Help Us Shape The Upcoming Forum!

For upcoming August 8th forum, we based the questions on feedback we received from the June forum on school issues, as well as comments from the original forum last year. It was clear from both that once a youth set aside the usual jokes about the best school being no school, they wanted to have a meaningful learning experience, and wanted to be inspired and pushed and listened to.

But how to capture that theme in the forum discussion? If you've received the email or card invitation, you will have seen the "What do you think...?" section, where for the last few forums I've listed some of the questions that have occurred to us in our planning. For this one, I listed the following:

• What does success look like for you?
• What kind of education do you need to be successful?
• What are you doing to make your education successful for you?
• What are the schools doing – or not – to make your education successful?
• What are your parents and other adults doing – or not?

Do you think those are the right questions? Will they help in creating a productive discussion? Are there assumptions, whether we meant them or not, that shouldn't be there? Is it clear we understand that everyone -- youth, adults, schools, the system -- has a responsibility to create that meaningful experience? Is it clear that we are asking the youth to define success on his or her terms?

Let us know. We will not be preparing the dialogue outline until later the following week, so we'd love to hear from you. We will also be incorporating the feedback from a group of young people who will be meeting this coming Monday afternoon (July 24).

Thanks!