Futures Plan/ Strategies and Pathways

Greg Clinton Director of Technologies and Research & Development

As a learning organization, AISC is constantly evolving, transforming itself, growing, and changing. Since 2012, the School has engaged in a form of strategic planning that envisioned the next five years of change and how to make it happen. In 2018, in the final year of the first five-year plan, the School adopted a more agile approach to strategic planning that we call “futures planning.” It recognizes a few fundamental aspects of organizational change that have only become than others—the strategies and pathways model of futures planning allows us to recognize the variable timelines of goals. And finally, uncertainty is the new constant, and new ideas appear at an accelerated rate—in order to respond to the ever-shifting state of the world, to provide our students with the best future-oriented educational opportunities possible, and to incorporate new tools, practices, and experiences into our community. Agility in planning is more important more salient in the past few years. First, five years is a long time—our school can develop best-fit strategies that take into account new data, new obstacles, and new goals if we pursue a rolling three-year plan. Second, some goals take longer than long-term fixed stability. Futures planning occurs on a shorter horizon, is flexible, and more agile.

One of the highlights of the futures planning process is the Community Planning Team (CPT). Made up of volunteers from every community group—students, parents, faculty, and administration—the CPT meets three times each academic year to explore the strategies and pathways of the plan, discuss additions and changes, and listen to presentations about milestones and achievements from school leaders.

The Futures Plan contains projects and goals divided into four strategies:

• Learning, where we align teaching and learning to support the School’s Mission. This year we tackled a huge range of substantive goals including enhancing established programs like Learning Support, Research and Development, STEAM Week, Well Week, and CareerX, creating new mission-aligned portfolio systems, mapping the adoption of a competency approach to curriculum, and creating new tools for curriculum reform based on diversity and equity.

• Resources, where we reflect on our use of educational data, how it is collected, safeguarded, interpreted, reported, and used for decision making.

• Talent, where we work to hire, develop, and retain staff members who embody our Mission and Values. This year we have been busy prototyping a new professional growth handbook and process, as well as starting conversations around intercultural competence as a crucial skill.

• Community, where we work toward building our unique group of global and local stakeholders, enhancing communication and support structures. This year we focused energy on environmental responsibility and sustainability, developing data systems that can better communicate the impact our systems and practices have, and what we can do to optimize consumption, recycling, repurposing, and waste management.

It’s been an enormously productive school year. The energy and contributions from everyone at AISC are what make it possible for us to continue learning, growing, and evolving into the futures we can imagine.

In the following pages, catch up on updates from the various Councils and Committees that work to fulfill these goals.