Values
Mira Education’s work is grounded in creating communities that bring people together. The more perspectives — across roles, cultures, and lived experiences — we can bring to conversations about public education, the more likely we are to build schools, systems, and leadership that serve students well. This intentionality is rooted in our core values as an organization.
What we do is who we are.
Over more than two decades, Mira Education has sought to create bigger circles of leaders and a more accessible profession. We formed the first virtual community of teacher leaders in 2003 to connect educators with rare opportunities to lead, piloted “teacherpreneur” roles to place their voices at decision-making tables, built intentional teams to address policy and practice challenges, and co-designed a teacher preparation program that would intentionally bring more perspectives into classrooms.
Candor: We communicate in clear, professional, and proactive ways to support de-siloed work, learning, and impact. We offer and receive feedback as a gift of growth and trust.
Clarity: We articulate challenges, successes, and learning to support the accomplishment of our mission, vision, and goals and to share what we know with the field. We lead with reflection and curious questions to illuminate new opportunities and underlying challenges.
Collective leadership: We each shift between leading and contributing to work, grounding our contributions in our expertise rather than our titles. We select personnel and partners that expand the competencies and perspectives we can access, allowing us to accomplish our mission more successfully together.
Data-informed practice: We anchor reflection, analysis, learning, and decisions in data, so we can base strategies on what works rather than what simply feels innovative. We rigorously seek out evidence from others’ research and work to complement our organizational learning. We stay open to options in the absence of evidence.
Professional community: As a foundation of collective leadership practice, we create an environment that welcomes and supports the leadership and professional learning of each person, embracing a range of perspectives that enrich the ways we create an education system that serves each learner well. We collaborate with colleagues, partners, and other organizations generously, knowing their impact is evidence of our impact on the wider space.
Responsiveness: We adapt in how we respond to opportunities and challenges of our partners and our organization, making it more possible to meet our goals for P20 learners and systems. We regularly adjust internal processes and approaches to make it as simple as possible to do complex work.
Culture is about much more than what we believe or how we feel. It is fundamentally about how we approach our individual and shared work, and the extent to which those actions align with our stated beliefs. No matter our role or expertise, each person who is part of Mira Education commits to practices that align with what we value as an organization.