Flourishing Together

A Christian Vision for Students, Educators, and Schools

Lynn E. Swaner, Andy Wolfe

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467463225
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

How do students, educators, and schools flourish together—especially in an eraof increasing pressure from standardized testing, growing challenges to student mental health and well-being, and frequent educator burnout?Many schools strive toward academic achievement as their primary marker of success, but this well-meaning approach can lead to a reductionist view in which students are too often seen as statistics rather than whole human beings. Teachers, school leaders, parents, and of course students know that flourishing is a much broader and more holistic aim for education. But what is to be done?

The goal of this book is to call Christian educators back to a better vision of flourishing within a robust theological framework, with the practical guidance necessary for implementation. To accomplish this, Lynn Swaner and Andy Wolfe take readers through an exploration of five essential domains identified through extensive empirical research—purpose, relationships, learning, resources, and well-being.

An ideal resource for professional development and strategic planning, Flourishing Together persistently adheres to the principle that "anything that is worth building cannot be built alone." Thus, the vision for flourishing here is one in which the school community is understood as an interconnected ecosystem, in which "each one's flourishing is dependent on their flourishing together." Accordingly, teachers and administrators will be inspired and equipped to reshape their schools as places where they—alongside their students—can flourish together in a community of abundant life.

1

PURPOSE

EXPLORING THE RESEARCH

1

Our Shared Calling

Education is not an end in itself; it is a means to develop a response to our calling in life. Consequently, when we discuss a purpose for education, it must be related to an adequate purpose for living.

—Donovan Graham, Teaching Redemptively¹

Three bricklayers are asked: “What are you doing?”

The first says, “I am laying bricks.”

The second says, “I am building a church.”

And the third says, “I am building the house of God.”

The first bricklayer has a job. The second has a career.

The third has a calling.

—Angela Duckworth, Grit²

The question of purpose is a question of story. As Steven Garber explains in Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good, “Human beings are story-shaped people, stretched between what ought to be and what will be. In our imaginings, our longings, at our best and at our worst, we are people whose identities are formed by a narrative that begins at the beginning and ends at the ending.”³ Accordingly, every school has its own story—with a beginning, focused on why our schools were founded, how they were founded, and by whom; a middle, which centers on what we do every day as leaders, teachers, and students; and an aspirational end, which identifies what we aim to achieve for our school, for our graduates, for ourselves as educators, and for our communities and societies.

Most schools internationally have attempted to articulate their organizational purpose through mission or vision statements, which point directly to the story that schools desire to tell about themselves. In Christian schools these words may have an explicit or implicit biblical underpinning, or links to particular theological perspectives and local church traditions. The purpose statement for many Christian schools in North America is often grounded in what is referred to as a “biblical worldview,” while for Church of England schools the terms “Christian vision” or “Christian ethos” may be more familiar. Regardless of our preference for a specific term or the intellectual and ecclesiastical history from which it arises, our statements of purpose point fundamentally to the story in which Christian schools locate themselves.

If we are to understand the purpose of our schools, we must understand this story. While in some ways it may appear similar to that of other types of schools, the principal difference is that Christian schools ground their story in the biblical narrative of the Old and New Testaments. In Restoring All Things: God’s Audacious Plan to Change the World through Everyday People, Warren Cole Smith and John Stonestreet explain,

The Bible is not, or not merely, a book about how to have a better life or how to handle life’s problems. It is a book that explains the universe and how God is in the process of redeeming and restoring it to its original good, true, and beautiful state…. He created it good and loves it still, despite its brokenness and frustration. He has plans for it yet and invites the redeemed to live redemptively, for its good and our flourishing.⁴

A Christian vision of education offers this narrative as a framework for students and educators alike to see a path toward a purpose-filled life, which necessarily includes understanding the pain, difficulty, and doubts in their lives and in the world around them, as well as thinking of themselves and their unique passions and talents as “gifts” for the lifelong restorative work to which people are called. As Garber explains:

When we see all of life as sacramental, as the graceful twining together of heaven and earth, then we begin to understand the meaning of vocation…. We can begin to see that all of life, the complexity of our relationships and responsibilities—of family and friendships, of neighbors near and far, of work and citizenship, from the most personal to the most public—indeed, everything is woven together into the callings that are ours, the callings that make us us.⁵

We are reminded of the apostle Paul’s words in his letter to the church at Ephesus, referencing the biblical narrative and our calling within it: “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”⁶

While the stories of our schools may vary in their attractiveness, hopefulness, and effectiveness, all of us, together, collectively inhabit these stories. They shape how we believe and behave as individuals, how we interact with one another, and how we gauge whether and to what degree we are successful. At the same time, each of us helps to shape our school’s story—and, if we work together, we can even be so bold as to reshape the story, in ways that lead to greater flourishing for schools, educators, and students.

Flourishing Schools

When we think about how an articulation of purpose comes to be held in common across a school community, right away we find that our metaphors around shared vision are unhelpful. Words like “casting” and “catching” vision give the impression not only that vision is something external, but also that it is something leaders toss to constituents—who in turn, may or may not “get” it. Unfortunately, this is sometimes what we find in schools; there is a huge variety in stakeholder engagement, with notions around purpose sometimes conceived by a charismatic individual school leader bringing personal vision to bear, or sometimes by an external organization (educational or ecclesiastical) imposing a set of values that may or may not be shared locally.

