Many of the connections among the traditions in our schools have obvious links – teachers/resources/instruction, or students/ instruction/teachers/outcomes – while others are more complex. This complexity of schooling – school leader as advocate for the students, or the range of items that might be considered as resources beyond instructional materials such as meals and transportation and the focus of our efforts to drive improvements is regularly captured in the variables between various frameworks, research studies, beliefs and practices.
Maybe it’s the air of summer, or the need to escape political discussions, or that conversation with a nephew about creating 3D imagery, that set this idea floating through one night which lead to messing around with ways to represent the notion, and consider how it might have value in the complex and often messy world of changing the outcomes we are getting in too many of our schools.
Each of the si
x core elements has crosslinks to the other core elements and it is the intersection of these crosslinks and the complexity of how those links drive each other that is the heart of this visual. One challenge is that none of these arrangements are fixed or all inclusive e.g. the “students” map does not contain resources, yet students are the primary beneficiaries of the resource allocations and students do utilize those resources be they textbooks, technology or lunch. – but there is generally an intermediary between them.
That is the nature of the complexity that I am hoping to explore in the 3D perspective in this model where each core element is the face of a cube – like the six sides of a die. Disassembling the die gives each face a pyramid shape that joins all the other elements at the center – a confluence I am considering as the school culture resulting from the effects of all six elements working together. If you can visualize that projection – each exterior edge aligns with one edge of four other facets, and inside the die, each corner and edge of the pyramid intersects with the corners and edges of two others – e.g students, teachers and instruction… (resources are linked to students through teachers “utilization” of resources, and “guidance” from those instructional resources). This is the area I am working on next – how to describe and support consideration of what happens in and around those adjoining elements that create the school culture and what can we do intentionally to make it better.
In the 3D model I have added a label at the point of intersection of the faces on the dice as an effort to offer a broadly descriptive starting point for considering the relationship between those facets- though like all such labels they are not intended to limit the scope of the relationship – just provide a starting point for consideration.
My thought is to turn this into a 3D space that has both a fly through to visit the concept intersections, and a walk through experience with attached guiding questions, along with follow-up sharing of the ideas and complexities that emerge as a point for further discussion. (The screenshots above are from my first effort to remember how to build 3D models – its been a few years – but this is one of many free tools out there).