Dear Crossroads College Preparatory School Community:
What counts as leadership or learning?
What counts as diversity or justice?
These questions have been on my mind since Monday when I left a Schools That Can meeting at UMSL. Together, public, charter, and independent school leaders and university leaders spent two hours in activities and conversation around this question: How can we connect design thinking, school leadership, and our experiences across educational settings to improve education for all students in St. Louis?
We began by thinking about what counts as exploring, envisioning, and enacting. The question “What counts as . . . ?” is striking to me. I can offer a lot of words about what exploring, envisioning, and enacting might be. I can do a lot of explaining about leadership, learning, diversity, and justice. But stopping to think about what counts as these things is challenging. It requires me to define and narrow and to think about what I do not just what I know.
I look forward to my next meeting with these educators, and I am proud to be a part of the conversation about what counts as leadership, learning, diversity, and justice not just for Crossroads but for our community and region as a whole.
With great expectations,
Jason