We held our spring Sprint® Closing Workshop for the Middle and Upper Schools last week and I wanted to share a little bit about what we discussed.

We kicked off the workshop with a video celebrating some of our student accomplishments over this past year. Please know this is not an all inclusive highlight video as there are many more achievements also worthy of celebration, but for our purposes, it allowed us to celebrate what we can accomplish when we set out to do it! 

You can watch the video below:

So how does this connect to the Sprint® process? 

This video highlights Brookstone students achieving something they had to stretch for. They had to try things that may have been outside of their comfort zone. They had to work at getting better. And none of it was without deliberate practice.

In addition, none of those things accomplished could have been done without the support and encouragement of other people. Development is a team sport. 

During a Sprint®, we want to celebrate similar things even if those things are less public. Perhaps someone stepped outside their comfort zone or tried something new. Maybe they tested one of their big assumptions or gave a little extra thought to how they are thinking about a situation. Those are all accomplishments worth celebrating!  

And even though not everyone has scored a touchdown or had a leading role in a play, we want to remind our students that they have the leading role in their own lives. It’s up to them to shape their life, and to build their capabilities to do things they might never have imagined they could do. Those things might not lead to formal rewards or recognition like a trophy or a medal, but instead we hope they lead to a new kind of satisfaction and self-confidence enabling them to take greater charge of writing their own story. 

Like any sustainable change, the Sprint® is not about overnight success or instantaneous results, but it is a process. Developmental growth can be slow and not always immediately visible. Still, we know that seeds are being planted in the minds of our students and good things are happening. We are excited to see how this continues to grow over time.