At the beginning of this year, our campus began a renewed focus on building strong Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). As we began to put the structures in place, we reviewed our mission and vision and realized that what we had was, number one, not being used, and number two, no longer relevant to our campus. I began to research mission and vision development and came up with a game plan. We would start with a staff training and get input from all staff members at that time. Then we would form a team to take that staff input and craft a new campus mission and vision. The plan was to do the training in November, but due to unforeseen circumstances, it was pushed back to January.
At the initial training, we reviewed the importance of a mission and vision to the PLC process and then spent time reflecting on two questions: Where are we headed and what will it look like when we get there? (Vision) and What is our purpose? Why do we exist as a school? (Mission). I know these are very simplified, but it worked with our staff. Each individual submitted their own ideas and then collaborated with others to focus their thoughts. At the end of the afternoon, we had about 30 large sheets full of ideas from our faculty. As I walked through the room, I also saw them reflecting and dreaming more than I had seen in a long time.
After that meeting, a colleague and I sat down and disaggregated all of this data to produce two documents that simply listed the mission ideas and vision ideas. I also had each PLC, our support personnel, and special education groups select someone to represent them on a team to create new or updated mission and vision. Interestingly enough, two PLCs chose not to pick a representative. I approached them twice and then decided it was better to not have them than have someone who would not add to the conversation. We ended up with twelve people on the team.
Today, we sat down for our first meeting. As a team, we reviewed the responses from the whole group regarding our mission. Each person rank ordered these with no more than five number ones. Prior to starting the meeting, I had been casually talking about reading the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown and brought up the concept of looking at whether something was simply a Yes or a "Hell, Yes" and then choosing to focus only on the "Hell, Yeses." The team took this to heart and really honed in on what our purpose is related to the children on our campus, a Primary (K-1) school. After individually rank ordering the ideas, we then grouped up (one admin, one teacher, and one support person) and did the process again only with our number one items. Finally, as a whole group, we recorded the top choices. Conversation was active as we looked at each item and discussed whether it belonged on the list. We also discussed themes that emerged in the final information. The final chart is below:
Notice the big "K-1" across the page. This was a reminder to focus everything on the fact that we serve kids in these two grade levels.
After completing this, we chose a team from the larger group who will meet over the next couple of weeks and put together a draft mission. This will be presented to the team for review and editing until a final mission is created.
Once we finish with our mission, we will follow the same process with vision. We will also begin crafting our values and goals, but I don't want to overwhelm people yet.
Since I've never developed a group mission or vision, I was unsure how this would all work. I've been pleasantly surprised so far.
One thing I've kept in front of the group throughout the process is that, if these are just words on a page, they are useless and we've wasted our time. For the mission to be effective, it must be kept in front of us all the time and used for setting our priorities, evaluating decisions, and keeping us focused on our purpose as a school community.
I'm looking forward to continuing this process and growing as a campus. I'll be sharing more as wer move along.
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