The Steps Towards a Powerful Vision:
- Think about the teacher and staff leaders you will need to make a school wide vision possible. Ask yourself or your group many questions: If our vision is progressive, who are the most progressive thinkers in our school? Are these the same people that have influence over our school culture? Is this a representative group or can it be more of a "think tank"? How will we invite and engage this group in the process of dreaming about our school?
- Lead a meeting process that engages people in creating an enduring vision. This will be different for every school, however the key element is creating a sense of urgency that a vision is a crucial part of future school success.
- Lead a BIG brainstorm! With topics such as: teacher traits, student traits, community traits, must have's, & values that all focus on creating your ideal school.
- Bring the group together for synthesis, how can we synthesize this into the most important concepts? Once we have the concepts, how do they create parallels for our teachers, students and school community. What is the interplay between the concepts in our vision? What is the right visual representation to help engage our staff?
- Develop the commitment to the accountability behind the vision. How will our vision be the focus of our professional learning? How will the vision impact classroom observations? How will the vision impact teacher/staff evaluation? How will our vision impact our greater school community?
- GET STUCK ON YOUR VISION! As in every school, there are so many moving parts that it is easy to get distracted....don't let other things get in the way of focusing on your vision. This is a process that should evolve with feedback, however you need to always communicate the connection with your school vision at every opportunity. There is plenty of disbelief out there that you need to overcome before your school vision becomes the primary topic of conversation.
- Design and implement professional learning that directly connects with your school vision. If you have the expertise in your staff to lead the learning process, fantastic! If you don't....be transparent that you are learning with everyone else and rely on sharing initial research that you have gathered when you synthesized the concepts in your vision. Learning with your staff only increases the feeling that we are all building this together.
- Integrate opportunities for observation of your school vision in action & bring the observation back to your staff. The instructional rounds process (http://hepg.org/hel-home/issues/25_3/helarticle/improving-teaching-and-learning-through-instructio ) is one option to help formally gather data on your vision and it will definitely show you the areas where it's working and where it needs to improve.
- Grow your leadership team! The group you started this process must be your biggest believers! Make sure they have an opportunity to be involved in the process every step of the way because ultimately the success and/or failure of the vision will rest on your group leadership. One quick key to leading this group: always try to balance how you speak to the emotion & the logic of your vision. A great resource for the psychology behind this is the Heath & Heath book "Switch" (http://heathbrothers.com/books/switch/ )
- Continue to plan and develop the next steps in ensuring that your vision is the driving force around your school community. Ask yourself this crucial question: what do I need to see to believe our vision has become our reality?