Value-centered Interconnectedness at Mitchell

Katie Welsh • Cahn Fellow 2023

Our beautifully diverse school engaged in deep work over the last six years supporting the social emotional well-being of our students and our staff. In the midst of a mental health crisis for teens and children in our country, we have been relentless in developing school wide SEL support with fidelity. Unfortunately, when we take a step back and reflect, we recognize a dilemma with student and staff ownership. We observe spotty internalization of concrete values when it comes to how we treat one another. We realized through data analysis around our students’ behaviors and the implementation of our strategic plan (known in Chicago Public Schools as our Continuous Improvement Work Plan) that we operate without guiding school-wide core values, grounding our connections across stakeholders in all interactions (small and large). We observed students’ hunger for individual success and their general compliance with school rules. But when we peeled back the curtain and looked more closely we saw them going through the motions with their learning and their complacency with human interactions. We theorized that this human condition is impacted by children’s use of technology taking the place of deep human interaction and the lack of prosocial experiences. We see this also with the adults. We began to look inside our staff culture as well under this same lens. We noticed that our teachers individually care deeply about students and their craft as educators, but we picked up on an absence of collective ownership and urgency amongst our teacher teams and leadership teams. In the current context of polarization in our country on the brink of another challenging election cycle, we concluded that this was the most important work for my school to dig into. Another factor contributing to our culture crisis had to do with the transition from elementary to high school in Chicago. Students compete with one another for limited spots in selective high schools creating a “Hunger Games” mentality to life after elementary school. Parental fear contributes to this dilemma. That said, our key stakeholders for this project began with 4th-7th grade students, parents and caregiver and, our entire staff (all levels of the organization), leaders of our teams (Instructional Leadership Team, Multi-tiered Systems of Support Leadership Team, Behavioral Health Team, Culture of Learning Team, and Local School Council). We dug in and got started transforming our school culture one step at a time. We set out to answer the following questions.

● What are our shared core values at Mitchell?

● How do we help students live out our core values so that they feel connected and responsible for one another?

● How can we help humans at Mitchell feel a collective responsibility for the communities they are a part of: school, city, and beyond?

● Do the teams within the school feel a collective responsibility towards the continuous improvement work?

● Ultimately-what is the Mitchell Moral Compass that guides us everyday?