What is this post about?
Some schools write mission statements because they are expected to. Some schools write missions statements to communicate to others who they are. Some schools write mission statements to give teachers an opportunity to discuss educational issues, to clarify their own beliefs, and to discover areas of agreement and disagreement.
Those are fine reasons to write a mission statement, but the post that follows encourages writing and using mission statements for a different reason: to drive school improvement. The post assumes that successful school improvement requires the focused involvement of all or most of the staff and it assumes that one of the biggest obstacles to successful improvement is the tendency that all of us have to forget what we said was important and to get distracted from our focus by the demands of daily life.
In that context, mission statements have three purposes. First, school mission statements can be used to reduce confusion and increase focus by clearly establishing direction and purpose for the school as a whole; second, school leaders can use mission statements to regularly remind teachers what they agreed that their focus and direction should be; and third, team mission statements, which establish direction and purpose for teams, committees, action groups, etc., can help to ensure that the activities of those teams support the mission and goals of the school.
For school improvement to be successful, each person and every group needs to be pulling together in more or less the same direction and needs to be doing so not for hours or days, but for weeks and months. Using mission statements to focus activity can help.
If that seems useful or important, read on...
What is a mission statement?
As complicated or nebulous as it may sometimes sound, what a mission statement is can be simple and potentially very useful — a group’s mission statement defines its task. It says,
- this is who we are,
- this is what we’re trying to do,
- this is why we’re doing it, and
- this is for whom we’re doing it.
In short, a mission statement provides members of a group with an answer to the questions, What is my job here?
Why mission statements are important and how they can be used…
Many school have written mission statements and many have found the process of creating a mission statement to be useful — any process that involves teachers in discussions about what they’re doing is useful — but I’m not so sure that most mission statements once written are much used.
In part that may be because there’s just not much confusion about what schools are supposed to do. They are supposed to 1) prepare their students for success in whatever comes next — middle school, high school, college, work, life; 2) they’re supposed to keep those students safe; and 3) they’re supposed to spend the taxpayers money wisely. Those are the basics and the district, the state, and the public keeps track and takes results with respect to each very seriously.
In addition, school mission statements often include language about caring environments, self-esteem, opportunities to reach full potential, creativity, critical thinking, health lifestyles, personal exploration, lifelong learning, etc.
While this additional language may be useful in signaling parents that the school is aware of their values or in acknowledging for teachers that the school is aware of their values, such language is often not taken seriously. If it were taken seriously, it would be connected to specific expectations for action or behavior and that rarely happens. What does it mean, for example, for a third grade teacher to promote lifelong learning for her students? What would it look like if she did that? What would someone see her do? What would someone see her students do?
On the other hand, if my mission is straightforward and says that my job as a third grade teacher is to make sure that my students are prepared to be successful in fourth grade, what I have to do is much clearer. Not clear, but clearer, and I have an idea about how to make it even clearer. (And, in the long run, students who are successful in fourth grade are more likely to become lifelong learners than students who are not.)
While vague and high-sound missions might make people feel better about themselves, they are not much use for school improvement. School improvement may not require a good mission statement, but school leaders can use a good mission statement to help drive school improvement. School improvement fails when teachers aren't focused and working together and school improvement fails when teachers forget priorities or get distracted by demands that come at them in unending array. One job of school leaders is to remind everyone of the priorities and to help them keep focused on what's most important. Frequent and regular references to good mission statements can help school leaders do just that.
But then, it’s not just school mission statements that are useful. Mission statements for groups — teams, task forces, work groups, committees, etc. — within the school are equally important and rarely used. As a result, there is often confusion about what the purpose of such groups are and that confusion can lead to conflict and frustration.
For example, in one high school the principal asked members of the math department to review alternative math texts. The members of the department assumed that they would be able to decide which text would be chosen and the principal, who had been a math teacher himself, assumed that he would have a say about their recommendation. When the math teachers discovered that the principal wasn’t comfortable with their recommendation and wanted it changed, some of them felt that all the work they had done had been wasted and they were furious. That might have been avoided if it had been clear from the beginning that their job was to make a recommendation, not to make a decision.
A possible mission: We are the members of the math department. Our task is to make a recommendation to the principal which of three available textbooks/math curriculums our school should adopt for the coming year. Our goal is to recommend a text that we believe will make it most likely for our students to be successful in the math.
In that case, clarifying the purpose of the group might have avoided a conflict between the principal, who had given the group its task, and the members of the group. Other times, clarifying purpose can cut short hours of unproductive discussions among members of a group who have different ideas about what they’re supposed to be doing.
For example, a group of elementary school teachers needed to spend most of one meeting deciding whether their task — revising the school’s action plan — meant that they needed to fine tune the existing plan or start over and follow some or all of the steps of the process that they had used to create the plan in the first place. The discussion was confused as they simultaneously tried to decide exactly what they were trying to do, what data they would have to collect and what process they would use if they were going to fine tune the plan. Not surprisingly, it was impossible to make decisions about data or process before they had decided what they were trying to do.
In many cases, team members find discussions like these frustrating (Let’s get down to business!), but clarifying tasks is an important first step that often saves hours of wasted time and frustration later. This group, having clarified the task, was able to quickly make decisions about process, data and next steps.
Possible mission. We are a group of teachers who have agreed to revise the school action plan and present our revised plan to the leadership team for approval. Our work will be based on what we have learned over the three years since we created the current plan and on data about the progress of our students. Our goal is to support continued academic growth for our students.
The group’s addition/clarification. This means that we will review each activity in the current plan and recommend continuing the activity, modifying the activity, or stopping the activity. In addition, we will recommend additional activities, as needed.
Creating a school mission is a way of encouraging all staff members to align their activities and efforts to achieve a common goal. Creating missions for groups within the school is a way of ensuring that the expectations of various responsible groups or actors are aligned.
In the action plan example, the school’s leadership team had asked for volunteers to review the plan without being completely clear about what that meant. After their discussion, the group could have written a mission statement, reviewed that mission statement with the leadership team, and gotten the leadership team’s approval. In this case, the group did not put their clarified understanding of their task in writing. They just went at it, which is not necessarily a bad strategy if the task is reasonably clear and uncontroversial.
In other cases, writing a mission statement and bringing it to the chartering group (e.g.,the leadership team) for approval creates the possibility of negotiation between the chartering group and the members of the action team and can be a step towards ensuring that groups within the school are functioning in sync.
Finally, it’s important that a mission statement or, at the very least, a statement of purpose is in writing. Even if there is a discussion about purpose and even if there is agreement now, there is likely to be disagreement later as various members of a group have different memories about what was agreed to. While there is no guarantee that there won’t turn out to be disagreements about what the words in a written mission really mean, having them written is at least a step towards clarity and the elimination of confusion.
No comments:
Post a Comment