IF A MISSION FALLS IN YHE WOODS

On any given day, a school leader might be greeted, by chance or by design, by an extraordinary array of tasks. As mentioned earlier in this book, school leaders sometimes ensure that classrooms have enough trash receptacles. A few minutes later, these same leaders might facilitate a workshop on teaching strategies or help a group consider a major shift in curriculum or discuss an incident with an angry parent or ensure that a booklist is appropriately multicultural. These examples, and the dozens of others we could have included, highlight the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink nature of school leadership.

But if we were to boil down most school leaders' job descriptions, they reduce to a similar sauce. Really. Effective school leaders align activity in their area with the school's mission, and they are successful to the extent that their area of school life reflects every area of school life (that is, the mission). For example, if you are running an extracurricular club or an after school sports team or leading a department or a division, then your goal is to make that club/team/department/division reflect the mission of the school.

The word “reflects,” of course, is sneaky, and we mean it that way. There is alignment—making sure decisions and behaviors hedge closely to the language of the mission—and then there is the reflection of that alignment—making sure to manifest mission-specific work or activity. The former suggests getting things done; the latter suggests demonstrating what got done. The subtle (sneaky) difference between the two modes arises naturally from the kinds of educational environments in which we currently teach, learn, and lead.

Over the past decade, schools have been increasingly unbundled. Much of what used to take place mainly in school buildings and classrooms now takes place, at least in part, virtually anywhere. Students can learn in a classroom in your school or they can travel abroad. They can learn from you face to face or they can learn from you screen to face. That is why we're here together—writing this book, reading this book. As schools shift, the story of school mission shifts too. Mission is executed (that is, is aligned to behavior) less and less behind closed doors because there are fewer closed doors available to educational enterprises. It is possible to see the lesson plan, the test, the video, the student work, the archive of letters from the principal, the photograph, the tweet, the course list, sometimes the grades … from the comfort of one's home, car, office, train, bed, or hotel. School gets done in more places than it used to, which means that school is demonstrated for more audiences than it used to be. We can ask which comes first in the twenty-first century: alignment to mission or demonstration of mission?

It is a typical blended conundrum with a typical blended answer—both. And we are not going to tell you what should get done in your school or what your school should stand for, other than to say that schools should stand for something—an approach to learning, a set of traditions that promote excellence, a religious affiliation, a set of beliefs. But in our world of technological bullhorns, where everyone has equal access to communication platforms and tools, silence about one's mission is not an option. In fact, even living out one's mission quietly in the corner of a school is not enough. You have to live it and show it. In the schools we have today, if a mission falls in the woods and no one is around, it does not make a sound. And no constituent is served by such silence—not the student who should derive motivation and focus from the school's mission, not the parent who should partner with the school to support the school's mission, not the teacher who should inspire students to reach for the school's mission, not the alumni who should proudly support the school's future.

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 nondigital.

• What aspect of the lived school mission should be visible online? Should such Web content be visible internally, externally, or both?
• What parts 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 examples from the world of education. The story of mission is being rewritten in some unlikely places and some increasingly lively ways.

BETWEEN TWO FERNS AND WTF

The Economist is as distinguished and trusted a newspaper as many of us are likely to see in our lifetimes. Read by presidents and aspirants, business leaders and business students, it is 171 years young. In fact, many people who subscribe to it (in our experience) see it as a near-solemn part of their weekly routine. It piles up on the nightstand quickly, and if you fall behind in reading it, you feel like you're letting someone down.

On November 6, 2014, forming and maintaining a relationship with the newspaper's content became a bit easier. On that day, the Economist Espresso was launched. The newspaper's website calls it “a new morning briefing from the editors of the Economist.” The website also announces the fact that this briefing will be “delivered to your smartphone or inbox before breakfast” and will help you make sense of “the global agenda in the coming day” (“Get Help with Economist Espresso,” 2014).

Coming from the Economist, those are big but not outlandish promises. Making sense of the world is, after all, the magazine's core business. What seemed outlandish, though, is the fact that the magazine's venerable editors were embracing smartphones and speed—two cultural memes with which the very nature of the Economist seems at odds.

It felt strange to be able to read a briefing from the Economist on a smartphone, but not nearly as strange as it felt to see the president of the United States sitting for an interview with Zach Galifianakis on the comedian's show Between Two Ferns. Galifianakis's interview style on the show, described on his Wikipedia page, is a mix of “typical interview questions, bizarre non sequiturs, awkward product endorsements, and sometimes inappropriate sexual questions and comments.” Sitting between two ferns with anyone, let alone Galifianakis, is an altogether odd place for a world leader to find himself or herself. And it was altogether odd for this same president to find himself being interviewed on YouTube or, more recently, in Marc Maron's garage for his podcast WTF.

There had to be a reason—just like there had to be a reason for the Economist to suddenly start to covet the kind of attentional real estate that can fit snuggly in its readers' inside suit pockets.

Maron, the comedian most recently pointing a microphone at Barack Obama, offers some insights. In an interview for Slate about his time with the president, Maron explained what was on everyone's mind: How did this interview even happen?

They reached out to us! Months ago. Apparently one of his staffers was a fan of WTF. When they reached out to us I was like, oh yeah sure. Then all of a sudden it was happening. I was like ok where do I gotta go? Do I fly to DC? I'll fly to DC to talk to the president. And they were like no. He wants to come to the garage. I was like THAT'S CRAZY. (Maron, 2015)

Obama's team reached out to Maron. And Obama wanted to go to the garage. Between those two statements sits an entire narrative about the way mission articulation works these days. Read closely … This was not an example of a cult-status entertainer hustling for a decade and finally scoring the guest of lifetime, though he has certainly been hustling for a long time and Obama certainly was the guest of a lifetime. Maron did not do anything to land the biggest fish of his life—he just answered the phone—which means the big fish actually landed him. He didn't “catch” the president; the president's team saw a particular kind of media outlet, at a particular time, reaching a very particular audience … and they reeled it in.

Not so crazy, after all: Maron fit perfectly a digital strategy that the president had been using to flip the script on the way he tells his story and amplifies his message. He went to Maron's garage to work from a seething, hip, relevant technological platform that was barely a blip on the media landscape when he started running for president. He moved his agenda into a new technological space because such a move was a calculated bet that he could somehow deliver on his mission—that is, flex, extend, and reflect his mission—in a new or different or better way there … in that garage, with that comedian who has bled, sweat, and cried to assemble a passionate audience paying a very particular kind of attention to a very specific, hand-made, and social-media-enabled program.

The Economist, it turns out, plays its own kind of mission flexing, extending, and reflecting game when it moves its content online. Tom Standage, deputy editor and head of digital strategy for the Economist, gave an illuminating interview to Joseph Lichtman for the Nieman Journalism Lab in April 2015. In that interview, Standage was clear about what the Economist does not do. For example, they do not include links to external content in their stories. Standage explains, “[It's] not because we're luddites, or not because we don't want to send traffic to other people. It's that we don't want to undermine the reassuring impression that if you want to understand Subject X, here's an Economist article on it—read it and that's what you need to know” (Standage, 2015).

They can afford to be very clear about what they don't do because they are very clear about (and good at) what they do. They specialize in, chase, and deliver that “reassuring impression.” As such, when they move their work online, they know which digital features to turn on and which digital features to avoid. They know which tools will help them to reflect their core mission.

The president, of course, is no different—only better. His own version of Tom Standage (Communications Czar Dan Pfeiffer) explained to Steven Levy why Obama's communication strategy has included stop-ins at online properties such as Buzzfeed and Funny or Die. Levy was sharp enough to call the article, “The Man Who Made Obama Go Viral.” “Going viral” is not necessarily a term of endearment, since much of the content that goes viral is often quite trivial. And, do we really want to think of the president of the United States as content, let alone trivial content?

Regardless, the point Pfeiffer makes is that Obama's team, like the Economist's team, is singularly focused, knows what it is and what it is not… . and is willing to use technology to show its mission at work, to connect its work with new audiences, to reflect its missions more widely. According to Pfeiffer, “[They] simply couldn't rely on the same old mainstream communication tools to reach the public in the age of atomized media where people have a lot of choices” (Pfeiffer, 2015).

This brings us back around to schools, which face the same problem and the same opportunities. Eric Sheninger, a former award-winning principal and current senior fellow with the International Center for Leadership in Education (ICLE), has thought about schools in the same ways that Tom Standage has thought about journalism and Dan Pfeiffer has thought about political communication. Sheninger draws similarly pragmatic conclusions about the communication of school mission in his book Digital Leadership. “Societal shifts,” Sheninger notes, “have made traditional forms of communication such as snail mail, newsletters, website updates, and even e-mail irrelevant as many stakeholders no longer rely on or value these communication mediums” (Sheninger, 2014, p. 78). His point is Standage's point is Pfeiffer's.

