By Charles Hartney, Head of Upper School Thinking Again: Remaking Culture & Community at Park A school’s culture and community, for better or worse, are always visible. You can see them in the way a school’s physical spaces are organized, from the layout of different buildings to the design and accessibility of common spaces. You can see them reflected in bulletin boards and signs, photographs and posters, all of which tell you what a school values. Most of all, you can see them in the way the school’s people interact, from the work that happens inside classrooms to students greeting each other in the hallways to faculty convening and collaborating over coffee during a planning period. A vibrant, supportive, and inclusive school culture and community have long been hallmarks of Park’s Upper School, where students have long been seen as collaborators in our shared work. Our Upper School students have always had the freedom to make meaningful decisions about their educational experience and the agency to foster and cultivate a school community we could all be proud of. After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, many of those freedoms were taken away out of necessity. The school experience changed drastically for everyone, but none more than for our Upper School kids. As the students with the most independence, they had the most to lose. Students were placed into cohorts for safety reasons, limiting their program options. We couldn’t gather as an Upper School division because we didn’t have a space large enough after accounting for social distancing. Even our short morning meetings were disrupted by health screening questions and temperature checks. All of those changes were necessary to keep students safe, and I’m incredibly proud of the work Park did to ensure that safety during the pandemic while also ensuring students were in school, in person, five days a week. But our school culture and community took an undeniable hit. Anecdotally, I had Upper School students telling me that Park didn’t feel the same, that the community feeling that had always been there had been lost. That feedback, while absolutely reasonable and probably even predictable, was difficult to swallow. As a result, rebuilding the culture and community of Park’s Upper School was my number one priority coming into this school year. As I started doing that work, however, I realized it wasn’t about rebuilding so much as it was about rethinking. :: :: :: If nothing else, the last couple of years have provided all of us, collectively, with a catalyst for reassessment. Rather than simply reproduce what existed before the pandemic in an effort to return to normal, we have all had the opportunity to reimagine what our lives, systems, and structures look like. That has been as true in schools as anywhere else, and it has led us at Park to ask important questions about who we are, what we value, and what kind of culture and community we want to cultivate at our school. We are in good company: independent schools around the country have been asking themselves similar questions. In fact, Independent School magazine has devoted two recent issues to the exploration of culture and community in our institutions. But asking those questions isn’t enough in and of itself, as authors Greg Bamford and Carla Silver argued in “Paradox Found,” an article focused on the challenges of reimagining school cultures. From their perspective, those challenges stem primarily from the schools themselves and an unconscious resistance to the very idea of reimagining. “Blinded by the nostalgia for a culture that once was–or maybe never was,” Bamford and Silver write, schools “struggle to diagnose the parts they need to change.” Schools are unwittingly dishonest with themselves about their cultures and communities and thus end up perpetuating the same systems they’re trying to change. We’re resistant to reimagining because we’ve become too attached to the original. Organizational psychologist and New York Times bestselling author Adam Grant writes about this same phenomenon in Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. In this book, the title is the thing: Grant argues that being able to think again is perhaps the most important skill we can develop in today’s increasingly complex world. “When people reflect on what it takes to be mentally fit, the first idea that comes to mind is usually intelligence. The smarter you are, the more complex the problems you can solve–and the faster you can solve them. Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.” - Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know According to Grant, we struggle to rethink–or think again–because we get stuck in one of three archetypes as we think and talk: that of the preacher, who passionately defends their sacred ideas from critics and nonbelievers; the prosecutor, who seeks out flaws in another’s beliefs and exploits them to win their case; and the politician, when we campaign and lobby for the support of our constituents. The best mode, argues Grant, is that of the scientist, who runs experiments and tests hypotheses in search of the truth. A scientist knows the limits of their own understanding and constantly seeks new information and new data to clarify, update, and otherwise rethink what they already believe. While Park is asking similar questions to our independent school colleagues about culture and community, we are also unique: our roots in John Dewey’s philosophy of education mean we need to approach complex questions from a place of authentic inquiry. That inquiry comes in the mode of the scientist, which is as much a frame of mind or attitude as it is a method. By focusing on what we don’t know–or on things we thought were true that no longer are–we can fulfill Dewey’s hope for a rigorous, inquiry-based approach to education while also rethinking (and then remaking) the culture and community of our Upper School. :: :: :: 15
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