Our core values — Collaborate, Innovate, Advocate — are the foundation of our culture. A culture that makes it possible to accomplish our mission: Maximizing outcomes through partnership. On this foundation, our culture is constantly under construction, constantly being built up and reinforced by the small everyday choices of SCREDsters in our office building and across our member districts.
Collaborate
We believe we are better together. We form partnerships where accountability is shared, vulnerability shines, risks are taken, stumbles and wins are both owned wholeheartedly, and innovations are cross-pollinated.
We Are Learners, Not Hiders
"Without psychological safety, your team members waste valuable time and energy avoiding embarrassment or hiding their mistakes rather than focusing on reaching team goals." - Eric Karpinski
Google's Project Aristotle revealed that "psychological safety" — a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking — is the factor most associated with team success. You can hear 🎥 researcher Amy Edmondson explain what led her to coin the term.
Our energy needs to be focused on learning, not "impression management" and worrying about our competence being judged. We need our teams to be "safe" places where people can experiment, freely share mistakes, and learn from them together. Watch 🎥 Simon Sinek explain how impactful this is.
Our team meetings and SCRED gatherings are deliberately optimized to foster trust, vulnerability, and shared accountability.
We Cross-Pollinate Wins
Our districts thrive off of synergy. We connect staff in different districts who are working on similar projects or struggling with similar problems. SCRED staff catalyze progress by sharing breakthroughs and insights. Because of this synergistic collaboration, our districts can take massive leaps forward in a short amount of time.
Within SCRED, we leverage each other's strengths. All SCRED staff complete the StrengthsFinder assessment. SCREDsters are encouraged to lean into their areas of strength and to share them with each other through collaboration. Need a strategic thinker? Borrow one! Have a vision and need someone to help you execute it? Partner with a meticulous teammate!
We Share Accountability
"Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind." - Brené Brown
We work alongside six individual school districts, each with its own organizational culture and ways of work. When it comes to navigating decisions and coordinating tasks, a system this complex could easily feel like a hedge maze!
We create clarity by communicating about the roles of each SCRED staff member and making this information easy to access, level setting with our district partners about how specific decisions are being made, and establishing steady communication loops with our stakeholders.
We want our support to member districts to be reliable and effective, the work of SCREDsters to be sustainable and fulfilling, and decisions made between SCRED and our member districts to be navigated in true partnership.
Innovate
We believe in pushing past the status quo in education and implementing game-changing ideas. We use data to illuminate stories, investigate obstacles to success, and tenaciously pursue bona fide solutions that will stand the test of time.
We Design for Stable Growth
"It's not best practice if it's not sustainable." - Paul Emerich France
Every school could be humming along like a finely tuned German sports car. Every problem in education is theoretically solvable. We have enough research and the solutions aren't exactly mysteries.
But making solutions stick — and stick around — is hard work. Picking a usable practice, figuring out if it fits, giving it the time and attention it needs, learning from bumps in the road, etc. Without this "implementation science," roughly 85% of our projects will fall flat.
We don't live in a fantasy land. We believe in realistic pragmatism, and we strive to co-create action plans with our district partners that everyone can stick to.
Advocate
We believe in meeting the needs of all learners through the empowerment of all educators. We design elegant tools and sustainable systems that equip educators to thrive in the profession while providing every learner with an equitable, whole child education.
We Champion the Field
In order to get every student what they need, we need to get every educator what they need. These goals are inseparably intertwined. We do not accept that teachers must "martyr" themselves and sacrifice wellbeing in order to achieve student outcomes.
We maximize both student and educator outcomes by "controlling our controllables," but we also maximize the power of our influence. We testify at the state legislature to seek more resources for public education, we communicate with lawmakers and the Dept. of Education to advocate for realistic regulations, and we partner with agencies such as SpEd Forms to create tools that will reduce burdens on teachers.
We Hunt for "Less New, More Better"
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
We want our processes and resources to be elegant — lean, simple, efficient, effective, and robust. To achieve this, we cannot approach problems by quickly throwing together additional documents or additional steps.
Instead, we strive to deeply understand the strengths and weakness of our current resources and practices — how stakeholders experience them and how we can evolve them to achieve a lot while asking a little. We also collaborate with each other transparently, not in "silos," so that we avoid duplicating work and making life more complicated for our stakeholders.
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Connect
 Please reach out if you would like to discuss or have questions about SCRED's organizational culture.
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