Collaborating with school stakeholders to develop a school vision

Richard DeFour, an educator and school administrator, is well-known throughout the United States for his concept of "Professional Learning Communities." Recently, at xxx school, we were fortunate enough to apply DeFour's principles to develop a mission and vision statement for improved education for our future students.

According to DeFour, in order to create a professional learning community, it is necessary to "focus on learning rather than teaching, work collaboratively, and hold yourself accountable for results." In such an organization, everyone involved has a clear sense of the mission to accomplish and a shared vision of the conditions they must create to achieve it. They work together in collaborative teams to determine best practices for accomplishing their aims and the current reality of the conditions in their organization. Any discrepancy between best practices and the reality motivates them to take action to reduce the discrepancy.

DeFour also stresses that this work is not a one-time activity or an annual event, but rather an ongoing process that drives the daily work of people throughout the organization. The entire process is designed to engage teams in a cycle of continuous improvement. This consists of gathering and analyzing information, identifying weaknesses and areas of concern, working together to develop and implement strategies to address specific concerns, collecting new data to assess the impact of the strategies and then starting the process all over again. Most important, the effectiveness of the organization is assessed on the basis of results, rather than intentions or activities.

On (date), Xxxx (principal's name and title) and I (title) had the opportunity to initiate a new educational improvement approach, when our school improvement team met to begin the Professional Learning Community process. From the beginning, we recognized that this was a collaborative process where everyone works together. The entire staff is represented on the improvement team, including (staff titles e.g., teachers, social worker, librarian, etc.), all working jointly toward our goals. Secondly, we noted as DeFour emphasized, this is a continuous process to constantly make improvements where necessary.

At this first session, we created new mission and vision statements. The mission answers the question why do we exist? In one form or another we are here to help all students achieve at a high level. However, we did not wish to create a lofty mission statement where goals are difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Rather, we wanted a mission that was specifically directed toward learning and developing accountability on what our school needed to improve. As a result, we established the following statement: MISSION STATEMENT

The vision gives a picture of a school in three to five years. The values are guidelines for the way we collaborate to accomplish this vision. The goals provide the continuous steps that will move forward. The vision statement we jointly created is: