Peter Senge says that “Few, if any, forces in human affairs
are as powerful as shared vision.” In
education, we often refer to shared vision as the mission and vision of the
school. Senge added, “Shared vision is
not an idea, but a force in people’s hearts.” He also points out that “People begin to see
[the shared vision] as if it exists.”
I’ve
worked with many schools on creating or updating their mission and vision and I
have a couple of warnings, a suggestion, and an un-suggestion (if you allow me
to make up such a word). The warning is
a practice that I’ve seen in many schools and early in my consulting career, I
encouraged this as well. The warning is to
avoid trying to create a new vision too soon or too suddenly. A shared vision is something that evolves
over a period of many years with teachers gradually enrolling as the vision
begins to correlate better with their experiences or “stories that we tell
ourselves” (as Kerry Patterson in Crucial Conversations calls it). Senge lists several strategies to enroll teachers in a vision including: 1) Be enrolled yourself (live the vision) 2) Be honest about your vision (don't exaggerate the results) 3) Don't try to force people to follow the vision, it'll never work.
According
to Peter Senge, creating a shared vision begins with the leader creating their
own personal vision, sharing it, living it, and ensuring that their goals,
words, priorities, and policies all align with it. This alone could take a matter of years. Then, it’s a matter of enrolling the
leadership team, the faculty, the students, the parents, and the community in
that vision. This can also take a matter
of years. The mistake that I see is a
principal’s first faculty meeting at a new school, breaking out the “Let’s
rewrite the school’s mission statement.”
It’ll never work.
I was
invited to one school where the principal was in the middle of enrolling
teachers in his vision. His vision was
that every student graduate from high school with the opportunity to get a
college degree and that the racial graduation and college-going gap was
completely unacceptable. So, we
collected the data for his school and planned a series of activities for the
next few faculty meetings to put a face on the achievement gap at his
school. First, we had an economics
professor come from the local university and speak about the future of students
who drop out, graduate high school, or get a college degree. It does no good to talk about graduation and
college if teachers haven’t considered the fate of those who do not
graduate. We spent several meetings
addressing this part of the question since the reason I was working with the
school was their low graduation rate.
Then we
culminated by inviting 100 students to come to a faculty meeting. We had used the district student information
system to find out at what point students dropped out of the system. For this example, I’m giving the numbers as I
remember them and they may not be perfect.
We had someone calling out grade levels and we had instructed the
students when to step out of the circle as the grades were called out. We found that less than 1 in 100 students
drop out in grades k-5, so things were looking good so far. By 6th grade, we had 1 in 100
students dropping out, 2 more in 7th grade, and 2 more in 8th
grade. By the end of middle school,
there were already 5 students in the dropout circle. We paused here to point out that
statistically, 3 out of 5 of these students were Hispanic, 1 was African
American, and 1 was white. All 5
qualified for free and reduced-price lunch.
By 9th grade, another 9 students left the circle. In 10th grade, another 8 left and
moved to the dropout circle. We now had
22 students in the dropout circle and 78 left in the school circle. In 11th grade, another 8 left the
circle and in 12th grade, another 4 left. There were now 34 in the dropout circle and
66 in the school circle. That was more
than half in the dropout circle and it was a powerful visual. We stopped here with statistics about the
demographics of each of the groups. This
was that point at which I saw the first tear roll down a teacher’s cheek.
Teachers
had an idea what percentage of graduates went on to college, but that
percentage was of those who made it to the end of 12th grade, not
the total number. Of the 66 remaining in
the circle, 12 went on community college and moved to the community college
circle. 16 went to the university
circle. The other 38 moved to the
dropout circle. We couldn’t go
year-by-year in college, so we fast-forwarded 2 years. Half of the community college students failed
to complete a degree or transfer to a university, so 6 community college students
moved to the dropout circle. Of the 16 university
students, 4 had not completed one year of credits in two years and moved to the
dropout circle. By the end of four
years, 2 community college students moved to the associate’s degree circle and
2 moved to the university circle. There
were now 14 students in the university circle and 84 in the dropout circle. Of these, 9 completed a bachelor’s degree and
5 moved to the dropout circle.
In the
end, we had 2 associate’s degrees, 9 bachelor’s degrees, and 89 “dropouts.” Again, we discussed the demographics and the
likely future of those 89 students who never achieved a college degree. Here, I saw a least three teachers with tears
streaming. For the next several
meetings, we had a series of student speakers share their stories with the
faculty from those who overcame gigantic obstacles to those with infinite
unfulfilled potential.
Not until after all of this did we
even begin to approach the re-writing of the school’s mission and vision. Even then, we did not have unanimity in our
goal for students.
The worst attempt that I ever saw
at coming to a shared vision was the principal who had teachers compete to see
who could write down in 2 minutes the most reasons why students weren’t
successful. He then went on a tirade
about how these were all excuses and had each teacher put their list of “excuses”
through a shredder. I had the pleasure (read
in a sarcastic voice) of presenting right after this activity and the mumbles
and grumbles about the excuses in the shredder continued for hours.
Doc Searles of UC Santa Barbara and
Harvard pointed out that one reason that Walmart outperforms K-mart so greatly
is the shared vision of “Everyday Low Prices.”
Walt Disney had a vision of creating the first feature length cartoon
that spread slowly and the Disney Corporation is now worth $68 Billion. Martin Luther King Jr. changed the trajectory
of the country by enrolling the masses in his vision of equality. At my office, every single employee knows
that our shared vision is “Extraordinary Service.”
What benefit could be realized by
creating a shared vision at your school?
How will you do it? What have you
already done? Share your ideas in the
comments section.
Here’s a video of Daniel Pink
answering the question, “After all you’ve learned, what do you think is the
most critical attribute for a leader today?”
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