You belong here, you are loved, you are enough
The semester in middle school and high school started with this simple message. These were the words I heard during a formative conversation with a member of Apple's Industrial design team, who had worked at the heart of that team for twenty years and designed everything from the iMac to iPhone, to the Apple Stores.
My question was simply, could you tell me about how to create great designs and any tips for teaching project based learning. I was expecting him to tell me about the design cycle, and instead he said 'firstly Stuart, you need to know you belong here, that you are loved and that you are enough'. It was not what I was expecting to hear. The second thing he said was 'when you see fireworks, not many people think about the space between fireworks'. Again, not exactly what I was expecting and not obvious how to turn that into a lesson plan!
The point he was making is that for anything as fragile as a good idea, trust, a friendship, care or for that matter learning to happen, we need to create a place that feels safe and where we feel accepted. At ISA we call that 'kind and inclusive' and we work very hard at building our fabric of trust and care.
This week, the feeling of care and calm was palpable with the new longer advisory sessions, the calm split lunches, and the renewed emphasis on relationships. The first days of school can feel manic - but instead they have felt calm, joyful and caring.
The kindness and inclusion is both an end in itself, but it is also the space between the fireworks - those moments when we discover more in ourselves than we knew was there, when we spark a new friendship or when we invent an iPhone.
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