to prepare students for an industrial age cope?

Well, we hope that we prepare students to think.

During the convocation, Upper School Principal Heather Clarkson shared some very important perspectives about how we go about this task. Stanford professor Carol Dweck argues the crucial starting point is believing that we can constantly learn and grow.

During a powerful moment of her talk, Ms. Clarkson asked students to close their eyes and reflect on a personal goal for the year. She asked them, eyes still closed, to raise their hands if their goal was about good grades or doing well on a test. She then asked for hands up if a main goal was about a personal challenge to learn or do something new.

I don’t have to tell you what it looked like in the auditorium during that exchange.

Ms. Clarkson then challenged students to consider that the purpose of school is more than just passing somebody else’s test of their worth. We cannot avoid assessments, but we should not be driven or defined by them. We must embrace our capacity to learn and grow throughout life. As Ms. Clarkson aptly tells students: “Own your learning.”

Several others have been challenging us to see things differently for quite a while. Educator Grant Wiggins, writing in Education Leadership more than 20 years ago, said “the aim of curriculum is to ‘awaken’ not ‘stock’ or ‘train’ the mind.” Just this past week, the New York Times op-ed section ran a provocative piece on the importance of teaching ignorance.

The recently approved Cary Academy Strategic Plan contains language that challenges us to think about the ways in which education is changing. It challenges us to think about how we use space, how we organize curriculum, and how we help prepare students for an uncertain future.

If Google, a company seemingly on top of the world, feels a need to change — announcing recently the creation of a new organizational structure and parent company called Alphabet — I suspect that change is coming for us all.

Hey, maybe Alphabet can help bring back my beloved LOL.

What's in your wallet?

The Dining Hall was buzzing, as 125 employees at Cary Academy shared stories with one another about one of their most personal of objects — their wallets. Then, with one short phrase from workshop facilitator and Dean of Faculty Martina Greene — “OK, everybody, you have 20 minutes to build your prototypes” — the din of voices was replaced with the hum of working hands.

“Can you hear that?” asked Director of Diversity and Inclusion Jason Franklin. “This is what happens when folks get engaged in the creative process. Language turns off as other parts of the brain engage.” Jason would know, as an accomplished artist and teacher who was trained in art and design at NC State.

And so it went during the opening week of employee preparation for the 2015-2016 school year. A good deal of our time during these planning days is spent getting people and spaces ready for the arrival of students and meeting to review schedules, curriculum, or goals for the year.

As a kick-off to the new Cary Academy Strategic Plan, all employees went through an introduction to design thinking as a way to lay a foundation for future conversations about innovation and creativity in our work together. This isn’t a new concept to us, as all CA 9th and 10th graders are exposed to this mindset as part of their required art and design courses. However, we believe that design thinking also can help us unlock some of the goals in our strategic plan.

The protocol we used this past week came from the Institute of Design at Stanford University. Using a hands-on project to design the ideal wallet for a partner, our employees were exposed to the five core steps in the process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.

“Building the wallet was a fun way to put the concept [of design thinking] into practice,” said one employee in a post-session survey. “Listening to my partner and then trying to design to her needs made me think about how much my students want to give their input regarding how we approach learning in our classroom. I hope that the students are ready to ENGAGE because I am ready!”

We were excited to use a design thinking workshop as a kickoff for the implementation phase of our strategic plan, which was developed over the course of last year involving input from the full community. A core planning committee comprised of board members, faculty, staff, parents, students, and alumni drove the process.

Our strategic vision is to create learning opportunities that are flexible, personalized, and relevant — cultivating self-directed and bold life-long learners who make meaningful contributions to the world.

Among some of the first tasks at hand as we start this school year:

To create operational structures and language to promote deeper innovation at Cary Academy. The design thinking workshop was our first step.
To implement a formal, cross-divisional curriculum review cycle. We will begin with an evaluation of our mathematics, science, and health curriculum this year.
To assess and improve our communication structure and flow. We have solicited proposals from outside experts to help facilitate this process.
To strengthen community by showcasing the breadth of creativity and innovation currently in practice at Cary Academy. We will do this through a full-day program on November 6, 2015. More information to come soon.

I will be sharing more information about the school’s Strategic Plan at the grade-level PTAA coffees held on campus during mornings throughout the fall. Dates and times can be found on the CA website.

In the meantime, you can check out what we’ve been up to by visiting a display of some of our prototype wallets in the library. Design thinking stresses the importance of sharing unfinished work, and I think you’ll see exactly what that means if you stop for a visit.

