This feature was first published in Journeys Winter 2018.

This article was written by Dr. Chip Kimball.

Several weeks ago one of our seniors, Ernest Wang, asked me to do an interview regarding the recent history of Singapore American School. His project, with the help of longtime faculty member Ron Starker, is to create an oral history of Singapore American School since 1996 when we first opened our Woodlands campus. As I talked with Wang I found myself deeply grateful for the incredible accomplishments of our leadership team, faculty, staff, and students over the past seven years. Together we have seen tremendous student growth, undertaken profound and important changes, and ultimately laid a foundation that will empower thousands of Eagles now, and well into the future. 

It is important to recognize that great historical schools stand on the shoulders of giants. The work that we have been able to accomplish recently is only possible because of the equally impressive work of leaders and faculty over many generations before us. Creating an exceptional school
 that is both predictably successful and responsive to our current and future needs is challenging, requiring each generation of leadership to make strategic and often hard decisions.
My interview with Wang reminded me of how impactful this particular season of great work has been for SAS, and how thankful I am.

Each year we say goodbye to hundreds of students in June and then welcome nearly a thousand new students each fall. With such high turnover, it is possible that many of you were not here for much of this journey. As I enter my final semester at SAS, I want to take a moment to reflect on our journey since 2012. 

When I joined SAS in 2012, the school was by traditional measures successful and thriving. But most leaders know that complacency is where excellence goes to die, especially when there are signs of changing and threatening conditions. The SAS board knew this, and I came with a specific mandate to lead the evolution of SAS that would accelerate our success long 
into the future. What was especially concerning was an emerging economy that requires students to have new and different skills, a shifting emphasis in US education and universities, and new competition in Singapore that would require SAS to be more exceptional, serve more students, and be more financially stable than ever before. 

From my previous work, I understood how to change a school system in an ambitious and innovative multinational community. The question we faced was how to best approach this challenge at SAS, within our context, with the goal of not only preventing stagnation but creating systems for student growth such that SAS would truly serve as a world leader in education. 

In my early days, the SAS board provided a mandate—one that was invigorating and spoke to the visionary nature of the community that I would serve. The mandate included: 

The SAS school board saw a challenging but incredibly exciting future ahead for SAS. They understood that decades of historical success
did not guarantee our future. With
 a rapidly changing workforce, they
 saw the need to improve the way students learn to prepare them for the future. In 2011, the board organized 
a long-term strategy committee and sought to create the best possible conditions for an evolving SAS while supporting a leadership team that could get us there.

My early days at SAS were enlightening and challenging. I conducted a listening tour and heard from hundreds of families. Company executives consistently spoke about the skills that kids need today and the failures of modern education. Moms and dads shared concerns regarding teacher and program quality and making sure their child is known. They also shared a consistent message of extraordinary care for our students, an endearing quality at SAS, and endless opportunities in clubs, sports, and service. These early days shaped much of what would come. 

I remember making some difficult and often unpopular budget, structural, and personnel decisions during my first few years. These are often the most dif cult decisions a leader has to make, and hurt the most, but are often required to take a team in a new strategic direction. During 2012-13 we used a community process to develop a new vision—a world leader in education, cultivating exceptional thinkers, prepared for the future. There were great debates over language and meaning, and in the end, this vision became the centerpiece for everything that was to come. The existing SAS mission was reaffirmed, and by late 2013 the foundational elements for the future of SAS were now in place. 

Simultaneously our team started diving deep into research specifically focused on the skills and characteristics required of students in today’s modern world. We invited world-renowned thought leaders to come work with
us and launched a multi-year R&D process involving faculty and school leaders where they would visit schools, evaluate programs, talk to universities, and interview companies about students and the future. This turned out to be some of the most important and groundbreaking work in the history of the school. In all, 75 faculty visited over 100 educational institutions ranging from elite private schools to very successful public schools in different parts of the world. 

 

In spring 2013, we held a 21st century learning summit for our community. This summit, alongside our WASC accreditation process and our R&D work, led to the adoption of critical learning outcomes for our students. We call these our Desired Student Learning Outcomes (DSLO), and they are now at the heart of SAS programs systemwide. 

The R&D process at first included
 three phases; research, development, and implementation. It became clear during the process that we would need to add more steps and more time to fully realize our vision. We also knew that we would need to build capacity among our faculty to ensure we could confidently deliver. This process helped shape our strategic plan and ensure the long-term sustainability of our programming, but also integrated many of the other new programs that were already underway at SAS. We committed to building programs, processes, and structures that are world leading, and that future students would benefit from due to their sustainability and attention to quality. 

As our faculty visited schools and interviewed experts across the globe, they noticed interesting themes emerge. The most effective schools, those deliberately focusing on future-oriented skill development, had eight common elements that turned out to be deeply instructive for our team. These themes would ultimately guide the development of each division’s R&D recommendations. 

Faculty and leadership team members used these themes to help guide their culminating recommendations and after two years of research, debate, vetting, and culling for the best ideas in the SAS context, each division made final recommendations that were approved in 2014 and 2015. 

