Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:09 Hello, and a big welcome back to school, to all of our lancers and welcome to our first episode of Parker podcast. We have so many exciting episodes in store for your family, and we hope that this becomes a regular part of your podcast. Listening routine. In this series, you'll hear from members of every corner of the Parker community, and you'll have opportunities to deep dive into a variety of Parker programs. Today, we're kicking off with an introduction to Parker strategic work ahead, which is encapsulated in the recently released strategic direction document, uh, which is conveniently linked in the notes of this episode. You'll get to hear from head of school, Kevin Neely and Dan Lang, who is our assistant head of school for JK 12 strategic initiatives. So sit down, relax and put on your strategic thinking hats.
Speaker 0 00:01:04 Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:01:04 Welcome back, Dan. Uh, tell me how's the first week of its first day or two of school
Speaker 3 00:01:08 Going? Yeah. Today's day too. It's been awesome. First day of school is always great. My, my favorite part is watching kids run into school. Like they haven't seen their friends in like five years and hugs and, uh, screams of joy and all kinds of fun things happen and big smiles and, and right back to it. So it's been, it's been, uh, a good first two days of school and so far everyone's getting settled in and we're excited.
Speaker 2 00:01:33 Love it. Love it is exciting time here at Parker. Um, so I wanna take a little bit of time and just pick your brain about what we're calling strategic direction. So maybe if you could just kind of give, give us a one minute version of exactly what strategic direction is.
Speaker 3 00:01:48 Sure. I like to think of strategic direction as a way of orienting our work. So instead of following a list or tasks or to dos, it's really making sure that we're keeping the five themes that are important to us here at Parker up front. And as then, things come by asking ourselves, is this great idea that's coming by? Um, is this something that fits into one of our themes or not? Uh, and it gives us the ability to say no to things. And it gives us ability to say yes to things, and it gives us the ability to prioritize. And instead of being bound by things like timelines and specific tasks lists, it's a little bit more flexible so that we can make sure that we're actually pursuing our mission. We want to make sure that whatever we're doing, the actions that we're taking are leading us to fulfill our goals, which is the mission of the school mm-hmm <affirmative>.
Speaker 3 00:02:43 So in that way, it's a little bit different than, than saying, well, we've got these tasks to do in the next five years. Of course there's gonna be things to do in the next five years, but we also have said perhaps five years, isn't the right window. Um, some things might get done faster as we start to see and pursue things. We might find that some things are things that we don't actually need to do anymore. And we want to build in that flexibility. And as we start to pursue things, we wanna make sure that we're keeping our eyes open to, there are things that we didn't see at the beginning, and now we need to add those. So it's a generally more flexible framework for the work of the institution.
Speaker 2 00:03:24 So Dan, not to put two fine a point on it, but most people are familiar with a strategic plan and the role of strategic plan plays in the life of the school. Um, but we're referring to it now as strategic direction. And that's more than just a name change. Can you speak to the difference between what we used to have in strategic plans and what we now have in strategic direction?
Speaker 3 00:03:45 Sure. Um, strategic direction. I, I used the word orientation before, and I'm gonna come back to that because really what it is is an orientation that places, the organization's goals first, while acknowledging that the actions and organizations taking to achieve its goals may need to change over time. So we're in a school setting. What I like to sometimes, um, think of, of how to present this. If I'm talking with my colleagues or peers or others who aren't, you know, immersed in this to say, this is really like, um, scope and sequence or lesson planning for, um, for the organization. So teachers, when, when you talk about it that way they get it, cuz they go, oh, well, yeah, generally speaking, I, I know where I'm going to take my students over the course of a year. You know, whatever course it is generally speaking, a teacher knows where they're getting their students from the year before, where they want them to be at the end to pass them off.
