Scheduling That’s Efficient, Effective, and Stress-Free—It’s Possible!

Are you knee-deep in the annual scheduling process for your school? Now is a great time to assess what is and isn’t working.

Join Carrie Nelson, ISM ScheduLogic Manager, and James Collins, ISM Director of Sales, as they discuss ways to evaluate the effectiveness of your current scheduling methods. Whether you’re wrestling with communication breakdowns, software limitations, or logistical challenges, they’ll help you pinpoint areas causing unnecessary stress and frustration.

Make Your Meetings Matter

Meetings are necessary for moving any organization or institution forward—they are the way business gets done. But they can also be real killers of time and effectiveness. If you are responsible for meetings, whether as Board Chair, School Head, Division Head, or operations lead, it is important to make your meetings matter. Doing so not only helps your school operate more efficiently but also enhances each team member’s sense of responsibility and contributes to improved morale.

Powerful Leadership and Your School’s Culture

The late educator Zig Engelmann (1931–2019) had a motto that he promoted tirelessly: “If the learner hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.” According to Engelmann, this “operating principle” offended many because it placed all the responsibility for education on teachers. Of course, the statement is simplistic—it’s a motto, not a fully-fledged philosophy or plan. But in the end, most teachers and school administrators will probably agree: Teachers have a responsibility to engage students and to tailor their instruction so that students can be successful.

How to Lead and Sustain a High-Performing Administrative Team

Decisive, steady, collegial, and empathetic leadership is essential as independent school leaders face increasingly complex uncertainties in the independent school market. These complexities can be compounded when we work with multigenerational faculty expectations and parents seeking a “return on investment,” and as we gain a better understanding of neurodivergence in our students.

Achieving an Always-Updated Curriculum Scope and Sequence

New teachers often find they are free to design classes as they wish. While this autonomy may feel desirable, they struggle to create coherence with other grades and within teaching teams, making autonomy more of a problem than a welcome luxury.

Administrators often assume that maintaining a careful scope and sequence is beyond their ability to manage, yet they know they cannot allow the curriculum to become stale.

In this webinar, Mike Gwaltney, ISM Consultant, will reveal the keys to maintaining a coherent, mission-aligned, student-centered academic program.

How AI Could Impact Teaching and Learning

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has great potential to enhance student learning. If you’re wondering if it’s something you could—or should—incorporate into your academic program, this webinar is for you.

Join Andrew Taylor, ISM Consultant and Executive Coach, for a discussion on how AI can provide personalized, adaptive, and engaging student learning experiences. He’ll also explain AI’s benefits and limitations, providing practical implementation strategies you can use to incorporate AI into your existing curricula.

“Delivery of Mission” Is the Most Important Metric

Understanding how your current parents feel about your school is essential—it is so vital that you should never let a year go by without some systematic collection of parent opinions. But even more important than frequency is your ability to understand what you are hearing from constituents and to interpret these opinions accurately. Only with sound interpretation can you take wise actions based on survey results.

Understand Your School’s Economic Engine

“The buck stops here!” was popularized by President Harry S. Truman, who kept a sign with this phrase on his desk as a brazen reminder of his authority as chief executive. Truman believed that he was the head of an administrative bureaucracy, to be sure. But as President, he shouldered everything as his own responsibility. That’s noble leadership.

Do Language Classes Need to Meet Every Day? It’s Time to Dispel the Myth

ISM advocates student-centered schedules. As we define it, a student-centered schedule is grounded in (1) an understanding of how students learn and (2) a commitment to actions that support student well-being.

In practice, student-centered schedules are marked by several characteristics:

Planning for Your Next Annual Giving Season Starts Now

Annual Giving is the foundational program from which all other development efforts grow and flourish. Creating a sequential, assignable, and measurable plan for your annual giving campaign is essential for success.

In this webinar, ISM Consultant Michael Christopher, IAP-L, will walk through the 15-month process of planning your annual giving campaign from beginning to end.

Subscribe to Academic Leadership