In contrast, flourishing together in Christian schools requires that our school’s purpose be truly and authentically shared across the school community. This begins with an honest appraisal of why our schools exist and what we are trying to accomplish together. Smith and Stonestreet identify “visionary leaders” in education as those who “ask not only what makes a ‘quality education’ according to the standards of education experts. They also ask the question ‘Why?’ Why are we educating ourselves and our children? To what end?”⁷ Asking “why” enables schools and teams to focus on what truly “matters.” In The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters, Peter Block defines the question “why” as “shorthand for our capacity to dream, to reclaim our freedom, to be idealistic, and to give our lives to those things which are vague, hard to measure, and invisible.”⁸ With our “why” questions and answers in full view, we move toward a shared calling in schools that both unifies us and enables us to work toward the “greater good” to which we aspire together.

Along these lines, the Flourishing Schools research found that flourishing outcomes were positively linked with everyone within the school—from trustees to administrators to teachers to staff members—having a shared sense of responsibility.⁹ Responsibility implies much more than agreement or even buy-in, but rather involves leaders and educators interpreting purpose in and through their daily lives and work. Rather than being dictated, shared responsibility must be cultivated through collective dialogue and reflection. In Mission Drift: The Unspoken Crisis Facing Leaders, Charities, and Churches, Peter Greer and Chris Horst also cite the need to “intentionally craft the culture” of organizations through “traditions and practices”¹⁰ which can either promote or inhibit the flourishing of those who engage in them. Professional development, board meetings, and schoolwide community meetings provide opportunities for intentional engagement, through reflection and dialogue, around the school’s purpose. Care must also be given to the orientation or training that is commonly provided for new trustees and employees; often this induction experience focuses on role-related tasks and responsibilities, but it also presents a ripe opportunity for substantial engagement with the school’s purpose.

The Flourishing Schools research also found that a school’s purpose must extend beyond the school walls—involving more than a calling held just by those who work in the school—to a genuine partnership with school families.¹¹ The research showed that when families feel they are a part of the school’s mission, and that their involvement with the school is truly valued, there is a positive link with greater flourishing outcomes. The emphasis in this finding is that families feel there is a genuine partnership. This means that understanding families’ perspectives is essential, as is realizing that our actions and interactions as leaders can be perceived by others in very different ways than we intend. This means cultivating partnership with families must go beyond a suggestion box or even a parent volunteer organization, to gathering in-depth feedback, involving families in decision making, and resolving conflict in healthy ways.

Importantly, we need to also broaden the circle of families we typically invite to engage and include those who are on the margins of our school community—whether because of background, socioeconomic status, geography, work schedule, or other factors that may inhibit their meaningful involvement in the daily life of the school. To this end, it is helpful to ask ourselves “Who is missing?” and “Who are we leaving out?” when we plan school events or send out communication to families. Forging genuine partnerships requires showing hospitality and care as part of the biblical command to “love each other deeply.”¹² It also requires that we be willing to change long-standing practices to remove barriers to engagement with families, and to take the time and effort needed to develop trusting relationships (something we address further in Part 2, “Relationships”).

On a final note, even if our school’s purpose is widely shared among staff and is manifested in genuine partnership with families, it must necessarily impact our practice in the school in tangible ways. The Flourishing Schools research found that integrated purpose¹³—when our biblical worldview or Christian ethos fully shapes how we educate—is linked positively with flourishing outcomes. Other research has similarly identified constructs like “coherence,” or “consistency, coordination, integration, and alignment” of vision with practice as “essential beams supporting the correlates of highly productive schools.”¹⁴ A school’s purpose is translated into action through our decision making, in our schedules and budgets, and frequently in how we address our most challenging circumstances. With this in mind, we turn to consider the centrality of educators—leaders, teachers, staff, as well as trustees—in translating our school’s purpose into action.

Flourishing Educators

As Angela Duckworth’s “parable of the bricklayers” suggests, while holding a job or having a career is an individual pursuit, fulfilling a calling binds us to something larger than ourselves. Whether a cathedral or a school, anything that is worth building cannot be built alone. This is because a calling imparts a sense of collective “why” that not only motivates professional work, but also provides deep meaning to that work. This in turn engenders character, excellence, and an abiding commitment. Educators who are “called … demonstrate this through their words, actions and decision making, exemplifying a strong moral purpose, confident vision, and ambitious trajectory of improvement,” the outgrowth of which is a “deep sense of resilience” exhibited during seasons of challenge and change.¹⁵

Since most educators have little free time beyond their current workload to develop new activities and routines, the key to living out the school’s purpose lies in what we are already doing. This necessarily begins with a realistic assessment, both personally and collectively, of how integrated our purpose is with our daily practices. This is no easy feat, given our human tendency to become entrenched in our habits of work without thinking back to how they connect to the “why.” In On Christian Teaching: Practicing Faith in the Classroom, David Smith of Calvin University recalls a moment of revelation in this regard:

It became viscerally clear to me how powerfully my subconscious self was scripted by particular narratives of what a teacher was supposed to look like, and that I had not consciously chosen these. Much of my teaching is shaped not so much by a clear-sighted evaluation of what will lead to the most learning at any given instant, or by my carefully honed articulations of my beliefs about God and the world, but by what I have done before, what I have seen others do, and what I assume others expect from me.¹⁶

If we are honest and humble, we can see ourselves clearly in the mirror of this confession. Our challenge in schools becomes to recognize...