Speaker 3 00:04:40 But what that journey looks like is going to be very different based on the context of that school year and the things that come up along the way. So you may have a great lesson planned for a Tuesday at 8:00 AM or 8:30 AM. And uh, something happens in the broader world that you have to throw that lesson plan out and go with something else. Strategic direction is the same thing. We know that we want to fulfill the mission of the school. We know there, there are specific things that as an organization we've decided are important to us that we want to improve upon how we get there and what we learn along the way may be different as we embark on the journey together. Mm-hmm <affirmative>
Speaker 2 00:05:18 I appreciate that. And one of the things that I appreciate about, um, this new way of thinking this sense of we're gonna orient ourselves in a particular direction is the flexibility that it gives us. However, um, what have we done or what have we placed in this strategic direction that ensures that there's not too much flexibility such that we lose our way or we get off course?
Speaker 3 00:05:46 Well, our key, our key test for ourselves here at Parker has always been our mission, our vision, our core values. So whatever it is we're planning to do do, if we hold it up to those things and it passes that test of are we being true to our values? Are we fulfilling our mission? Is this how we have defined ourselves as an institution, then we're okay. If on the other hand we find something that actually, even if it looks great, even if it's a wonderful, exciting, shiny object that we say, wow, it'd be cool to do that, but we hold it up to our mission. We hold it up to our, um, to our values and it doesn't quite align. Then we have a pretty clear way to say, that's not gonna work for, for Parker. That doesn't mean it's a bad thing. It might fit better at another school, but it doesn't fit what we're trying to pursue here at Parker.
Speaker 2 00:06:37 Great. When I look back over some of the decisions that Parker has made, uh, one example of kind of having that flexibility to be able to pivot when we needed to, but still kind of orienting our orienting, excuse me, ourselves toward our mission or vision is when we made a commitment to always putting the kids first doing, uh, what is in the student's best interest. And we put that out there and we headed off and then we began to learn about the impacts of sleep on kids. And so now we said, okay, we're gonna change directions in terms of, we're gonna look at our schedule. And in the end, we ultimately went to a later start date, but we didn't change is our commitment to doing what's best for kids. Mm-hmm <affirmative> is there an example in strategic direction that you could give that will say, Hey, look, this is where we're heading. This is one of our high priorities in the strategic direction, but here's how it might flex as we go along the way.
Speaker 3 00:07:32 Sure. I I'd say one of the largest areas in our strategic direction, just from, from, um, the amount of work that I think that needs to be done in a particular area would be our theme of one Parker. And there are so many things underneath there that we could, um, take up and look at, but really the overarching piece of one Parker is about institutional alignment. And that's gonna look very different in a lot of places, but that means that when we're thinking about strategic direction, we're thinking, okay, in order to be aligned as an institution, I often remind our, myself and our, and my colleagues that a family will bring us their child at four. And, you know, we're very happy that they choose to come back year over year. And if they do all the way through 12th grade, that's a 14 year journey, keeping ourselves aligned along that mission.
Speaker 3 00:08:23 There are so many tasks that we could kind of pencil out in a strategic plan that have, that are related to curriculum. But if we can actually back ourselves up and say, do we have an orientation towards our fifth grade teacher knows what's happening in seventh grade. And our, uh, 10th grade teacher knows what's happening in sixth grade. We start ending up with an, with an organization that's aligned when it comes to thinking about curriculum and then natural things that we could put onto a task list. Like all English teachers will review their, uh, book lists with each other, you know, five through nine, that's a task, but what's the why behind the task. If we instead focus on the orientation of saying, we want all of our kids to be moving through our curriculum in a way that we can understand document and speak with authority to our families about then those tasks become natural out outflows of our orientation.
Speaker 3 00:09:23 Mm-hmm <affirmative>. So that's just one example in a, in a curricular place. I think another, uh, example is in equity. I justice, we've done a huge investment in our faculty and our staff and our students around the theory about learning about equity and justice and that it starts with ourselves. And now our orientation to making sure that equity and justice is part of everything we do here means that we had to take the folks in our D I B office who are the subject matter experts. And we had to join them with our director of curriculum and say, where does this actually become something living, not just something where, wow, it's great that we learned all this stuff, but how does our, what happens in the classroom actually reflect the fact that we're applying the learning that we have done through our D E I B office. So that comes from a sense of, this is what we want as an outcome. We want, uh, equity. And we want students who have a mindset towards equity to be, uh, our graduates. And that means that can't really be captured in a task list. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, that has to be captured through an orientation and a mindset if that's the outcome that we want.
