Who owns the story of your school?
NISN believes that communities know best how to determine the goals for their children and how to critique existing systems for greater alignment to their desired results. The Mission-Driven Story Cycle (MDSC) is a community-led improvement process that helps schools translate their mission into meaningful learning experiences and outcomes for students through an annual framework that prioritizes student voice, teacher agency, and community-led design via graduate profiles and capstones, collection and analysis of street data, and ongoing iteration. This continuum facilitates the alignment of teaching, learning, and professional development to the school’s Indigenous education mission supported by and documented within the MDSC Annual Report. Through MDSC, schools work with NISN to build systems that connect:
Mission → Graduate Profile → Graduate Capstone → Community Feedback → Annual Reflection & Planning
This process ensures that schools are primarily accountable to families, students, and communities––not solely to external stakeholders––and that those who are closest to the impacts are the ones empowered to tell the story of the school through meaningful, mission-aligned data.
NISN’s Mission-Driven Story Cycle provides an annual framework and aligned tools to support schools in community-led iteration into the school’s mission. These tools include Community Input, Graduate Profiles, Graduate Capstones, Mission-driven Learning Teams, and Annual Reports to support school reflection and iteration.