SAS is an ambitious school. We want the best for our students and will go to great lengths to make sure that we are as good as we possibly can be. This mindset was reflected in our recommendations with 115 specific recommendations and an overly ambitious timeline. It was during this time that we had to take a serious look at the number of initiatives that we were planning to implement, as well as the organizational culture we wanted, a core element of our long-term success. 

We understand from practitioners and research that even with the most ambitious plans and funding, organizational culture means everything to the success of a school. In previous iterations of SAS, our organization culture was often characterized in “the vital few.” We worked with faculty and leadership to identify the core elements of the culture we want, resulting in the SAS strategic anchors—a culture of excellence, a culture of extraordinary care, and a culture of possibilities. It is our view that the cross-section of these three elements makes SAS truly unique, helping us take our place as one of the leading schools in the world. 

As we thought back to the R&D work and schools that we visited, we saw some element of one or two of our strategic anchors in many schools, but almost none of them could master all three at the same time. For SAS this has become an aspirational target, a cultural norm, and a decision-making filter that we use for future programming. This has become our “special sauce." 

In addition to being intentional
 about culture, we also knew that our planning was ambitious, but possibly not implementable when taking into consideration many of the other school initiatives alongside operating a school of nearly 4,000 each day. It was during the 2014-15 school year that we held a faculty leadership summit to tackle this challenge, prioritizing our most important work and putting all strategic decisions on a more realistic implementation timeline. This has helped us to focus our resources, manage expectations, develop our staff, and ensure that we deliver on the level of excellence that you would expect at our school. At the highest level, we focus our work in all divisions upon five institutional priorities found in our strategic plan. 

As the SAS vision becomes a reality through implementation, we are finding our strategic foundation and strategic anchors critical as we implement
 with fidelity. Our strategic plan drives priorities, budget, professional development, and hiring decisions as we move the school forward. Each division sets goals, measures student outcomes, and we are aggressively developing
 new tools in the curriculum to ensure that students are building the skills that they need. And as with most great organizations, we are learning along
the way. We are proud of the work that we are doing, but also know that it has been far from perfect. As a school that is committed to continuous improvement, we learn from every implementation
 and work towards improving each and every time. This is an element of SAS that makes it truly an exceptional place to lead and work. 

When we look back to the foundational themes that we found in great future- ready schools around the world, purpose-built facilities were consistently integrated into most of them. Early in
 my tenure, I was asked by the board to consider the long-term facility needs of the school keeping in mind demand, location, cost, program needs, and conditions in the tropics. As early as 2012 we were considering sites in Singapore for program opportunities and have looked at dozens of possibilities over the past seven years. Importantly, we decided that before a master plan was to 
be developed, we would need to be clear about our strategic direction, the kind of learning we hope to provide for students, how facilities can serve the long-term interests of the school, and explore all of our options in Singapore. By 2016 this work had been done and we started developing a long-term vision for facilities at SAS. 

A facilities plan in a complicated and large environment is intensive and requires a great deal of thought and 
planning over many years. We started 
this work by developing principles that would inform our planning; this includes values such pedagogically appropriate spaces, improving the use of student time, embracing sustainability, and capturing the culture of SAS and Singapore. 

The principles for our long-term needs were developed into a master site plan helping us to envision what is possible for our school given our particular constraints including building in Singapore. Pathfinder projects were initiated to begin checking our assumptions and to model the spaces that we may be considering. These spaces have been deeply informative, providing some of the best pre-construction action research found anywhere in the world. The next SAS superintendent will have an enviable opportunity to bring a version of the facilities master plan from conception to reality, finding even more ways to serve existing and future students. 

And while many of the great initiatives at SAS were captured in our initial R&D work and strategic planning, many projects have been implemented along the way, in real-time. This has included the systemic use of professional learning communities (PLCs), Response to Intervention (RtI), athletics and activities changes, laptop programs, and changes to services such as counseling, learning support, health services, and employee wellness. We have worked on HR systems, data systems, governance improvements,
and leadership development. We have started programs like the on-site doctoral program for faculty and have adopted great practices from others like Reggio Emilia-inspired approaches for early learning. It has been an incredible journey of growth and innovation requiring ambition and patience coupled with hard work and humility when we don’t get it right. 

I have seen hundreds of schools around the world. I have mentored leaders and consoled frustrated educators. I watch some of the finest educators in the world teach your children, and I have worked with leaders who are only limited by their own imagination. While not perfect, and certainly not done yet, I can say without question that SAS is one of the finest schools in the world. 

Over the past number of years, we have
 had experts from all over the globe visit SAS. Dr. Tony Wagner, an innovation education fellow at Harvard University said about SAS, “I don’t remember ever having been to 
a school as established and successful as SAS that is taking the ideas of educational research and development and innovation so seriously, so thoughtfully, and in such courageous and committed ways.” 

For some, you have been along the entirety of this journey with us. For others, much of this is new. Regardless of when you joined you are a part of the SAS family and it is with pride that we provide a world-class education for your children. I am certain that a year from now I will view my time here as the pinnacle of my career.