Loading summary
Transcript25 lines
- [00:02]
Podcast Announcer
This show is a part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to your favorite. You'll get brand new episodes of all your favorite shows sent right to your device and you'll help us know that you're out there listening. Never miss another episode by going to podcast hillsdale.edu subscribe that's podcast hillsdale edu subscribe or click the Follow or Subscribe button on Apple podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.
- [00:46]
Dr. Steven Shipp
Welcome to the Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula and teacher led classrooms. Now your host, Scott Bertram.
- [01:05]
Scott Bertram
Thanks for listening. The Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast is part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes at podcast hillsdale.edu or wherever you get your audio. You also can find more information on topics and ideas discussed on this show and at our website, k12hillsdale.edu. We're joined by Dr. Steven Shipp. He is headmaster at Seven Oaks Classical School in Ellettsville, Indiana. You can find more at sevenoaksclassical.org Dr. Shipp, thanks so much for joining us.
- [01:41]
Dr. Steven Shipp
Scott, it's good to be with you.
- [01:42]
Scott Bertram
Talking today about the portrait of a graduate, something you've been working on for Seven Oaks, this Portrait a Graduate. So how would you define what you're trying to achieve? And why did you set out to write one?
- [01:57]
Dr. Steven Shipp
I think what we're trying to do with a Portrait of a Graduate is something that has kind of been catching on as the sort of thing that a school should consider writing, and I think for good reason. So in one sense it's something that people are coming to expect. But I wanted to embrace the task of writing a portrait of a graduate because I I really saw it as another way to articulate the mission of the school and to provide another kind of anchor in that sense, or a kind of North Star. And it's the sort of document that has the opportunity to really showcase ways in which your school might be distinct. So when we talk about a portrait of a Graduate for us, and I think for a number of schools, you're talking about a document that's probably one page, maybe two in length. Often what you'll find is some headers with some narrative text or bullet points underneath that just in fairly brief succinct form, give you a picture of the sort of person that you're hoping your school helps to produce.
- [03:03]
Scott Bertram
Now, most schools have some kind of mission statement as you alluded to earlier, how would you describe the relationship between the mission statement of a school and what might be its portrait of a graduate?
- [03:16]
Dr. Steven Shipp
Yeah, that's a good question. Because they're doing, in some ways they're doing some similar things. I think the mission is rightly regarded as a kind of bedrock. It is a starting point of an organization. It's the initial focal point that provides a reason for being of, in our case, a school. It really kind of, in the context of a school, describes what the education is intending to do, especially while students are under your care. So our mission statement talks about training minds and improving hearts through the kind of education we offer. And that education includes instruction not only in academic subjects, but in principles of moral character and civic virtue. The portrait kind of extends the field of vision. You look beyond the time that the students are under your care and you're trying to think about what is the long term effect that you hope the education has in the lives of your students. But the mission still in a very real way, central. So for us, our portrait of a graduate fits on a page and right under the title Portrait of a graduate is the mission of the school. Because we think that that ought to inform and be intimately connected with the kind of effects that we hope that the education has over the course of students lives.
- [04:39]
Scott Bertram
So who is the portrait of a graduate for? Is it for administrators, for teachers, for students, for parents? Who's the target audience?
- [04:49]
Dr. Steven Shipp
Yeah, I think that also is a very good question. And I think the answer is all of the above. So there's both an internal and an external audience. Just as is true with the mission statement, we want to, for people who are considering the school. This is one of those documents that marks out what kind of school we're trying to be, what it is we're trying to accomplish. And so it's useful for people who might be looking at the school for the first time. But it's also something that we want to be a living document internally. It is again a kind of anchor. It's a kind of succinct summary of what we're trying to accomplish. In that sense, it's something that is going to be very of great interest to teachers who are already attracted to the school because of its mission. And it's the sort of thing that we want to introduce our students to because we want to hold up a vision of the sort of people where we see ourselves as helping them become.
- [05:55]
Scott Bertram
Was there any particular moment or a particular problem that arose that pushed you to take on this project of writing the portrait of a graduate.
