When you are part of a culture that values collective success, you don’t often notice. It takes others pointing it out to you.
I was recently on a call with several Vancouver area superintendents planning an event for the new year. As we got to finalizing the plans, one of the superintendents said, “We need to think about how this will impact those in other areas of the province, and how they could also be involved,” The facilitator of the call was so surprised. He said that he does lots of these kind of events and planning and only people in BC talk like that – it was meant as a compliment.
Thinking of another example, there was a recent event with 170 high school principals across more than a dozen local school districts sharing ways they were implementing new initiatives and learning from each other. The principals came for the networking with both the belief they had something to learn and something to share.
I have recently spent some time in other jurisdictions in Canada and the United States, and there was definitely a more secretive and non-sharing culture. The ideas of networking seem far less important than winning. A vendor at one of these events, who felt they had a top end reading product promised school districts if they used it he would not sell it to surrounding districts so they could out perform them – it was a selling point that they could have something better than those around them.
Good learning and education is not like pie. If West Vancouver gets a nice big piece, it doesn’t mean all our neighbours get smaller pieces of pie. And too often it is lost on some that if one student’s success, one school’s success or one district’s success is at the expense of others, it is not really a success. Rather if we can create a community where we learn from each other’s success we are really onto something.
One value I really appreciate in BC education is that this collective success seems built in. Those in one district don’t want to gain advantage at the expense of others. And within districts, the conversations over the impact on other learners and other schools is always taking place.
We can be competitive without taking away from others. It is a careful balance but one that is always forefront for so many of us.
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