The Remarkable Vision Formula: How to Create the Campus of Your Dreams [Part 3 of 3]

Chapter 4. Lead Your Remarkable School

When my friend, Joe Clausi, moved across the country for his first principalship, he had no idea that the charter school he would be leading was failing. The school itself was only two years old, but it was already struggling. The only charter school in the district, it had been founded to focus on career and technical education, offering classes in construction, engineering, and architecture—all careers that made sense for the local community.

When Joe arrived, he learned that the school wasn’t even accredited and had acquired a negative reputation. It had become the school where kids were sent after being expelled or suspended from other schools in the area.

For the first year, Joe focused on making several immediate, necessary changes to turn the school around. He let many of the former staff go and hired new staff, overhauled their block scheduling, and changed the grading system. In his second year, the school applied for accreditation. During the review committee’s visit, the committee chair pulled Joe aside and praised him for all the progress they had made.

“But,” the chair added, “You don’t have a long-term vision for the school. I’m going to challenge you now, and when we come back in five years, that is what we need to see.” He told Joe that they needed to have a clearer vision of their ideal student, a profile of a graduate, and more rigor.

Joe realized the chair was right. They had been working so hard just to put out the proverbial fires, but they had no overall vision or direction for improving the school beyond that. They were still an afterthought in the community, despite having improved.

After that meeting, Joe got his team together to talk about their strengths. What could they do to up the level of rigor and offer a truly unique and exemplary learning experience?

They first considered providing Advanced Placement (AP) classes. But they quickly realized that most other schools in the area offered the same thing; they didn’t want to fit the mold of every other school. Instead, they looked for another option that would lean into their unique focus on vocational and technical education.

One teacher suggested they look into the International Baccalaureate® Career-Related Programme. The whole team was excited to see that it offered a rigorous curriculum and fit perfectly with their hope to provide relevant, real-world experiences for their students. Plus, no other school in the entire state was doing this program. They would be the first.

As they began the two-year authorization process, Joe realized that the teachers would have to collaborate more in order to achieve their goal, so he gave every teacher a collaboration period to work with each other. They built relationships with businesses in the community so that students could apprentice with professionals and graduate with real-world experience. They added classes in computer science, design, and robotics—years before this became a trend. Their scores in the core disciplines improved, along with their reputation in the community. Over time, the school became a place where students wanted to be.

When Joe talked to the committee chair again, he shared what they had done. The chair nodded his head and said, “That’s it. You’ve got it.”

Have you ever been in a situation like Joe’s? Have you ever felt so overwhelmed by all of the challenges in front of you that you couldn’t think about what to have for dinner tonight, let alone a long-term vision for your school’s success?

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day planning. That’s why you need to retreat to regain perspective and discover where you need to go next.

In this chapter, we’ll help you create a vision as inspiring and empowering as the one Joe and his team created.

Reflect: Visualize Your Remarkable School

Imagine it’s three years from today. You’re walking around your school with a notebook in your hand. And while you’re walking through your school, I want you to capture everything that you see and everything that you hear. Capture everything that you can experience with your senses and write it down in your journal or in the space below.

Remember, go crazy with it! Dream big. Don’t censor yourself or worry about what others will think. Right now, no one else is here. This is your vision for your Remarkable School. Don’t create an upper limit where none exists.

Remarkable School Vision List

Now that you’ve got a general vision for your Remarkable School, let’s get more explicit and dream about the details with the Remarkable School Vision List. Just like we built our Dream 100 List around a number of categories, we’ll do the same thing for our Remarkable School.

Most schools don’t think about vision with an eye toward the specifics. Most schools create a “vision statement” that’s usually too vague and general to be truly meaningful and useful.

The mistake here is that school administrators think a generic vision sounds right but it couldn’t be more wrong. By not taking a position, by not getting specific, by trying to please everyone, you’re setting yourself up for a mediocre vision at best. The value is in getting more specific and defining your expectations. It’s via specificity that you can actually start to see a path toward your Remarkable School.

You don’t have to fill out all of the reflections right now, but do take some time to read through them and envision what changes you’d want to see in your school for each category. These are the categories that I start with for dreaming up my Remarkable School Vision, but you might think of more. Feel free to expand and add as many categories as you need. This is your vision, after all!