Shared Core Beliefs

In our effort to transition our campus into a Professional Learning Community, it was important to spend part of our beginning of the year PD developing our Shared Core Beliefs.  After being on campus for a year, it was very evident that there were meaningful shared core values on the campus that impacted student learning daily.  We did an "All on the Wall Activity" that allowed all teachers to add their unique beliefs on a sticky note, and then we collaborated to organize the stickies into categories.  We ended up with three powerful statements that absolutely defined what I saw on campus.  This is what we started with:
We Believe-

1. In Building Positive Relationships
2. In Providing a Safe, Structured, and Engaging Learning Environment
3. That Actions Speak Louder than Words

After spending about two hours on the developing the three shared beliefs above, it was evident to me that we were missing one.  However it was not apparent to the staff.  This was a Friday afternoon in August and everyone was exhausted.  We dismissed for the afternoon and agreed to meet together the next Monday to look at it again.

Over the weekend, it really bothered me as a principal that no one had brought up anything about ALL students being able to learn.  But deep down, I already knew that belief was missing.  I had seen and heard their conversations over the last year and realized that although we had great teachers, with wonderful hearts, they didn't collectively believe that all students can learn.  So on Monday morning, I stood in front of the group and stated that although we had not collaboratively come to the shared belief that all students can learn, we were adding it as one that we were going to work hard to adopt.  After I announced it, many teachers realized that some of their sticky notes and ideas could support the belief that all students can learn and that many truly believed that.  They also realized that we needed to adopt this as one of our shared beliefs to improve our campus.  It was an eye opening activity and I think we learned a lot through the activity.  Here is what our final product was and we couldn't be more pleased as a campus.  We are planning on using these values to define what we do each day and to create our new vision and mission statement.

The "All on the Wall" activity is found here.  I received this activity through the Arkansas Master principal Academy.  I tweaked the activity to start with the discussion at their vertical team table groups and organize categories as a small group before the large group activity.