Speaker 2 00:10:29 Okay. And when, um, and we're gonna get to kind of the final document and how we've, um, created these five themes that kind of orient us in the direction we need to go in this kind of pursuit of excellence. But before we get there, I wanna pull way, way, way back and a question that would be on the minds of some might be okay. So where did this all come from? I mean, how do we know that this wasn't baked up in the minds of Kevin and Dan, when, you know, they decided, Hey, this is the direction we want the school to go. Um, can you, can you speak to the Genesis of the strategic direction in terms going all the way back to, I think June of 2019, when we came together as a professional community, and then of course the, the role of the accreditation that took place right before the pandemic.
Speaker 3 00:11:11 Sure can. Yep. So you're right. It, it was actually, uh, June of 2018 in the field house, very hot. Uh, we kicked off a process, a self-study process, and we actually built on, um, the 2012 self-study process where we, where Parker as an institution started looking at how we did accreditation differently. And accreditation's another example of something you can treat as a checklist. You can treat as a checkbox. Uh, and many schools can have be very successful in their, in their self study and accreditation process in that way. But we wanted more, we wanted to really deeply learn as an institution from going through our self study process with as many people, having a voice in that process as possible. And so that was June, 2018 sitting in the field house together around, you know, the, the 10 foot, uh, rounds with folks from all over the school and mixed groups starting to take on the questions that are, you know, CIS gives us a great framework to work from, um, to really ask what is it that you see that is really exceptional about your school and what is it that you see that you think your school can do better?
Speaker 3 00:12:22 And that's really where we started. We started with the people of Parker wrestling with those two questions and over the course of two years, answering those questions in multiple committee groups and writing the self study, uh, we, we got to, uh, our visiting team <laugh> came to see us right in February of 2020, right before COVID. And, um, they came and looked under the hood and said, yeah, the things that you wanna achieve as a community are the things that we see that you should work on as well. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, and the things that you celebrate as a community, we celebrate with you as well. And that really gave us our start in this direction. Um, and then during COVID, we all really learned how to be adaptable. And interestingly, a lot of this work just kind of carried on. We, we learned a lot during COVID.
Speaker 3 00:13:10 Um, and then our senior leadership team got together with the findings of, um, the findings of our visiting team and a broader set of hopes and dreams. Uh, and you led that meeting in, uh, the summer of, um, 20, 21 mm-hmm <affirmative> summer of 2021. Um, and you, you had us all come to the table and think about the same two questions, but with the background of the information that we had from the broader community, and as we all went through the exercise of as a senior leadership team saying, these are the things that we heard our, our community say, and these are the things that as senior leaders we're bringing to, uh, to the equation, some the, the themes that are driving our current strategic direction started to appear mm-hmm
Speaker 2 00:13:58 <affirmative>. And for our listeners, um, you talked about an accreditation process, which is a, a critical step along the way, but why that's so important is the, the accreditation process invites independent school leaders from throughout the state to come. And there was a group of seven and they're coming, and they're looking at us from, from an external view to do really two things, to validate what we think we're doing well and where we think we can improve. And then also to, to provide perspective. And that's really important because, um, if it's only people from within the school, there's the risk of us only confirming what we know and looking for what we want to see. So that was a really important piece. And, and, uh, the good news air course is that not only do we get their insights, but the school was also, um, awarded the, the highest level of accreditation, which means we got the full term.
Speaker 2 00:14:48 So again, that was a, another validation, but strategic direction took pieces of that. But as you said, it took other aspirational goals that we wanted to, to, uh, push forward. And, and there are five, and maybe just as we wrap this up, if you could just speak briefly to each of those five and give a, give a simple example, so that as a student, a parent, or an alum of Parker, I can be paying attention to, oh, now I kind of see strategic direction manifesting itself in the life of my student or of myself or of my Alma mater
Speaker 3 00:15:19 You bet. Um, so our I'll go through our five themes really quickly. And then I'll, I'll give you a little comment on each of them. The five are one Parker, healthy minds, healthy bodies, the needs of society, lancers for equity and justice and future forward. And, um, just not to belabor things, but one Parker really came out of our, our self observation that if we really wanna serve our families and students best, we really need to be playing well together as a team. Uh, and that's alignment in so many different ways. One of the things I think I haven't mentioned yet, that's unique about strategic direction is it doesn't really have an end date there there's, uh, sometimes strategic plans a lot. Well, in the next five years, we'll accomplish this. The, the idea of promoting institutional alignment, especially in a school is forever work.