Welcome Back

I hope you and your families are enjoying these last lazy days of summer.

Throughout June and July our many Summer Quest campers kept the energy level high on campus, but we do miss our students. Now the time has come to turn our full attention to the 2015-2016 school year. Our faculty began their work together on August 3, joined by seven new teachers in Spanish, technology, dance, social sciences, math, and science. You’ll learn more in upcoming communication from the divisional heads and a piece in the fall Access newsletter.

Campus changes

In addition to routine painting and repairs, this summer has seen several smaller but significant changes to the campus, including:

new student furniture in 11 MS and US classrooms, which is the result of the successful the test project we ran last school year,
new brick pavers outside the US building facing the Quad, which is a test of brick that could replace the concrete throughout the internal facing walkways around campus, and
a new “community space” across from the US office to support school clubs and service organizations.

Students in the Upper School will notice that faculty members are no longer in their “normal” places. In an effort to increase departmental collaboration and use of classrooms, the Upper School has “rezoned” to create pods for mathematics, English, and social sciences. Teachers will share office spaces, and classrooms will be grouped by department rather than by grade level. Science labs have not been moved, and world languages are still in the SEA. This is a test of some of the concepts that emerged out of our master facilities plan, which will help inform future building remodeling.

The summer also saw many of our faculty members take the opportunity to work on curricular development projects, including: improved grading systems for physics classes, units for robotics and programming in MS science classes, new MS media literacy units, web-based instructional units in US Chinese classes, and the development of blended modules for coursework in architecture, calculus III, and human anatomy and physiology.

On our plate this year

On the heels last year’s upgrades to our Lenovo laptops, Windows 8, and Office365, we are in the process of a significant change to the way we handle school data. At schools, these are called Student Information Systems (SIS), and Cary Academy has been using a system called Blackbaud for many years. That system had reached its “end of life” and was scheduled to be phased out by its developer in the next few years. After an extensive, year-long review, we have begun the switch to a system called Veracross. Like the laptop and cloud migration last year, this change has the potential to be highly disruptive. At minimum, it will change the look and feel of how we all interact with student and family information, such as billing, attendance, grades, schedules, report cards, and transcripts. We believe the overall system will be more reliable and easier for all, but the process of getting comfortable with new procedures will take time. Thank you in advance for your patience.

See you all soon!

On August 12, we will open the school year with 753 students, including 129 new faces. Our employees and seniors will get a chance to personally welcome everybody to the 2015-2016 school year during our Handshake Ceremony held at the end of that first day. Until then, enjoy the last days of summer.

Standing on Shoulders

We have a plan!

At their final meeting of this school year, our Board of Directors approved a Strategic Plan for Cary Academy.

Putting it together

This plan represents the collective work of our entire community, and more specifically the efforts of 24 members of a core strategic planning committee and another 36 individuals who served on four action teams. These groups included board members, employees, students, parents, and alumni.

Our planning teams relied heavily on data collected from two big community surveys last year as well as focus groups that helped provide a deeper dive into the state of our school. In addition to school-centered data, the team had a broad reading list that included reports from the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), Independent School Management (ISM), the Organization of Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD), the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the Harvard Business School. They tapped the scholarly work of Clayton Christensen, Tony Wagner, John Kotter, Michael Fullen, John Hattie, as well as local experts from UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State’s Friday Institute for Educational Innovation.

The writing of the plan took place beginning at a two-day retreat in October and ending with a two-day retreat in March. In between, action teams fanned out to research and write draft strategies and action items.

Five-Year Planning Cycle

The school has been working on continual improvement through strategic planning for the last 10 years, with plans beginning in 2005 and again in 2010. These plans did a great deal to help create the school that we have today. A quick look at the key goals from each of those plans can help us see how the school has evolved.

Our goals in 2005

Create an environment that attracts, develops, and retains outstanding educators committed to the mission of Cary Academy.
Nurture and grow a constituency that is emotionally connected to the school.
Support students and employees in establishing and maintaining a balanced life.
Better communicate Cary Academy’s admission philosophy, profile of the ideal Cary Academy student, and profile of the ideal Cary Academy class.

Our goals in 2010

To prepare students for their futures, Cary Academy will be a leader in teaching and learning enhanced by the creative and effective use of emerging technologies.
Strengthen the development and retention of outstanding employees who will uphold and advance the mission and values of the school.
Build the framework necessary to ensure the long-term financial sustainability of the school.
Strengthen student development programs to include character education, leadership, ethics, global citizenship and commitment to respect, integrity, and compassion.
Strengthen multi-culturalism in an increasingly diverse school community through education, experiences, and meaningful relationships.

