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.

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:

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.

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.

ISM’s long-standing contention has been that schools have two primary markets: parents and students. Over time, we have seen an increase in the influence students have on enrollment decisions. From ISM surveys representing nearly 1,000 parents, 11% of respondents indicated that their children had significant to total influence, and 28% said that their children had equal influence. As one would expect, the level of influence increases with each grade, particularly beginning in the sixth grade. But even kindergartners are reported to have significant influence for some parents. To remain sustainable, a school must appeal to both parents and students from the admission process through graduation.

In a previous article, “The Rhetoric of Rigor,” we argued that schools should abandon the use of the word “rigor” in their marketing messages because of its ubiquity and ill-defined nature. We encountered then—and continue to encounter—schools that adhere to educational practices they know need change (e.g., AP program, homework policies). But they fear those changes because those practices were once provided as evidence of academic rigor. Fear stands as a barrier to change as schools often see “academic rigor” as their competitive advantage.