Day 25 – Strengths Based Schools

Keeping to one topic is sometimes very hard. I feel like I could ramble on about a number of things but that would thwart the purpose of the discipline of writing that I am intent to develop. Yesterday I started to read Strengths Based Leadership. The authors report that an awareness of our own strengths will increase our self-confidence. Higher confidence at a young age (14-22 years old) increases career satisfaction, produces a higher salary, and decreases the likelihood of health problems. People with high self-confidence have a “cumulative advantage” that grows over a lifetime. Conversely, if you focus on people’s weakness they lose confidence.

It seems to me that this has strong implications for schooling. Much in school does not boost student confidence. Teachers mark student’s mistakes on papers and grade accordingly. There is not a focus on what is done correctly but what is done poorly. If a student’s strength is not math, reading or writing then over seventy-five percent of his or her day is spent doing work that he or she is not good at doing. What if we re-focused schools and curriculum around student’s strengths? What if at least half of the school day students could work from those strengths and gain more confidence? Would that change the dropout rate? I think it might. I know more students would be engaged in learning if they could operate out of strengths.

Taking a cue from the research on leadership, if part of school was to help students find out what they were good at and then develop curriculum, goals, and learning targets from their strengths, the results might be more than we ever hoped. I think it’s worth a try.

Day 4 – Truth Telling

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---Emily Dickenson

I wonder what the slant telling of the truth of Christian education sounds like. I’m sure it is not the gibberish of a balanced approach to learning nor is it the swish of the great pendulum swinging back toward center. I’m just as sure that it includes a lyrical melody of imagination and creativity, with plenty of rests for the time to reflect on its paradoxes and harmonized with logic so that the final song makes sense to the mind and to the ear.

Our ways of thinking are so acculturated that we do not see ourselves accurately. At our best of times we are looking toward a foggy mirror. Even as we look intently, moving from side to side hoping for a better viewpoint, we never quite get a clear picture. If that is the case we must hold any truth we tell lightly because it is full of the bias of our experience.

Often the best answer to the question, “What is truth?” is “The Truth is a person.” This is true enough but what does it mean, really? Again we are stuck in the mindset imposed by our culture and hold to the notion that truth is only in the telling. Living the truth is incomprehensible. We easily separate what is in our mind from that which is in our heart. We are separatists by nature and put our knowing the truth a great distance from our doing anything about it. Herein lies the greatest difficulty in a slant telling of the truth, whether it be about Christian education or any other worthy endeavor.