Decision Making in a Learning Community

As a principal, I know that it is never easy to bring together a diverse group of people of different ages, backgrounds, and philosophies to make decisions, even about the most mundane issues. When parents, teachers, and administrators join together to make decisions about the education of their children, it takes commitment, patience, flexibility, perseverance, and a basic belief in the strength of collaborative decision making for the learning community to function smoothly. This basic belief in the strength of collaborative decision making forms the essence of the OC as a learning community. Before becoming principal of Washington Elementary School, which houses both the OC program and the traditional school for neighborhood children, I had taught for 13 years and been an administrator for 8 years in a variety of settings. I viewed myself as a believer in and practitioner of collaborative decision making. I had a fair amount of experience working with diverse groups, including students, parents, and boards of trustees. Never, however, had I encountered a group of parents and teachers who had a stronger sense of “community” or deeper implicit beliefs as to how their program should function. This may sound as if decision making in the OC was rigid—which was not the case. It was only that over the program’s 13 years, many of its beliefs and processes had become so intuitive that as a newcomer I sometimes had a difficult time understanding how decisions were made and who the ultimate authority was. I was principal of the OC for four years and never discovered “the ultimate authority.” During that time, I did discover that common understandings regarding the importance and value of dialogue, communication, and participation served as threads that formed the fabric of the program. Here I discuss some issues that arose regarding decision making and how they were handled by the community. Notice that I did not say “how they were resolved,” since one of the things I learned while working with the OC is that often simply processing or dialoguing about the particular issues brought about closure.