The problem/ challenge: The school (BS Wilakkers, Eindhoven) has been standing for a clear set of basic values for many years. But they see that the world is changing and so does the city and the Brainport region. They wanted to know whether they are still on the right track and how they can anticipate to these changes in their environment in the best possible way. That is clearly something the school director wanted to find out with a full involvement of the school team and the parents. He decided to organize an evening event at the primary school and all parents were invited to participate.
We quickly defined the background, set the main goal for the event and we agreed that I would be the facilitator so that the school team can easily engage into discussions with parents and participate instead of managing the whole evening. The main goal of the evening was to define the core values of the school based on the perception of the parents and school team – the so-called DNA of the Wilakkers and define which extra direction/ dimension parents and team members would find valuable to add and develop in order to transform the school from a great school to a dream school.
Before and after the evening the children were also involved and asked to define what they love about the school and they were challenged to visualize a dream school.
The co-creation session:
Since we expected a group of 60-80 people and I would facilitate the evening alone, I chose not to work in small groups.
After a short introduction by the school director the process followed these steps:
1, Empathizing & defining the school DNA – Parents were asked to remember the big moment/ situation when they definitely decided to register their child to this specific school and to write down the first 3 core reasons that influenced them. The school team was asked to remember the moment they decided to start working for this school. Participants wrote down each reason on a separate post-it. After sticking more than 100 post-its on the windows, we clustered the ideas and transferred the main clusters on the Wilakkers DNA poster.
2, Defining and Ideating of a dream school – Participants were asked to think of a dream school. The perfect school to be proud of. They defined as many aspects / directions they could think about and wrote down each idea on a post-it. After sticking hundreds of post-its on the windows again we started making clusters with a few teachers. Believe me, it is anything but easy 🙂
3, Defining the right direction with voting- Since 17 different main clusters were defined the group discussed about the common interpretation of the cluster names and decided to merge and eliminate some clusters. Each participant received 3 sticker dots and was asked to divide the 3 dots among the clusters according to their own priorities. This led to a clear priority list of 3 topics/ directions.
4, Defining the necessary change – Participants were asked to think of all necessary actions that would be necessary to achieve the impactful implementation of these defined 3 core directions. The post-its were divided into 2 areas:
1, change actions
2, things the school should stop doing or get rid of (because they do not contribute to these core directions)
Interesting to see that many people mentioned actions that would be performed by the parents and the children themselves, not necessarily by the school staff. Definitely something we hoped for. Great to see that parents actually want to contribute.
5, Ownership, involvement and action – as a school is a community involving staff, parents and children and quick wins can easily be achieved without much effort in terms of human capacity and financial investment all participants were asked to write their name and a concrete action on the change poster with which they think they can and want to contribute to the realization of the goals.
We closed the evening with a check-out wall besides the exit door to let participants write down their feeling / feedback in one word.
And I personally closed the evening with sleeping like a baby... Facilitating such a large group is very hard work if you want to keep up the speed, the vibe and the positive energy.
Follow-up: The next step will be to see how the children see the dream school and let them also vote for the most important direction and work out concepts/ prototypes for the implementation of the 3 core directions. But that is another co-creation process which I will share in another blog post.
Interested in a co-creation process for your own school or organization but you do not know how to start? I am happy to help you.