Blending Leadership: Transparency

Blended leaders understand the mission-critical nature of properly broadcasting one’s mission, and they are the ones who ask, and live, the newest mission-related questions that occur when the digital presses in on the non-digital.

• What aspect of the lived school mission should be visible online? Should such web content be visible internally, externally, or both?
• What part of school life should not be visible? What parts of school should be private for the teacher and/or the student?
• Should you invest in demonstrating your school’s mission in action as it unfolds — hour by hour — or should every media image pass through a central communications office?
• Should you invest in producing “long tail” content that could be browsed or drilled into by niche audiences trying to connect to your school or understand it better?
• How does any of this activity around mission actually promote and stimulate student learning?

We can begin to answer these questions by first looking at examples of digital strategies outside of education and then returning to actual examples from the world of education. The story of mission is being rewritten in some unlikely places and some increasingly lively ways.