National School Reform Faculty

Vision/Mission Strategy
Date: March 4-6, 2003
Listserv: Coaches
Resources: Future Protocol

Tuesday, March 4, 2003 12:45 PM
I work as a school coach in Federal Way, WA, and I've been asked to help a newly reconfigured middle school to develop a vision/mission statement. In my experience, that process can be cumbersome and unwieldy, and it often results in a statement that is so general and abstract as to be meaningless. Do any of you know of a good process to use that will produce a more authentic result?
Patty, Washington

Tuesday, March 4, 2003 1:04 PM
One thing we've been playing around with is to have people write "A Day in the Life of a Student" in their ideal school (2 pages or so) and then do some sort of text based discussion around the pieces looking at the values/beliefs/priorities of the school that are evident to the student based on their experience - (e.g. How does the student experience personalization). A bit of revision and another go-round and then perhaps one of the pieces is the vision statement and/or the distillation of the best of the "days" is the vision. Next step is "day in the life of the teacher" and that leads to all sorts of PD priorities/scheduling/structuring discussions.

Warning - it can be tedious.
Alan, New York

Tuesday, March 4, 2003 1:37 PM
Hi Patty,
Our staff and parents have been working on a vision statement using the process outlined in the book Professional Learning Communities at Work by Dufore and Eakers. It has been helpful to define mission, vision, values and goals and to establish a process for creating them. We are early into the process having only a draft of a community vision that is being critiqued by all for approval mid-March.
Hope this helps.
Jon, Colorado

Tuesday, March 4, 2003 1:53 PM
Hello Patty,
Can I offer you some insights from my experiences here and one of the tools that I've created to do some work around mission and vision? I am a teacher and staff developer in Jefferson County, Colorado where a few years ago our district cabinet leaders wanted to focus on the strategic plan. I wrote up a structure to guide the conversation, learned a great deal from it and have created a "Future Protocol" to help folks vision out their work. It has been used by whole schools, education groups, departments, clubs and organizations that have questions about where they are going and how they might get there.
Plusses for the protocol (as shared with me by many who have used it, along with my own observations and facilitation):
1. It works from a very positive, can do, basis, as opposed to a problem-based, deficit model.
2. It surfaces the "current reality," which Senge asserts is the creative tension needed for change.
3. It uses alteration of "time" and language to make more tangible the future and what a group might become. For most of the protocol, you live and speak as if it already happened and surface where you WERE and how you GOT there?
4. It supplies the group with directional choices and options for moving forward. It has a "documentation" element that supplies folks with tangible product to work from during the conversation and in follow up
5. Along with good facilitation, it manages many voices and makes progress in a short period of time.
6. I've heard people describe it as "fun," which can't be all bad when doing serious work!
Challenges we've discovered:
1. It is not simple to facilitate...takes some multi tasking or shared facilitation, both of which just take some up front consideration and prep.
2. It is not done at the end of the protocol. It is just beginning.
However, given what you said, and I agree, the work is not the "statement" the work is living/doing it!
3. The lists generated are "more" than can probably be done, so there needs to be some prioritizing and sense-making
4. Folks participating need to have similar buy in and be similarly informed on the task at hand.
5. The "time shift" and language piece can be a little tricky (informs facilitation), but is crucial to the visioning and the affect of the interaction.
I am attaching the protocol for you and just so you know, it is also part of the current NSRF packet of protocols. Best of luck with your work, however you proceed. I am compiling data on this protocol for publication, co if you do use it, I'd love to hear from you and have you help me with some insights.
Let me know if you have any questions,
Scott Murphy

Tuesday, March 4, 2003 3:43 PM
Hello, Patty,
I am a newly retired middle school principal, who just cannot stay away from the work. My life's work has been in the inner city schools of Houston, Texas. My last assignment in Houston was that of Principal, Sidney Lanier Middle School, which was one of the first Annenberg Beacon Schools, and also a Carnegie Systemic Change School. Lanier is a magnet school with 1500 students, grades 6, 7 and 8, deeply involved in middle school reform.

