Sharing the vision?
At our last meeting, we touched on the issue of how to share the vision we are developing with students and the community.
A technology teacher at Arapahoe High School, (which is working on their vision) worries on his blog that staff or students can’t articulate the school’s vision and wonders how to better share it, in his post What are Your Core Values?
I think this is an important consideration as our committee moves forward–how to we share the message and values of our vision with the students and staff, and the larger community? Landon touched on this in the previous post.
Comments? thoughts?
December 15, 2006 @ 5:00 pm
Another vision statement I liked from the Science Leadership School in Philadelphia:
“”How do we learn?”
“What can we create?”
“What does it mean to lead?”
http://www.scienceleadership.org/mission.php
January 2, 2007 @ 3:48 pm
All right, here are some thoughts on sharing the vision. The first thought is that we can best share the vision with our community by getting them to help us in building the vision.
As I have been doing my interviews, I have begun asking interviewees if they would be willing to take part in followup interviews in which we invite a number of persons from our community to share in the process of defining a new vision for Westlake High School. Everyone I have asked has said, “Yes!” I have also been seeking to identify community based sites where these meetings can take place. For example, a bank president affirmed his interest in having a meeting take place in the board room at his bank. Three additional sites have also been confirmed as available.
These meetings could be structured under a similar rubric as my individual meetings; that is, participants could be invited to take part in a conversation for the purpose of defining a new vision for Westlake High School. The conversation itself could be structured around the four questions we have already approved, questions which have a proven ability to stimulate productive exchange of ideas. In answering these questions, participants would be given the opportunity to share their perceptions regarding the skills which make for success in the 21st century, and how these skills might be integrated into the process of pubic school education.
Time frame for these meetings would be about 1to 1&1/2 hours, depending on the size of the group. A minimum size would be 3-4 persons, and a maximum size would 15-20 persons. With larger groups, it would be ideal to subdivide into smaller subgroups of 5-6 persons, with a time at the end of the meeting for reconvening and sharing ideas.
Meeting results would be reported by writing up a one page initial review of comments shared during the meeting, and then sending this review by email to a list of all meeting participants, inviting participants to respond through a reply email which could include additional comments as needed. After all meeting participants had been given an opportunity to read through and comment on the initial review, a final review would be prepared and submitted to the Vision Committee.
Those are my thoughts on how we could proceed. There are actually some more issues that will need to be addressed if we decide to move forward with this process, but what is written here should be sufficient to get us started in thinking about how we could proceed in sharing the vision.
This is an exciting opportunity. People are aware that we are living in an increasingly competitive global economy, and that if we want to continue to see America maintain a position of world leadership, then our public education system needs to produce graduates who are confident, capable, and ready to succeed at the challenges life brings their way.
Happy New Year to all.–Landon.