Foremost, the Souderton Charter School Collaborative embraces the concepts of a true learning organization. Corporate America is making continual progress towards creating organizations that can learn continually and adapt to a rapidly changing world because corporate systems present many opportunities for continual learning on the part of all participants. In fact, an important part of a company's success depends on its ability to learn and innovate because, without growth and change, it will go out of business. The same is not true in today's educational system. However, unlike the educational environment, corporate America has the resources necessary to encourage and support a learning environment. For example, there is time for business colleagues to dialogue and collaborate, to discuss issues and to generate ideas. The culture of our school will embody these same ideals. "If the United States is serious about wanting an improved educational system, we will evaluate the time needed for teachers and administrators to interact as professionals in learning new skills. We must bring teachers out of the individuals boxes and provide them with the time for collegial study and dialogue" (Erickson, 1995).

To this end, we have examined and reinvented crucial components of the overall organizational system, such as professional roles and responsibilities. For example, a key role of the Principal is that of instructional leader. Many traditional responsibilities of the Principal have been shifted to that of the Director of Adult Learning Systems. Indeed, the key role of the director is to foster a learning organization for all adults involved with the School. Additionally, we have designed changes into the school calendar and schedule, community partnerships, and incentive strategies.

Within this fundamentally different educational system, schooling also must be reinvented. The School expects and nurtures the skills most people believe are critical for success in life, skills such as collaboration and responsible citizenship, life-long learning, critical thinking, metacognition, and information processing and multimedia literacy. The educational environment embraces an experiential approach to learning that focuses on nature and the local environment. Experiences have meaning to the learner's life because meaningful experiences allow everyone to become involved emotionally in the learning process; emotional involvement is required in order for deep learning to occur (Jensen, 1996). A wide variety of community service projects is encouraged suggesting no arbitrary distinction between school and the real world. This type of learning provides active roles for children with diverse skills and levels of abilities thus becoming the leveler for all children to be challenged and valued members of the school community.

The School's experiential learning environment looks and sounds like real life, indeed school interactions often mirror home and community interactions. The School encourages and creates an environment where learning is occurring more spontaneously; the learning environment is more active than the traditional classroom, providing each child with opportunities to focus on individual learning experiences. Children and adults are questioning, talking, experimenting and moving throughout the local environment and community much like we do in our every day lives. To a large extent, children make decisions about how they will spend their time on a daily/weekly basis resulting in a learning environment where multiage groups of children are engaged in different activities at the same time throughout the school and community. In the traditional classroom, all children typically complete the same activity at the same time as directed by the teacher. Furthermore, behaviors such as hand raising, standing in line, and waiting for permission to speak are reserved for school. This School's learning environment has shifted from the traditional, distinct, and adult directed environment to a more flexible, emerging and child directed environment.

In order to create the intended learning environment and to encourage/support continual learning among the children and among all adults, a new definition for the concept student is required. Every member of the school community will be a student. Most of us have been involved with a joint effort that resulted in something bigger than could have been produced by individual effort and we understand the energizing feeling and deep learning that occur from such an accomplishment. Learning such as this requires the need for ongoing and bi-directional dialogue among everyone involved (adult to adult, adult to child, child to adult, child to child). Ongoing dialogue represents a shift from traditional schooling in two ways.

First, in today's educational institutions teachers are considered experts who disseminate factual information and test children for recall. For dialogue to be meaningful, the topic of discussion must shift from factual information and topics, where there are apparent right and wrong answers, to concepts, essential understanding and connections, where answers are more complex and elusive. For example, one topic in Social Studies is the Revolutionary War; students traditionally learn facts such as who signed the Declaration of Independence. Some of the complex concepts behind this topic are collaboration, perspective, and freedom. Understanding these concepts requires meaningful dialogue among children and their teachers.

Second, most teachers virtually are isolated in their classrooms with children and given little opportunity to spend quality time in dialogue with colleagues. The same shift we want for our children i.e. from learning facts to learning concepts must hold true for the adults. For adults to identify and embody concepts relevant to a learning organization they also must engage in meaningful dialogue with each other.

Only when we redefine the very essence of schooling can we hope to bring about fundamental change to the educational institution that is required to set up all of our children for successful and productive adult lives. The Collaborative's ultimate goal is that all of us continually learn how to learn and to cooperate with one another, thus becoming members of society who are confident not only in our abilities to adapt to a changing future, but in our abilities to guide and direct our future.