Creating Shared Vision: Back to the Future

In a recent post, I discussed the importance of sticking with an innovation for at least three years so that the benefits of the change would be noticeable and enduring.  An understanding of the current reality and ongoing communication are required to create this kind of persistence.  Creating change that lasts also requires shared purpose and vision. 

Henry David Thoreau wrote, “It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?” (goodreads.com, 2018).  We define what we will be busy about, not by being visionaries ourselves as leaders, but by walking with others, so that together we create a picture of what we hope will be.

Envisioning possibilities together energizes action and creates collective commitment for the long haul. We need to know our destination.  Choosing the future doesn’t mean selecting from the paths that are already before us – it means creating that path.

When my district started working on a literacy adoption, representatives from schools and stakeholder groups got together to define hopes and dreams about literacy learning.  We used a process that has become my favorite for visioning work, the Back to the Future protocol.  We started by dreaming big – what would literacy learning look like in our schools in five years? But here’s the trick: We spoke as if it already was. Using the present tense, we said things like, “Students are sitting around the room with books in their hands and they are so engaged that they don’t look up when someone walks into the room.”  On a chart labeled “Future,” we wrote: Students are engaged in independent reading.  We continued our visioning, filling in the Future chart with descriptions of things as they could be, describing them as if they already were.

Then we came back to the present.  On our “Present” chart, we described the existing state of literacy learning. We drew on the data about current proficiency levels and our own experiences in the classroom to describe our current reality.  It was not quite as rosy as the hoped-for future.  Putting a blank chart between our “Present” and our “Future,” we detailed our “Path,” what it would take to get from the realistic present we’d described to the future we pictured.  The details in our plan convinced us that our dreams could be realities.

To create a shared vision, we keep communicating with all the people who care about the change: teachers, administrators, parents, and students. We want everyone to be part of creating the picture of what the future will be like.  So, we talk about hopes and dreams.  We project ourselves into a hoped-for future.  When we imagine ourselves and our students living and acting in that potential future, we gain insights about what it will take to achieve that goal. When we are clear and spend real time in that future place (if only in our minds), we people the place with ideas that can become realities.

This week, you might want to take a look at:

An administrator’s view on why coaches are important:

https://dennissparks.wordpress.com/2018/09/19/using-instructional-coaches-effectively/

A great list of novels in verse:

https://www.choiceliteracy.com/articles-detail-view.php?id=406

The social brain is the gateway to learning (and social context vs. online learning):

https://www.edutopia.org/video/what-social-brain

Coaching about when to use open and closed questions:

https://studysites.corwin.com/highimpactinstruction/videos/v6.1.htm

Teaching tips for adding diverse texts for reading and writing:

https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/trtr.1759?author_access_token=et4KN73P5MzraPnrGcZ6T04keas67K9QMdWULTWMo8N2-YZG8OMSPZ-N9ZTpkuEeUTVa5ZIabqtU8XgQ4Y_bvwfQi5GGPoKbVIWtvvj-_bROb2FAEQsfkQBy5lkLBfP4&

Was this helpful?  Please share!

Want to know about new posts? Click “Follow” (bottom right)

Like on Facebook at: facebook.com/mycoachescouch for more coaching and teaching tips!