Foundational Work: Redesigning a School’s Global Citizenship Journey

Students have been involved in redesigning foundational aspects of the Nido mission, vision and portrait of a learner.

Educators at Nido (The International School Nido de Aguilas) in Santiago, Chile, have been doing some deep spadework in redefining their purpose and vision for the future. 

“The pandemic has caused so many schools to engage in deep identity reflection,” explains Patricia Podorsek, Nido Director of Teaching and Learning. “At Nido, we had to trim and trim during the pandemic and, like any season of winter, we went into a reflective mode and realized our school’s guiding statements were bulky and heavy.” 

Patricia and her team analyzed the school’s mission and vision statements and identified 28 distinct attributes represented in both statements.

“We knew we needed to focus and simplify,” she reflects. “With the previous mission and vision statements, it was impossible to live into the spirit of being a mission-driven school.”

The leadership team simplified the school’s mission to be more agile and fresh, and to allow the team to focus on the primary goals and dreams for Nido students. 

The new Nido mission statement is this: “Nido empowers learners to connect authentically, explore with curiosity, and act with purpose.” The key action words in this statement, as identified by the leadership team, are Connect, Explore and Act. 

The vision statement developed to accompany the new mission statement says: “The International School Nido de Aguilas strives to be an open and dynamic global learning community.” And the mission and vision statements align with the school’s core values: engagement, ingenuity, adaptability, generosity and happiness.

“Working on streamlining our mission and vision was liberating work,” says Patricia, “Then, as we explored more opportunities for agility in our school and school systems, Inspire Citizens came into the conversation. They were recommended to us initially by a staff member who had previously worked with them in Beijing, and no other organization is doing the kind of work they are doing to help schools navigate how to think and plan for the future in a way that merges global citizenship with futures thinking.” 

The Inspire Citizens team has helped Nido teachers unpack the three key words from the new mission statement (connect, explore and act) with a future-focussed mindset, and they have also supported the development of a “Portrait of a Nido Learner”. 

Key descriptors in the portrait of a learner are that Nido students will be inquirers, thinkers, designers, connectors and changemakers. 

Ideation and input from students, teachers, parents, coaches and administrators has helped articulate what a Nido learner could look like.

“We wanted to articulate measurable learning outcomes through our portrait of a learner,” explains Patricia. “We spent all last semester working on this, and included students, parents and faculty to unpack the learner attributes that would exemplify our new mission and vision. Steve, Aaron and Scott helped with this whole process.” 

Nido is now in phase 3 of redesigning foundations for teaching and learning. This involves writing learning progressions based on the portrait of a learner, and this work is rooted in the Inspire Citizens’ Empathy to Impact model and Jay McTighe’s transformational learning goals. Educational consultant Greg Curtis is also helping with this stage of the work.

“It’s been exciting! We’ve been working with small groups and we’ve been working with our communications team to roll out our new mission and portrait of a learner,” says Patricia. “The real power in this is giving our entire community common language and a common vision. One of the things that can plague schools is creating a shared understanding of the big questions like ‘what are we here for?’ and “what are we really doing for our students?’”

In addition to the foundational work that is happening with the school’s guiding principles and planning, 18 educators are enrolled in the 2022/23 Inspire Citizens’ Global Citizenship Certificate course this year. This includes the entire grade 4 team, the grade 8 humanities team, a number of high school teachers, 2 librarians and a number of administrators and coaches. 

Nido is a Pre-K to grade 12 school with approximately 1550 students and is one of Inspire Citizens’ whole-school partners for school transformation and impact.