What Are The Characteristics Of A Good School?

by Terry Heick

When a society changes, so then must its tools.

Definitions of purpose and quality must also be revised continuously. What should a school ‘do’? Be? How can we tell a good school from a bad one?

This really starts at the human level but that’s a broader issue. For now, let’s consider that schools are simply pieces of larger ecologies. The most immediate ecologies they participate in are human and cultural. As pieces in (human) ecologies, when one thing changes, everything else does as well. When it rains, the streams flood, the meadows are damp, the clovers bloom, and the bees bustle. When there’s drought, things are dry, and stale, and still.

When technology changes, it impacts the kinds of things we want and need. Updates to technology change what we desire; as we desire new things, technology changes to seek to provide them. The same goes for–or should go for–education. Consider a few of the key ideas in progressive education. Mobile learning, examples of digital citizenship, design thinking, collaboration, creativity, and on a larger scale, digital literacy,1:1, and more are skills and content bits that every student would benefit from exposure to and mastery of. As these force their way into schools and classrooms and assignments and the design thinking of teachers, this is at the cost of ‘the way things were.’

When these ‘things’ are forced in with little adjustment elsewhere, the authenticity of everything dies. The ecology itself is at risk.

The Purpose Of School In An Era Of Change

What should schools teach, and how? And how do we know if we’re doing it well? These are astoundingly important questions–ones that must be answered with social needs, teacher gifts, and technology access in mind. Now, we take the opposite approach. Here’s what all students should know, now let’s figure out how we can use what we have to teach it. If we don’t see the issue in its full context, we’re settling for glimpses.

How schools are designed and what students learn–and why–must be reviewed, scrutinized, and refined as closely and with as much enthusiasm as we do the gas mileage of our cars, the downloads speeds of our phones and tablets, or the operating systems of our watches. Most modern academic standards take a body-of-knowledge approach to education. This, to me, seems to be a dated approach to learning that continues to hamper our attempts to innovate.

Why can’t education, as a system, refashion itself as aggressively as the digital technology that is causing it so much angst? The fluidity of a given curriculum should at least match the fluidity of relevant modern knowledge demands. Maybe the first step in pursuit of an innovative and modern approach to teaching and learning might be to rethink the idea of curriculum as the core of learning models?

Less is more is one way to look at it, but that’s not new–power standards have been around for years. In fact, in this era of information access, smart clouds, and worsening socioeconomic disparity, we may want to consider whether we should be teaching content at all, or rather teaching students to think, design their own learning pathways, and create and do extraordinary things that are valuable to them in their place?

Previously we’ve assumed that would be the effect–that if students could read and write and do arithmetic and compose arguments and extract the main idea and otherwise master a (now nationalized) body of knowledge, that they’d learn to think and play with complex ideas and create incredible things and understand themselves in the process. That the more sound and full their knowledge background was, the greater the likelihood that they’ll create healthy self-identities and be tolerant of divergent thinking and do good work and act locally and think globally and create a better world.

A curriculum-first school design is based on the underlying assumption that if they know this and can do this, that this will be the result. Of course, it doesn’t always work out that way. Worse, we tend to celebrate school success instead of human success. We create ‘good schools’ that graduate scores of students with very little hope for the future. How crazy is that?

How can a school call itself ‘good’ when it produces students that don’t know themselves, the world, or their place in it?

So then, here’s one take on a new definition for a ‘good school.’

