Planning for the Future

Goal setting is an important component of success, regardless of what field you work in or how old you are.  As Earl Nightengale said, "People with goals succeed because they know where they are going."  This recent article from Forbes, "5 Reasons Why Goal Setting Will Improve Your Focus" gives a brief overview of why goal setting can be so powerful.  According to the article, goals trigger behavior, guide your focus, sustain momentum, align your focus, and promote self-efficacy.  For many of these same reasons, teachers regularly talk to their students about setting goals for themselves related to academics, behaviors, and peer relationships.

As a district, Pleasantdale strives to continuously improve as we work together to provide our students with an optimal educational experience.  Because of this, District 107 engages in goal setting as well.  Our Future Planning process was the best way to involve as many stakeholders as possible in our goal setting.  Parents, community members, teachers, students, and administrators came together to collaboratively create a plan for our schools that will sustain us over the next five years.  The three focus areas of the goals created by the committee relate to Building Human Capital, Building Learning Capacity, and Building Learning Spaces.  However before we could dig into the specifics of what our goals were going to be, it was important to have a claer mission for our District to guide us.  

After studying a variety of powerful mission statements and brainstorming our values of what transformative "sticky" learning looks like, the committee created the new and improved mission for District 107:

To create a community of inspired learners.

Once this mission was established, we were able to use this unified vision to begin establishing our goals.  The next step in the process was to create a portrait of a Pleasantdale graduate.  Given our mission, we asked ourselves the key characteristics we hope all our students possess by the time they walk across the stage at the eighth-gradee graduation ceremony.  After much collaboration and discussion, the committee agreed we hope our students are successful communicators, problem solvers, global citizens, and individuals.

With both a mission statement and our portrait of a Pleasantdale graduate in place, the Future Planning Committee then had the task of fleshing out specific goals for the three areas of Building Human Capital, Building Learning Capacity, and Building Learning Spaces.  Over the next three weeks, our administrative blog posts will delve deeper into each of these areas as we celebrate the goals that are focusing our District's journey throughout the next five years.