- [06:06]
Dr. Steven Shipp
Yeah, I really started to think a lot more seriously about this project as the school grew. So we started kindergarten through eighth grade back in 2016, and then we added a grade each year. So as the high school grew, as we approached our graduating class, that really was pushing me to sort of think about life beyond Seven Oaks. And now we're. We're in our ninth year, and we're getting to the point where we're not very many years away from having students who may have been here all the way from kindergarten through 12th grade. And. And so it feels like a time that's ripe for trying to give articulation to what it is. We hope what kind of lasting mark we hope the education will leave. I mean, really, in some level, we do have students for a lot of time. It's a remarkable thing that we have approximately 180 days with students for up to 13 years. On the other hand, we are just offering a foundational education, and we hope that this is just one early, formative, but early season of a student's life that goes on long beyond their time at Seven Oaks. But we want to think, as we look back on what the school did, what it offered to students, we want to be able to say, what is that? But it really is the growth of the school and this approach of a time when students could have gone their entire foundational education here that kind of of pushed me to take on this project.
- [07:46]
Scott Bertram
What was your starting point? Where did you begin with crafting this portrait of a graduate?
- [07:53]
Dr. Steven Shipp
Yeah, I think there's different ways of approaching this question of a starting point. I think there are some very early decisions someone writing a portrait of a graduate has to make. One of them is, what is it that you're writing? Are you writing a description of your graduates as most of them actually are most years? Or are you trying to paint more of an ideal? We try to paint more of an ideal now. At the same time, I should say, we recognize that we're just one institution among others. A school can do its work really well and for a variety of reasons, fail to make an impact on a student, or we may do our work poorly and students come out and flourish. We also think that the ultimate test of a portrait of a graduate is going to be the ultimate test for what kind of lives students live. It's just that it's the life lived. And so we thought it would be most useful to stick with something more aspirational. I think I used the image before of a kind of north star or a guiding light that sort of marks out what we hope to see people moving toward and so then contribute in the ways that we can as a school, as one institution among others. Maybe a little bit more practically. I think as we. As I started to play with this idea of a portrait of a graduate, it seemed like one of the first decisions to make is your basic categories. And I think we kicked around a number of possibilities. And people in education hear all kinds of categories that you can imagine being employed, college and career, critical thinking and lifelong learning. Head, heart, hands. Good, true, beautiful. There's a lot of directions you can go ultimately for us. Well, again, we came back to the mission and with our mission statement, talking about training minds and improving hearts and ending with a reference to moral character and civic virtue. I think a really good summary of our mission ends up being those categories of moral and intellectual and civic virtue. And so those ended up being the categories that we worked with for the portrait of a graduate, again following our missions.
- [10:17]
Scott Bertram
You mentioned that school's now been around for what, almost a decade at this point. Have you found it difficult? Or how have you managed the hurdles with staying true to something like your mission statement, this portrait of a graduate, as you add classes, as the school expands, or where have you found challenges, perhaps, in staying true to what Seven Oaks is?
- [10:41]
Dr. Steven Shipp
When I think about how do you stay true to the mission, it's what I ultimately come back to is there have to be keepers of the vision. In the case of Seven Oaks, I think it has been a benefit that there's been a continuity in leadership since the school was founded. I think that then plays into hiring, where you're constantly looking for people who are going to work for the school as faculty or staff who are actually attracted to the mission of the school. And I also think there's a place for thinking about different ways of putting setting the mission and vision in front of people and sometimes in fresh ways. So sometimes this looks again just. It can take a programmatic form. If you were to attend our grammar school morning assembly on a Monday, that would be Mission Monday. And a student in the assembly would lead K through 5 and the recitation of the school's mission, that's great, but it can find its way. There are other ways you can hold it in front of different constituencies in the school. I think there's a tight connection between the mission and the way we crafted a code of ethics for teachers or the way we evaluate teachers. And I think again, to come back to the Portrait of a Graduate. One of the benefits of the Portrait of a Graduate is that it is another way of articulating or giving expression to that same mission. And I think having additional or in this case, a fresh way to express that same mission as part of what helps us keep our vision clear.
- [12:23]
Scott Bertram
So as you've gone down this path of writing and working on Portrait of a Graduate for Seven Oaks, is there anything that you recommend avoiding? How can people learn from your potential mistakes?
