To what extent do you intentionally use your school’s accreditation recommendations to help others flourish?

/ mkessenburg

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Use your international Christian school’s accreditation recommendations to get your students, staff, and leaders flourishing! Why?

You might be thinking, “I get your idea of focusing a flourishing. But to be honest, we’re finding it challenging enough just to comply with the accreditation recommendations. And we do get something by completing the task—we stay accredited!” I get it. International Christian schools have a lot going on, and it is an accomplishment to complete each major recommendation. 

And I also want to share that completing accreditation recommendations is a bit like studying for grades—you get all the tasks done, you get a good mark, and you miss the real point.

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So, what’s the real point of completing accreditation recommendations? To get others flourishing by helping them consistently experience passionate purpose, resilient well-being, healthy relationships, transformative learning, and helpful resources (based on ACSI’s model). For example:

(1) Passionate purpose: Your school has worked to find new and better ways to assess the expected student outcomes—good. Remember that the real goal was for your staff to more consistently experience passionate purpose by getting them more engaged with the expected student outcomes. Are they more engaged?

(2) Resilient well-being: Your school revises its job descriptions to help staff be clear on what the expectations are—good. But remember, the real goal is for staff to more consistently experience resilient well-being in terms of having, for example, adequate time to do their work. To what extent are your staff experiencing this?

(3) Transformative learning: Your school further develops its curriculum and gets better at using/disaggregating data—good. But remember, the real goal is for students to more consistently experience transformative learning that helps them walk with Jesus and impact the world for Him. To what extent are your students increasing their learning as a result of staff developing the curriculum and using data?

To what extent do you intentionally use your school’s accreditation recommendations to help others flourish? (Note: Intentionally doesn’t include coincidentally, incidentally, or accidentally.) Full disclosure: when I was responsible for my school’s action plan, my focus on was on completion and on maintaining accreditation. I didn’t intentionally focus on helping others flourish, and to some degree, any flourishing that happened seems to have been coincidental, incidental, or accidental.

But now with ACSI’s new school culture model and with its new accreditation protocol (Inspire), we can more easily be intentional about using accreditation recommendations to help others flourish!

Source

What helps you intentionally use accreditation recommendations to help others flourish? What helps me includes:

  1. Knowing which group (students, staff, leaders) a given accreditation recommendation is primarily focusing on.
  2. Identifying which domain a given accreditation recommendation is primarily focusing on.
  3. Envisioning what we want to see (in terms of flourishing) when we complete a given accreditation recommendation. This involves writing out a vision script.
  4. Using an after-action review to reflect on each completed accreditation recommendation. This includes considering questions like: What excites/concerns us about our progress toward making our vision a reality? What helped/hindered us? If we could do this over again, what might we do differently?
  5. Having 1 champion for each accreditation recommendation whose task it is to ensure that the task is completed and that we keep our focus on helping others flourish.
  6. Seeing individual action steps as experiments toward making the vision (see #3 above) a reality.

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And what also helps me is including the 6 items above (along with other things I find helpful) directly into my action plan. Here’s my attempt (template), composed of a spreadsheet with 4 tabs:

  1. Action Plan 1.0: This includes the basic components of an action plan, along with 3-6 above.
  2. Action Plan 2.0: This includes basic components, 1-6 above, and some additional features.
  3. Vision Script: This includes what you hope to see in terms of flourishing as a result of completing a given recommendation. (In case it helps, here are sample vision scripts for students, staff, and leaders at international Christian schools.)
  4. After Action Review: This includes 8 questions you can use to reflect on each completed accreditation recommendation.

Here are some related resources:

What about you? How do you feel about using your accreditation recommendations to help others flourish? For you, what’s the real point of completing accreditation recommendations? To what extent do you intentionally use your school’s accreditation recommendations to help others flourish? What helps you intentionally use accreditation recommendations to help others flourish? 

Get flourishing!

Michael
P.S. Don’t forget to check out this template for an action plan that is designed to help you intentionally use your school’s accreditation recommendations to help others flourish!