Speaker 3 00:16:11 Um, humans drift, and we need to constantly be coming back to those things that are, that are our anchors, our mission, our vision, our core values, and seeing how that's going to manifest over the course of years so that we are truly working together for the benefit of our students. That's the heart of one Parker. We could get into a lot of different details, but to me, that's, that's the heart of it. Mm-hmm <affirmative> are we working together to make sure that what we're doing, what we're providing for our students is the best healthy minds, healthy bodies, um, is really a big part of who we are as a school. We, we have distinguished ourselves as a, as a school where academics, you know, you're gonna get excellent academics and we're gonna care for every last piece of your child's whole being and healthy minds.
Speaker 3 00:16:57 Healthy bodies is just a piece of that. Um, of course there's a, there's a very large, um, and exciting project that's associated with healthy minds, healthy, healthy bodies, uh, Parker forward. So we're really looking forward to that. So that, that falls in that space, but even when Parker forward is complete, this is where the direction piece comes in. That's not just a checkbox because we have so much more to do after that, to ensure that we're still encouraging our students to be well. Um, so we'll have beautiful facilities. We have excellent, uh, professionals in those spaces, but beyond that, we've, we've made commitments to say, are, are students getting an education in mindfulness? Mm-hmm, <affirmative> our students, uh, are students being able to, uh, access a mental health professional at, at every grade level? Um, those are the things that, that make it more than just, um, a big project that we can check off and say, it's done needs a society.
Speaker 3 00:17:56 I think, um, if you were to look at that, that really ties back to Colonel Parker's original vision for what schools should be, that schools really serve, uh, what society says it needs. Um, and this is a place. This is a spot in our strategic direction where Parker has the ability to extend everything. That's good about Parker beyond our everyday school year, enrolled students, um, really exciting, uh, horizons at Francis Parker school horizon San Diego at Francis Parker school is now reality in its second year. It's growing quickly under the leadership of Erica Asad. And, um, couldn't be more excited that students who are not regular year, day students here at Parker, get a chance to participate in what Parker's all about and to deepen their love of learning and the joy of learning, um, lancers for equity and justice. I touched on earlier. It really is.
Speaker 3 00:18:53 It's baked into who we are. Um, we are a school that in addition to students who are well prepared academically, who are well prepared with the skills that they need to take care of themselves, probably the most important thing, uh, is that they're good citizens. They're good people. And that is captured in lancers for equity and justice. Uh, if we can't get our students to be to a point where they understand that equity and justice for every single citizen is important, and that's what we stand for as a school, we've missed something, uh, in the education of our students. And then future forward is really about, uh, making sure that all the good work that we benefit from as the people who are currently stewarding this great school that we're contributing to that. So that, um, I like, I like to say, we're, we're all gonna be leaving someday. Um, you know, we're all, we're all gonna be moving on and someone else will take, take over the great work that we're doing. And have we built the systems? Have we cared for the institution? Have we asked the questions to make sure that it's a sustainable project that, um, can be carried forward by the folks that come after us in the same way that we're carrying it forward? Uh, based on the work that was done by people before us.
Speaker 2 00:20:15 I really appreciate that. And I certainly appreciate like all of us, all the work that you've done, uh, to get us to this, this point, clearly there are lots of, uh, folks involved, but it wouldn't happen if it weren't for your commitment and your direction. And, uh, so you have held the Baton well, and I hope you hold onto it for a very long time before you pass it on to the next person. So again, thanks to all for listening. You'll hear more about strategic direction and about this school that we love so dearly. Thank you.