Our vision, goals, and strategies for the next five years

When moving into a new planning cycle, we do not abandon the old goals but instead pull those accomplishments and dreams into a new vision:

Cary Academy will create learning opportunities that are flexible, personalized, and relevant. We will cultivate self-directed and bold life-long learners who make meaningful contributions to the world.

Our goals and corresponding strategies:

Create institutional flexibility to facilitate innovative and dynamic learning experiences by

Creating institutional mechanisms to strengthen and sustain a robust culture of innovation
Creating collaborative time for students and faculty to engage in nontraditional, bold learning opportunities within and across divisions
Reviewing and revising our academic programming to reflect our commitment to student-centered learning

Foster the intellectual and cultural elasticity needed to adapt and thrive in the world by

Enabling community members to identify and delve deeply into areas of passion
Ensuring community members have opportunities to expand cultural awareness and develop cultural competence

Strengthen existing relationships and build new connections to embrace multiple perspectives and opportunities by

Improving access and exposure to Cary Academy news, events, and opportunities for participation in community life
Establishing an accessible network of Cary Academy community members to strengthen relationships and share expertise
Seeking out opportunities with other schools, organizations, and individuals to gather and share knowledge, inspiration, and innovations

Build the professional and learning environments necessary to realize our strategic vision by

Identifying and implementing enhancements to the school’s culture and operations
Identifying and implementing improvements to the campus
Designing and implementing a funding program

Implementation

The implementation of our plan also will require a broad community effort. The plan is designed to be a “living document” — meaning we have clear goals and strategies in place, but the action items will be determined each year as the plan and our needs evolve.

This spring and summer, our Leadership Team will be working to develop the first set of action items that will begin in the fall. These items likely will include:

Creating operational language and structures to promote deeper innovation at Cary Academy, which could include expanding the use of design thinking beyond our current implementation in upper school visual arts program;
Strengthening community by showcasing the breadth of creativity and innovation currently in practice at Cary Academy;
Implementing a formalized, cross-divisional curriculum review cycle;
Reviewing our communication structures within the school and recommending improvements;
Tweaking our academic schedule to enhance collaboration opportunities between and within divisions;
Moving forward with the development of a campus improvement plan to create more student-centered and flexible learning spaces.

The development of this new strategic plan also involved updating the description of our mission statement and the creation of core beliefs about learning, and I look forward to sharing more about these in a future post.

You can follow the full planning process on our web site.

Authors of our own stories

Well, we survived March Madness.

I’m not referring to the craziness that is the NCAA basketball tournaments, but the race to complete the college admissions season. Now that we’ve flipped the script past May 1, we are through notification and commitment season for our seniors.

A few weeks back, I wrote about the pressure that so many high school students feel about college admissions. Many say the system is broken. Common applications, an exploding applicant pool, and an obsession with rankings has created a feeling of scarcity that is having a huge impact on many students and their families.

This spring, I’ve had a few conversations that helped me see this pressure in action. In these cases, students are approaching college admissions like it is the defining moment in their lives. Where one gets into school will set them on a predestined path — for greatness or mediocrity.

This is troubling, not just because it clearly isn’t true but because it reflects a mindset that turns over control of our destiny to others. In this case, an admissions committee, but in other aspects of life it could mean ceding control of our lives to friends, a boss, co-workers — or fate.

This is even more troubling when you consider that this is the exact opposite of what we want our students to learn during their time with us.

School is about coming into your own as a person. We want students to develop skills, so they can adapt to new and unfamiliar situations. Our hope is that our graduates walk across that stage believing they have the tools to be successful anywhere. We want them to have the confidence that they can make something meaningful from whatever life throws at them. And throw it will.

To You, the Student Reader

Some students at CA are reading this right now. I know this because many follow my Twitter account (where this blog is linked) so they can get the announcements about snow days a few minutes ahead of the last-century email-only crowd. Smart ones, those CA high schoolers.

I bet right about now more than one of you is thinking: This sounds great, Dr. Ehrhardt — but you are preaching from a comfortable position as an adult. You are not carrying the hopes and dreams of your parents or the obscene pressures of keeping up with a peer group of pretty awesome classmates.

True enough, but I’ve also been in your shoes. I can think back to times in my own life when I was pretty convinced that a singular decision had sealed my fate as well.