So what do we do? We do what we have been doing from the start of this book—take a close look at what blended leaders are actually doing in schools. There are plenty of fresh, bold, replicable examples of school leaders straddling the online/offline divide in ways that allow them to articulate the specific missions of their schools and the specific work that they do.

DAD'S OLD RADIO—FOR THE MASSES

About three years before this book was published, Todd Smith, an athletic director from New Jersey, started using Twitter to publicize the sports program at his school. The account has garnered more than eight hundred loyal followers since he first created it.

Like your father's old radio that allowed him to listen to baseball games while he chopped wood or checked the oil on his car (okay, maybe this was just Steve's dad), this account has allowed people from Todd's school community, or those interested in that community, to follow the important plays in the games of student-athletes as those games unfold.

A simple tweet brings you into the action of an important baseball game: “Cougars get the runner at 3rd. Runners at 1st and 2nd. 1 out.” Two weeks later, Todd used the platform to showcase the achievements of student-athletes from the lacrosse team.

A quick look at the followers list for this account would show another benefit: The Twitter handle serves current students (hoping to keep up with their friends), former students (hoping to keep up with their alma mater), and local media outlets (hoping to “cover” newsworthy achievements in high school sports).

So how does this kind of thing happen? How does an athletic director build a following for a Twitter account? How does an athletic director—one person—create a sense of ubiquitous coverage when he can't possibly be at every game?

First, he publicizes the Twitter handle in a variety of ways. He tells people about it, follows them on Twitter, and even places it on T-shirts if that is what is needed. Second, he intentionally arranges the game coverage—not leaving anything, even the spontaneity of high school sports, to chance. Before games, he finds out which of his trusted colleagues will attend games that he himself cannot attend, and then he asks people to text him updates throughout the game. He then is able to post the relevant information to Twitter. He literally dispatches people to cover the games, and because people love the final product so much, they are glad to help.

Todd has always been interested in building school spirit and in building community in and around what happens on the fields of the student athletes of his school. Technology has allowed him to shift some of his leadership into an online mode, intensifying the way in which people engage with the athletic program he oversees.

And people are having more fun offline as well. Here is an email that was sent to Todd after one of the most exciting football games in his school's history. The game was played during the week, and the person who sent it was working at his desk:

Thanks for all the effort you make to spread the word about our athletics. I was following the football game on Twitter and I almost fell out of my chair as the game turned in our favor. I ran out of my office and bumped right into [another faculty member] who ran out of hers. Then we “watched” the rest of the game unfold on Twitter.

Todd replied later that night:

I heard the Boys Soccer team gathered together in the locker room with their phones, and their parents had to wait 20 min. for them to get out. Heard the Field Hockey and Girls' Soccer teams were huddled around their phones the whole bus ride home, too.

Without Twitter (or a similar social media platform), such community engagement could not exist. Without the smart phones that reside in the pockets of so many adults and students, such blended leadership, on Todd's part, is just not possible.

Antonio Viva, head of Walnut Hill School for the Arts, uses Twitter in an equally deft manner. We can see him tweeting about the success of an alum of the school:

Such success is important for people who attend the school—to see that others are “making it” in the art world. Also important to people considering the school is the quality of the teachers. Viva uses Twitter to showcase that quality, as well.

Viva routinely takes to Twitter to exhibit thought leadership in the arts, again an important indicator that his school is on the forefront of arts education. Viva also uses Twitter to highlight his school's strategic partnerships. If you're following him—as a current student or parent or a prospective student or parent—you are continually aware of the specific opportunities made possible by this school.

DR. GRAY SMITH REACHES FOR THE PNEUMATIC NAIL GUN

Robert Atkinson, founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, made an important point about innovation in a recent report from the Aspen Institute:

[When] it comes to what is more important to economic growth—more tools, a better ability to use them, or new tools—the answer is fairly clear. In building a house, for example, a pneumatic nail gun is more likely to increase productivity than multiple hammers or a training class on how to use a hammer better. (Bollier, 2013)

We have said it before and we will say it again (and probably again): Blended leaders pick the best available tools to achieve the missions of their respective institutions. What we can add to that dictum in this chapter is that, at times, they adopt the right tool even if that tool itself falls outside their typical practice.

One of Steve's mentors, Dr. Gray Smith, recently became the head of an independent K–8 school in Maryland. When Steve met Gray, Gray believed in four things: education, lacrosse, fly fishing, and the power of a well-crafted sentence. Though he was very technologically proficient, Gray preferred the hand-written letter to any kind of communication that relied on social media. To this day, he still harbors that preference, but he started using Twitter professionally almost as soon as he was formally installed as head of school. Using Twitter had nothing to do with his love for, or comfort with, the platform. It was a leadership decision.