In 1999, my husband was transferred to Toledo, Ohio, where we now live. For the past three years, I have worked as Director of Professional Development and Outreach, College of Education, The University of Toledo. I am also one of the original national facilitators for the National School Reform Faculty. In my past life and currently, I work with schools and school district principals, central office administrators, business community members, lead teachers, and school board trustees, helping to facilitate systemic change within their systems. One of the first steps is, of course, creating the school (or district) vision and mission which provides the road map for the journey through reform and/or continuous improvement.
I am just on my way out the door to work with one of the feeder patterns within Toledo Public Schools, but I wanted to connect to you before I left -- just to say hang on -- there are proven methods for the work you are beginning. Tomorrow, I will put together a few recommendations and send them your way, if you are interested.

Until then,
Brenda, Ohio

Tuesday, March 4, 2003 5:19 PM
SACS Accreditation Process is helpful--Southern Association of Colleges and
Schools---surely there is a similar process in your area.
Janice, Georgia

Tuesday, March 4, 2003 6:00 PM
Scott,
I wanted to say thank you...you posted this protocol on this listserv some months ago and I used it with a group working on strategic planning in our school district. It was very effective to create the sense of future that you talked about that is necessary for teams to think in a forward motion.
I would encourage anyone interested in trying this to give it a go and "tweak" it for your own group. I would also agree that the team members felt that it grounded a piece of very serious work in a way that gave us all the freedom to think of how our school district could be without any restraint. By coincidence, we were just meeting this afternoon and debriefing about some of this work and we agreed to use this tool again in a modified format with some community outreach that we are planning as part of this strategic planning process. I guess in that way its success speaks for itself.
Again, thank you and good luck.
Donna, Rhode Island

Tuesday, March 4, 2003 8:27 PM
Hello Scott,
I am a teacher/CFG coach at a k-12 school in New York. It's amazing timing but your Future Protocol that was mentioned sounds like just what we need as a school to re-visit our original vision/mission and look for different ways to implement it. We will be discussing this tomorrow in our school governance meeting, so if you could also send me a copy of the protocol it would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Nancy, New York

Tuesday, March 4, 2003 8:58 PM
Hi Patty,
I just finished writing/editing my high school's Self-Study report for our upcoming WASC visit (Western Association of School's and Colleges). We have a faculty of 110 teachers and administrators. Writing a vision statement under a time crunch boiled down to getting our focus group leaders together to brainstorm a few sentences about what we are trying to do in order to produce good citizens of the world. The 10 of us (2 focus group leaders per focus group) brainstormed out about 5 sentences. Then we presented this to the whole faculty and gave everyone a chance to voice their ideas/suggestions. There was about 30-45 minutes worth of discussion about the content and wording. Going through the editing process as a faculty was quite interesting. At the end of one hour we had a statement that everyone voted to approve.

Now, I think Scott's method is much better as far as gaining ownership and producing a meaningful vision. If you don't have time for that level of commitment, this method worked for us. Honestly, we pay a lot more attention to the Expected School wide Learning Results (the ESLRs) than we do to the Vision Statement. If you have to choose where to spend a lot of time, spend it on developing the ESLRs.

My two cents...from a WASC school-site coordinator in the midst.
Angela, California

Wednesday, March 5, 2003 6:53 PM
I just used this protocol last week (slightly tweaked) with a parent/faculty group that was having difficulty communicating. We used it to create a vision of what strong parent/teacher communication would look like and sound like in the school. It was most helpful for the group and really allowed the negative perceptions to surface without individuals taking offense. I only wish that we had allotted much more time. (We took 2 1/2 hours but could have easily used 4 without losing quality.)

Thursday, March 6, 2003 9:12 AM
Patty -
Sorry to be getting to this a bit late, lots happening here in the last few days, a tad behind w/the ole e-mail.
Having read several of the suggestions, I want to add only the following - the final product "Mission/Vision Statement" should be short, simple, something meaningful that grasps the essence of the school's focus, and really be useable, not something lengthy that includes everything under the sun, but that no one can even remember without looking at it (and trying to remember where they put it!). Ours quite simply is - "To educate global citizens for the 21st century." - and is constantly referred to, particularly by staff and myself, and we don't have to look it up and dust it off!
- Good luck,
Dave, New York

Thursday, March 6, 2003 9:43 AM
So Dave, how did your community agree on your Mission and avoid the wordsmithing that we have all experienced at one point or another?
(I agree with you that everyone should know the mission without looking it up.)
Debbie, Pennsylvania