Concluding Thoughts

Already have several teachers who are using the first days of school to develop shared sets of classroom procedures and rules with their students? Start there. Instead of focusing on simple procedural expectations during those conversations, teachers can emphasize behaviors connected to the school’s mission, vision, values, and goals. Asking students, “How can we make our school year safe, happy, and successful?” is just as easy as asking, “What steps should a student in our classroom take if they are absent from school?” If teachers are already requiring students to keep data notebooks to track their progress toward mastering important outcomes, then start there. Turning data collected by individual students into a classroom success wall can be a useful addition to an existing practice that your teachers already believe in.

The key is to find logical and approachable next steps worth taking if connecting students to your mission, vision, values, and goals will be an important part of the way you do business in your school. The most successful change efforts are sustainable—and sustainable change depends on keeping things simple until leaders have built the capacity of both students and staff.

Concluding Thoughts

Identifying the school’s mission, vision, values, and goals is an essential behavior for any PLC. Meaningful collaboration depends on ensuring that all staff members have a unified sense of purpose and that sense of purpose is articulated in the mission, vision, values, and goals statements. Prominently displayed proclamations crafted with great sincerity by the adults in a school community should be thought of as tools to motivate, inspire, rally, honor, drive, ignite, and light anew the efforts of the adults charged with working together to ensure success for all students. More important, prominently displayed proclamations crafted with great sincerity should be thought of as tools to guide the actions of the adults in the school. As Learning by Doing authors DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, and Mattos (2016) explain, “The words of a mission statement are not worth the paper that they are printed on unless people begin to do differently” (p. 34, emphasis in original).

It is just as vital that students share that unified sense of purpose. They are, after all, the most important stakeholders in a school community. If the primary goal of schools is to ensure high levels of learning, then educators need to see the mission, vision, values, and goals as tools for motivating, inspiring, and guiding the actions of learners. In fact, we would argue that the major difference between highly functioning learning communities and those that struggle to produce results is not that the staff have a shared sense of purpose. Instead, it is that the staff have deliberately crafted plans for—and followed through on—communicating these foundational concepts to their students. Stated another way, a commitment to high levels of learning in a school does not start when the adults agree to it. A commitment to high levels of learning in a school starts when the students believe in it.

For some teachers—particularly those in buildings without a strong, unifying sense of purpose— deliberately crafting plans for communicating foundational concepts to students is going to feel like just another thing to do. And there is no doubt that taking this step will require time for discussion, dialogue, and debate as the adults consider the key messages and actions that each teacher and administrator would advance to their students. These conversations may even make some staff members uncomfortable. It might be—after all—the first time they have ever been challenged to connect their instructional practices to the descriptions of the school the community wants to become and the goals they want to achieve.

The result, however, will be a sharing of ideals, messages, and actions that can reinforce the school’s mission, vision, values, and goals in the hearts and minds of every stakeholder, including students.