The Instructional Soul

Book excerpt: The Instructional Soul: Leading Schools with a Spirit of Innovation is about connections. It explores a new way of organizing our schools and aligning our curriculum and lessons that is long overdue. What we know with great certainty is that our educational system is comprised of a disconnected assortment of skills, subjects, and departments. What we learn in math has little to do with what we learn in science. Even worse, our students are often disconnected from each other, and our schools are disengaged from their communities. In many ways, school is simply a place where we drop off our kids in kindergarten and pick them up when they are eighteen. This book dares to suggest something different, a system that is fully integrated, aligned, and purposeful. It provides a new framework for how we shape our curriculum, involve our families and communities, and align our work around skills like creativity and confidence in ways that are so unlike what we do now that a revolution may be in order. In the end, that will require bold leadership and a collective search for our souls.