- [12:35]
Dr. Steven Shipp
Okay, well, I think. I suppose that I do have a couple pieces of advice here. I mean, I think when we. As we fleshed out our own vision of a graduate, we moved beyond categories. We found that with some of our major categories, we had subcategories that kind of made for natural groupings of things we wanted to talk about. So, like with intellectual virtue, there are points that seem to relate more to knowledge or skills or characteristics or another way of thinking about things is. Some of the points we wanted to get across seem to have more to do with ideas and some to do more with points of practice. I think it's good to have a mix of all of those things. You wouldn't want to just talk about the knowledge you're going to convey or just about the skills you're going to equip students with. You want to talk about character, I think as well. I think another potential hazard in the world we live in is being tempted to feel like you have to quantify and a portrait of a graduate your success. It's called a portrait of a graduate. I think most of us would look at a paint by numbers sort of work of art and say, well, that's probably not great art. It lacks nuance, it lacks richness, it lacks texture. In the same way, I think you want to be careful not to over quantify the kind of outcomes that you want. I also think you want to kind of avoid any kind of Procrustean bed. You know, I think I'll. Sometimes what you find in classical ed circles is you'll. You'll find people who talk a lot about college prep to the point where it starts to sound like if a child doesn't go to college following high school, that somehow they're less fully successful than the student who dies. Or you sometimes hear this. Some schools kind of talk so much about preparing the leaders of tomorrow. If you don't quickly find yourself in some sort of executive role in business or government again, students left to wonder, have I been? Have I succeeded? So I think you want to find ways to paint A portrait that on the one hand is painting a picture of a kind of ideal, but in another way is actually potentially attainable by virtually anyone.
- [15:09]
Scott Bertram
Talking with Dr. Steven Shipp, headmaster at Seven Oaks Classical School, about the portrait of a graduate, do you have any suggestions for crafting a portrait of a graduate that is specific to your institution, one that perhaps only applies to Seven Oaks and not another very good classical k12 school? How do you make sure it is your own?
- [15:34]
Dr. Steven Shipp
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I don't know that I can say that there's something that we would say in a portrait of a graduate that no other school would say. But I don't think that's the nature of this document. I think good schools should be attempting to do essentially the same thing. And so I would hope that there are many schools that could paint a portrait very similar to the one that we paint. I think there'll be some differences in detail. I don't know that every school would use the same categories as we did, the intellectual, moral and civic virtue. I'm sure in some of the points they might express this or that point a little bit, a little bit differently. But I think most classical schools are going to be painting with the same set of colors. They're going to be painting with a similar palette. It doesn't mean the final product is going to look identical, but I would actually hope that there was more similarity than difference.
- [16:39]
Scott Bertram
Any places thus far you've found your portrait of a graduate particularly useful for Seven Oaks?
- [16:46]
Dr. Steven Shipp
Yeah, it's a. It's a gift that just keeps on giving. Already in the. As we've been working through drafting a portrait of a graduate and then becomes part of your giving. Expression to the thoughts that are contained in the portrait proves helpful in things like we have. We have what we call a founder's award, which is the kind of top award we give to the student who most fully embodies the mission of the school. But now as we're equipped with a portrait of a graduate, we have more than ever fleshed out a picture of the kind of person who really would, we think, embody the mission of the school. And so that provides something that teachers, provides a kind of lens through which teachers can look as they nominate students for the Founders Award. It also, as an administrator, again, it helps clarify some thoughts so that as I coach teachers or as we approach the end of year teacher evaluations, is there what sort of teachers we can ask ourselves are being most successful in helping draw students toward the sort of people that we want to, we want to foster, to cultivate the form. And I think there's just a way that going through the process of writing a portrait and having a document like this, I think it just helps focus the mind and draw us back to basic questions about what school is for, what high school is for, how to gauge if we're doing well. And so just that kind of refocusing by recurring to first principles, I think is just an incredibly fruitful exercise.
- [18:29]
Scott Bertram
Dr. Steven Shipp is headmaster at Seven Oaks Classical School in Ellettsville, Indiana. You can find more at Seven Oaks Classical as we talk today about the portrait of a graduate. Dr. Shipp, thanks so much for joining us here on the Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast.
- [18:47]
Dr. Steven Shipp
My pleasure. Thanks, Scott. Good conversation.
- [18:50]
Scott Bertram
I'm Scott Bertram. We invite you to like us on Facebook search for Hillsdale College K12 classical education. You also can follow us on Instagram hillsdalek12. That's hillsdalek12 on Instagram. Thank you for listening to The Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More at Podcast Hillsdale Edu or wherever you get your audio.