MISSION S TAT E M E N T Together, with over one thousand participants, the American School of Madrid community set out to renew its Mission Statement.
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All of our school community stakeholders from alumni to parents, staff, and students had the opportunity to share their thoughts around who we are, what we value, what we hope to achieve, and how we might go about it. During the initial brainstorming and data collection stages, stakeholders contributed their reflections on the three mission driving questions:
• Why does our school exist? What is its main purpose?
• What problem/challenge is our school trying to ASM
solve?
• What are the values and beliefs that will help us
continue to grow as a school now and in the future?
Early in the school year, the Board of Trustees and Educational Leadership Team participated in a world cafe-style protocol around these questions and reflected on the commonalities and key areas that were shared.
Throughout January and in the midst of Storm Filomena, the wider community contributed their thoughts to the process; parents, alumni, and community partners through an online survey. Students at every grade level engaged in conversations related to our shared values and ambitions for the community, the middle and upper school students dedicating half a school day to participate. In the end, over 1,200 ASM community members engaged in the process. Gathering all the data, team and community members got together on a Saturday to synthesize it all down to the core ideas and arrange them into summary charts and draft statements. Passing their work onto creative and communication-oriented writing teams, we watched the community’s collective voice form into a number of possible statements. Those were then brought to a focus group, again representing various community voices, to ensure that while we could not utilize every idea shared in the brainstorming process that the most significant and commonly shared made it through. Finally, using that feedback a small group of skilled wordsmiths produced the inspiring and actionable statement we see today. The Mission Statement of the American School of Madrid: We empower lifelong learners to take on challenges and thrive, care for others in our diverse international community, and think globally and creatively toward a better future. As the process was coming to a close, the idea of distilling the statement down to its key components produced the four cornerstones of the mission: empower, challenge, care, and create. While the Mission Statement represents who we are and what we do, the important work begins in the 2021-2022 school year when we start to envision how we live into the cornerstones in our day-to-day work and interactions, making the mission alive, vital, and meaningful. If one thing has been certain through this process, it is that we all value this richly diverse and closely connected ASM community.