A year after getting my college diploma, I applied to a well-regarded graduate school to study journalism. I can distinctly remember getting the acceptance letter. I was standing in the kitchen, and I thought: “This is it. This letter changes my life. My career is set.” I went out that night to celebrate by watching the (first) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

I applied for nearly 100 jobs after school, and the ONLY job offer I got said they didn’t much care that I went to grad school but were impressed with my on-the-job experience at real newspapers between college and grad school. The name-brand of my degree mattered less than what I had done outside of the classroom. I stayed in journalism only two more years, taking an offer to move overseas and teach over another journalism gig. So much for the career-is-set outcome that I was expecting from that original grad school acceptance letter.

After our first overseas teaching job, my wife and I attended a job fair where we made a verbal agreement to take a job in Brazil over another offer in Taiwan. That night, we freaked out — convinced it was the wrong decision. The next day, we asked to get out of the handshake agreement. We were told no. Verbal agreements are binding and part of the contract we signed to participate in the job fair, we were reminded. I was devastated at the thought that this one decision by somebody else not to release us from our agreement could completely ruin our lives.

We cried some more that night, and then moved halfway around the world on that handshake.

Ten years and two kids later, we finally left Brazil, having been transformed by the experience.

Why do I mention these stories? It is not to say that everybody should do the dumb things I’ve done. (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to celebrate grad school acceptance. Really?) It is not to diminish the pressure our students feel today. That is real, and the times have indeed changed.

However, as adults we can help students with something they do no have yet — perspective. I certainly heard a lot of those types of stories during our most recent career day, when CA parents and alumni shared their journeys with our high school students. These messages are important to get out early and often.

We want all our students to see themselves as authors of their own stories, able to overcome any of the inevitable plot twists that are likely to come their way.

Innovation by Design

Recently I asked all our employees to describe a time in which they felt most alive and engaged in the life of the school. Many reflected on the school’s start up days, when they were collaborating to execute on the founding vision and build something new and exciting.

The product of that labor of love is the Cary Academy we know today, and by nearly every metric we have available, Cary Academy has reached the top tier of independent schools in less than 20 years.

With the upcoming launch of the Cary Academy 2020 Strategic Plan, we will no longer need to reflect backwards to capture that entrepreneurial, can-do spirit of our founding. We soon expect to unlock the next wave of big thinking and creative energy within our community.

An understanding of the importance of innovation and collaboration is much more widely shared than in 1996, when Cary Academy was founded as “a learning community committed to discovery, innovation, collaboration, and excellence.” In the short time since our founding, the internet and mobile technology have transformed industries and upended the ways we communicate and learn. Scholars like Harvard’s Clayton Christensen and John Kotter have studied these disruptions and worked to help organizations understand how to survive and thrive in a fast moving world.

In the language of our strategic plan, we have chosen to highlight the phrase “institutional flexibility” to signal our purposeful desire to design systems that can unlock innovation. The first goal of our draft plan reads: “We will create institutional flexibility to facilitate dynamic and innovative learning experiences.”

John Kotter has called such a setup a “dual operating system” — where smaller-scale improvements can be encouraged from everywhere within an organization and institutional might can be harnessed to do big things with the most relevant and proven concepts. Ultimately, the system itself can be transformed rather than be rendered obsolete.

At Cary Academy, we may take this one step further and ultimately organize around three important aspects of innovation:

Sustaining,
Disrupting,
Diffusing.

Sustaining innovation at Cary Academy means focusing on the core of what we are all about: excellent teaching and learning. Sustaining innovation means having a portrait of an ideal teacher and student, an articulated view of learning, processes for holistic curriculum review, a strong assessment philosophy, and robust methods of for professional evaluation and development.

Disruptive innovation at Cary Academy means having a system to allow for smaller-scale research and development and the willpower to allow new ideas room to grow. To foster meaningful disruptive innovation, we need some common language around process, access to additional resources and talent, and a way to feed back promising ideas into the core of the institution.

Finally, diffusing innovation hits at a core founding vision for Cary Academy: to be a lighthouse school that collaborates with our wider communities. To foster this we need renewed platforms for connecting with constituents and peers locally, nationally, and globally. We need communication systems that share what we are working on and methods to bring people together for meaningful conversations, through short-term methods like meetings and conferences and long-term relationships such as partnerships and exchanges.

In this structure, I hope that you can feel a bit of regular and a bit of radical. Our strategic plan is both a process for continual improvement and path to an even brighter future — but to be effective there needs to be a strong connection between the two. While we might not quite be able to see the future, it is important that we can imagine taking a road that leads us there.

