Any professional, knowledgeable architect will ask your school for educational specifications—a definition of the “who, what, when, why, and how” for each space in the structure. These “building blocks” make the difference between a generic, restrictive structure and one specifically designed to: support your school’s mission; meet the needs of your program; serve the students, faculty, and staff who use the building daily; and stay within your budget constraints.

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As School Head or Division Head, you may already be immersed in the practice of Professional Learning Communities (PLC), or you may be just starting to integrate them into your practice. They can, of course, exist in various settings—here we will apply it strictly to teachers working together. The term dates from the 1960s when researchers were already trying to find an antidote to the isolation experienced by teachers. It gained popularity in 1993 with the work of Milbrey McLaughlin, when she and her collaborators identified the major characteristics of a PLC that have largely survived intact to this day.1 These characteristics include:

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ISM has been largely concerned with management and leadership research and improved practice. Throughout, we have advised school leaders within the context of a school’s own mission and the impact of our advice on the lives of students. In our research, we discovered the principle of “freedom-within-structure,” ISM’s predictability and support model that is the foundation of great teaching practice. While structure/predictability was construed as “what the teacher wanted to do” in the conventional (20th century) educational paradigm, the new paradigm (21st century) includes the teacher and the student in an ever-evolving relationship.

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Private-independent schools typically do not think of themselves as financial institutions. But their engagement in certain financial activities may subject them to obligations under the federal Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, commonly known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA). Additionally, every school that hires any third-party vendor with access to the “nonpublic personal information” (NPI) of employees or students should be concerned about the terms and conditions of the contract relating to data protection and response to data breaches. To the extent that those vendors perform financial activities and are covered by GLBA, then contract provisions relating to GLBA compliance are important and the school should ensure that they are adequate.

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Private-independent schools have struggled with integrating technology into buildings for many years now, facing issues such as bandwidth and power sources. Planning our school buildings now requires a deeper conversation that includes teachers. While some schools continue to eschew the greater use of technology for philosophical reasons, most schools that embrace and integrate the use of new technology have a competitive edge in the education landscape. This does not imply that technology is necessarily an attractant. More fundamentally, the power of personalized, adaptive technology and feedback enhances instruction and learning, and can be a game changer in the effectiveness of the school’s mission delivery.

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As the Marketing Communications Director, you understand that a five-minute speech is a valuable marketing tool—an effective strategy that generates good word-of-mouth. Handled properly, the speech shares accurate, positive information about your school. Whether the audience is an auditorium full of families waiting for a performance to begin, a representative of the media, or a small group of donors, use the opportunity to train your listeners in ways they can talk about your school. Each speech should be personalized, not generic or “canned.

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ISM’s long-standing recommendation is that the Board President annually form a Head Support and Evaluation Committee (HSEC) to work with the School Head to: create a list of major School Head goals at the start of each year; identify or develop an array of data bearing on each goal; support the Head throughout the year in analyzing the data and introducing, as needed, midcourse corrections; and produce at year-end a summary/critique pertinent to each goal for presentation to the Board President.

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By accepting the role of Chair of your Board’s Committee on Trustees (COT), you have accepted leadership of a committee that ISM regards as one of the Board’s most critical for the strategic success of the school you serve: that is, success as a viable and sustainable institution for the long term. Aside from your everyday, year-round task of providing as-needed assistance to the Board President—partnering with her or him to insure the smooth, strategically focused operations of the Board—you will find there is a predictable cycle of tasks the COT can expect to undertake in most years. (“Most years” refers to the fact that Boards occasionally face tasks of such magnitude that a standard Board calendar cannot realistically be followed, such as a year in which the search for a new School Head is conducted.)

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There is a close relationship between the quality of your Board-meeting agenda and your Board meeting minutes. If one of those is done in a perfunctory or unfocused manner, so, often, is the other. Frequently the Board meeting agenda is, in fact, merely a generic meeting outline that is retained for meeting after meeting with little attention given to it from one session to the next. That being the case, the meetings themselves may become formless discussions of whatever topics come to mind, a meandering process that will sometimes be reflected in formless, meandering Board meeting minutes.

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What should professional development be today? A decade ago, we published an article, “The Changing Paradigm for Professional Development,” that contrasted the descending paradigm of teacher-centered satisfaction with the ascending paradigm of student-centered learning. While the broad strokes of teaching improvement have been laid out many times, re-evaluate this in the light of increasing competition in the marketplace and because the context of professional development (PD) has changed as part of the broader education revolution.

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