Establish a Common Vision
Having a strong vision—and a mission statement that goes with it—is critical. It’s not just true for global learning schools; every successful company has one.
Your school’s mission helps everyone who studies there, your faculty, parents, and the community understand their purpose. It helps the education community come together to turn ideas into realities. It provides programmatic focus to all aspects of your work. And the stakes in a global learning school is high: it gives a clear pathway for students to succeed academically and in life.
The following exercises help you think through the mission of schools—and to find your own voice. It further invites all stakeholders to help craft the ideas and take ownership of the mission, because in a successful school, it will also be their own.
Prepare Ahead of Time
Write an Open Letter
Write an open letter to the school community. Be prepared to read the letter to faculty and staff, and to share the vision with students, parents, and the community. Start with this prompt:
We’re creating a school for students who will be globally competent and ready for college. What will be the basic beliefs that everyone will see and feel when they visit the school?
Outline your own vision in the open letter. Here are some documents for inspiration:
Workshop
Audience: school faculty and staff
Time required: half day
Materials: chart paper, pens, post-its
Invite Faculty and Staff to Dream
At a faculty and staff retreat or planning day, share your open letter, and invite your colleagues to think about their own vision. The qualities that emerge time and again will become part of the school mission.
To start, read your letter out loud as a facilitator records the main points. Alternatively, note-taking may be crowd-sourced on a digital platform like Trello.com or TodaysMeet.com or on a wiki.
Invite the faculty and staff to talk about their vision for the school. The facilitator should note these ideas, too.
Together, the school community looks for patterns and overlaps on these lists. The ideas become foundational for the school. By the end, there should be a list of attributes that will define the teaching and learning experiences of the school.
Plan to Turn Vision to Reality
At this point, if the group is large, divide the group in two and assign each group one question.
Using the list that was created, ask the school community:
If these are our foundational values, what rituals and traditions should we create to help make them a reality?
And
What will the classroom experiences will exemplify these values?
If there were two group discussions, make time for each group to report findings.
Make a plan to share these golden threads widely: post on your school website, share at parent gatherings, post them around the school.
Refine the Vision
Periodically throughout the school year, devote a staff meeting or other planning time to check back using these valuess. How are they exemplified? What do we want to change?