v0.0.3, last revised 30 September 2017
N.B. This document is only a draft. Please feel free to send any questions to [email protected] or leave comments inline.
How does Atlas need to do what it does?
How would we like to go about co-designing and co-developing Atlas?
On Atlas/Individualized Learning Plans
At PHS, people will mostly work and play. Like in any creative organization, the work people do will emerge from a mix of intentional plans, semi-intentional environments, and unintentional happenstance.
For youth, this work will be managed by a small team of staff who get to know them over their time at PHS. For staff, their work will be managed by a mix of their peers and directors at PHS.
Over time, as people work, we need to be able to render that work legible. That means we need other people to understand (a) the quality of the work and, (b) the personal growth fomented by the work. This is true both of staff and youth.
But, different people bring different assumptions and lenses to these questions of quality and growth. In the case of youth, parents see it differently than employers, who see it differently than central administration, which sees it differently than us. In the case of staff, we see it differently than the teachers' union, who sees it differently than the Superintendent. Together, these differences will be amongst the most significant challenges we face in our work.
While we can work on this in some ways over time—getting better at creating a culture, developing social proof, setting expectations, and so on—that challenge will never go away. It is at the core of our work. And it will remain so as long as (1) school is responsible for something as long-term, messy, and hard to inspect as human development; (2) school is held accountable by a set of stakeholders as diverse as parents, employers, and district officials; and (3) school is managed through nearly entirely leading indicators like test scores.
Because of this, the systems which help us to create consensus around the human development we're stewarding are mission critical. We believe these systems should be grounded in the actual work people do and the artifacts their work creates.
This document attempts to outline what we know about the first such system we intend to create, tentatively named Atlas.