I look forward to sharing more with the community after our Board of Directors endorses the plan at their next meeting.

Season of Madness

April 1, 2015

‘Tis the Season.

This is the time of year for fantastical stories of flying penguins and silly pranks on friends and family. Since my own were little, everything in my sock drawer seems to mysteriously disappear every April 1 only to magically reappear the next day.

But this is also the season for something that isn’t quite as fanciful as missing unmentionables: college admission season.

By now, anybody with a high school junior or senior has probably read Frank Bruni’s March 13th New York Times column “How to Survive the College Admissions Madness.” In this piece, part of a book he has written on the topic, Bruni shares stories of a few talented young men and women who first survive and then later thrive after getting turned down at elite colleges. On underlying problem, he says, is that many of our students have come to equate their self-worth with admission into these highly selective universities. Whereas, many of us working in primary and secondary education like to think we are a part of a much longer end game: to help foster healthy and happy 35-year-olds. The paths to that outcome are many.

What our kids are up against is often referred to as a madness or a mania. I think this is fair, because it also implies that even the most healthy and well adjusted can get caught up. By now, the story is fairly well known. A small and well-publicized number of elite schools are now competing globally for students, making the marketplace more competitive than ever. In addition, helpful tools like the Common Application are making it easier for students to apply to many more schools than ever before. According to the National Association of College Admissions Counseling, only 9 percent of students applied to seven or more colleges in 1990. By 2011, that number was 29 percent. Students who apply to more than 20 colleges are not uncommon. This leads to ever shrinking acceptance ratios that are under 10% and approaching 5% at the most elite schools.

This can’t help but create a potentially unhealthy environment for our students, feeling they have to do more and more to beat the odds. Sites like College Confidential at first seemed to open up the admissions process, but now seem only to add to the sense of competitive frenzy.

One Cary Academy student used this stress as a jumping off point for an Original Oratory that she wrote and performed during this year’s speech and debate season. She starts with an imaginary college application essay:

“Dear College Admissions Officer,

“In thinking about what to write for this essay I really struggled picking just one topic. I can honestly say I have loved my high school experience. I got to work with incredible teammates and coaches in all three varsity sports I played. I might have to pick track as my favorite since I set the national record in the two mile my freshman year. Unfortunately this dedication to my sports took a toll on my cello practice and I only barely made the National Youth Orchestra. Along with these fantastic out-of-school opportunities, I am incredibly grateful for my curricular opportunities as well. A huge shout out to the math department at my school who found a nearby college to let me take Topics in Geometric Partial Differential Equations. I’m just so grateful that after working so hard on last year’s Oratory it was cited by the Nobel committee as a reason for bringing peace to the Middle East. Well, maybe more like a temporary cease fire.”

More and more students are feeling pressure to craft resumes in high school that don’t really reflect true passions or interests, and as a result are matriculating to college with significant health issues. As our CA student cites in her speech: “The latest Stress in America survey from the American Psychological Association finds that teens are mimicking the high stress lives of adults and are ‘setting themselves up for a future of chronic illness.’”

So what to do?

Bruni highlights the healthy way in which the parents of one particular young man kept perspective throughout the process. Their letter of support to their son on the eve of admission notification reassured him that he is not the product of the decisions of an overwhelmed admissions committee.

I’d also add the importance of being a part of a healthy school and community environment. Schools have many subtle and not-so-subtle ways of increasing the stress and competitive environment, from starting college counseling in middle school, to encouraging underclassmen to take multiple AP exams, to ranking students by their GPA. The answer to the college admissions madness is not to double down and go even more mad.

In the end, college counselors can demystify this process and help our students see that there are absolutely fabulous options beyond the top 10 lists that dominate the popular press and social media. When we help our students understand themselves as learners and as people, then they can see themselves as happy and successful in many different places.

Despite the craziness of the application process, this is exactly what colleges are also saying they want from our students. Our Upper School Principal Heather Clarkson recently reported on a panel conversation she attended at the National Association of Independent Schools conference featuring the leaders of four universities. They said they were looking for graduates who:

can interact in a community,
have perseverance,
have good writing and quantitative skills,
have a healthy and balanced lifestyle,
have the ability to self-reflect and self-assess,
and can navigate new situations and act independently.

Thankfully, I do believe that we’ve got the right balance here at Cary Academy. I’ve found myself on more than one occasion describing our environment as “healthy.” So as we move through the April 1 craziness, I might find myself worrying less about our seniors and more about what will happen when The Guardian switches from printed paper to Twitter.