What is a vision?
A vision statement answers the question, what are we trying to accomplish? It describes, in some detail, a desirable, future state. It is different from a mission statement, which is a statement of purpose although, I have to admit, the differences can be murky.
Here, for example, is a fairly typical high school vision statement:
At [our] High School we envision a campus where there is an atmosphere of mutual respect in which students develop healthy lifestyles and become creative problem solvers, critical thinkers, and effective communicators.
Clearly, I could make that into a mission statement by changing a few words.
The mission of [our] High School is to create a campus where there is an atmosphere of mutual respect in which students develop healthy lifestyles and become creative problem solvers, critical thinkers, and effective communicators.
Is it a mission or is it a vision? Is it my job to help students develop healthy lifestyles or is that a vision of a desirable future? In truth, it may not matter. If all school leaders do with the mission and vision, once they’re written, is post them on classroom walls and include them in official school documents, it may not matter much what they’re called.
But if the goal is school improvement, then missions and visions have very different uses. A mission statement is a brief statement of purpose. Who are we? What is our task? Why are we doing it? For whom? (See previous posts for more information.)
In the context of school improvement, a vision statement needs not only to describe some desirable future (students becoming creative problem solvers), but also it needs to spell out in some detail, what teachers will be doing to make that possible. What, for example, will teachers at the school be doing that will result in students becoming creative problem solvers? The vision above is bare bones. To be of use for school improvement, a vision needs to put some meat on those bones. The bones are a description of what students will achieve. The meat is a description of what teachers will need to do to make such student achievement possible.
(A Pew study of programs in seven urban school districts that received Annenberg Foundation grants concluded that "clear expectations for instruction are as critical as clear expectations for student learning.")
I have an example of a meaty vision, but, before I share it, I want to provide a warning: this vision was not created overnight. Or in a week. Or in a month. It is the result of several years of professional development, experience, and experimentation. I’ll talk later about the steps in creating such a vision, but, for now, think of it as a vision of a vision, a desirable future state, something to be achieved.
The vision has four sections with a sentence to describe, in brief, the vision for each section.
Assessments: [Our] Staff uses multiple sources of data from formative and summative assessments to target instruction and measure program effectiveness.
Instruction: Students at [our] School are engaged in intellectually demanding tasks that require higher order and critical thinking skills.
Curriculum: [Our] School’s teachers plan instructional content and learning goals based on California Standards.
The Learning Environment: The learning environment at [our] School is caring, inviting, and safe. It is achieved as staff members model the way for students, for each other, and for the community.
These four statements are the beginning. The vision also includes additional detail to illustrate each of the four areas. For example, for instruction, the vision explains that engaging students in intellectually demanding tasks that require higher order and critical thinking skills means
- instruction is based on essential standards,
- instruction is targeted,
- instruction is differentiated depending on students' needs,
- a wide variety of instructional strategies are used,
- schoolwide instructional practices are research based: grade level teams agree to the levels of use for instructional practices in their collaborative planning, and
- instruction is intellectually demanding.
But the vision doesn’t stop there. It spells out what each of those statements means. For example, “instruction is targeted” means the following…
- Learning objectives are based on assessments.
- Learning objectives are clearly stated.
- Students understand the importance of the learning objective.
- Teachers frequently check for understanding and adjust instruction as needed.
In all the vision includes one full page for instruction, one for assessment, a page and a half for curriculum, and two pages for the learning environment. In short, the vision describes in remarkable detail what teachers at the school will be doing at some future time. It is more than a statement of a goal or of a purpose, it is rich description of pieces that the school’s teachers believe need to be in place for them to be able to achieve the success they are after. More than that, it is an excellent guide for school improvement. Having the vision in place makes it possible to look at the present and to map out the steps that teachers will need to take to move the school from where it is to where it wants to be.
Simpler visions may be useful for schools not concerned about improvement. But for a school that is concerned with improvement, it is crucial to have both a vision of what students will achieve and a vision of what instruction should look like to make that achievement possible. Those two things together provide direction and make it possible for the school both to move effectively and to keep track of its progress.
The question, of course, is how to arrive at such a vision. And the answer is, slowly, proceeding step by step.
It all starts, of course, with a vision in terms of student outcomes. That’s the easy part. Here are some samples from various school visions…
- Students will develop healthy lifestyles.
- Students will become creative problem solvers, critical thinkers, and effective communicators.
- Students will be prepared to enter college and/or the workforce.
- Students will develop intellectually, physically, ethically, and aesthetically to the limits of their potential.
- Students will face challenges with optimism and confidence.
And, of course,
- Students will develop a lifelong love of learning.
It is reasonably easy to come up with a vision statement that includes such statements. No one is against healthy lifestyles or critical thinking. But there is a second reason to get agreement about a vision statement based these or similar declarations: such agreements usually have few consequences. Now that we’ve agreed, teachers say, can we please get back to work?
The harder part comes when teachers attempt to agree on the consequences of having made such agreements. What will it mean, in terms of what teachers do everyday in the classroom to have agreed, for example, that all students will develop intellectually, physically, ethically, and aesthetically to the limits of their potential? What additional agreements about school policies, about the use of resources, about teacher behaviors, etc. will need to be made to make sure that happens?
Fortunately or unfortunately, these more difficult discussions are the basis of school improvement. And those discussions will be difficult not only because the agreements that come out of them will have consequences for the behavior of individual teachers. They will also be difficult because, at the beginning of such discussions, it is unlikely that any group of teachers in any school will have sufficient information about possibilities to envision in detail what they want to be happening in their school and in their classrooms. They may have a general idea, but it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to describe what they want in detail.
In such a situation a school, teachers need to begin by taking a possibly fumbling first step based on the best information that they have available and then, as they learn and experiment, they can proceed step-by-step, collecting information and exploring alternatives.
This is not what most books about improvement — and there are many — suggest. Mostly they describe an orderly process for considering alternatives and making choices. I will describe my own favorite orderly process in this blog at some future time. Yet, in spite of all the advice, progress in schools is rarely orderly. Progress lurches forward in fits and starts, happening in odd moments as a function of who read what book or who went to what workshop or what brief moment of time is available.
Though progress is more likely to be a messy than neat, that is not necessarily a bad thing. The important thing is to keep in mind is that a detailed vision needs to be built slowly, piece by piece, agreement by agreement. It may begin from an agreement that instruction will be based on standards. That will lead to questions about what it means to base instruction on standards and about which standards are important and which standards are most important? When or as those questions are answered, there will be others about what it means to have achieved proficiency and how teachers and students will know who has and who has not achieved it.
There is no way to answer such questions in advance. There are too many questions and too little time to think the questions through. There’s not time to read the books, go to the workshops, or get the training needed to solve all of the problems all at once. Patience is necessary and persistence.
As the process goes forward — with discussion, learning, experimentation, failure, and success, with struggle and celebration — there will be both agreements that can be captured as part of the vision and disagreements that will require further exploration and experimentation.
The vision is not created first with school improvement to follow. The creation of the vision is the heart of the process of school improvement and the vision will never be finished. It gets written and rewritten, created and modified and then modified again as teachers learn and experiment and reach agreements as they develop a clearer and clearer description of what they want to happen in their school.
More to come in Part 2.
No comments:
Post a Comment