Creating a Strategic Plan for a School

I’ve just spent two full days working (over 20 hours) with teaching colleagues, administrators, board members, trustees and parents to create my school’s strategic plan. We formulated a draft mission, objectives and strategies to guide our school through the next 10-20 years of its existence. What an incredibly powerful and beautiful experience.

Are the beginning of our work the facilitator Steve Barrone asked us why we accepted the invitation to participate. At the time, I thought that I thought that my reason was because I complain a lot and I think that if I’m going to identify the problem, I should be part of the solution. As I’ve just read Seth Godin’s blog post entitled We Can Do It, I realize that my other reason for being vocal and participatory is because I have hope and faith. I know that we do a better job of educating our students and I want to be be part of figuring out how to do that and implementing it.

Imagine a roomful of over twenty people sitting in a circle. Imagine that those people reflect the diversity in demographics of the school community and that all of them are focused on the children who come to our school now and the ones who will come there in the future. Imagine a group of educators, administrators, business people, writers, mothers, fathers, alumni with all our various biases, agendas and perspectives working towards consensus. Some would say that this exercise was doomed for failure. Many use the impracticality of consensus as the reason for not using it as a decision making strategy. Of course it’s difficult to make decisions using consensus: it requires one to absent their ego from the discussion; it requires incessant FOCUS on the main client, it requires listening even more clearly than speaking and it requires patience, trust and openness in participants.

One of my biggest challenges in this process was noise. I require a degree of quietness to think effectively; as a child, I required silence to do my homework. There wasn’t much time for individual quiet reflection. I made time by going to the washroom or escaping into my head or mapping my thinking on paper. I’m curious as to what mechanisms others used to clarify their thoughts to be comfortable that they were representing their best views.

Here were my written objectives:
1. Students identify and take advantage of opportunities to be active in the world.
2. Students make connections between what they are learning and their life to pursue new knowledge and understandings of their own choosing.
3. Students will have dreams and engage in planning and activities to achieve their dreams.
4. Students participate in team projects to work on real life problems.

This is a first draft that I wrote in a few minutes of quiet reflection about what I value in people and in myself. These are not the objectives that we agreed on although there is nothing here that wasn’t addressed either directly or implicitly in our school’s mission and the accompanying objectives. When I see what we created put together on a page and presented as a strategic plan, I get goosebumps because I think that if I work towards them every day in my classroom, every student will learn something about his/her interests and will get started on the path to lifelong learning, every student will develop a mindset of service to the community, and every student will improve their creative AND critical thinking skills. But there ‘s more than that; to work effectively toward the school’s mission and objectives, I need to be transparent in reflecting/modeling the same attributes that I want my students to learn and exhibit. This makes my classroom and my school a place of learning, not just for the students but for me as well. By a similar argument, the school must also a place of learning for administrators and other members of the school community.