Costa (1991) summarizes his vision of "the school as a home for the mind" in this statement: "The school will become a home for the mind only when the total school is an intellectually stimulating environment for all participants; when all the school's inhabitants realize that freeing human intellectual potential is the goal of education; when they strive to get better at it themselves; and when they use their energies to enhance the intelligent behavior of others."

In Adrian, a rural southeastern Michigan community, this vision is becoming reality in the form of a seven- to ten-year project entitled "Communities for Developing Minds." This school improvement process moves beyond Costa's focus on the school to include the entire community, enabling citizens and school staff members to examine the needs of our student learners. Through collaborative training, study, and research, we are designing strategies that are intended to change the way our community facilitates learning for all students and adult residents.

Focus on the Future

Communities for Developing Minds focuses on the future and the best a school and its community can become. By developing new learning traits as a part of a community, learners become more active participants in life rather than just recipients of more schooling. Communities for Developing Minds aims to make a difference for kids both in and out of the classroom. It also aims to enrich the daily lives of all district employees both professionally and personally. Finally, Communities for Developing Minds hopes to improve communication within the Adrian school community relative to exploring and studying topics that will initiate change in education.

One assumption underlying this project is that past efforts to install good ideas in schools have failed primarily due to inadequate implementation procedures. Thus, Communities for Developing Minds places heavy emphasis on the intelligent behaviors of all participants and on change processes that the Institute for Development of Educational Activities (I|D|E|A) has researched and developed since 1968.

Initial Training

In January 1991, Adrian Public Schools received formal notification that it had been selected as the only district in America to develop a prototype of schools of the future with the guidance of I|D|E|A and Arthur Costa, Bena Kallick, and Marian Leibowitz. The goal was to put into operation all the desirable traits of a quality educational environment.

In August of that year, the project commenced with a week-long summer workshop. For two-and-a-half days, 126 community members representing every employee group within the school district along with parents, senior citizens, nonparents, business leaders, students, clergy, and government leaders came together as a School Community Awareness Team. These "community ambassadors" were instructed on how to acquaint other members of the community with the project. This initial training unveiled "three Cs" that became the cornerstones of our work together:

• Communication focused on how we talked with and listened to one another as a community.
• Collaboration highlighted how we worked together as a community.
• Cognition continually emphasized the role of thinking in our community.

During the remaining two-and-a-half days,18 community members representing broad leadership roles within Adrian were convened as the "Vertical Team." They were instructed on how they could best support, provide understanding of, and be models of intelligent behaviors to the building facilitator and School Improvement Teams. Because of their various job roles, you might think these team members had unlimited autonomy. In fact, they had neither authority nor jurisdiction over site improvement teams. The idea of the Vertical Team was to transcend all hierarchical barriers in the district and community to bring ideas and people together representing policy, practice, and management. Because of the tremendous success of this team during the first year of implementation, two Vertical Teams were developed for the following school year. Team C (continuing team members) was expanded to 25 participants and Team N (new team) had 26 representatives with two of the previous year's team members serving as co-facilitators. The 1995-96 Vertical Team will be expanded to include more community business people with the Adrian Chamber of Commerce being the hub of activity.

Facilitator teams were developed at each site, comprised of an administrator, a parent, a teacher, and a support person (for example, bus driver, custodian, secretary, or food service). They were instructed in the processes that would enable them to work with their individual School Improvement Teams. The processes evolved around shared decision making, brainstorming, problem solving, consensus development, vision building, and higher-order thinking—all in preparation for designing a plan of what their school might become. The buildings/grounds, maintenance, and transportation centers along with the central office and Head Start also have Improvement Teams for their sites with trained facilitators.

Nine Principles of Education

The characteristics of what human beings do when they behave intelligently (Costa 1991) played a major role in team discussions and practice. Through qualified research, it was found that community members from all walks of life who are effective thinkers share the same characteristics. The understanding, practice, and modeling of these behaviors have played a key role in the success of the different teams, and they have begun to permeate classroom strategies for teachers and students.

Also integral to the work of the facilitator teams are the nine principles of education developed after twenty years of research by I|D|E|A. These principles are:

1. Education is increasingly used to prepare students for successful life transitions.
2. Schools make every effort to link students with appropriate community resources that could make a positive contribution to the student's education.
3. Students become increasingly self-directed through planned activities leading to self-educating adulthood.
4. Schools explicitly teach and reward the agreed upon values of the school and community.
5. Parents are expected to be active participants in the education of their children.
6. Each student pursues excellence in an area of his or her own choosing.
7. Everyone affected by a decision is involved directly or representatively in the making of it.
8. Schools strive to integrate the interdependent educational efforts of home, school, and community.
9. Every participant involved in educating youth models the role of learner.

Eighteen to 25 community members were later convened per site as individual Site Improvement Teams. Using the nine principles as a context, they were instructed by Facilitator Team members from each site on how to think about and process ideal educational opportunities and intellectually stimulating working/learning conditions for all staff and students.

After approximately four principles had been comprehensively processed by the Site Planning Teams, a second facilitator training was conducted. The purpose of this training was to prepare for the Site Planning Team retreat and the ensuing Design Teams, which would be responsible for outcomes implementation.

To develop broad ownership in the vision, information about the ideas and discussions of the Site Improvement Teams needed to become common knowledge throughout the school staff and school community. Toward this end, as many discussion groups as necessary were convened in order to accommodate as many participants as possible. Fred Wood, Dean of the School of Education at the University of Oklahoma, has dedicated his sabbatical to working with the Discussion Group concept in Adrian.

The next phase of the project encompassed the Design Team. These teams were assigned to prioritize the outcomes developed at each site during one-to two-day retreats. It was the task of the Design Teams to develop a first-year implementation plan that would move a school toward its desired vision.

