Planning Update, Fall 2012
Task Forces Have Completed Their Work
Integration Team Has Coalesced Linchpin Ideas To Frame Our Path Ahead
“Succeeding with our strategic plan will take maximizing, intensifying and becoming more intentional about all the things we do well; and taking on striking, aspirational new objectives. It will also mean decisively aligning our existing resources and raising new financial support.”
— Head of School Todd Bland
An unparalleled institutional effort since its launch in January 2011, Milton’s Strategic Planning has built upon the insight of faculty, staff, administration and trustees in conversation with one another. The process has engaged students, alumni and parents, as well. At meetings and events on campus, across the country and overseas, people invested in the direction of Milton’s future have shared their points of view in person and through the Web site.
The planning conversations have affirmed and celebrated Milton’s strengths, and at the same time posed key questions about the future: ensuring both excellence and relevance. This process underscores the great value for Milton of shared inquiry and deliberation.
Targeting key issues—faculty, student life and education—our Task Forces led us over many months in asking hard questions, aimed directly toward Milton's future. The Task Force chairs completed an update for the board of trustees this spring. Led by trustee Chris McKown, Strategic Planning Steering Committee chair, an extensive conversation among trustees and the chairs about Task Force findings followed.
Over the summer, an Integration Team, which included the Task Force chairs, wove together these findings. This team applied certain themes that cut across the findings (for example, how infrastructure enables or disables best use of time; or, the interconnectivity of the curriculum). The team has developed explicit objectives; a sequence and critical path for action; and resource implications.
From the team’s recommendations, the Strategic Plan Steering Committee fashioned a draft plan that the board considered at their meeting in October. The board has adopted and will soon publish a plan that identifies broad, but bold goals for Milton.
In his letter to all Miltonians, Head of School Todd Bland highlighted key, linchpin ideas that guide the plan:
- As we imagine Milton's role, nationally and internationally, we want Milton to be known as the most exciting and rewarding school for teaching professionals. The deep commitment of our learned and experienced teachers is Milton's great treasure. To honor that legacy and the profession itself, we want to cultivate educational leaders, both in pedagogy and in discrete disciplines. Our key opportunity now is to set the highest bar for the teaching profession and to provide our faculty with the support to achieve that objective.
- We want to vest our faculty with a critical responsibility: continually renewing our curriculum. Milton's goal is to set in motion a clearly defined, regular process that evaluates and re-imagines our curriculum, and to set in place a contemporary methodology to assess students' needs for particular knowledge and skills. Holding ourselves accountable for responding to those measures will energize our curriculum, our faculty, and our learning environment.
- You, our alumni and parents, have shared with us how Milton helped you realize your own or your children's personalities and capabilities. We are eager to make that student experience universal. Milton is ready to invest even more purposefully not only in our students' intellectual development, but also in their interpersonal development.
These are bold aspirations, worthy of Milton: Attracting the most gifted and inspiring professionals to teaching. Shaping tightly-knit processes that not only recognize excellence but also escalate professional support. Cultivating an environment that is self-aware and highly accountable. Connecting our faculty with the most promising students, from every kind of background and regardless of their families' economic circumstances.
More detail about the plan's outcomes will be available soon, on this Web page, as we publish the Strategic Plan priorities this winter. Right now, as we consider implementation issues, let us know whether this focus sounds right to you, through the feedback link on this page.
Thoughtful comments and messages about all aspects of the Milton experience have been crucial to this planning process. We're thrilled with the input of so many who love Milton and care deeply about preserving and extending Milton's identity and unique role in education.
