Sadly, many schools operate with great imprecision regarding their collective vision. Even if these schools arrived at their destination, it’s conceivable that many staff members wouldn’t even realize they had arrived. Why is it so difficult for us to reach clarity about vision? There are many reasons, but what learning theorists and those who have studied the brain have discovered in the last several years is that from a learning and comprehension standpoint, the process of collectively capturing a similar image in an otherwise diverse group of people is far more difficult than could have been imagined (Reason, 2010). This new information is helpful in that now we can examine this otherwise dark and murky process of establishing a vision and can break it down into a handful of working components that thoughtful leaders can use to make vision clarity a reality.
No matter how charismatic or articulate a leader may be, he or she can never come into an organization and upload his or her image of the institution to everyone in the organization . . . at least not yet. The vision is usually based on predictable construction points, and the best way for there to be a more solidified vision for your school is to construct it together. When a leader constructs the vision alone, the school becomes far too reliant on one person. No matter how great an influence a principal or other dynamic school leader may be, it’s a mistake to create conditions where the future of the institution exists primarily between the ears of one person. Even if that person performs at exulted levels, there are always other human factors that ultimately shape the destiny of the school. Therefore, for practical reasons, vision must be a shared proposition.
In some respects, it’s amazing we get anywhere at all in schools, given the difficulty in establishing a clear vision. In just about every school I have visited, I have noticed staff members with wildly different perspectives on essential school issues, such as the merits of technology, the advantages of online learning, the need to differentiate, the effects of collaboration, and so on. Our schools are more diverse than they’ve ever been, and that diversity gap is only going to increase in years to come (Cato Institute, 2013). As immigration numbers continue to expand, our teaching force will become less homogeneous. In addition, as digital natives and digital immigrants continue to work together, the cultural and experiential backgrounds will continue to create chasms that make establishing a solidified vision that much harder. This chapter, therefore, is all about setting up your school’s learning rhythms to create the clarity necessary to be more effective than ever.
Paradigms of Yesterday
As you think about this arguably more evolved set of ideas about establishing and pursuing a vision in your school, it’s important for you to directly reflect on some of the old paradigms. In Taylor’s time, establishing a vision within an organization was all about the capacity of leaders at the top to appropriately word what should be accomplished at every level of the organization (Braverman, 1998). The notion that everyone in the organization would have a say in what the ultimate goals of the organization were and would be involved in thinking about how the system worked was completely foreign to the Tayloristic model. What mattered was that you did your job, followed the rules, and simply executed your localized function. It was up to people with higher pay grades than you to see and pursue the big picture.
Key Concepts for Today
Demonstrating mastery of this concept, establishing vision clarity, requires leaders to come into the school with the capacity to see things as better than they are today. This means they need to be able to conceptualize a highly effective system and imagine it working at even greater levels of effectiveness and optimization. This is more than just having the capacity to dream. It is about understanding the work in schools well enough to digest the current state and visualize improvements. These leaders also have enough knowledge of best practices in schools to be able to recognize opportunities when they emerge. To excel, a leader must be able to synthesize her leadership experiences and knowledge of best practice and resist the temptation to assume that any innovation effort will work as formulated. Leaders who truly understand vision recognize that every school building has to follow its own journey.
Leaders who master this concept must be able to listen extraordinarily well. Everyone in the school, including students, has a vision for what the school is and what it could be. Unless the principal is able to listen well, he won’t be taking advantage of the learning power and capacity to innovate that are all around him. The leader also needs to be able to create a connected culture in which collaboration and communication are such that individuals are able to continuously articulate the details of the vision and work with others to co-construct the vision’s continuous evolution. This process of continually reflecting and refining should happen over a cup of coffee on the morning of the last day of school as thoughts are shared about what’s possible for the next year. It should happen on the soccer field as teachers talk about a key meeting they had two weeks earlier. It should happen as a result of an argument and the subsequent resolution. Actions, reactions, and all the stuff in between help shape what people believe about what’s possible for their school. The vision for what’s possible continues to ebb and flow based on every new voice that enters the conversation, the new challenges put in front of you, and the new opportunities that are suddenly revealed.
Understanding basics about the neurological process points of establishing vision will help you consistently create a culture in which a more cohesive and connected vision is made possible throughout your school. When establishing a mental representation or a vision, there are three important elements to consider: (1) history, (2) mental models, and (3) current learning context. Keep in mind that this is a simplification of what happens neurologically. There are many other nuanced, but important, brain functions that work together to affect what you actually see when your brain goes from perception of experience and stimulus to the creation of a saved image. I don’t want this discussion to drive you crazy; rather, I want to share that establishing a vision is a neurologically complex process.
History
Personal history has an effect on your capacity to establish vision for several very important reasons. First, most of our learning is based on the continuous construction of new information based on old information we’ve already gathered (Braine, 2009; Moss, Kotovsky, & Cagan, 2006). Burning a hand on a hot stove teaches us to change our behavior and affects how we visualize cooking, stoves, danger, and pain. The experience of burning your hand as a child can emerge in multiple ways in the future as you interact with the world and can shape how you visualize what’s next. I can remember visiting Pearl Harbor for the first time with my uncle, who had also never been before. I was in my twenties and had never served in the military. He was in his sixties and had five of his best friends die in World War II. As we considered visiting that memorial, our individual visions for what we thought we would see and what that experience might mean were obviously very different.
In terms of learning, think about working with a small group of teachers in your school. If you’re hoping to establish a vision, the history of each member will affect the vision the group establishes. For example, if you have a group of seven, the fact that three members have more than thirty-five years of experience, lived abroad for ten years, and have English as their second language will all be contributing factors to a vision construction process very different from the one envisioned by the members without those experiences. Any series of words or images used with that group is likely to have a very different impact on