requires leaders to come into the school with the capacity to see things as better than they are today. This means they need to be able to conceptualize a highly effective system and imagine it working at even greater levels of effectiveness and optimization. This is more than just having the capacity to dream. It is about understanding the work in schools well enough to digest the current state and visualize improvements. These leaders also have enough knowledge of best practices in schools to be able to recognize opportunities when they emerge. To excel, a leader must be able to synthesize her leadership experiences and knowledge of best practice and resist the temptation to assume that any innovation effort will work as formulated. Leaders who truly understand vision recognize that every school building has to follow its own journey.
Leaders who master this concept must be able to listen extraordinarily well. Everyone in the school, including students, has a vision for what the school is and what it could be. Unless the principal is able to listen well, he won’t be taking advantage of the learning power and capacity to innovate that are all around him. The leader also needs to be able to create a connected culture in which collaboration and communication are such that individuals are able to continuously articulate the details of the vision and work with others to co-construct the vision’s continuous evolution. This process of continually reflecting and refining should happen over a cup of coffee on the morning of the last day of school as thoughts are shared about what’s possible for the next year. It should happen on the soccer field as teachers talk about a key meeting they had two weeks earlier. It should happen as a result of an argument and the subsequent resolution. Actions, reactions, and all the stuff in between help shape what people believe about what’s possible for their school. The vision for what’s possible continues to ebb and flow based on every new voice that enters the conversation, the new challenges put in front of you, and the new opportunities that are suddenly revealed.
Understanding basics about the neurological process points of establishing vision will help you consistently create a culture in which a more cohesive and connected vision is made possible throughout your school. When establishing a mental representation or a vision, there are three important elements to consider: (1) history, (2) mental models, and (3) current learning context. Keep in mind that this is a simplification of what happens neurologically. There are many other nuanced, but important, brain functions that work together to affect what you actually see when your brain goes from perception of experience and stimulus to the creation of a saved image. I don’t want this discussion to drive you crazy; rather, I want to share that establishing a vision is a neurologically complex process.
History
Personal history has an effect on your capacity to establish vision for several very important reasons. First, most of our learning is based on the continuous construction of new information based on old information we’ve already gathered (Braine, 2009; Moss, Kotovsky, & Cagan, 2006). Burning a hand on a hot stove teaches us to change our behavior and affects how we visualize cooking, stoves, danger, and pain. The experience of burning your hand as a child can emerge in multiple ways in the future as you interact with the world and can shape how you visualize what’s next. I can remember visiting Pearl Harbor for the first time with my uncle, who had also never been before. I was in my twenties and had never served in the military. He was in his sixties and had five of his best friends die in World War II. As we considered visiting that memorial, our individual visions for what we thought we would see and what that experience might mean were obviously very different.
In terms of learning, think about working with a small group of teachers in your school. If you’re hoping to establish a vision, the history of each member will affect the vision the group establishes. For example, if you have a group of seven, the fact that three members have more than thirty-five years of experience, lived abroad for ten years, and have English as their second language will all be contributing factors to a vision construction process very different from the one envisioned by the members without those experiences. Any series of words or images used with that group is likely to have a very different impact on the older, well-traveled individuals.
Mental Models
The term mental model refers to elements of your memory or experience that have resulted in the creation of a predictable pattern in your learning system that you use as a filter or a lens for your observations of the world (Reason, 2010). Our brains are always looking for patterns; understanding patterns of weather, predators, and gravitational pull has helped us avoid extinction and maximize our own survivability. As humans observe these patterns, we look for symmetry and order (Reason, 2010). Thus, your experiences will ultimately shape your mental models.
Let’s think about how mental models are formed for some of the common elements that exist in teaching. One person’s mental model might revolve around the notion of a grand lecturer with pearls of wisdom flowing extemporaneously. He may see students gathering at the lecturer’s feet, attempting to model the behavior, and supporting the scholarship. Another mental model of teaching may be where the act of teaching revolves more around supporting the learning pursuits of others and creating stimulating learning opportunities. Neither mental model is necessarily wrong. They’re just very different. A student could go to school and experience both types of instructors yet come away with a very different mental model for the word teaching. Once again, this is complicated stuff, because two people could go through the same experience and establish very different mental models.
Current Learning Context
Thoughts about the learning context can vary dramatically. Thus, I refer to this portion as a current learning context, because in every instance of trying to establish a vision, it is a learning process. The current learning context will always have a significant effect on the ability to establish a particular vision. It can be extraordinarily comprehensive and include virtually any variable associated with the current situation where learning is happening and vision is being constructed (Hall, 2007).
For example, if the community pledged financial support for a school and the school received a special commendation from the state for improvement on testing, a retreat for establishing a school improvement plan for the next five years would probably be done in relative comfort, joy, and contentment. Conversely, if the school had recently gone through yet another round of failure and was being threatened by the state in terms of potential takeovers, a summer retreat to save the school by establishing a new school improvement plan would represent a very different learning context. While the goal in both situations is to establish a plan and a vision for the future, the context changes the challenge so dramatically that it shapes the experience as a result.
Consider a school community that has consistently served a blue- collar community with conservative political perspectives in a region where jobs have steadily been lost. These outside factors create a local context that affects the school’s vision. Other contextual factors include the size of the school and, to some degree, its physical makeup. Dark, dreary working conditions would indeed affect the context. Multiple decades of success or failure could also create a contextual expectation of achievement, or lack thereof.
While history may be somewhat episodic, the creation of a context speaks to longer standing issues in place due to a confluence of variables. Context, in many respects, is the most static of the three essential components. Yet, as time goes on, different historical elements shape how we see our history, and we can always adjust how we think about our experiences. Our mental models can likewise be challenged, and we can adopt new perspectives about the prevailing mental models in a particular situation or institution.
History, Mental Models, and Current Learning Context Working Together
So how do you make all of this fit together? It’s not hard to imagine how bringing together personal histories, mental models, and the current learning context can be complicated, even if it makes a great deal of sense in terms of establishing a vision. Furthermore, there may be disagreement about what the current learning context is all about. Some may see it as comfortable
