Designing a school for a community of people with beautiful minds

NoTosh is helping to create one of the most remarkable learning community on the planet. It’s remarkable because it’s a school just as much for parents as it is for their children.

In almost every school, ‘belonging’ features as a desired outcome. The pandemic threw learning online, but it also created opportunity and challenge in equal measure. In 500 sources gathered in preparation for the Live Curious festival, there is an almost even split between those who found online learning offered a greater opportunity to get to know parents and families, and those who felt it disconnected teacher and student.

Belonging and ‘connectedness’ have been such common desired outcomes in the years we’ve undertaken strategy work, but there have been remarkably few levers that we can trust to generate it.

Until our latest project.

In Colina Noua, a Romanian village that is just sprouting into existence this spring, the team at NoTosh has been helping to create the framework of a remarkable learning community where belonging is in the DNA, and the levers for generating it have been thought through, mapped out, and built into the bricks — literally.

Because the whole village has been created with lifelong learning and well-being at its heart:

The investors and construction firm are dealing with things from a completely different perspective. Usually people ask: “How could I build my house as closely to the city as possible?” But instead, the Colina Noua team asked “what is the minimum distance to the city that would allow us access to the kind of natural resources we all dream of living amongst?”

So the investors bought 140ha of land — a huge area where a few thousand people can live — and this was the first step in their future success: having a guaranteed context where you can start to talk about well-being without having to undo the expensive damage of modern schools, infrastructure and community management.

From the start, the investors mapped out five aspects, each with dedicated teams building them:

• a healthy lifestyle,
• the Colina Learning Centre,
• a culture of continuous personal development,
• design everywhere you look, and
• a community of people with shared values.

The Colina Learning Center is therefore not a school — it is the village. Well-being, community and parental connection are plumbed into an iconic curriculum framework, designed by Team NoTosh alongside Learning Centre founder Andreia Mitrea.

Most schools have one group of learners.
Children.

We have two.
Children and adults.

This means we’ve designed a dual curriculum, where learning expeditions for adults get as much thought and attention as the learning expeditions for young people. Doing this meant rethinking the nature of school itself, which we wrote up as our Colina Noua Manifesto for Learning:

1. We design learning for children and adults, and see them as equally important.
   Children deserve the best teachers and the best parents. To flourish and to keep up with the changing times, adults also have to learn as much as their children. We make a commitment to invest in every person in our learning community to ensure they reach their full potential.
2. The school’s vision is to foster your personal vision.
   When we say ‘learn for life,’ we will never forget it is your life. Our dream is for you to have your own dream of a great life. From childhood to adulthood, you will continuously do the work of being the author of your life because only your own ‘why’ can sustain your resilience for long time learning.
3. Learning should make a difference now, not later.
   Everyone can make an immediate impact on their lives and the world through their learning. Look at the teenagers who begin to apply the brakes to climate change. How much of a difference can we make in the world if we design every learning experience to have an impact?
4. Learning is worthwhile when you learn the essential skills to thrive in every part of life.
   Our students are whole beings. That is why every program of learning taps into physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual development. Our learning objectives are holistic and behavioural. Our learning system is based on essential competencies for all the important areas of a good life.
5. We will not measure achievement by grades at final exams but by the degree of well being and success in adult life.
   Achievement is not about passing exams or high grades. We will measure success by the long-term impact on our students. Our learning system will continue to provide experiences and contexts that support everyone’s learning beyond the years of ‘formal education’.
6. Mastery.
   We are all capable of reaching mastery where we have talent, passion and hard work aligned. Expect greatness of yourself, and you’ve got a chance of achieving greatness. We will create great things through our learning. How do we know? Because we won’t stop until we do.
7. Learning happens in every moment, everywhere.
   Real learning happens where life happens. We should not be limited from reaching our potential based on how close we are to the school building or by the timetable. We will develop a powerful learning culture with rituals and habits that take learning into day-to-day life. Our program is designed to support remote learning from day one.
8. Relationships sustain transformation.
   Learning and thriving happen in relationships. We will create a system that allows you to find a coach to support you, a mentor to inform you and a team to keep challenging you. You will learn how to thrive and you will not be alone.
9. Joy and celebration keep the learning going.
   We will stop to rest and celebrate how far we have come. We will smile on the way. On the journey of learning to thrive, we will enjoy the progress, and the process.
10. It doesn’t take “a” village. It takes a great village.
    We will never believe we are the smartest people in the global village. We will always co-design with the best practitioners and minds in the realm of learning and thriving. Wherever in the world they may be. Together we will build a learning culture in every classroom and every home in our network.

The manifesto has been used to design a curriculum framework, approach to learning, job descriptions for new recruits, lessons and expedition plans. We’re now in prototyping mode with a partner school in Ohio, to see the effect of this extraordinary way of working in a ‘normal’ state school in Sycamore.

What parts of our startup school manifesto would translate right now into the kinds of practice you want in your school? Which elements are supported readily by the changes you made to learning and connection with parents during the pandemic in 2020?

How might we create this kind of community connection and belonging no matter where we are?

Ewan McIntosh leads Silver Linings from Our Toughest Year at the free Live Curious festival, February, 2021.