Characteristics Of A Good School

1. A good school visibly and substantively improves the community it is embedded within.
2. A good school adapts quickly to social change.
3. A good school uses every resource, advantage, gift, and opportunity it has to grow students and tends to see more resources, advantages, gifts, and opportunities than lower-performing schools.
4. A good school has students who get along with and support one another towards a common goal–and they know what that goal is.
5. A good school produces students that read and write because they want to.
6. A good school admits its failures and limitations while working together with a ‘global community’ to grow.
7. A good school has diverse and compelling measures of success–measures that families and communities understand and value.
8. A good school is full of students who know what’s worth understanding.
9. A good school speaks the language of the children, families, and community it serves.
10. A good school improves other schools and cultural organizations it’s connected with.
11. A good school understands the relationship between curiosity, inquiry, and lasting human change.
12. A good school makes certain that every single student and family feels welcome and understood on equal terms.
13. A good school is full of students that not only ask great questions but do so with great frequency and ferocity.
14. A good school changes students; students change great schools.
15. A good school understands the difference between a bad idea and the bad implementation of a good idea.
16. A good school uses professional development designed to improve teacher capacity over time.
17. A good school doesn’t make empty promises, create misleading mission statements, or mislead parents and community-members with edu-jargon. It is authentic and transparent.
18. A good school values its teachers and administrators and parents as agents of student success.
19. A good school is willing to ‘change its mind’ in the face of relevant trends, data, challenges, and opportunities.
20. A good school teaches thought, not content.
21. A good school decenters itself–makes technology, curriculum, policies, and its other ‘pieces’ less visible than students and hope and growth.
22. A good school is disruptive of bad cultural practices. These include intolerance based on race, income, faith, and sexual preference, aliteracy, and apathy toward the environment.
23. A good school produces students that see and know themselves in their own context rather than merely as ‘good students.’ These contexts should include geographical, cultural, community-based, language-driven, and professional factors and ideas.
24. A good school produces students that have personal and specific hope for the future that they can articulate and believe in and share with others.
25. A good school produces students that can empathize, critique, protect, love, inspire, make, design, restore, and understand almost anything–and then do so as a matter of habit.
26. A good school will connect with other good schools–and connect students, too.
27. A good school is more concerned with cultural practices than pedagogical practices–students and families than other schools or the educational status quo.
28. A good school helps students understand the nature of knowledge–its types, fluidity, uses/abuses, applications, opportunities for transfer, etc.
29. A good school will experience disruption in its own patterns and practices and values because its students are creative, empowered, and connected, and cause unpredictable change themselves.
30. A good school will produce students that can think critically–about issues of human interest, curiosity, artistry, craft, legacy, husbandry, agriculture, and more–and then do so.
31. A good school will help students see themselves in terms of their historical framing, familial legacy, social context, and global connectivity.
32. A good school wants all students ‘on grade level’
33. A good school has a great library and a librarian who loves students and who loves books and who wants the two to make meaningful connections.
34. A good school may have maker spaces and 3D printers and wonderful arts and humanities programs, but more importantly, these kinds of learning spaces are characterized by students and their ideas rather than the ‘programs’ and technology itself.
35. A good school is full of joy, curiosity, hope, knowledge, and constant change.
36. A good school admits when it has a problem rather than hiding or ‘reframing it as an opportunity.’ (Sometimes, too much growth mindset can be a bad thing.)
37. A good school doesn’t have unnecessary meetings.
38. A good school doesn’t spend money just because it’s there.
39. A good school may love project-based learning but loves the projects more and the students doing the projects even more.
40. A good school explains test results honestly and in-context.
41. A good school never gives up on a student and depends on creative thinking and solutions for the students who ‘challenge’ them.
42. A good school isn’t afraid to ask for help.
43. A good school sees the future of learning and merges it with the potential of the present.
44. A good school doesn’t graduate students with little to no hope for the future.
45. A good school separates knowledge, understanding, skills, and competencies–and helps students do the same.
46. A good school ‘moves’ gifted students as ‘far’ as they move struggling students.
47. A good school benefits from the gifts and resources of its students and their families–and then bolsters those gifts and resources in return.
48. A good school doesn’t exhaust teachers and administrators.
49. A good school feels good for all visitors to learn within, teach within, visit, and otherwise experience.
50. A good school seeks to grow great teachers who seek to grow all students to shape and change their world.

The Characteristics Of A Good School