Portsmouth Future Search participants voting on conference themes.

The 63 members of the Portsmouth school community who had come together for a strategic planning conference wrapped up the two-day effort by identifying key themes and driving 9 of them to the level of concrete next steps. The Future Search workshop, led by facilitator Jan Williams, achieved a broad consensus on the key issues involved in taking the schools to the next level, and participants left with clear ideas about the work to be done.

"You went from looking at this with new eyes yesterday morning to very specific ideas," Williams told the group as they wrapped up. "You can do this."

Interviewed later, she said "This district has really got a wonderful opportunity," and added that she was struck by "the quality of participation and the energy that people maintained for two days," adding, "There are a number of ideas that are really on the cutting edge."

School Committee Chair Dick Carpender described the process as "uplifiting," and Superintendent Susan Lusi said she was impressed that the conference "not only built a set of ambitious goals, but also a team to help accomplish them."

The group convened this morning at 8:30, picking up where they left off the first day's work. Williams primed the group with a Japanese proverb: "Vision without action is a daydream; Action without vision is a nightmare," and then sent them off into their 8-person mixed stakeholder table groups to brainstorm a shared vision of the future.

Future search participants roleplay parents meeting in Clements' Market, January 2019.

Each table had to envision the Portsmouth schools in 2019, dramatizing the future scenario by acting out a 7-minute scene on the Hathaway school stage. There was a visit from the President of the United States (a PSD graduate!), TV news shows, a press conference with the RI Comissioner of education, and a new parent bumping into people at Clements' and hearing all about the schools. The creativity and enthusiasm of the group in jumping into the reality was amazing, from the tongue-in-cheek portrayals of the entire Cabinet as Portsmouth alums, to imagining every student walking around with a "Google WorldPort Personal Edition" to enable 24x7 video conferencing, to the wry suggestion that in 2019, Dr. Lusi "is paid as much as the URI basketball coach."

As each group performed, the rest of the participants were listening keenly for themes, and spent the hour after lunch identifying common threads at their tables and scribing their top choices on flip charts. Once these were done and arranged at the front of the room, the hardest part of the work began: voting, as a whole group, on the common themes that would become the outputs of the conference. Not simply what showed up on the most flip charts, Williams said, but "ideas you're willing to work toward." she went on to stress that the participants were committing to stand behind the choices: "It is an endorsement. It says that we did our best thinking for two days."

Conference participants reviewing and reaching consensus on themes.

Leading the group through a deliberate, meticulous, but always positive discussion, Williams worked through every item the flipcharts, checking the group for understanding and seeking consensus on the themes. Out of the welter of possibilities, about 20 made the cut, which were quickly refined to a top 9 for teams to chew on as the final exercise of the day. This was the first time groups were allowed to sort themselves, and new tables were created for each of the themes: Excellent teachers, Community involvement, Business internships, Comprehensive social services, Global competitiveness, Individualized Learning Programs, Educating the whole child, Technology, and Adequate funding.

It would be a disservice to the enormous work the groups did to try to capture their report-backs with sketchy notetaking; suffice it to say that by the end of the exercise, each of the tables had drafted a set of propositions defining their issue and a set of next steps developed using the SMART framework (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bounded). All the materials from the conference will be available in a few weeks and will be posted on the PSD web site (you'll certainly see a link to 'em here when available.)

The day ended with the entire group forming a circle, and each person offering a comment about the experience. There were a lot of voices expressing gratitude for the opportunity to participate, thankfulness for the vision of Dr. Lusi in making the event happen, congratulations all around for hard work well done, and kudos for the outstanding facilitation work of Jan Williams who took 63 mostly-strangers with disparate agendas and helped them generate new ideas and robust consensus in just 16 hours.

For several people, and for me as well, the truly wonderful thing was the sense of hope and possibility for our kids that came out of the workshop. With the vision and energy from all the tables — businesspeople, teachers, community groups, and parents — for the past two days, one has to believe that no problem facing us is insolvable, and that when we do look back on this event from 2019, we really will see it as many of the skits envisioned the workshop: a pivotal point in the history of Portsmouth's schools.