Building a culture of success - Mark Wilson
Most every day I'm with principals, assistant principals, and people who want to be administrators. Everyone wants the same thing: a successful school. They want their students to be successful, their teachers to be successful. But how do you go about this?
How do you have a successful school? There are so many mandates with which we must comply, and we have to comply with them. But that's not the end of it; we have to go beyond that. We have to go into performance. We have to go into excellence. We have to build an environment of success. If you want a successful school, there are so many different pieces you could do as an administrator, but I would suggest starting with culture.
A culture of success begins with defining what culture is. Culture is the beliefs and priorities that drive the thoughts and actions of the people at the school. The school administrator is the proprietor, the spokesperson, the keeper of those thoughts and beliefs. He says what they are; she does things that show people what they are. Eventually, you hear the echoes of your words in the hall; you see people carrying out the thoughts and actions of the school, and you've built a culture.
So how do you go about this? Success is measured in a lot of different ways. It's often measured in quantifiable pieces: graduation rates, students in advanced courses, students who are doing well in advanced courses, and college placement scores. At our school, we had explosive growth in all of those areas, but we didn't start exclusively focusing on those areas.
We had hundreds of people who visited our school. They wanted to come and find a nugget that they could take back, and they could do this particular action and they could be successful at their school. But it wasn't about what; it was about how we were doing what we were doing. It was about why we were doing what we were doing. It was about culture.
To build a culture of success, you need to have a vision. What is it that you're seeking to do as a school? You need to have unity. There has to be a coming together, a collaboration. A vision of one person is just that. There has to be empowerment; people have to be able to do; people have to be able to act. Those pieces together create a special culture of any organization, but particularly at a school.
I would suggest that the people of the school, the residents, the stakeholders have to come together. They have to answer a certain set of questions, beginning with who am I? Because each individual has something to bring to the school. Collectively, the group has to answer: who are we? Once those are answered, you can move to those next questions which are really critical: what is it that we wish to be and why, and how do we become what we wish to be?
At our school, we determined what we wanted to be. We determined that we wanted to be a place of student success, and we focused on three W's: what they know, what they're able to do, and what kind of people they're growing to be. That approach gave our school a significant focus on students and what they were doing. It came together with the vision, a piece of unity, and it was in two words: One Morgan.
As Morgan County High School, One Morgan was more than a motto; it was a way of life. One Morgan not only meant coming together as one, but it also meant that the one individual, one person, is very important. Their hopes, their dreams, their aspirations, and the things that they're good at matter. They are exceptional.
With vision and unity, we add empowerment. Empowerment, as Daniel Pink mentions in his book "Drive," is that piece of motivation that really helps people be very successful in what they do. When people have purpose and you give them autonomy, they'll work toward mastery. That's what happened at our school. We had a genuine coming together of people who had a purpose of this One Morgan, of people who had a vision of success—not just in one format or one pursuit but many.
Because of our focus on empowerment, our students and teachers were able to do amazing things. They were able to do extraordinary things. We were a very ordinary place, a very normal school of about 1,000 students, with 50% on free and reduced lunch and 12% special needs students. But we did amazing, extraordinary things because people had the opportunity to do those things.
We built a skate park. We started a drive that went national, where we wrote 25,000 handwritten letters all in one day to support research for muscular dystrophy. We started a program for English language learners to support them in their efforts on a daily basis. Every year, we raise thousands of dollars to be able to take community children to shop at Christmas time, both for themselves and for their family members.
We had a mock Congress which taught our students not just by reading about it, but by doing it on a three-day basis, culminating a whole semester of study, learning bills, and learning to argue about things. This really came in handy when we had the opportunity to lobby our actual state legislature to pass a bill called Caleb's Law, which made it illegal for anyone in the state of Georgia to text while driving. Our students had the power to act. Our teachers empowered them, and because of this, we did amazing things at our school, including an example of the extraordinary things that can happen when people come together with a common vision and unity.
I was at the tennis courts one afternoon, and two students, Tyler and Jared, walked up to me. They said, "Doc, we got something we want to talk to you about." I said, "Sure." They said, "Do you know Nick Walker?" I said, "Sure, I know Nick Walker." They said, "He's one of the best kids we have at school." I said, "Yeah, we got a lot of good kids." They said, "Doc, do you know he holds the door open for everybody at lunch every day at school?" I said, "Yeah, Nick is great."
They said, "We want to do something special for Nick. We want everybody to know what he means to our school." I said, "What do you want to do?" Tyler and Jared said, "We want to have an assembly. We want to bring all the students of the school together and all the teachers, and we want to give him a plaque in front of everyone."
Our school is a kind of place where that wasn't so unusual. So we called an assembly. No one knew what it was for, only a few people. When we gathered together, the cheerleaders went up into the stands and they got Nick and brought him down to the floor. The football players made a tunnel, and Nick walked through the tunnel to the end of the gym. There, at the end of the gym, was a big chair—a throne—because Nick was king for the day.
As he sat in the chair, people came up one at a time. There were songs, there were testimonials, people talking about what Nick meant to our school. The head dietician, Miss Ronda, grabbed the microphone and she said, "Nick, everybody knows you hold the door open every day for people to come in. But what they don't know is before you do that, you come back in the kitchen where our ladies are cooking for everyone, and you know every one of the lunch ladies by name. You know their children's names, and you ask about them, and you tell them how pretty they look that day."
Then Nick's teacher grabbed the microphone, Miss Holloway, and she did the most powerful thing I saw in 25 years of education. She said, "If Nick has given you a compliment this year, would you stand up?" We had about 1,000 students and 120 staff members in there, and nearly everybody in the room stood because of one person who made such a big difference at our school: One Morgan—a culture of success brought together by this vision of what student success really looked like.
Well, we concluded the ceremony. Tyler and Jared read their plaque, and it read: "To Nick Walker, Mr. Morgan County, for showing all of the students and teachers here how we should treat each other." It's success; it's not a test score. But we did well on all the test scores because we focused on the big pieces first. We came together with a vision, we empowered people to act, and we had success. Thanks.