ISM research has long demonstrated the strong correlation between a healthy faculty culture and student performance, satisfaction, and enthusiasm. We know that a healthy school culture is the result of:
students receiving the appropriate balance of predictability and support from their teachers;
teachers experiencing predictability and support from their school leaders; and
the Head receiving these from the Board.
Where to Start to Help Reduce Student Stress
As an academic administrator, you can’t expect to eliminate all the stress in your school. However, you can certainly take steps to ensure that your school structure causes as little stress as possible, and is set up to best support faculty, staff, and students.
Three Tactics to Make Your Monthly Faculty Meetings Successful
Your monthly faculty meetings can become a dreaded occurrence at your school. But a few tactics can help turn your meetings into an activity that your entire team enjoys (and may even come to look forward too).
Why You Should Rethink Your Parent Education Program
Your parent education program aims to engage your students’ families and help them feel like true members of your community. Your school puts hard work into holding events and creating materials, so it can be disappointing if only a small percentage of your families participate on a regular basis.
The Importance of a Strategic Scheduling Meeting
Your school’s daily schedule is an incredibly important aspect of how you deliver your mission to students. It defines how long students spend on each subject, with each teacher, and in each classroom. It can enhance academic performance or become a source of stress for students and faculty.
That’s why it’s important to hold an annual strategic scheduling meeting to assess what’s working and what isn’t within your school schedule.
Providing Support for the Summer Program Director
Operating an attractive, effective, and profitable summer program requires the year-round attention of the Summer Program Director. During the summer, the Director needs considerable administrative support as he or she works full-time, focusing on day-to-day administrative tasks—in short, reacting to the immediate. During the academic year, the need for administrative support becomes more intermittent as the Director works part time to plan and prepare for the coming summer’s programmatic excellence and financial success.
Staffing Your Corps of Advisors: Criteria and Caveats
ISM has encouraged schools to recognize the benefits a robust, mission-based advisory program can yield for students, faculty, and the institution. We encourage you, as School Head or Division Head, to focus on creating and sustaining a professional guidance program contributing to a predictable and supportive experience for all middle- and upper-school students through a principled assignment of personnel to the advisor role.
Student Engagement’s Impact on Stress and Well-Being—What Your School Must Know and Do
It is a distressing and growing issue that private-independent school students are showing increasing levels of stress, substance use, risky behavior, and anxiety. Recommended strategies for mitigating stress and managing mental health, while improving student well-being, include enactment of a healthy daily schedule and yearly calendar, and a predictable and supportive faculty culture, with effective advisory and counseling programs. Recent ISM research with nearly 13,000 students in private-independent middle and upper schools demonstrates that increased student engagement must be added to that list.
Annual Statements Show the Value of Employee Benefits
As the School Head or Business Manager, you know how much the school spends to provide employee benefits. It’s frustrating when faculty, staff, and administrators do not take advantage of these programs to the fullest, don’t value them, or, worse yet, don’t even know they exist. This tends to be a reality in most organizations—not just schools. In our fast-paced society, unless people perceive that the information directly pertains to them, it may sometimes be hard to gain their attention.
Reinvent Your Whole-Faculty Meetings
Whole-faculty meetings—the phrase alone makes eyes glaze over. Administrators often view these sessions as a necessary evil. Teachers routinely consider them one of the least productive uses of their time.