Every School Is A Think Tank
by Terry Heick
Every school is a think tank.
Every school, by design, opens it doors to the brightest developing minds a community has to offer.
Each one of those students has unique talents, and is plugged into a complex network of resources both human and otherwise.
It’s the case then, that every student is a teacher–a person having experienced a perfectly human experience that carries with them the moments of their life piling up behind them to each subsequent moment.
These moments are a wonderful mix of performance and failure–of abstraction and practicality. These manifest as needs and opportunity.
As such, students are a kind of human duality of needs and opportunity insofar as their daily practice and knowledge acquisition is concerned.
They come to school full of what they can do, and what they need.
Teachers can guide the intersection of these two planes until they sit neatly on one another.
School then becomes a place where children solve problems and realize possibility while catalyzed by each moment as it comes anew.
As children solve problems in an authentic and sustainable way–this particular problem and this particular family in this particular context in this particular community–the school crystallizes into something else.
Properly conceived then, every school is a think tank.
The question becomes, then, how closely can you, as an educator, align those needs and that opportunity for that student?
School Design: Every School Is A Think Tank