We’ve recently read Peter Block’s amazing book Community: The Structure of Belonging and were struck by a quote of his: “[t]he transformation of large numbers of individuals does not result in the transformation of communities” (p. 5). This has left both of us talking about the individual student as the unit of analysis. Countless times we have witnessed hardworking teachers pouring time and resources into individual children, often large numbers of them, only to see similar results year after year. This in turn can lead to the blame game: “I’m working as hard as I can, and nothing changes. The problem must be with the student.” Block’s book is giving us a entry point for internal conversations at our school about the cost of focusing solely on individual reclamation projects while overlooking the larger community of the classroom and school. Maybe what Block is telling us is what we’ve silently wondered all these years: we don’t have time to change the world one child at a time. We need the school to be the unit of analysis. can a focus on the community lead to the transformation we hope for?

We’re spending the next two weeks in the company of high school students who are visiting the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. If you haven’t been there yet, it is an amazing interactive museum devoted to issues of hate, from the Holocaust to cyberbullying, and the personal decision-making of the individual to make the world a better place. The challenge is making this trip extend beyond a single experience. The History teacher has all his students writing a letter to themselves and dated one year from today. They’re describing the three personal commitments they made and how it resulted in a better situation. He’ll return the letters to them on January 7. 2011.It brings to mind a question we’re often faced with: how do you make the learning from a field trip endure beyond a single day?