Connecting Your Mission Statement to the Community

How connected are your students, teachers and parents to the mission statement and student learning outcomes of your school? We often spend a great deal of time working in committees developing these guiding documents but fail in our efforts to communicate and embed them into our school cultures. Sometimes the sharing is little more than placing copies of our mission statements and learning outcomes on classroom walls. This really doesn’t slice it in our media rich world. Our students’ brains want a much richer media format that can start discussions, develop ownership and build understanding.

Much like our efforts to integrate technology and various literacy skills into the curriculum, we need to think about ways to combine technology and learning to deliver our respective schools’ mission statements and student learning outcomes into the classrooms and out into the larger school community. One idea is to pull together a team of students to go through the video production process to create videos that paint the picture of the mission statement from a student perspective. This real world, project-focused effort can be done at each school division involving the usual steps that go into videography production.

Multiple intelligences come into play as student teams apply their language arts skills to storyboard, write the scripts and contact the “talent” for each of the scenes. Roles for actors, camera people, director, music creation and video editors are also assigned.

Once the videos are produced, they need to be shared in as many possible venues as possible. Play them on your closed circuit TV system along with your normal student news shows. Post the videos to your school Web site and make sure you have links on your prospective parent and employee pages as well. Also, think about getting your school leaders to add the videos to their blogs. Ask them to post about their plans and actions to move the school community towards making the mission and student learning outcomes a focus in how decisions are made.

Strong connections are made with the viewers due to the social and visual nature of our brains. Students want to see the work of their video producing classmates and we know they really connect to images over text any day. They also will see the mission statement as more meaningful when explained by fellow classmates and teachers. You probably will find more success with your elementary students interviewing adults to explain the various segments of your school’s mission statement and/or student learning outcomes. As you move up in divisions, the students can take on more independence interviewing each other as well as adults or work to create scenes that depict their own interpretations of what the mission and learning outcomes look like.

To get you started with an example, here is a link to one of a five part video series created by Mrs. Brings’ Third grade class to promote the Hong Kong International School’s mission statement. It is a streaming WMV file so hopefully your media player can handle it.

Service & Global Understanding

Tags: mission statement, project-based, video