Conversations with Heart and Meaning

CONVERSATIONS WITH HEART AND MEANING

"Our single greatest discovery has probably been the power of simply getting people asking, ‘What is good for the kids?’" says Les Omotani, who led West Des Moines public schools for ten years and later led the Hewlett-Woodmere system in Long Island. "Gradually, this has evolved into building learning communities as the core strategy for change."

When Omotani first came to West Des Moines, he found "a pretty typical school system." Parts of the community were very affluent because much of the suburban growth in the city had spread to the west. But it also had three Title I schools (schools serving communities with low income levels), and significant achievement gaps existed between different schools. Development was also skewed. "We tended to build our new schools in the west, following the population trends, but I also learned that people cared about all the schools and students doing well."

"When we started to organize regular community dialogues, lots of people showed up, not just teachers and administrators or parents, but local business people and town officials. Gradually, we started asking questions about things that are what people in the education mainstream refer to as ‘immovable walls.’ Why are we limited to a one hundred and eighty-day school year? There are a lot of kids who could really benefit from thirty more days of instruction. Are we not putting enough attention on schools in the oldest part of the community? Why is kindergarten only a half day, when we know kids can benefit from a whole day? It wasn’t me pushing my agenda. It took some time, but these questions just arose naturally as the types of issues that were being neglected."

At the same time, Omotani had teams of teachers and administrators and community members who were working together on the details of different ideas. The two processes, dialogue and implementation—again, reflection and action—were moving in parallel, and feeding each other. "Gradually we were able to hold community forums where we weren’t afraid of introducing new ideas that were still taking shape. We said, ‘Why don’t we show that we trust people enough to say there really are choices? We don’t have to build the next school in the west. The money could go elsewhere. We could fix up an older school. What would happen if we did it differently?’"

Eventually, they did do a lot of things differently. One Title I school and its feeder school became a ‘Leonard Bernstein model,’ one with an arts-based approach to integrated learning. "To say that ‘music and the arts are profoundly important in addition to academic success’ in a school with the greatest number of Title I students is pretty striking when schools everywhere in America have cut the arts back or out entirely," says Omotani. At the time of Senge’s account, the newest elementary school was in the oldest part of town. The second Title I school was being completely refurbished, and the system was entering its sixth year of an extended-year program, approximately two hundred and ten days long, for students who needed it. "After I left, the community committed to maintaining the early childhood learning center we had started [that offered] daylong kindergarten, which was a real sign to me that these ideas had taken root." Senge reports that many achievement gaps had narrowed and student performance across the system had improved.

"It’s very hard to explain to people how this all worked," says Omotani. "It wasn’t any one thing that happened that enabled this or that innovation to occur. It was definitely the result of those conversations. It was all about developing a capacity to talk together in very diverse groups, developing a collaborative network of people who were supportive of one another, and through this tapping people’s deep caring for kids."

"I was brought up as a Japanese-Canadian in Alberta, Canada, and I’ve also spent a lot of time in Hawaii and with our native peoples. In those cultures, when a child comes up to a group of adults, the adults will always stop their conversation to see what the child needs. One of the first things I became aware of when I moved to this part of the U.S. was that adults tended to ignore kids. I noticed that here people mostly just go right on talking."

"Now, I don’t think we are so different as human beings, but something about how we live seems to have cut us off a bit from our innate caring for kids. As the community became what dialogue researchers call ‘a safe container,’ this innate caring just started to come out more, and the conversations and thinking became profoundly different from what was going on elsewhere. We came to a simple phrase: As the community, so the schools; as the schools, so the community.’ If you say that enough, the meaning becomes clear. People start to remember it and start to repeat it themselves."

"Communities grow from people pursuing questions that have heart and meaning to them," says Juanita Brown, founder of the World Café method for organizing large meetings as genuine dialogues. Les Omotani and his colleagues created a space for these conversations. When this is done, learning communities arise as a by-product. It is important that this "social space" be created consciously and be maintained. But it is also important to realize that the creation of learning communities is a natural process that does not need to be controlled or manipulated—indeed, attempts to control it can easily backfire.