In his book A Place Called School: Prospects For The Future, John Goodlad (1984) talks about teachers being extremely isolated as they perform their craft behind closed doors. He goes on to say how little time they have within their rigid daily schedules to meet, plan, observe, and talk with each other. In our initial work with this project, we have learned that bus drivers, secretaries, custodians, food service people, instructional aides, and maintenance people also feel isolated. They have communicated a sense of confusion about their role in "schooling," but their voices have often gone unheard.

Indicators of Success

As a result of the communication, collaboration, and thinking that is happening among both certified and classified staff, sharper images for a climate of thinking are being molded. School busses, classrooms, cafeterias, central offices, and maintenance workrooms are being celebrated as interdependent communities. For example, a high school custodian in her second year as a Vertical Team member recently worked with a chemistry teacher and his class by analyzing cleaning fluid.

Last year, a Vertical Team meeting centered upon a discussion of self-directed learning. Eighteen students from grades K–12 actively participated in the discussion. It was rewarding to listen to a 4th grader from one elementary school talk about the importance of decreasing impulsivity and being more persistent with his work. There was also a kindergartner from another school who talked about his action research project about bears, while his mother described how she worked with her son on using accurate information.

Further evidence of intelligent behaviors and community was demonstrated during a recent budget reduction of $1.6 million. Since a broad base of staff and community had become participants in the project, it made good sense to design a process in which their input could be quantitatively, qualitatively, and objectively reflected in the budget.

More than 1,000 staff, students, and community members participated in a nominal group process of prioritizing reductions. Trust, problem solving, consensus development, brainstorming, listening to others, flexibility in thinking, and striving for accuracy and precision were readily observable during nine community meetings. Before Adrian's involvement in Communities for Developing Minds, budget reductions would have been determined in a central office meeting, making them the target of emotional reaction because of the traditional top-down approach. With the new process, intelligent community behaviors prevailed, and only 17 complaints about the reductions have been documented.

All of the Community Site Planning Teams have prioritized their outcomes. By the spring, how the outcomes will begin manifesting themselves in new traits of schooling will be more identifiable.

As for the role of curriculum, instruction, and assessment, those responsibilities remain solely in the hands of teachers and administrators for the time being. Due to the significantly increased participation of community members in our school district because of Communities for Developing Minds, I envision greater community participation in curriculum development during the next cycle.

It has became abundantly clear that noncertified staff members' knowledge and understanding have increased due to the systematic nature of this school improvement process. During the last six months, I have observed a growing number of classified staff and community residents becoming more aware of and interested in curriculum issues.

The integrity of our work will increase thanks to the prior knowledge that community members will bring to the curriculum development experience from their School Improvement Team research and study of educational topics. For example, math teachers taught with a slant on learners being mathematicians, and science teachers taught as if children were going to be scientists. I believe knowledgeable community participation will create an influence on curriculum outcomes that reflect learners using math, science, social studies, and the arts in all professions.

Parents who are already participating on the various teams have become acutely aware of the terms interdisciplinary, tactile learners, kinesthetic learners, alternative assessment, experiential learning, and outcome based education. As their participation increases, I believe any teacher whose sole strategy is lecture will be challenged by parents whose background information on classroom strategies has been heightened. Though this may seem intimidating to some educators, it could have a very positive impact. The more a community understands the challenges, burdens, frustrations, triumphs, and hopes of the classroom practitioner, the more the seeds of a home-school partnership are likely to flourish.

The issue of alternative assessment may prove to be the most challenging for community and staff understanding. There appears to be a mindset that a learner's performance must be quantifiable in numerical terms only. But with the help of the past three summer workshops involving 381 community members in the strands of thinking, problem solving, coaching, assessment, parent involvement, and alternative schooling, the task may be easier than we first thought. With the guidance of Bena Kallick, 23 of the workshop participants convened as the assessment strand each morning. During the afternoon, members joined other strand representatives in designing lessons for grade-level clusters that would be taught to students later in the week. For example, I was teamed with representatives from the coaching, problem solving, and thinking strands for the purpose of designing and delivering a lesson to 21 early elementary students. The other groups were upper elementary, middle school, and high school. In all, 223 students have volunteered to give up two days of their summer vacation to work with us.

In work sessions on assessment with Kallick during the summer and throughout the year, we learned that effective performance criteria must lend greater clarity to instructional outcomes. In addition to professional educators, parents, students, and other community members can share in the responsibility of learning if everyone understands the performance standards that qualitatively and quantitatively measure a learner's progress.

As an Adrian community, how everyone becomes more knowledgeable of the standards against which learning is assessed is critical. To that end, the assessment strand formulated a series of questions within a context of community, some of which are:

• Does the community understand the whole as well as the parts with which they will be working?
• How do we work for more community inclusion/participation?
• What are the indicators of successful leaning?
• What will constitute evidence of successful learning?

As representative Community Teams, we are trying to focus on what is written as high achievement outcomes and expectations for students, what is taught, and what is learned. In order to examine this more closely, we are concerned with the juncture in which the print transforms into practice and when the practice results in improved learning as documented in multiple assessment.

Currently, 1,711 community members have participated or are participating in Communities for Developing Minds. For a school community of 25,000, I believe that to be significant. And as more Design Teams become operational, that number will increase. Even though specific results of Design Team work are not yet available, I know that a greater number of people within this community have learned how to talk with and listen to one another, to work better together, and to think about intelligent behaviors. I've worked in this community for 10 years, and I'm witnessing a genuine change of attitude from what was to what will be in relation to new traits of schooling as a community for the 21st century.

References

Costa, A.L. (1991). Developing Minds: A Resource Book for Teaching Thinking. Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Goodlad, J.I. (1984). A Place Called School: Prospects for the Future. New York: McGraw-Hill.