hard deadlines

Future Search facilitator Jan Williams sets up the day.

More than 60 people from around Portsmouth — parents, business owners, members of community organizations, school staff and administrators — came together at Hathaway School this morning to kick off a two-day strategic planning session for the schools. The group, guided by professional facilitator Jan Williams, is using the Future Search method to explore the past, present, and future of the Portsmouth school system with the goal of creating a shared vision and strategies for achieving it by the end of the workshop.

"It's important for an organization to have a vision and a roadmap for where they want to go," said Williams, as she introduced the process. "Is it time to do something like this, given the State and national economy? It's even more important," she said, "When facing declining resources. It allows you to honor your priorities and vision even when you have to make difficult choices."

And after introducing the methodology and ground rules for the day, Williams essentially turned the session over to the participants, who worked in tables of 8 on a series of highly structured activities, each of which had deliverables that were reported back to the whole group. Participants were deliberately mixed by group at assigned tables, with roles (facilitator, scribe, reporter, timekeeper) drawn for each roughly one-hour activity.

In the morning session, participants looked at the past. On a series of pages taped up around the Hathaway cafeteria, people jotted individual observations about major events from each decade between the 70s and now, in four large groupings: self, Portsmouth community, the Portsmouth schools, and the US and global society. This became input for the first table exercise as teams analyzed each of the groupings to bubble up themes and implications.

[Side note: since I was the only member of the press invited to attend the entire event, I will be reporting on the proceedings under Chatham House rules: I am not going to identify the source of any quotes from participants.]

Participants look for themes.

The groups looking at the "self" found interesting patterns among the more than 30 flip-chart sheets full of details about the participants' histories. There were common themes of resilience in the face of major life changes, and a population that was at once better educated and involved, while at the same time being resistant to change and less diverse than the increasingly flat world around us.

Those looking at the Portsmouth community saw a rural character of the 1970s give way to a housing boom and expanding demand for services in the 1980s, with a shift in educational focus toward college prep. The 90s were a period of desirability of Portsmouth as a place to live and valuation increases, but at the same time, the beginnings of budget cuts and mistrust of school spending that culminated in the Tent Meetings leading up to 2007.

Paralleling the community changes, the schools saw new facilities and realigned elementaries in the 70s, a period where social issues and weak policies around accountability and things like drugs and alcohol reversed into increased accountability in the 1980s. The 90s saw more parent involvement, while the schools began to feel new challenges of meeting Federal standards, a trend which intensified after 2000.

The report back on global events was more predictable, but I found hearing the recent history of Portsmouth boiled down in the previous three grafs enlightening. It really felt like the group was able to crystallize insight out of their shared experience; I'm certainly not doing it justice here, but you'll want to read the final report.

In the afternoon, everyone changed tables to sit with their stakeholder group: school administration, town government (although there were no representatives of the Town Council there, which several lamented as a missed opportunity), teachers and staff, businesses, parent organizations, and community groups. Everyone had been asked to bring in a newspaper clipping related to issues facing the schools, and the first session was a roundtable discussion of those.

Then Williams took up a fistful of markers, set a fifteen-by-five-foot blank sheet of paper in front of the group, and asked the participants to create a "mind map," a free-form diagram of ideas relevant to the future of Portsmouth's schools. The whole group took up the challenge, and within minutes, the room felt like popcorn in a microwave, with people jumping in, shouting out ideas and adding branches, and keeping Williams hopping back and forth in front of the canvas.

Click image for full size (1.4mb jpg). Dot code: Blue/Admin, Red/Government, Light Blue/teachers, Black/businesses, Dark and Light Green/Parent orgs, Orange and Peach/Community orgs.

Each member of a stakeholder group then got a strip of dots to "vote" for ideas on the map to set priorities. "No selling your dots," said Williams, and set the group off to plaster the map with stickers. You can blow up the image above to get a sense of how the groups voted.

The next table exercise was for the stakeholders to pare down their priorities and articulate their desired future responses to their top three among the issues or challenges on the map. This was probably the longest exercise of the day, with groups hashing out their priorities and preparing three-minute report backs.

There were some commonalities as the groups reported out — many talked about challenging curriculum, superior teachers, and technology as key to their vision of the future. But there were also interesting differences: the community organizations highlighted the need for social services, the town government talked about adequate budget and both "Doing the right thing and doing things right," and the admin group stressed teaching for "excellence" instead of the "minimum."

In the final task of the day, groups were asked to synthesize the history and overview work done during the day and come up with a list of "prouds" and "sorries" as well as issues that needed further understanding. Since this rolled up a lot of the insights of the day, it's worth quoting at some length.

And that was just day one. More to come tomorrow...