We have been having a conversation as both a staff and a board about the difference between “values” and “strategy”. Now that we are living our North Stars and about to unveil (stay tuned) a powerful strategy document and presentation, all the energy we are generating and all the prototypes we are launching are dedicated to bringing us closer towards our values.
Values define who we are and why we exist. They guide us, like a moral compass for all in the community. They are the foundations of what we do and the ultimate test of whether our goals and strategy have a ‘fit’, now and in the future.
Any strategy we undertake, therefore, is to provide us with the actions and behaviors – habits – we need to adopt in order to best live our values. Today, I want to introduce a new strategy with its attendant prototypes that we have begun at the Ottawa Jewish Community School to help us truly become a Community of Kindness, where we are “responsible each to the other” and “we learn better together”.
Something I often say is that if you really want to know what a school values, you only need to look in two places- the budget and the schedule. How we spend our two most precious resources is the clearest way to reveal what we truly value. If we want to live our values, if we want to build a true community of kindness, not simply a catchphrase, we will need to allocate time and money. So the first strategic decision was to position this work in the portfolio of our Student Life Coordinator, Deanna Bertrend. We believe this strategic combination of personality and position will help ensure we are dedicating the proper resources to an initiative of such great import. As important as staffing is a plan…
“Community of Kindness” makes a great slogan and a lousy call to action. We all recognize the need to be more “kind” and to ensure that our community act with increased “kindness” to all…but what exactly do you do? To answer that question and to provide us with a common vision, language and set of behaviors, we are turning to a well-researched set of habits, seven of them to be exact.
Our strategy is to go ahead and adopt and adapt The Leader in Me:
The Leader in Me helps to create a common language within a school, built on proven principle-based leadership skills found in Dr. Stephen R. Covey’s best-selling book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:
- Habit1: Be Proactive® • You’re in Charge
- Habit2: Begin With the End in Mind® • Have a Plan
- Habit3: Put First Things First® • Work First, Then Play
- Habit4: Think Win-Win® • Everyone Can Win
- Habit5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood® • Listen Before You Talk
- Habit6: Synergize® • Together Is Better
- Habit7: Sharpen the Saw® • Balance Feels Best
It is important to note that there has also been work in the Jewish day school field work on translating the habits into Jewish settings and value language. Our friends at CAJE-Miami who work in this area offer the following helpful chart:
We began at Faculty Pre-Planning when we spent time in “Book Club” with those teachers who chose to read The Leader in Me as their summer reading and then later that week in a full staff briefing on the new program. We had a soft launch at our Middle School Retreat where we introduced each of the habits to our middle school students with fun, informal activities to help them understand how these habits could positively impact them. Our plan for the whole school will have us, beginning last month, introduce and focus on a new habit at our Rosh Chodesh assemblies. There will be a role to play from Knesset (our student council) and as we ramp up there will be grade and age appropriate activities, including stories, lessons and resources. Parents should look for evidence of how the habits are coming to life on the website and blogs. In fact, we even have a dedicated 7 Habits page on our OJCS Student Life blog!
This month, we have been focusing on the first habit – “Be Proactive”. For my part, I am going to try to “be proactive” by dedicating a post each month – this being the first – to its habit. And we will need your help! If you are a parent at OJCS, you are welcome to read and learn along with us. Incorporating the habits at home will only make what we do at school that much more powerful. So you can “be proactive” as well!
As we aim towards our (North) Stars, let’s make this the year that kindness ceases to be a slogan and starts to be a habit.