Get everyone rowing in the same direction.
A clear North Star makes everything else easier: employees are more engaged, teams start moving in a common direction, and your school attracts more people who connect with what you do.
Designing a New Mission Statement
Your mission statement is an opportunity to explore your core reason for existing; define the invisible thread connecting your past, present, and your future; and define yourself clearly in your market. When your mission is crisp, resonant, and distinct, it helps leaders take action and make the case for change. It also helps the school attract, and keep, the right employees and families.
Many missions, however, are well-intentioned and vague. They’re not known in the community and they’re not used to frame decisions. The result is a lost opportunity.
Leadership+Design’s mission design process brings your community together across constituency in a human, ethnographic exploration of what makes your school special. Moving from past to present to future, your design team will unlock new insights and sharp language that will resonate deeply with your community – and frame a “North Star” to guide you toward positive change.
Building a Portrait of a Graduate
A Portrait of a Graduate is a tool that frames the essential, transdisciplinary skills that you’re building in all parts of your program. Reaching clarity on those skills makes it easier to collaborate between division and departments; advance place-based, project-based, and experiential learning; and lay the groundwork for competency-based learning or a Mastery Transcript. A powerful tool for teaching and learning, it can rally educators around common goals – and help families understand the value of your work.
Our collaborative Portrait of a Graduate design process will energize your team, spark conversations about the purpose of learning, and lay the groundwork for positive change in the years to come. With a transparent and collaborative design process, you will experience forward movement and gain clarity on the road ahead.
School Values and Student Character Traits
Education is about more than what you know – it’s about who you are. In an era where schools are rediscovering the importance of character, reflection, and self-awareness, we help schools get crystal clear on the values they hold at their core – and the character traits they seek to develop in their students.
Depending on your goals, we can work with your board, your faculty, your community, or a combination of the above. Our playful, creative, and collaborative process generates buy-in and a list of crisp values that moves beyond generic platitudes.