You’ve been through a lot over the last 12 months.
How can you use it to get better as a school?
As the school year approaches its end, educators get eager to put the school year behind them. Too often, there’s a temptation to move on without pausing to reflect on what we’ve been through.
What did we start that we want to keep doing?
What did we pause that we never want to go back to?
What needs have become clearer? What gaps have been exposed?
What are the new opportunities in front of us?
Design for Next Year is for schools that want to plan the next school year with intention.
Design for Next Year Team Experience
Six Facilitated Meetings
Structured Team Development, Reflection, and Planning
Big Picture Thinking + Concrete Outcomes
$9,000
A Team Approach To Designing Next Year
“Design for Next Year” is designed to carve out the time you need to be thoughtful about what’s next, while making it manageable for you to do so.
Each participating school will select a team of 4-8 people (either a leadership team or a cross-functional group of faculty and staff) to guide this work: reflecting on the current school year and applying those lessons to the next. We’ll facilitate the design team’s process, while providing ready-made tools each team can use to engage their broader communities.
Participating teams will lead reflection on their school’s experience over the last year, document what the school has learned, and make an intentional plan for next year.
6 Meetings, 12 Hours.
We interviewed dozens of school leaders in designing this program. Again and again, we heard how hard it was to find time to reflect. We’ve designed this intentional team experience so you don’t have to. You carve out 12 hours to reflect, learn, and plan, and we’ll help keep you on track.
Meeting 1: Sharing Stories and Framing Aspirations
Meeting 2: Mapping What You Learned Last Year
Meeting 3: Generate Ideas To Make School Better Next Year
Meeting 4: Select and Develop “Hacks” To Make School Better
Meeting 5: Clear The Space To Do New Work
Meeting 6: Make A Plan To Get It Done
Six Steps To Plan For Next Year
1. Share stories. So much of what we have lacked is time to process our experiences in community. We believe the work of planning for next year can’t happen well until we’ve had time to process how we got to the current moment. And schools need to design rituals to mark the transitions into the current year, and the transitions that are to come.
2. Identify what you have learned over the course of the year. This allows you to be build from strengths and celebrate the work of others in your community.
3. Map current community needs. A design thinking approach defines the needs of your community now, which may be different than the last time you crafted a strategic plan. Understanding the needs now allows you to be responsive in your planning.
4. Identify concrete “hacks” to use your new knowledge and meet needs next year. There isn’t time to overhaul everything, and no one has the bandwidth for another year of unpredictable change. But identifying a concrete and manageable set of “hacks” can get us started on making school better. School Retool defines “hacks” as “small, scrappy experiments that move you closer to achieving your aspiration.” That’s a useful lens for thinking about the scale of next year’s ambitions.
5. Declutter. Doing new work means getting rid of old work. Schools are bad at that! We are believers in Ecocycle Planning as one tool to help schools clear the space to take on new activities. Fortunately, the last year has put many of our “normal” practices on pause - this is a healthy moment to re-assess what “comes back,” and what goes away.
6. Make a plan. Obviously, this means deciding on next steps and who owns responsibility for what. But it also means asking: what are the stories we should be telling ourselves about the last year, and about who we’ll be moving forward? What new habits will we need to practice to turn those stories into reality?