Learn practical strategies to handle emerging trends and leadership challenges in private schools.
No matter if you’re a School Head, Admission Director, Development Director, Board member, or any other private school administrator—Ideas & Perspectives, ISM’s premier private school publication, has strategic solutions for the pervasive problems you face.
- Tuition not keeping pace with your expenses? In I&P, explore how to use strategic financial planning to create your budget and appropriately adjust your tuition.
- Enrollment dropping off? Discover how to implement the right admission and enrollment management strategies that engage your community—and fill your classrooms.
- Trouble retaining teachers? Learn how you can best support your teachers using ISM’s Comprehensive Faculty Development framework. Your faculty members will become more enthusiastic about their roles—which ultimately improves student outcomes.
- Fundraising campaigns not as successful as you’d hoped? Implement ISM’s practical advice and guidance to build a thriving annual fund, construct an effective capital campaign, and secure major donors—no matter your community size or location.
- Not sure how to provide professional development—for you and your staff? Learn ways to develop and fund a successful professional development strategy. You can improve teacher-centered satisfaction and growth, which in turn strengthens student-centered learning.
- Problematic schedule? You can master the challenges of scheduling with the help of ISM’s practical advice, based on our experience with hundreds of schools and our time-tested theories.
- And so much more.
I&P has shared targeted research, up-to-date insight, and sound theory with school leaders since 1975. More than 8,500 private school decision-makers find the answers to their schools’ administrative and governance matters in our advisory letter. We give you the strategic answers you need.
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See the articles from our latest issue of Ideas & Perspectives.
The Allocation of Time and Your Faculty's Professional Growth
Volume 33 No. 9 // July 23, 2008
As School Head, you are aware that your success in developing a growth-focused faculty culture is the most critical ingredient in the long-term quality of the student experience—that is, the central determinant of your students’ performance, satisfaction, and enthusiasm. You are aware, as well, that the qualities of "predictability and supportiveness" in your students’ environment (the conditions most closely associated with high-level performance, satisfaction, and enthusiasm) are most reliably generated by establishing those same two qualities in your teachers’ environment.
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Revisit Your Conflict of Interest Policy
Volume 33 No. 8 // June 28, 2008
Over the past few years, ISM Consultants have worked with a number of private-independent schools that have faced conflict-of-interest issues. Such problems usually occur because a school has not (or not properly) written a conflict-of-interest policy.
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ISM's Standards for Professional Growth and Renewal: Process Standards
Volume 33 No. 8 // June 28, 2008
The ISM Standards for Professional Growth and Renewal provide private-independent schools with a way to assess whether their investment in faculty professional development is focused clearly on students, clearly articulated as a systems activity, contextually meaningful in building professional relationships among faculty, and accountable for the results achieved. This article, the third in a series, recommends a set of metrics related to the Process Standards.
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Teacher Impact: How to Identify the Difference Makers
Volume 33 No. 7 // June 4, 2008
Faculty evaluation is, by and large, an individualized exercise. Evaluation is rarely considered within the context of the faculty as a whole, i.e., what is this teacher’s impact compared with others in the school? In this context, "impact" means the level of effectiveness demonstrated by the teacher in delivering the mission of the school to the students.
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ISM's Standards for Professional Growth and Renewal: Culture Standards
Volume 33 No. 6 // May 9, 2008
The ISM Standards for Professional Growth and Renewal provide private-independent schools with a way to assess whether their investment in faculty professional development is focused on students, clearly articulated as a systems activity, contextually meaningful in building professional relationships among faculty, and accountable for the results achieved. This article, the second in a series, recommends a set of metrics related to the ISM Culture Standards.
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How Character Education Fits Your Price/Value, Product, or Process Platform
Volume 33 No. 6 // May 9, 2008
ISM has previously suggested that you, as School Head, consider the advantages of positioning your school based on one of three marketing platforms: the price/value platform, the product platform, or the process platform. In view of a probable increase in the use of character education as a differentiator among schools, an examination of your approach to marketing your character education program(s) is in order at any time, but especially as you approach such significant opportunities as (a) your quadrennial strategic planning event, (b) creation or revision of your Purpose and Outcome Statements, or (c) major Board and/or administrative committee charges derived from your existing strategic plan (e.g., creation of a fresh strategic marketing plan or fundamental revisions in an existing strategic development plan).
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Six Key Questions About Endowment
Volume 33 No. 5 // April 13, 2008
Endowment is an important element of the financial picture in private-independent schools. If your school has an endowment, the following six questions and answers are intended to help you clarify its focus and function. If not, the questions will help your school think about endowment in a meaningful way.
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The Fallacy of Thinking Outside the Box
Volume 33 No. 5 // April 13, 2008
In working with schools, ISM Consultants often are asked to provide recommendations that will help a school’s Board and Management Team "think outside the box." School administrators instinctively know that improvement and progress will result from modifications in how they function.
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Parent Relations in the Pre-enrollment Period
Volume 33 No. 5 // April 13, 2008
As the school year draws to a close and your new parents are in the process of transitioning into active members of your school community, review the effectiveness of your Parent Retention and Education Program (PREP) in the pre-enrollment period. An effective PREP moves your school beyond a conversation-by-conversation model to a strategic, systemic, and culturally savvy approach to parent relations that takes into account the psychology of "value reinforcement." A planned, structured education process strives to draw parents into a deeper and more meaningful relationship with the school.
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Beyond Advanced Placement: Mission and Educational Excellence
Volume 33 No. 4 // March 28, 2008
With your unique mission as the foundation, there are educational benefits for moving beyond Advanced Placement, including: freeing up your exceptional faculty to optimize their skills and exercise appropriate educational autonomy; and creating a curriculum that fits your school’s culture, mission, history, geographic, and political modalities. A third strategic benefit is: distinguishing your school from its competitors to improve your profile (over time) from a college-counseling standpoint.
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