Making and impact vs intending to make one

My colleagues and I read and discussed a portion of Barbara Sanderson's Talk It Out!, which I found crisp and useful. Sanderson makes a number of distinctions between different terms but a particular pair stood out to me: intention vs. impact. What do we want to have done vs what have we done?

I think this idea has been explored from a lot of different angles. Dewey and Piaget may have referred to this as the "hidden curiculum." What is the difference between what students learn (impact) and what you wanted them to learn (intention)? The old adage do as I say, not as I do belies the fact that students both hear what we say and see what we do. Our actions teach the students what we would  do and our words tell them what we want them to do. The hidden curriculum contributes to the overall impact that we have on our students.

This is rather an extreme example of the
disparity we can create between
intention and impact.

I am not surprised that this ties back to one of the core values we identified at the beginning of our Summer Institute: deliberateness. Every decision that we make in a school day/month/year, active or passive, sends a message to a student. The food we serve indicates what we think is a reasonable diet, the discipline we provide indicates what we consider fair and just, and the way that we interact with others on campus demonstrates how we think people should be treated. Whether or not we want these actions to greatly influence our students, they do. This demands that we make intentional decisions, reflecting on them as we go. If we want our impact to be in line with out intentions we have to be prepared to self critical and willing to change.

My cohort has determined that the school schedule (which I cannot entirely define just yet, so suffice to say anything having to do with time) may be able to have a positive impact on our students by means of contributing to the hidden curriculum. We are a long way off from finding out how, but we intend to find out and use that information to make an impact.

In two days we are going to pitch our plan to more of our colleagues and other members of the Malvern community. I look forward to answering clarifying questions and thinking about probing ones.