The beginning of the school year bustles with excitement and endless preparation. Before my students walk in the door, weeks are filled with planning meetings, arranging classroom furniture, organizing materials, and sharpening new pencils. At New City School, our start of the school year includes a day devoted to creating and displaying our own hopes and dreams as a staff. Regardless of a person's role at the school-a teacher, a custodian, or the principal-her goals for the upcoming school year are important and honored. They are the launching pad for how the staff will work and play together all year long.

Everyone needs a dream
Before coming to New City, I had been using the Responsive Classroom practice of helping students identify their own hopes and dreams every September. I enjoyed reading books to the students about aspirations and creating beautiful displays in our classrooms. However, I had never experienced the process myself, with my colleagues. I was surprised to see a full day devoted to the process prior to the first day of school. I kept thinking about all the preparations I needed to be doing in my own room, by myself. Now, after going through the process for seven years, I can't imagine starting the school year any differently. Sharing our hopes and dreams focuses our collective efforts on the success of the students. It helps us see not only our individual roles, but also that we're part of a team. Now I understand that everyone's pencils need to be freshly sharpened, not just the students'! [Note: For its middle level students, New City uses the Developmental Designs goals and declarations process.]

A container for our dreams
As part of an arts-integration focus at New City School, our hopes and dreams are portrayed in both words and an accompanying art piece. The students go through a similar process. The purpose is to support reflection about and expression of an authentic goal for learning in the year to come.

Last year, before beginning our work with art materials, we reflected on the following questions: What do you hope this school year will be like for both staff and students? What goals do you have for your own professional development? How do you want us to be as a staff together? Then we made paper boxes and embellished them, placed our written hopes inside, and sealed them shut. We displayed the same goal on an index card and placed it next to the box in a wall-mounted case in the hallway. My hope for last year was to help students make meaningful connections between their learning at school and the bigger world around them. I wanted to make sure that my lessons were rich in contextual examples and prompted applications to their own lives.

The process
To elaborate on the idea of the boxes and visualize them as more powerful objects, we imagined different kinds of containers that hold us. The school building is a container in which learning happens; our minds are containers for our thoughts; our hearts hold our cares and concerns. I recollected the treasure boxes I had created as a child and filled with ordinary objects: I could find an ordinary grey rock and turn it into a rare and colorful gem by treasuring it. That day at school, I covered my box with purple tissue paper and tied it with a string and decorated it with sequins. Beginning with milk cartons saved from lunch, we worked through the following steps:

• Place a written goal inside a single serving milk carton
• Fold the top of the carton fl at and tape over the folds
• Cover the box in colored or patterned paper
• Decorate the box with two- and three-dimensional beads, tin cutouts, ribbons, etc.
• Some teachers created an opening at the top to retrieve the written note.

The range of expression among us was surprising: flashy, bold, quiet, sculptural, contemplative, and playful. Each staff person had a special reflection of their aspirations. Since the boxes were so personal, I could sometimes tell who created a box without looking at the name. All the boxes were displayed in a common public area along with the written and signed hopes and dreams on cards.

Binding the school community in hope
Sharing these thoughts with students and their families is the final step in declaring our intention. When students come to school on the first day, they see our hopes for the school year and know that everybody in the school holds a wish that all our goals will be achieved. When prospective families visit our school, they mention what it means for the adults in the school to publicly declare their aspirations.

Staff desires are also part of our professional development process. As we reflect on our teaching at mid-year and year end, we take a look back and assess how we did with accomplishing our stated goals.

Three Art-Making Themes for Hopes and Dreams

Transformation
Staff members select something from nature that they feel connects with their goals: a feather, flower, branch, etc. In a series of exercises, they explore the object with different art media before settling into the final rendering. The aim is to experience a transformation of the object through careful observation and experimentation, symbolic of the transformation that occurs in students. Here are the steps of the process:
1. Place the object on a piece of white paper.
2. With graphite, create an observational drawing of the object.
3. Experiment with colored pencil as a tool.
4. Apply colored-pencil techniques to color drawings of various parts of the object.
5. Experiment with collage materials to render the shapes and textures of the object.
6. Integrate graphite, colored pencil, and collage media to create the final rendering of the object.
7. Write hopes/goals on paper and attach them to the artwork.

In the space of the sky
Staff members imagine and express their desires by observing the open space of the sky. In a quick field trip outside, they look up to the sky and make written and drawn notes of what they see. They allow their imagination to contemplate the infinite space above and expand their thinking about the possibilities for the coming year.

Teachers and administrators then return indoors and select images that express their aspirations from their notes. They create watercolor washes that reflect the sky background. Then collaged and drawn images are placed into the wash. The resulting artworks look as if each has taken a piece of the sky and placed it on paper. One of the teachers drew the chimneys that reached above the trees-as if to let her aspirations do the same. Aspirations were then written either on the artworks or placed alongside them.

Poems of hope
This process begins by immersing everyone in the language of hope. Staff members listen to and participate in choral readings of poetry such as Maya Angelou's poem "On the Pulse of the Morning" (below), as well as children's poems that express dreams and desires. These readings are followed by a watercolor process in which participants let the colors make their own forms on the soaked watercolor paper and identify shapes that suggest an inspiring image. The shapes may be brought forward with additional color. Participants attach their paintings to their written hopes for the year, and end the process by sharing those hopes with each other.

From Maya Angelou's
"On the Pulse of the Morning"
Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes, into
Your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.

Erin Klug taught 7th and 8th graders at New City School in Minneapolis, and is now a Developmental Designs consultant for Origins.

This article first appeared in Origins: A Newsletter for Elementary Educators, Fall 2010