The other day I exhorted schools to start living up to the most meaningful ideals they express in their foundational and aspirational statements, to make missions and values a real part of all of their thinking. I realize that folks may not really have much of a clue as to how to go about doing that, and what it looks like. I also know from experience working with schools and faculties that it’s not an easy project to get people excited about, as it tends to demand introspection, candor, humility, and above all the will to make fundamental behavioral and cultural changes. The devils we know are much easier to manage than the work of becoming the angels we might and may even want to be.
What follows is going to be an oversimplification. There is no magic bullet for making the changes you may discover you need to make, but there are some reasonably straightforward processes for arriving at a vision of what those changes might be.
A starting point people like me have been recommending for thirty years or more is something along the lines of a “Picture the Graduate” exercise. This is different from the “portrait of a graduate” that is sometimes used as a branding and marketing exercise or tool.
A meaningful Picture the Graduate exercise has a starting point, before you get into the juicier stuff: Bring your faculty and staff together and spend some quality time seriously delving into the things your school says it believes in—the language of the covenant the school makes with students and their families. Use the mission statement and any other expressions of values and beliefs—Our Pillars, statements on equity and diversity, codes of conduct, mottoes, taglines, words from the “About Us” webpage, the imagery on the school seal—to gain a thorough and sober perspective on how the school presents its core beliefs to the world.
And then, having distributed pads and colored markers, ask your faculty to envision an idealized graduate of your school in multiple dimensions, informed by their awareness of the school’s expressed beliefs. What does this graduate know, what do they understand, and most importantly what are their habits of mind and heart as thinkers and community members? It’s essential to throw in and emphasize dispositions with regard to things like equity, justice, and social-emotional and even physical well-being. Creativity falls into this, as well.
Make this a blue-sky exercise, interactive and rich in discussion and speculation. Post the pictures, and talk about this. Give this the time it deserves! This is your school’s chance to begin moving to a place of more authentic and real expression of who and what those who lead and work in it want it to be. Done well and with honesty, this could be one of the most important things your school ever does. Reflect, reflect, reflect!
And now the hard part begins. Still wearing your idealist hats, start asking some really, really important questions:
- In their ideal expression, what do our school’s beliefs and values require of our academic programs? Where must our emphases be as we select topics for instruction and learning? What perspectives must we keep in mind at all times? What must our aims be in each and every class in each and every course?
- How must we reshape the culture of our school in order to be who we say we are? Which of our policies and practices must be examined and altered to achieve the goals implicit in our statements of belief and values?
- Do our non-academic programs serve our mission and values with integrity and wholeness?
- Should our school stand aloof from the world or find more and better ways to engage with it on behalf of the learning experiences we wish to give our students?
- Are we the healthy place to live and work that we wish to be and that we know would optimally serve our community members?
- In the end, to what extent do we currently express and embody our values in the total experience of our school, and how can we maximize that expression?
The thing is, you’ve gotta go deep and wide on this work. Anything that’s just superficial isn’t good enough. There are hard, specific questions that must be answered, many of them.
Like,
- What do we chose to teach? Where are our content emphases? What’s our sequence? On what standards do we actually base our programs, and which have we just inherited from past practice and go along with because they represent the path of least resistance?
- How do we evaluate and record our students’ progress through our curriculum? Knowing what we know about equity in this regard, how can we do what we know is right?
- Do all of our students and faculty see themselves and their experience and heritage in our curriculum and in the culture of learning in which they live and work? Do all of our students and their families feel comfortable in all of their interactions with our institution?
- Has our school held its own feet to the fire in examining our commitment to all of the elements of what might be termed The Commonweal? (Yes, it’s my own term and I’ve tried to define it as best I can; others can do better, no doubt.)
- Do we provide our teachers and staff all the resources, training, and support they need to be fully functioning and thriving as working and living members of our institutional community?
Once you’ve addressed and reflected on all these issues, start doing what you need to do in order for your school to truly be who it says it is and wants to be for all its community members. You’ll figure that out, and there are people who can help you at every step of the way; find them and use them. And not just gurus with big ideas, but people who can help you with the critical job of bringing your community members through a process of change and growth and people who can help you learn to talk about what you’re doing and who you are in ways that will make sense to and even inspire audiences that matter.
And let me add something really important here: Your school’s governing board had better be all fine with all of this. Not just because they may need to allocate resources to make it all happen but because they must understand that their pride and their self-respect ride on getting this done. If they’re on your board because they profess to love and care about your school, they had better be prepared to put their eyes on the jobs that must be done and add their “ayes” to making it happen. In a legal sense, it’s their school, and they need to take responsibility for it and for honoring the covenant the school makes with its community. It’s about keeping promises.
Because making promises based on values that matter and keeping these promises is how we stop being hypocrites.