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           Building Consensus:  A Leadership Decision
It's a new year for most of us, and a time for getting our bearings with a new group.  With the core practices in mind, and as Foxfired teachers, we are probably seeing ourselves doing more discussing in our classes, and exercising a new leadership style.  We are probably doing more problem solving and asking more open-ended questions.  How many times do I hear myself asking:  "What do you think?"  "How should we go about it?"  Is life a Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DR-TA)?
There are a lot more decisions to make.  In our group discussions about assignments and curriculum, my students and I often think that we have to decide on a uniform end product.  As we have seen, it is not always easy to agree, and for me, as I help discussions proceed, I struggle for a certain harmony.  When do we leave decisions open to be made personally, when do we leave a matter undecided until we have had more time to think and gather information, and when do we expect uniformity in our outcomes?  W
hen do we need to agree?  How flexible can and do we need to be?  
A lot of guidance came our way recently from Karen Carpenter.  Karen is our spoke in Jackpot, and she just came back from Foxfire Teacher Outreach's Leadership Conference.  Her expenses were paid for by the national organization, and Karen spent a week studying leadership.  Her goal now is to share with us what she learned.  The day Karen came home she shared the enclosed handouts on consensus.  Indeed, in our Foxfire teaching we aim to develop a leadership/teaching style in which we build consensus for ac
tivity, and facilitate growth.  
When we use facilitative and capacity building teaching styles, uniformity of student work is deemphasized, and students develop flexibility in their thinking.  Peter Elbow uses the word "cooking" as a metaphor to describe flexible thinking.  We can make consensus work if there is an emotional and educational integrity in our dealings with each other.  Sometimes it is hard to bring integrity to a polish.  It is not easy to think about how we can show what we have learned if we have never had much choice in
 the matter or even seen much variety in how we might share our knowledge and interests.
Last year during Level I, Vivian Olds talked about feeling like she had to rattle the cages at the beginning of the year to get students to consider possibilities in their learning.  We often find ourselves suggesting outlandish ideas to see how students will respond, and as a way to get some flexibility in their thinking.
Once students get a little exercise considering possibilities for action, they can go pretty far.  At some point there are what we have been calling the givens.  Some givens, are our bottom lines. Valerie Andersen, from Austin, said that she tries to anticipate the range of possibilities her students will consider.  Then she decides what range of projects she'll be comfortable with.  This mental work beforehand might make it easier for me to experiment with this leadership style.  We hope that these handou
ts from Foxfire's leadership conference will be useful.Sincerely, Donald               September, 1992


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