Brand Workshop

This activity brings together the entire education community to discuss how to turn the vision of students being ready for college and the world beyond into reality. It’s appropriate for summertime or on one of the first days of school.

This activity is intended for students, but after facilitating this with students, you can ask the students to facilitate a session with parents and community members. This conversation is a great way to welcome new members of your education community to the school, and for returning parents to recommit to the school’s vision.

Prepare Ahead of Time

Open Letter to the Community

Take the open letter from the Develop a Vision exercise and edit it so it’s addressed to your students. Invite students to an important important meeting to set the tone of the school year, and tell them why their participation is important.

Repeat this process separately for parents and community members; plan to have students facilitate the community conversation.

Presentation

Prepare a slide show that will provide step-by-step guides on how to work together to form a school identity. Slides may include:

• Welcome slide
• Summary of the World Cafe process (read below)
• Norms for conversation, for example: listen carefully; do not interrupt; make sue of what others say; make your point succinctly and let others react; acknowledge good ideas; and find consensus. You may project these norms on one screen, or you may wish to display these rules on a tent card on every table.
• Three discussion questions, for example:
• What are your hopes and dreams for this school (in general or for the coming year) to ensure every student is college and career ready?
• How can the school community work together to overcome challenges and achieve our dreams?
• How do we connect local issues with the world at large? How do we give students the education and experiences they need for the global knowledge age?

Workshop

Audience: students
Time required: two hours
Materials: chart paper, pens, post-its

Welcome and Objectives

Welcome students by describing the purpose of this gathering: to get students to help design a school wherein all students are expected to be globally competent, ready for college, and the world beyond.

Explain how World Cafe works: you will raise a discussion question, which will be discussed in small groups throughout the room. Students are encouraged to spend 10 minutes to share perspectives and beliefs orally, and/or by writing or sketching on the table. The table captain will make sure everyone at the table engages in the conversation. The table captain takes notes and should be prepared to share a summary of this converation.

Go over norms for conversation; ask an allow short amount of time for agreement to norms.

To make sure students are sitting with people they may not normally interact with, ask students to count-off and sit at tables according to their numbers. You may also appoint a student to take pictures of the event and to gather quotes to for the school newspaper or other PR purposes.

Give students three minutes to introduce themselves to their fellow students at the table.

Round One

Students have 10 minutes to discuss this question:

What are your hopes and dreams for this school (in general or for the coming year)?

Table members can doodle and/or take notes on the butcher paper as they talk. Table captains should ensure that all students can contribute their ideas to the conversation. Table captains should also take notes to be ready to summarize this conversation in succeeding rounds.

Close the conversation; ask everyone except the table hosts to move to another table; participants should move randomly and not as a group through the rounds; encourage participants to mix with others with whom they don’t regularly talk.

Round Two

Students have three minutes to introduce themselves at their new tables.

Students have 10 minutes to discuss this question:

What challenges does the school community face?

Final Thoughts