Gray's commentary on that decision, included in this chapter, surfaces the kinds of thinking that should accompany any move from offline or traditional communication channels to online, possibly trendier or riskier modes. Also, it sheds light on the decisions made by Todd Smith and Antonio Viva to move critical communications onto Twitter, as well as the way in which technology can help a school leader to reflect his or her school mission.

BILL STITES'S SOCIAL NUMBERS

Gray Smith's use of Twitter started with inquiry—“I wonder if this tool could help me show the day-to-day life at my school”—and it ended with a note of hard-won wisdom—Twitter is good for certain things but not for others. It is not a panacea; it has both affordances and limitations, and the skillful blended leader uses it just enough and in just the right ways—and then goes looking for the next version of a pneumatic nail gun. Gray will not abandon Twitter; he will even admit that “it's fun.” But he will next go looking for a tool that can help him reach specific families and provide him with some data on how families engage with his communications.

Blended leaders know that one of the main reasons to tangle with technology is the data it provides; skillful blended leaders shape these data into compelling narratives. A good example of such practice comes from Bill Stites, blogger-in-chief for the increasingly popular edSocialMedia.com [ESM] outfit, which helps schools and individual educators understand and leverage the power of social media.

Some months, Bill sends out an email to anyone who has ever contributed to the blog. It is one of the best emails we receive regularly. Bill's energy and enthusiasm burst off the screen, sometimes pushing the very limits of syntax. You can tell that he loves representing edSocialMedia, and we have little doubt that his outright joy has contributed to the success of the project.

Relentlessly and enthusiastically pushing a project forward is an important component of leadership, as good and necessary offline as it is online. But we mention Bill's emails for their content—for what they can teach us about how a blended leader functions. In this case, the blended leader (Bill Stites) shares previously unavailable information, and in doing so, builds community engagement.

These emails routinely include what Bill calls “Social Numbers,” that is, the number of “Likes” received from Facebook, the number of followers from Twitter, the number of members in the LinkedIn group, the number of subscribers from YouTube, and so on. He lists the current number and then notes the increase from the previous month. Why share such things? What do such numbers have to do with writing?

Right off the bat, Bill highlights progress, increase, growth; he makes momentum a tangible, graspable, witness-able thing. And then he continues, listing ESM's overall numbers, including the number of visits, the average time per visit, the bounce rate, the homepage views, the top ten posts for the month, and a list of the names, titles, affiliations, and contact information for any new contributors.

What starts to happen, month after month, is that the contributors not only share, but also feel a connection to one another. If, as a writer, you see your name in the “top ten” list, you know you have truly connected with your audience. If you are at a conference and you meet someone you have seen on the contributor's list, you have an immediate bond. Bill Stites's model is not only good for online organizations and leaders; it is also an emerging standard for all organizations and leaders.

BINGE WATCHING WITH JENNIE MAGIERA

If we are going to talk about the possibilities afforded by schools engaging with technology, we cannot simply talk about photos and data; we also have to talk about video making and video sharing. Jennie Magiera, CTO for Des Plaines, Illinois, school district and a former digital learning coordinator for Chicago public schools, offers some insightful reflections on the ways in which YouTube helped her to channel student creativity and voice and advance her district's mission.

As you read her reflections, you'll notice some common refrains—they came through in Gray Smith's thoughts about Twitter and they came through in other sections of this book. First, the technology sometimes shows different angles of the student experience or the school mission—angles that wouldn't have been observable without the technology capturing them and someone shaping them. Second, the blended leader is willing to disrupt the default, iterating based on what he or she learns in context.

Magiera started using YouTube playlists to “curate content to support and inspire student learning.” She simply wanted to build a repository—almost like a digital textbook—to spark student learning. That was her plan, but her students had other ideas. “As time went on,” Magiera writes, “my students were spending less and less time consuming and viewing content and more and more time creating their own original content. So my use of YouTube playlists shifted to showcasing my students' work.”

