NEASC2024

As founding leaders of a new boarding school with a diverse student and staff population in an environment without a tradition of community-oriented boarding schools, creating a common purpose and shared culture was an existential necessity for us. This session will explore the principles and processes we followed as we developed a school culture with the singular mission-focused purpose of promoting student leadership. Our time will focus on three areas: 1) how we developed a shared understanding of our mission and shared language to promote the culture of leadership we aspired to, reflecting our "thinking about it" and "working on it" stages; 2) how we created and sustained routines, rhythms, and rituals that support a culture of leadership, reflecting our "living it" phase, and 3) understanding the student experience of building and sustaining a shared purpose, reflecting one pathway for a "what if" inquiry.