Signature Cafe

This morning I attended the Signature Cafe at Severna Park High School. It was my pleasure to meet so many from the community, and lend whatever I could to the cause. Each school in the county is trying to coalesce their curriculum around one common theme, or Signature, that will serve as the common trait of the students they produce.

After a year and a half of preliminary studies the group met this morning to brainstorm about narrowing the themes. The Greater Severna Park Chamber of Commerce was invited, so there was definitely a strong representation of business oriented opinions. The most prominent theme that has emerged from the previous discussions is Leadership. However, what I heard at the tables was more about personal development of life skills than Leadership. The term Leadership is ambiguous enough to encompass many of the skills that people want their children to learn: character, critical thinking, learning, expression of passions. But the exhaustive list of skills leaves me scratching my head a bit asking, "Doesn't everyone want these things for their child?" And perhaps most perplexingly, "Is Leadership really congruent with all the skills?"

There is a lot of overlay with Leadership skills and the life skills that I heard expressed around the tables today, but creating a concise term to cover those life skills is difficult. I would just hate to see the school settle for a term like Leadership that doesn't truly represent the product that we hope to create for our children.

I always enjoy the process of these focus groups, I learned a lot from observing the professionals from the Board of Education, and I hope to be involved in the future with the development of this Signature.

--Ben