Magiera's shift can be read as the digital equivalent of the sage moving off the stage. And once her students started to generate some shareable content, Magiera went to her default move for publicizing content: she started tweeting out individual videos. But Jennie quickly realized that, in doing so, she was bypassing one of the affordances of YouTube: “that YouTube-binge-watch phenomena where as soon as your video is over, another begins.” In a deft move—borrowed from pop culture—Jennie created playlists with themes, encouraging viewers to “binge watch” her students' content, stay on the site longer, and extend the reach of the work itself, student work. As their audience grew, Magiera's students learned valuable lessons about empathy, authenticity, and responsibility. According to Magiera:

Having this diverse and ever-growing authentic audience has not only encouraged my students to continue creating, but also makes them more deliberate about their voice and message. They realized that when engaging on social media, you can't always control your audience, so you need to look at your words through more lenses. They began to more carefully craft their original content and made sure that if they said something, it was a message they truly believed in and said in a thoughtful way. (personal communication, June, 2015)

Reshan decided to become an audience member; he sat down and binge watched one of the playlists. These are his running notes:

• The first video is a submission for the #YesYOUCan White House film festival. The students who are on the screen share how they engage with their community and how they have optimistic hopes for the world. Coming from a school in Chicago, you can see their pride for the President running this program (a Chicago native, for a time).
• The second video is about coding. A different group of students present a dance and song about coding. The enthusiasm displayed is inspiring—perhaps to inspire other students to check out coding? These students are in middle school, by the way.
• Video three is another White House film festival submission—another original song talking about all the technologies they use. “It's a classroom and it's fun” is not something you hear from a lot of kids. Even more rare is the insight—again from the students—that they “learn better this way.”
• Three videos in and not a single adult has made an appearance. It's all the kids.
• In video number 4, students defend their city. This video is different in that it is produced by the Chicago Sun-Times, and therefore scripted and produced. The audience, too, is larger. It is a response to a shooting and the way the media covers it, written and read by a 5th grade class.
• In the next video students image and prep android tablets for deployment. They set-up 25 tablets in 3 minutes. One of the devices doesn't set-up correctly, and one student walks through how to troubleshoot it.
• Video six is Twitter Tuesday. Students talk about their Twitter sharing and interactions.
• Overall impression: the students are confident and articulate. The videos are edited well. The tone is playful, but the messages are serious. It's unclear if this playlist reflects Jennie's mission as an educator or the school district's mission, but watching 10–11 videos from a single playlist immediately defines the school and its students. (Reshan, personal communication, June, 2015)

Students anywhere can create and post similar videos. And schools and teachers anywhere can facilitate a similar process for their students. What is different, and special, about Jennie's example is that she published these playlists from her own YouTube channel, therefore giving students unfiltered access to her own credible and wide network. She understands the power of networks to stimulate connections and learning; she understands, too, that she does not need to be involved, or visibly involved, once she combines stream A (her personal network) with stream B (her students' work). The benefits will flow freely as the two streams become one. Stream A will learn from Jennie's students, be inspired, and perhaps try a similar project at their own schools or places of employment. Stream B will gain an audience that Jennie carefully constructed and that understands what she is trying to accomplish as an educator. Like Tom Holt, mentioned in Belief 3, the master isn't burdened. The master, in fact, is out of the picture, allowing learning, growth, and development to flourish at its own pace and in its own way.

This is a point worth dwelling on a bit longer because it touches on an important aspect of network etiquette. Through ambition, effort, and resilience, blended leaders build up personal networks of people and information (see Belief 1). When embedded in a workplace, with certain defined responsibilities, they will often be faced with the choice about when, where, and to whom they will provide access to these hard-won and carefully curated networks. A good rule of thumb is, a blended leader should open his or her own personal digital networks to aspects of his or her professional life when the network benefits will positively affect both sides. Ideally, the blended leader will neither gain nor lose as a result of brokering such a connection.

So, for example, Reshan and Steve both used their own, personal accounts to tweet about the Startup 101 project described in Belief 2. They opened their networks because they wanted to inform their own associates about the project so that those associates might learn from it and possibly try it on their own; also, Reshan and Steve wanted to expose the Startup 101 students to a particular kind of attention—one that might lead to additional, self-generated opportunities for them after the project reached its artificial close. Think back to the reason for President Obama to sit for an interview in Marc Maron's garage. He knew he would gain access to a particular audience. All networks confer particular kinds of benefits and particular kinds of attention. When publicizing the work of your own students or schools, you should make your own personal networks available or unavailable with that in mind.

MICROSTORYTELLING: WORKING MORE VERSUS WORKING DIFFERENT

Let us catch our breath for a minute. As we did in Belief 2, we can hear our busy readers shuffling and sighing: “Every time we turn a page in this book,” you say, “Valentine and Richards tell us we have to do more.”

