From the Head

Challenge 2012

Last year the Board of Trustees adopted a visionary strategic plan, Challenge 2012, that everyone in the Menlo community should read. The priorities detailed in Challenge 2012 grew out of the Board’s intensive two-year review of every aspect of the Menlo experience. The study found that the school is very strong, and that it is serious about its commitment to educational excellence. While Challenge 2012 reflects a fair amount of institutional pride, it also shows that the Board is incapable of simply celebrating the status quo.

How has the school community reacted to this new strategic vision? A good deal of attention has begun to focus on what it says about improving Menlo’s arts and athletic facilities; these are exceptionally exciting development that obviously will do a great deal to strengthen our students’ experience in these programs. That said, the Board’s single most important goal is the one it chose to place first and to highlight in the language that introduces it: “Above all, make the instructional program even more engaging.”

I do not want to move on without first noting how unusual it is for a Board to focus so much attention on the students’ day-to-day classroom experience. On the contrary, other schools’ strategic plans almost always limit themselves to improving facilities and finances. But engagement? Engagement speaks to learning – our core purpose. As central as it is to the Board’s vision, engagement is also elusive. How do you define, for example, the excitement that ran through the Upper School last year when students received the catalog of Knight School offerings? And how do you describe the crackle in the Middle School when seventh graders raced to share their knowledge of – and solutions to – daunting world-class problems that had consumed their attention for over a month? It is such reactions that the Board wants to characterize the entire school day. In short, Challenge 2012 urges us to make learning in every class every day as deeply rewarding as we can possibly make it. Talk about a challenge!

This commitment to making engagement our most important priority certainly has the faculty’s attention. But how are we to move forward? What, precisely, are we to do to maintain high standards while promoting engagement? And, when the instructional experience we offer is fully engaging, what will it look like? Challenge 2012 suggests a number of answers that I will examine in future articles.

One further point: engagement is vital, but the other elements in Challenge 2012 are also integral to educational excellence. I plan to explore these various elements in Knight Line, our newest publication. Filled with glimpses into Menlo as it is and where it plans to go, Knight Line describes a school that is committed to excellence and is striving to achieve even more. I hope you will become a regular reader.

Sincerely yours,

Norman M. Colb
Head of School