The vision thing

The unending revision process of our district's long-range plan continues, ad nauseum. I revise for the most part and then give the district's media technology advisory committee (and other groups) a chance to react, revise and improve. I find that it helps to have a starting point. (See Kathy Sierra's "The Dumbness of Crowds" which gives the reason why this seems to work well.)

I've reached the visionish part of the plan - the big, heady ideals:

Mission Statement
The Mission of the district media/technology program is to provide an environment in which all individuals in District 77 are empowered to become life-long learners and effective users of information, ideas, and technology.

Vision
If technology is to realize its powerful potential for improving education in District 77, it must be used for more than just automating the traditional methods and practices of teaching.

Rather than the computer simply being a tool which allows a common task to be done more efficiently, technology will fundamentally change how instruction is delivered, how student performance is measured, and how teachers view themselves as professionals. The technology is used to actually restructure the educational process to allow it to do things it has never been able to do before. These include using technology to assure:

• All students, including those with special needs, master the basic skills of writing, reading and computation.
• All students, including those with special needs, practice authentic information literacy and research skills, and the higher order thinking skills inherent in them.
• All students, including those with special needs, have access to top quality resources, including human resources, regardless of location.
• All teachers can use technology to provide students and parents
• individualized education plans.
• continuous feedback on how well students are meeting their learning goals.
• opportunities for virtual student performance assessments.
• All teachers, administrators and staff have the tools and ability:
• to locate the research findings that will guide their use of technology.
• to collect the data that measures the effectiveness of their practices.
• to use technology to communicate with all district stakeholder in a timely and effective manner.
• The maximum amount of financial resources can be spent on student resources by reducing administrative costs through effective technology use.

Media/Technology Program Long Range Goals

1. All students, including those with special needs, will demonstrate the mastered use of technology to access, process, organize, communicate, and evaluate information in order to answer questions and solve problems.
2. Technology will be used to provide the most current, accurate and extensive information resources possible to all learners in the district and community in a cost effective and reliable manner at maximum convenience to the user.
3. All district teachers will have the technology training, skills and resources needed to assure students, including those with special needs, will meet local, state and federal learning objectives and have the technological means to assess and record student progress.
4. The district will use technology to improve its administrative effectiveness through efficient communication, planning, and record keeping.
5. The district will have a reliable, cost-effective, and secure technology infrastructure that supports the learning, teaching, and administrative goals of the district.
   

Beliefs
The basic Beliefs of the district media/technology advisory committee concerning the use of technology by students, staff, parents, business, and community include:

1. Technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
2. All technology efforts must be designed to meet measurable educational and administrative outcomes and must be assessed.
3. The use of technology to access, process, and communicate information is an essential skill that must be acquired by students and modeled by staff.
4. Technology must be networked throughout the district and community in order to provide adequate information accessing, processing, and communicating.
5. Technology is required for effective school district administration, planning and decision-making.
6. Technology skills should be integrated throughout the curriculum and at all grade levels.
7. Effective technology modeling by staff requires adequate resources: equipment, software, training, time, and incentives.
8. The use of technology must be ethical, safe, secure, and equitable.
9. Technology planning must be a coordinated effort between building teams and district administration with input by all persons effected by the plans.
10. The use of technology, by promoting student-centered learning, will have a strong, positive influence on achievement.

OK, did you manage to make it all the way through this list? Pretty good, even if a little dull, huh? But here are an observation and a question:

This portion of the document remains virtually unchanged from Long Range Plan to Long Range Plan. The mission statement is the same as it was in the 1992-97 LRP. (Yes, I keep copies.) Beliefs, Vision and Goals are from the 1997-2000 LRP.

10 and 15 years ago were we prescient or are we now stuck in a rut?

Comments

[Christopher Harris]

Doug, I would ask yourself a couple of questions.
1) Are we doing this now? If so, then it is an action statement, not a mission or vision statement and certainly not a goal. If you aren't doing it now, I guess it wasn't important enough to tackle in the past 10 years, so why is it still here?

2) Specific to the mission statement, this seems a bit...and I mean this in the best possible way...bland. Your mission is to provide an environment? Isn't that the mission of your HVAC equipment? What about

The mission of the district media/technology program is to invigorate learning by demanding full participation by all students and staff in a read/write information commons.

or

Our mission is to challenge you; to disrupt the static nature of information and welcome you to the new read/write information space.

or even,

Our mission is your mission - let us know what you want to learn and accomplish and the media/technology program will be there to help.

3) I think the vision, goals, and beliefs would change quite a bit (or at least the language) if the mission were more of a real-speak conversation with the target audience.

[Dan Meyer]

I signed up to help revamp my school's ESLR goals _only_ because they hadn't been updated in fourteen years and technology was a single sub-sub-level bulletpoint. I signed up without knowing _how_ to alter the ESLR direction only that it _had_ to be altered. Thanks for sharing all of this. This is helpful, to say the least.