Aspects of the professional growth process are driven by your school’s strategic priorities, which we call Themes. Once established, Themes serve as the guiding focus for your school’s work in Folio, whether to influence the selection of posts for the Community Feed, the focus of the observation cycle, or the generation of Goals. Schools have the latitude to select and develop themes that are relevant to their mission and the work that is most important to their community.
Why are Themes important? Research shows us that employees are more effective when they can see how their individual goals fit into the big picture (McKinsey, 2017). Faculty and staff who believe that they are working toward something meaningful and larger than themselves will be more productive and engaged than those who do not understand or connect with the “bigger picture.” Daniel Pink has termed this purpose, the sense that what we do as individuals produces something transcendent or serves something meaningful beyond ourselves (see Daniel Pink’s Drive or watch his TED talk for a more in-depth analysis of intrinsic motivation). Themes connect faculty and staff to your school’s strategic priorities, thereby tapping into this need for a larger purpose while also moving everyone in your community in a common direction.
As your Folio Supervisory Team considers selecting your myFolio Themes for the upcoming school year, it can be helpful to consider Themes as a way to lean into the work of a particular category of focus for your school. Here are some examples of Themes by category:
There are other categories of Themes that might be more relevant to your school community. These might include: Communication, Leadership, Miscellaneous, Personal Growth, Relationships, and Subject-Specific work.
What is most important is that your Folio Supervisory Team looks to adopt Themes that are relevant to the work that is central to your identity as a school and to your growth as a community. Looking across the Folio Collaborative of member schools, certain categories for Themes stand out as more resonant in a particular year. In 20-21, the “Top 5” categories for themes were:
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Step 1: Identify your school’s strategic priorities for this school year
Through conversation and reflection within your Leadership Team, consider your school’s mission and vision.
Consider asking these questions:
Step 2: Identify any additional priorities for Folio work
Once you have identified strategic priorities in broad categories, it is important to consider what other goals you have for your work with Folio.
Consider asking these questions:
Step 3: Combine your strategic priorities and anything else that arose in Step 2 to develop your school’s Themes for the year.
Consider asking these questions:
Step 4: Once you have developed your Theme/s, you can begin to create the connective tissue that will connect the theme to your school year.
Consider asking these questions:
Step 5: Once articulated as a Theme (Themes), you can align your myFolio platform in explicit ways to develop and further the work on the Theme/s.
Consider the following:
Listen to John Bracker of the Polytechnic School (CA) discuss his school’s use of Folio in 20-21. Bracker notes that faculty were asked to develop three goals, connected to Polytechnic’s Themes for the year: one goal connected to successful implementation of distance learning, one goal to respond to “calls for greater diversity, equity and inclusion” in the program, and one goal of their own. The unifying location of these Themes and goals helped Polytechnic keep their focus on what truly mattered in this school year. These Themes focused conversations within the Leadership Team and within division faculty meetings all year.