It is true, if you employ a blended leadership practice, you can end up “doing more.” But you can also end up “doing different.” More, in terms of articulating your school mission, would involve brainstorming, selecting, and capturing media or text; editing and shaping that media or text; producing that media or text; and, finally, endlessly, marketing that media or text. These activities—which result in short films, medium-length newsletters, and long periodicals, all of which need to be delivered—require teams of people and a great deal of concentration. To do them well, if they are not your primary function, you need to be willing to devote hours—on top of your regular hours—to your workweek. That is the definition of more.

Different, in terms of articulating your school mission, would mean working with the gaps in your schedule and adjusting your idea of a proper and usable mission-related narrative. There are entire blocks of your days that do not change, that should not change. There are the meetings, classes, and other school commitments within which you execute your primary function. But you shouldn't need to go “above and beyond them” to do the additional work described in this chapter. As these blocks bump against one another, cracks of time open up. With the right tools, and the right mindset, blended leaders can use these cracks the way some rock climbers use cracks in mountain formations—as handholds and footholds to help them steadily and creatively reach their goals.

So when it comes to reflecting your school's mission … if you can maintain a floating awareness of your goal, keep handy a quick and dirty set of tools, and remain willing to hop from crack to crack without too much forethought or afterthought, you can articulate your school's mission in fresh, interesting, and time-sensitive ways. And by time-sensitive, we mean time-sensitive for you, the storyteller, and for your audience, the story receivers. We call such work, when it pertains to mission, microstorytelling. That is, microstorytelling is storytelling in and from small spaces, gaining mission-articulation handholds and footholds in and from small spaces. We learned about this practice by studying practitioners—all of the above—and by doing it ourselves.

Very recently, for example, Steve was heading toward a difficult day—a rock formation the likes of which he had never seen before in his professional life. His wife was away on business, which means Steve was taking care of all the family details plus serving as a school administrator, English teacher, member of various school teams, and the coordinating editor of a publication of Columbia University's Klingenstein Center. What made this particular day even more challenging, though, was that it was the first day of a program, for which Steve was responsible, called May Term. This program involved the entire senior class; they would be interning, traveling, doing community service, forming a startup, and working on creative, self-directed projects; they had 19 days, so the project needed to begin with a palpable sense of momentum and excitement; Steve had no time to waste, and no time in which to waste it. He had to articulate the goals of the program—loudly, clearly, and vibrantly—from the start.

When Steve arrived at school, bleary already from getting his two kids up, fed, packed, and safely off to school, he had to interview a job candidate. After that, he had to prepare for a class and two other meetings, then finish grading three papers, teach the class, run the meetings, and deal with any other small, unexpected fires that popped up.

As he went through the first part of his day, he felt a weight on his back that kept getting heavier and an unpleasant taste in his mouth. He knew this feeling—it was the feeling of unmet obligations. We've all felt this in school from time to time. But Steve had worked hard on the buildup to the May Term program, and now he felt that he was failing it coming out of the gate.

But then he had a quick realization while standing up to walk to his class.

He was expecting to do “more” in a day when no more would fit. He was thinking of telling the story of the program in a way that just wasn't possible—because he had at least a half-dozen other jobs. On his way to his class, he took the long way, stopping by the room where one of the May Term groups (Startup 101) would be meeting. He took out his smartphone, snapped a photo, and went to class. When he got to class, he made a note in his calendar to return to the room at the end of the day. He looked up from his laptop and started the day's lesson—right on time.

After class, he tweeted a “calm before the storm” photo with a hashtag (#mkamayterm). At the end of the day, he returned for his next “photo session,” snapped five photos, returned to his desk, and tweeted the best “after the action” photo. He wrote a quick email to the senior class to congratulate them on their first day of May Term, told them a new hashtag was active on Twitter, and encouraged them to use it.

Steve remained busy throughout the duration of May Term, but he continued his microstorytelling efforts, joined by others who implicitly picked up the concept. Some students took it upon themselves to chronicle interesting and candid moments. Teachers shared what they heard and saw. In season, Steve knew he would never have time to do the kind of thorough storytelling that he wanted to do; he knew he wouldn't have time to do any kind of concentrated writing, any kind of careful selection of the perfect, luminous detail. He would only have the briefest, barest access to the mechanics of narrative: the before-and-after, the surprise, the half blurry, the lunge, the grab, the quick triumph. He could settle for microstories or nothing at all … and in the end, microstories ended up being highly compelling. Ask any fans of comic books and they will tell you that comic book artists do just fine with constraints. If we think of mission articulation in those terms—rather than in novelistic terms—it becomes more doable. The longer stories can be written out of season, in collaboration with marketing departments, reflecting on the details that surfaced, looking back over Twitter feeds and poring through photo reels, knowing in advance already which details resonated with people.

