Crafting a today-tomorrow vision for school: concrete, exciting, do-able.

Vision is a word associated with soundbite marketing slogans developed by the boss. But what if you could create a shared vision, with your team, that is grounded in today’s realities? We call this a today-tomorrow vision.

Imagine it’s a couple of years from now — not five or ten, just a few years away. What age are you? What age is that group you’ve just taught, or seen in the corridor? Now, pick up a pen and a few sheets of paper, and for the next 15 minutes, let’s just write in response to these prompts:

Before school starts, is everyone heading into school?

As you arrive at the school, what do you see at first? Who’s there, and what conversations can you hear?

Head over to the area of the school you normally work in, or the part of school where you’re making some changes happen. What’s happening?

Are there adults around? What are they doing? What kind of things are going on? What change did you make to see this happening?

Go and listen in on what some students are saying to each other. When you ask them what they’re learning, and why, what do they say?

It’s lunchtime, so head to where most people spend their time. What kinds of thing do you see now, that you’ve not seen in the past? What’s made that change happen? What did you change?

In the afternoon, what kind of things can you see in a learning space that’s not your usual one to spend time in?

And as it reaches 3 or 4pm, what starts to happen? What do you notice changing? Who’s in the school at this point? What are the adults doing? What did you do to create that? How is it different from a few years ago?

What are students doing, meanwhile, at home or out in the community? What do people say they’ve seen of your community?

Now, what is the one change you can take this week, or the one change you can ask a colleague to make, that could set you out on that path?

At NoTosh, we’ve used this script of ours, and others like it, to help aspiring leaders, top CEOs, teachers and office workers to develop compelling, concrete visions, and the first steps each of them can take to realise them. Key to the whole activity, is that it’s something everyone can do. Sure, when we do it, we have a Cannes Lion d’Or writer on hand to help craft it into shape. But as long as you can tell stories, you can do this.

The vision isn’t a short marketing line: it ends up as a really long set of stories people can remember.

The vision doesn’t end up rigid on a website ‘about’ page: it becomes a living, flexible set of stories.

The vision doesn’t get broadcast from the boss: it ends up as a dialogue between everyone in the community.