School starts on Wednesday, and here are some questions that I’d love my school’s leaders to answer. None of these were answered in the “Back to School” packets.
- What is the mission and vision for teaching and learning that guides your work? In other words, what are your stated intents for my kids’ school experience, and what pedagogies, practices, and principles guide you to those outcomes?
- How were your mission and vision formed?
- What is the last book you read about learning?
- Under what conditions do you feel children (or anyone, for that matter) learn most effectively?
- What conversations are ongoing at a leadership level around how to best create those conditions?
- What are the biggest challenges you face in educating my children? How are you trying to meet them?
- What research around children and learning have you read recently that has impacted your thinking about our school?
- How have you changed as a learner in the last five years?
- How are you modeling your own personal learning practice for the school community?
- Currently, who are your most influential teachers? Why?
- How do you use technology to learn?
- What was the last artifact of your own learning that you created with technology?
- What expectations do you have for your teachers’ use of technology in their own learning?
- What expectations do you have for your teachers’ use of technology in the classroom?
- What are your thoughts on the relevance of the current system of schooling in the United States?
- How do we best assess student learning?
- As a parent, what do I need to know about the current realities of higher education?
- As a parent, what do I need to know about the future of work?
- As a parent, how is my kids’ school also my school?
Feel free to make this an even 20 in the comments.