In short, floating awareness of a goal, plus a smartphone, plus a willingness to jump from moment to moment (crack to crack), plus the faith that you will catch hold of something worth sharing is sometimes a good enough formula for reflecting your school's mission in the digital age.

MEASURING FAITH TO HAVE FAITH

The results of such faith, it turns out, can be measured. And, such measurement, rather than acting as a handcuff, can act instead as a spur to further experiments.

Let us look back to the previously referenced Tom Standage interview. Standage reveals himself to be a voracious learner on behalf of the Economist. His ridiculously clear sense of the newspaper's mission, along with his grasp of the company's shifting revenue streams, allows him to consider innovations happening in the journalism space and decide what his newspaper will and will not try. “That's a big thing that we're focusing on,” he says. “How else can we apply the same values—which is the distillation and the finishibility, the trend-spotting and the advocacy—how else can we apply them to new areas?” (Standage, 2015). As they apply these values to new areas, keeping an eye on subscription numbers in both print and digital, the Economist's editors can watch the horse race of attention (and revenue) play out. Espresso, for example, is “up against lots of other products that are free. They're free, but are they sustainable? We'll find out” (Standage, 2015).

The “We'll find out” attitude is one that seems to drive Obama's team, too. Reflecting numerically on the president's interview on Between Two Ferns, Pfeiffer says, “We were able to track the people who clicked from the link at the end of the Between Two Ferns video, and it led to a huge spike in people actually filling out the applications to sign up for healthcare” (Pfeiffer, 2015). Other efforts, like a Facebook video breaking news about Affordable Care Act enrollment numbers, had only “a couple million views,” which was “not as good as other recent content.” Obama's digital team is able to take some bold risks because they know what they are trying to accomplish—their mission—and they have a set of baseline expectations to help them learn continually whether or not their efforts are paying off.

As such digital cycles become more refined, it is tough to know where mission articulation ends and mission advancement begins. What seems to be clear, though, is that broadcasting in a digital space one's mission, alongside reflections of that mission, drives organizations forward, upward, and onward. Eric Sheninger picks up on this concept when he talks about the importance of school leaders becoming “storytellers-in-chief” (Sheninger, 2014, p. 99). He also helps us to unpack the relationship between such storytelling and the act of leadership, the act of driving and steering innovation. When such leaders use social media well, Sheninger writes, “a voice is created, stakeholders are engaged, thinking is shared, and consensus can be built for facilitating change” (p. 95). When we present our missions in vibrant and timely ways, people listen. They see a quick update on their phone as they ride the train in to work; someone emails them an article about an aspect of the school that interests them; their son is featured in an Instagram photo that has 100 likes; they want to get involved; they want to talk back to the school and share their own thoughts, experiences, observations, and examples. This process allows consensus to take hold and innovation to flourish.

The Content Strategist, an industry-leading publication for content marketing news and analysis, is in the business of tracking the way such communications can lead to growth in organizations. Tessa Wegert recently looked at the way three big players in the startup community—Uber, Airbnb, and Buffer—“fueled their growth with compelling content” (Wegert, 2015). Uber, a transportation company, produces a print magazine called Momentum. In it, they include stories from drivers and customers, helping to build Uber into a lifestyle brand for both drivers and customers. If you have ever taken a ride with a passionate Uber driver, or been berated by a younger sibling to use Uber instead of a cab, you know that the company benefits from such a strategy. Airbnb, a company that helps people offer, find, or rent lodgings, also has a print magazine. It is called Pineapple. According to its publisher, “This isn't a magazine about homes, it's about the connections that our community makes in the environments where they live or travel” (Wegert, 2015). Again, the content allows the company to articulate—and reflect—an aspirational component of its mission. Buffer, a social media company, meanwhile, specializes in “employee-generated content” via videos and blogs; they seek to express individual personalities within the company, show thought leadership, and reflect one of their most important “core values,” which is “business transparency” (Wegert, 2015).

So there we have three big players in the startup world—a place to which we have been seeking clues to the potential future of our schools—looking to reflect their core values to either current or future customers or current and future employees. Each has a slightly different strategy with a completely similar purpose: to bind constituents more closely to the organization's mission. This, of course, is also the job of the school leader: to help all the stakeholders and potential stakeholders in his or her school get clear about what the school is trying to do; to articulate what the school is trying to do; and to allow that articulation to drive the growth of the school.

