Last month, "Livening up the blasé work of mission and vision revision" relayed the story of Suzanne Kennedy, principal of the College Heights Early Childhood Learning Center in Decatur, Georgia.
Kennedy enacted efficient and effective processes resulting in a purpose statement and a set of belief statements in which every member of her staff had a significant role. She scored well on an evaluation rubric used by AdvancED (an accreditation umbrella consolidating the North Central Association, Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, and Northwest Accreditation Commission) as part of an accreditation review.
This process with internal stakeholders certainly created meaningful documents with plenty of built-in belief from the employees. Many schools struggle in creating and reviewing core documents (e.g., mission, vision, purpose, beliefs, core values) with internal stakeholders. Therefore, when it comes to asking for external stakeholder input, it is deemed nearly impossible.
Jeff Homan, principal of The Main Street Academy, a start-up K-8 charter school in College Park, Georgia, leveraged technology as the school revisited its core documents in preparation for both an accreditation visit and a rechartering process with the local school district, both occurring every five years.
The Main Street Academy opened in 2010 and now houses 886 students in nontraditional facilities. The K-2 classrooms are located in a two-story segment of a historic church. Grades 3-5 are also in church classrooms — although this church is nearly a mile away and has three floors. Finally, middle schoolers are housed in eight portable classrooms on a parking lot across from one of the churches.
Despite this exceptionally challenging setting, The Main Street Academy serves its students quite well — 56 percent qualify for free and reduced lunch and 98 percent of the student body are students of color. On 2013-2014 state tests, several performances warrant special attention:
- 100 percent of The Main Street Academy eighth-graders passed reading
- 50 percent of The Main Street Academy third-fifth-graders exceeded state standards in mathematics
EdisonLearning is an important partner for the school, providing the infrastructure for all operations functions as well as consultative support for curriculum, instruction, and leadership.
The school took a major step toward adopting the Schoolwide Enrichment Model, developed by Joseph Renzulli, when 35 percent of the teaching staff earned their gifted endorsement. Another teacher cohort will complete the three college courses during the 2014-15 school year.
Parents in this charter school expect to be active participants in the life of the school, ranging from serving as one of 13 board members to fulfilling mandatory volunteer hours for fundraisers. As Homan prepared for the extremely important accreditation and re-chartering processes, parent input was vital and assumed.
Having some of his own accreditation experiences both as a building leader and as a chairperson of school accreditation visits, Homan knew the difficulty of asking many individuals to come together to write.
Placing 10 or 20 people in a room (much less 50 or more), expecting them to each participate in the writing of a sometimes esoteric document was not only improbable, but also not the product of intelligent planning. Although scenarios such as these are offered in goodwill to involve stakeholders, oftentimes individuals who have volunteered their time leave having a less positive outlook on the school and its employees.
Homan took advantage of a requirement in his charter: "Annually report parent's satisfaction of the school. 80 percent will score the school at a B or higher." In previous years, this question was buried in a long survey of more than 40 questions. Response rate was incredibly low, creating doubt that the results were representative.
Enter the 2013 survey — only two questions long.
The first question was not surprising: "What grade would you assign to The Main Street Academy (A-F)?" However, the second one was more intriguing: "What words or phrases would be important to have in a TMSA Purpose Statement?"
The question included the following help language: "We are applying for accreditation! In doing so, we need to create a purpose statement. Please list a few words or phrases that best describe TMSA (e.g., student-focused)."
The Main Street Academy capitalized on the ease of a Google form and began a campaign to increase their response rate. The survey's long Google-esque URL was shortened using TinyURL.com, and a small half-sheet flyer was sent home with each student. The link was placed on the website and pushed out to the Facebook page.
These moves do not seem particularly innovative, nor did they send the explicit message that The Main Street Academy truly wanted to hear from parents. The next two moves were more important and impactful:
- Provide a laptop at the after-school program pick-up location and require a survey response in order to collect children.
- Walk the carpool line at all locations with the TinyURL printed on a small piece of paper, highlighting the two-question survey length.
This charter school does not enjoy nor benefit from bus service — a preponderance of students are dropped off in a carpool line that snakes through the neighborhoods, often times numbering 5-7 blocks long. Administrators took advantage of these captive adults in their cars. Even walking in the rain, school leaders encouraged each adult to use their time wisely as they waited for their children and grandchildren to be dismissed from school, offering the TinyURL and sometimes even their phones to increase the response rate.
Response rate nearly doubled from previous surveys, resulting in a rich qualitative data set to use in crafting core documents for the school. Additionally, the same two-question survey was launched to staff. It was time to enact another efficient process to use these data sets.
A small workgroup of board members, parents and employees gathered at an evening meeting. Most anticipated this would be the first of several meetings to fulfill the task: draft a purpose statement and a set of belief statements that would be brought to the board of directors for consideration and eventual approval. A short 80 minutes later, both tasks were accomplished — and less than a month later, the board approved the purpose statement with minor word revisions.
The meeting began with an opportunity for each member to quietly read the two data sets, copied and pasted out of the Google spreadsheet, highlighting for themselves as individuals what words and phrases seem particularly important. Following this personal read of the data, the following two Wordles were provided to team members:
Wordle 1: Parent-generated
Wordle 2: Staff-generated
Wordle is a free website that allows users to type or paste words and phrases. The generator creates a visual where the size of the text represents the word frequency in the original document. Thus the larger words were mentioned more times than the smaller text. Prior to the meeting, parents' suggested language was copied and pasted into Wordle. The process was repeated using staff input.
Although it is quite an acceptable, perhaps expected, behavior for teachers to group and regroup their students, that best practice is rarely applied to groupings of adults. This meeting chose to replicate that best practice while accomplishing this task. The group was encouraged to work with a partner and use their personal highlighted text as well as the wordles to write a purpose statement of no more than two sentences. As partners finished, they posted each suggested statement.
Varying iterations were offered as the whole group contemplated each other's language choices. Consensus was built and a fist-to-five assessment resulted in strong belief that this work was the best this group could generate.
The draft purpose statement:
"At the Main Street Academy, dedicated and student-focused staff provide challenging and enriching experiences for all students. In meaningful partnership with engaged parents, TMSA prepares students to achieve at a high level as they become contributing members of their diverse, constantly-changing communities."
The last step of the night was to draft belief statements that undergird or "provide legs" to the purpose statement. A short list had already been drafted as some of these had been inadvertently voiced during the purpose statement generation phase. A similar consensus-building process took place, resulting in the following set of belief statements:
- We believe each student can and will learn.
- We believe each child needs and deserves enrichment.
- We believe students are best served through relationships with adults in their lives, particularly those at school and in their home.
- We believe passionate educators use data to make decisions in the best interest of their charges.
- We believe students are motivated by including choice in some of their learning.
- We believe strategies for teaching students that are gifted often benefit each student in the class.
- We believe that students rise to meet high expectations that they understand and care about.
- We believe that in the most productive school cultures, every person (the adults and the students) is an active and enthusiastic learner, whose creativity is perpetually nurtured.
Homan knew two important things:
- Acquiring broad stakeholder input on core documents is difficult and rare.
- Group writing experiences can be deadly for adult engagement.
The processes used at The Main Street Academy successfully alleviated both of these concerns, using both technology tools and quality group facilitation.
