Blog Post Assignment
Jennifer B. Blackstone
Prompt: In many schools, there is a distinct difference between the stated purpose in the mission statement and the purposes that are unstated, those that are communicated by patterns of behavior. After reflecting on the dominant patterns of behavior in your school or district, what (realistically) do you think is the fundamental purpose of your school?
District Mission: Empowering all students to maximize their talents.
The fundamental purpose of our school district is to find authentic and creative ways for students to learn. As a small, rural district, I believe many people would be surprised to know that we have an outdoor Land Lab, two Makerspaces, complete 1 to 1 technology devices for students, a vast variety of blended learning instructional software programs, and on-going training for teachers in technology driven learning for students. With an instructional staff numbering only 90 teachers, we have a Technology Instructional Coach, thirty teachers trained in project-based learning, and thirty teachers that are at least Educator Level 1 Google certified. We have two Gifted Intervention Specialists (GIS) and eighteen additional teachers who are completing a graduate level program to become GISs. We have built the internal capacity to keep innovation at the forefront of our teaching practices.
We have a mindset in this district that students should be moving and learning so we encourage teachers to get out of their classrooms and learn outside or around the community. All choir class convene in our outside shelter house. Elementary students walk to the community library branch monthly. Just in the past two weeks, all seventh graders experienced a cross curricular project that included calculating the ratio of birch and sycamore trees to total number of trees (math), documenting outdoor sensory words through writing poetry (English), I See, I Think, I Wonder observations at the vernal pond (science), and observations of where types of trees grow in connection with economics and geography (social studies). Additionally, all fourth graders were knee deep in the creek bed that parallels our district properly collecting a variety of water specimens (mayflies, river snails, and sow bugs). In addition to the Makerspaces in the elementary and middle schools, we have mobile STEM carts that can be used in classroom settings for exploration activities related to electricity, circuits, computer coding, and robots. The students are actively engaged in the learning and it is student driven and includes open-ended questioning. Not having the “right answer” is something that both teachers and students sometimes struggle with in the learning process. But it is extremely effective to say, “I don’t know, but I’ll keep trying to find the answer.” This exploratory nature of learning is fundamentally connected to the purpose of our district to engage students in authentic learning.
Our district mission statement needs revision to clearly articulate this purpose. Our behavior and decision making do not align with the current “vanilla” mission statement. As a new Superintendent, I would lead the process of establishing a new mission, vision, and core values at the district by engaging a variety of stakeholders in the process. Additionally, I would plan to engage in the process of developing a Quality Profile and Strategic Plan for the district so that we are continually aligning our belief system and our dominant patterns of behaviors as well as communicating those to all stakeholders.