Planning for a Bold Future

PLANNING

FOR A BOLD FUTURE

On a recent morning, The Pike School faculty and staff gathered to ponder an unusual question: If The Pike School was being transplanted to Mars, what five things (e.g., ideas, values, people, items) would they insist on sending along? The range of answers was both extensive and varied. For every group that elected a beloved peer to go, there were others who were sending ideas and values while others focused on items as diverse as the nature trail, the library, and even the recycling bins.

The Pike School is not going to Mars. But we are embarking on a trip, one that is very real and important. The destination? The future — and a strategic vision that will ensure student learning and outcomes remain at the heart of what we do even as the world our children are inheriting becomes increasingly complex and uncertain.

THE FUTURE OF LEARNING

It is May 2021, and a Zoom meeting is in full swing. Tiny rectangles frame the faces of parents, alumni, trustees, and administrators as they engage in conversations about their hopes and fears – for their children and for the world. The conversations are far-reaching, and the takeaways many; at their heart, however, is a shared promise that Pike is a place that can and will engage fully in ensuring that our students are prepared for the future.

This scene was part of The Future of Learning, a Pike-sponsored interactive series focused on the many ways education is changing quickly (see article: Exploring The Future of Learning, P.10). Artificial intelligence, the fourth industrial revolution, evolving skill gaps, and globalization are a few examples. And some of the challenges and opportunities our children will navigate tomorrow are emerging now, not in some far-flung future. Therefore, engaging students in new ways of learning and thinking is an essential concern for all educational institutions. As a PreK9 school, Pike is embracing an urgent – and aspirational – charge to lead the way as a model for other independent schools about what it means to be a school of the future, today.

As Stephanie Rogen of Greenwich Leadership Partners (GLP) notes, “The fundamental answers to what students need to know and be able to do, what the role of the educator is, and how and where learning happens are at an inflection point.”

Rogen should know. As the founder and principal of GLP, she is committed to helping schools become leaders in facing the future. “All schools must find their way towards deeper learning experiences, and the people who can make them happen.”

Pike is no exception. So, in the second year of Ashley Marshall’s headship, and just on the other side of a successful year facing the very real challenges of COVID-19, The Pike School is partnering with GLP to engage in an institutiondefining strategic planning process.

The fundamental answers to what students need to know and be able to do, what the role of the educator is, and how and

where learning happens are at an inflection point.

DIGGING DEEP

In many ways, the horizon-broadening nature of the Future of Learning event served as fantastic staging for the strategic planning process, especially in the ways it brought members of the Pike community together to engage on meaningful topics. Creating a strategic plan will require a similar commitment to conversation and exploration. The process was designed by Rogen and her team at GLP in conjunction with Pike’s Strategic Design Committee (SDC). The SDC is composed of representatives from the school’s faculty, staff, trustees, and administrators, and co-chaired by Trustee Jeannie Sullivan (P '18 '19 '23) and Director of External Affairs Kate Moran (P'20 '22 '27). The committee’s task is daunting: To guide the school in re-imagining what’s possible and what’s essential in meeting the emerging and future needs of our children.

To get there, Pike will need to engage in thinking that goes beyond the hallmarks of traditional strategic planning in schools. It is clear that designing strategies that reflect what Pike is already doing – without reaching further and without taking into account the reality of the current “inflection point” with regard to the future of learning – will not meet those future needs.

That is why Pike is taking a different approach, rooted in what GLC refers to as adaptive challenges – challenges with no easy, ready solutions, ones that require us to ask new questions, to reframe problems, and to think creatively.

Given the current landscape for independent schools, for learning, and for the skills that students will need to be successful in and beyond the classroom, three key adaptive challenges stand out: Talent and leadership, deeper learning, and equity in education.

COMING TOGETHER

The Pike School’s August opening meetings for faculty and staff are underway, and small groups of teachers and staff are seated around tables, telling stories. Despite the masks, one can easily see the engagement and energy of their exchanges. Today, the stories are about a time in their lives when they experienced a moment of intense learning. The commonalities of these stories – the emotions felt, the ways in which new vistas were opened up – provide touchpoints for exploring what it truly means to learn in ways that impact who we are as individuals.

Learning – and how we learn – will be one of the key themes of strategic planning. Indeed, one of the essential methods for exploring Pike’s unique potential will be through topic-specific learning teams – groups across constituencies that will wrestle with data, trends, outcomes, and possibilities in intensive and intentional ways.

A model for this approach, the brainchild of Pike’s new Head of the Middle School and Director of Academics Uzma Bogwani, will be focused on transformational learning. The group will dive deeply into the process of learning, how it works, and when it works most effectively. As Bogwani explains, the group will be driven by some essential questions, such as: What elements or attributes make our learning particularly impactful? How does deep learning engage us emotionally, physically, intellectually? How does this kind of learning really change us? What does it awaken in us?

The exploration of these and many more questions promises a strategic planning process centered around what Rogen describes as “a deep understanding of why certain strategies produce better outcomes for students.”

“The great thing about focusing the work this way is that the path to solutions then opens up, helping a school to align assets and resources with what is most valuable for students,” Rogen says.

How does deep learning engage us

emotionally, physically, intellectually?

WHY PIKE?

It is a deceptively simple question that Head of School Ashley Marshall asks often in her leadership. “When I ask, ‘Why Pike,’ I’m also asking, ‘What sets us apart? What carries us forward? What accounts for our success? What challenges us?’ By asking ‘Why Pike?’ I’m asking after our heart.”

The strategic planning process is designed to hear how each of us might answer that one deceptively simple question, Why Pike? Starting with the community-wide survey that was shared in September, the process is geared to provide the Strategic Design Committee with a wealth of data, input, and understanding. Multi-day campus visits to work specifically with the administration, trustees, faculty, staff, and students; sessions for families, alumni and other community members; and the exploratory work of the learning teams will combine to create a holistic picture of Pike that is both deep and wide.

As someone with a long history with Pike, Chair of the Board of Trustees Tasneem Dohadwala ('96 P'20 '23), appreciates the way this work will build on our past and present to ensure our future.

“This approach to strategic planning means recognizing our strengths as a school and a community, and then understanding how we can focus on and employ those strengths to meet emerging needs,” she says. “What I’m most excited about is how the process we are designing really opens up the windows and doors of Pike. The process lets us see what is possible, and that in turn will lead to a creative, vibrant, and aspirational vision – for our school and for the students and teachers who are here now and those to come well into the future.”

Indeed, the strategic planning process has Pike squarely facing forward and focused on the future. That’s a good place to be, especially within the context of our current era of sweeping social and technological transformation.

Marshall sounds a similar note, “I love exploring what’s possible. To me, possibility is a bold reach for the future, but one that is built squarely on what has come before, and what our past has prepared us for. And Pike is so well positioned to do this work, meaningfully and deeply, because of who we are and where we have been. The future calls, and I’m confident we are ready.”

The process lets us see what is possible, and that in turn will lead to a creative,

vibrant, and aspirational vision

– for our school and for the students and teachers.