CAUTIONARY TALE #1: IF YOU DON’T DO IT, SOMEONE ELSE MIGHT

Regardless of how you feel about using technology to reflect your school's mission, you may not have a choice about whether or not to begin to own the online impression of your school.

Recently, we watched a professional organization with which we are affiliated undergo a major shift in leadership. When the new leader was named, a segment of the community erupted. For a variety of reasons, some thoughtful and some reactionary, some people could not believe the choice.

How did we know about their outrage? We heard the uproar on Twitter and various blog outlets. We scrolled through the diatribes, dialogues, rants, and reactions. Although we are not proud of the way some of our colleagues behaved, we did take one lesson from the fray.

The organization was criticized for not demonstrating openness and transparency (the same kind that helps Bill Stites to be such an effective leader of edSocialMedia.com). Granted, they tried. They set up a Web page and encouraged people with comments or questions to “send a note to an email address” or “use a Twitter hashtag.” Good, right?

Not quite. The organization was then criticized for not permitting comments on the static Web page they had created. Because the organization would be receiving the comments via email, which is private, it is possible that they could cherry-pick the responses that they wanted to share or respond to, thereby controlling the discourse around their choice.

The possibility of this move—even if the organization didn't intend to make it—just doesn't sit well with people who have learned to expect the kind of open, transparent, nonhierarchal dialogue made possible by Web 2.0 tools.

Regardless of the organization's attempt at a forum, another forum was organized (by other leaders). They set up shop using a social network, attempting to pull together the conversation in an open and dynamic way. The conversation quickly generated more than sixty replies and nearly four thousand views, clearly serving the needs of the community: Some people needed to share information, some people needed to think out loud, and some people just needed to vent. In a world of connected computers, the leader is the person who enables the right kind of forum or platform to exist—whether it needs to exist for a long time, like the Twitter feeds of Todd Smith, Antonio Viva, and Gray Smith, or just a short time, like the one created after the shift of leadership just described.

CAUTIONARY TALE #2: PLAYING THE LONG GAME

In our first cautionary tale, we are not suggesting that you live in fear. But we are suggesting that you lead with your eyes on both offline and online spaces and an awareness, in particular, of the ways in which the latter can yield data and insights about how well your school is fulfilling its core mission.

In our second cautionary tale, we are asking you to hold a separate, and perhaps competing, idea in your mind. The results of education can often be seen quickly—a team can win a game, a hundred SAT scores can be averaged to understand the performance of a given class, a student can quickly pick up and apply a math concept. But the results of education can also be slow to emerge, and the game of education can be a long one, one that resolves itself many years after students graduate from your school. As you become adept at iterating quickly, at measuring more and more of your mission's impact, you also have to build the discipline to remind others—and yourself—that not everything that can happen in school happens during the timeline that school provides. Some of the best “measures” of your mission happen “off camera.” They unfold internally in students—in the wild, developing, inner landscape of young people. And faster, when it comes to learning and school, is not always better.

As if to punctuate this point, one of Steve's former students wrote to him in the middle of the composition of this chapter. Steve worked with her more than fifteen years ago, at his first full-time job in education. Before receiving the email, he sometimes thought about the ways in which this student struggled, and he could only hope that she found her way.

She wrote to him upon receiving her PhD from a very prestigious institution and program. In her email, she reminded Steve that she had been a pretty mixed-up kid; she also reminded him about a moment when Steve pulled her aside and explained the way the school in which they both found themselves worked. He explained to her the different pathways available to students and encouraged her to take the pathway that would be most challenging. He saw in her a student who would thrive if she plugged into the most rigorous aspects of the school's program. She admitted to being “a bit miffed at the time,” but also that this moment, where mission aligned for a teacher, a student, and a school, was a pivotal one for her.

The most important place for a school's mission to be “reflected” is within and around the student—whenever that student is most in need of it. Sometimes this will encourage a student to persist as a writer when his friends think writing is boring (that is what happened to Steve). Sometimes this will help a student to pursue his curiosity and his passion for music even when more practical concerns hone in on his attention (that is what happened to Reshan). And sometimes, like Steve's former student, this will help a mixed-up student (and what student isn't mixed up from time to time?) to buckle down, get to work, and end up becoming a scientist set on changing the world. In some senses, then, a school's mission can act as a protective layer, allowing the best parts of our students to flourish—when they are ready. This transformational process only works, of course, if all constituents know about the mission … that is, if someone articulates it loudly, clearly, and in the ways in which the constituents are most likely to see it and understand it.