Leadership in schools requires a broad and integrated vision, capable of embracing not only one’s own division but the entire educational context. My vision of vertical leadership extends beyond the day-to-day management of the school division, aiming to create synergy among all components of the school. When we look back on our school career, we identify light moments and darker periods. This perception varies depending on the people who accompanied us and the experiences we had. While it is true that everyone bases his or her judgment on his or her own experience, we must remember that school is based on three pivotal elements: people, experiences and community.
L’importanza delle persone
How can one person make a difference in school?
Being capable, competent and prepared are essential and admirable qualities in every teacher. However, what really makes the difference is, in my opinion, the logic of “quid pro quo” (give to receive): witnessing passion for this special work, being an example, doing one’s best to give one’s best, making sure that others can also do the same to improve the work environment and contribute to make the daily routine of school life optimal and peaceful for teachers, students and parents.
A functional school environment should be balanced, orderly, and respectful.
To achieve this, it is necessary to have a long-term vision that reflects values shared by everyone involved in each individual pupil’s educational project.
As coordinator, I try to establish a constant dialogue with the teachers and families in our division, as I believe that everyone should feel involved and complicit in the academic performance of each individual pupil or student, a teaching that comes right from the School of Barbiana and can be summarized in one phrase: “I Care,” I care, I care.
As Coordinator, I am committed to fostering a respectful, kind, and caring educational and training environment for teachers and students, firmly believing that kindness is contagious and that mutual respect is essential.
If the teachers form the backbone of our school, the students are its heart. And it is from this meeting that the best projects are born, such as, for example, the creative writing course coordinated by our English teacher, Dr. Matika: an ambitious project that involved our sixth and seventh graders, who improvised themselves as writers and poets, confessing to me how “amazing it was to feel like a poet, without knowing they were one.”
La Bellezza della Diversità Linguistica
In our classrooms we welcome an international audience of pupils, each with a different language level. The linguistic variety present in the hallways and classrooms offers interesting insights for language teachers, who daily find themselves inventing and adapting new teaching proposals. This is true not only for foreign language teachers, but also for Italian teachers, who are daily confronted with the regional varieties conveyed by our students from different regions of Italy. The strength of our school is definitely this: the constant confrontation between colleagues and the number of pupils we welcome allow us to modulate our teaching, create new projects and enhance the qualities of students and teachers.
Esperienze Significative
Experiences are equally crucial. Before I started coordinating the middle school division, I asked myself what my goals were and what values I wanted to convey to my boys. In an ideal world, I would have had to pursue the five core principles of our school right from the start, but that would have been unrealistic and unmeaningful. Therefore, I decided with my team to focus on the value we felt was most important for this school year: respect.
So we have organized numerous experiences to remember and reinforce this principle by making it palpable in respect for nature, art, diversity and legality. We involved our students in hands-on public service activities with the Central Park Service. Many of them participated in charity events to help the weak and less fortunate. In addition, we embarked on a meaningful course on legality, which concluded with a talk by Prof. Rosario Scalia and Prof. and journalist Antonio Nicasio, who has been working for years to spread these issues among young people.
We also worked to ensure that differences among students were recognized and valued, raising awareness of differentiated learning and normalizing different learning characteristics. It has not always been easy, but collaboration among our teachers and the help and support of families have always made it easy for us to achieve our goals.
Guardando al Futuro
In order to remain a competitive school, it is good to set ourselves new challenges and review the educational and teaching plan of our Division annually. Beginning in September, our team will work in carrying forward the projects that have worked and coming up with thoughts and ideas for new principles we believe in that will open the hearts and minds of our talented young people.
The first educational and teaching challenge our school will face is the application and authorization process for our Middle Years Program within International Baccalaureate. This will allow our students to further open themselves to international academic careers, seeing even more recognition of their education not only in the United States and Italy, but also in the rest of the international schools. We wholeheartedly hope that we can achieve this goal as well with the openness, availability and preparation that characterize our school.
Having the privilege of living and working in New York exposes us to great diversity, which we seek and want to enhance. Back to the crux of the matter: people. Without them, we would not have achieved what we have, had meaningful experiences or left our students with values worth living together.
The article People, Experiences, Community: Cristiana Grassi’s Vision of Leadership at the School of Italy comes from TheNewyorkese.
