Casting a Collective Vision

After building a cohesive team, the next step in Student Leadership is to cast a collective vision.  Defining the goal for a group is essential as this will set the course and empower long standing work for your student leaders.  We all know that there a difference between having a group of kids get together versus a team of students with one collective dream.  Let me expand upon this idea by using common language from athletics.  We often here the difference between a good team and a championship team include phrases like "we really came together" or "we were like a family" as they pursued and accomplished their team goals.  These same principles can be applied to the development of a Student Leadership Team.  These quotes below help capture the importance of taking individual leaders at your school and making an unstoppable force:

1. "Individual commitment to a group effort--that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work." --Vince Lombardi
2. "Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships." --Michael Jordan
3. "Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results." --Andrew Carnegie
4. "Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much." --Helen Keller
5. "Remember, teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability." --Patrick Lencioni

After reading all of these great quotes from people who were able to accomplish great works with others, we must ask ourselves... What are some primary principles when casting a collective vision?  We all know that we cannot take a group of middle school student leaders and place them in a room without any guidance and they magically come out with a well crafted plan to accomplish a collective goal.  They need a little more direction.  Therefore, middle schools staff leaders must take the initiative chart a course for successful collaboration and incorporate a gradual release of control to the students as they become more confident and self-sustaining. Here are some points to ponder:

1. Clarity
What do you want your Student Leadership Team to become?  In our case at Big Walnut Middle School, our staff leaders had already charted the Mission of each of our student leadership organizations with an overarching Mission of the Student Leadership Committee to inspire and guide social influence for students.  The adults identified our strength of service-minded students at our school and dreamed about how the collective empathy of our students could have a tremendous local, regional and global impact. Therefore, early in our work we clarified our observations with compliments to our students with specific examples of how they have impacted their world through service and started to paint the picture for 600 individuals at Big Walnut Middle School unified in service to others.  Think about... 600 people, 3.5 hours of service in one day.  What could we accomplish by unifying our efforts?

2. Connections
In order to strengthen our students perspective of service learning and assist in the development of a common language, we spent some time in reflection and conversation about the Corporation for National & Community Service Issue Brief on the Impact of Service Learning.  Students teams read through the article and had deep discussions about how service learning could impact our school.  The students used post-it notes to identify all of the benefits of service.  These conversations and connections would become really important to the future work of sending out our student leader teams to cast the vision to other students within our school and partners from the community (more to come in future posts).

3. Collaborative
I love watching student statements change from "I" to "We" when talking about student leadership initiatives.  For school leaders, this is an outward measure that ensures you are making progress towards developing a team with a collective vision. One way explicitly show student leaders that they are starting to act and think alike is by taking those post-it notes about why students should participate in service learning and categorize them as a group.  A lot of tech tools can help with this process (wall wisher or padlet) or you can just go old school with post-it notes.  Either way, students can visually see their ideas becoming one.

4. Communicate
Publishing your vision solidifies the team.  Make it a big deal because it is a very important step.  This the first opportunity for your student leadership team to tell others about their means and methods to reach their goals. Big Walnut Middle School used social media to highlight our progress and share perspectives (@BigWalnutMS on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram).

5. Celebrate
My last suggestion from today is just to celebrate. Let your students know how pride you are of them and their accomplishments. At the same time, talk about how much they will accomplish and how large of an impact they will have on your school and community. Enjoy the ride, smile and laugh and celebrate every step towards the fulfillment of your collective vision!