What Students Actually Want in Their School « Cooperative Catalyst

What Students Actually Want in Their School « Cooperative Catalyst:

What Students Actually Want in Their School

by Tara S

Over the summer, when David Loitz sent out a request for Imaging Learning Listening Session planners, I said, “Why not?” and agreed to organize one. Months later, after numerous emails back and forth between David, Charles Kouns (the founder of Imagining Learning) and Mr. Bo Adams (my old teacher, who was helping me put it all together), I filled out my consent to be recorded form and knew that the day was finally here.
On November 15, I arrived at Unboundary for the “Listening Session,” full of energy, but unsure of what to expect. I’d heard that a Listening Session was an opportunity to share ideas on what we, as students, imagined school should be. What I found was a fun, small, thoughtful community, bursting with ideas and jokes and smiles. With 6 other students from schools around the metro Atlanta area, led by Mr. Kouns and his partner, Stella Humphries, we started the process of cultivating ideas.

Personally, I hadn’t been so sure how easily 6 strangers and I would interact over topics that lots of people shy away from. But as soon as we started the first round of sharing our responses to 8 journal questions, Mr. Kouns had created, I could tell this was going to be something special and exciting. On some questions, our answers were extremely varied, on others (including the unlikely question who was your favorite person as a child), the answers were repetitive, creating connections between us.
The second part of the listening session involved telling a story about something you heard (or read) that