Last week a trustee at one of our schools voiced a familiar dissatisfaction,
“Generative thinking. I like the
idea, but the whole thing’s too abstract.
What are some concrete ways to DO it?”
Want to hear my favorite recent example?
Last year at a PreK-8 school in our network, ideas were percolating
for long range planning. The
school had acquired an adjacent property, though its current tenants wouldn’t
vacate for many years. That left
time to consider what Pat Bassett calls “blue sky” options.
How to do this well?
At a Governance Committee meeting, the chair mentioned that he’d just
been reading Governance as Leadership
(Chait, Ryan, and Taylor, 2005) and wanted to try out a suggestion from the book. “Let’s do
something that brings lessons from our history
