2007 Year of Formulation: Formulation
As we began 2007, we identified three key tenets or principles of formulation:
| 1. | Authenticity: Building the school is the school. There is not some school out in front of us that we are separate from and planning to reach one day. Whatever we do now is the school just as much as whatever is done later will be the school. This includes documenting, recording, and capturing the experience and process so that the value and learning that happen along the way become part of the richness and wisdom the school makes available to others. The education is in the journey, not the destination. |
| 2. | Curiosity, questioning, exploring, testing: Each person has ideas about what would work best or the way it should be done. Formulation is not a competition to pick the 'right' way or strategy. It is not a space of advocacy or promotion. When you are already sure you are right about how something should be done, you are no longer in formulation. Formulation is a space in which the primary action or doing is exploration and testing. This is where things get examined and tried out, where they are held up to the scrutiny of the community. |
| 3. | Choosing the foundation, structures and accountabilities the school will be built on. The outcome of a successful period of formulation is choice. We distinguish choice not as deciding among alternatives, but as selecting freely, not based on our considerations, but after consideration. |
