Many schools spend considerable time crafting their guiding statements but how much time is spent ensuring that these guiding statements are embedded as part of a school’s culture?

There are many ways for school leaders to ensure that a school’s mission, vision and values are living and breathing in its’ fabric.

Guiding statements provide us with rich language for communication with all stakeholders in our school community. These statements should be used regularly in school leadership team meetings to define the way a team works together and also uses the guiding statements to make decisions.

School leaders should also use these statements with faculty and meetings, as well as community meetings with students and parents. Additionally, schools leaders should spend time ensuring that other leaders in the school use this common language and spread the words, so to speak.

Teachers can use the language, especially school values, explicitly with students through various learning engagements either in an introductory or a reflection activity. Teachers can also use a school’s values in the reporting process through communicating a student’s development with respect to the school’s values.

A school’s communications should also reflect its’ guiding statements whether that be in promotional materials, community communications and social media posts.

However, we need to be careful, as it is often said that if you say something for long enough you end up believing it. When schools mention their guiding statements, we must avoid paying them lip service, our actions have to speak louder than words.