After Winter Storm Jonas paralyzed much of the East Coast on January 23, school cancellations for slippery roads, power loss, and facilities damage were rampant. Remembering the storm-tossed winter of 2013-2014, during which the United States saw a “polar vortex” causing double-digits of school days missed, the question of snow days arises once again—and whether they need to be “made up” at all.
Interdivisional Idiosyncrasies (Or, Your Division Is Not the Center of the Universe)
It’s easy to get caught up in the details and duties of your own division. Faculty meetings, evaluation and coaching, professional development, and perennial "fires" all demand your attention. But when you’re one Division Head of several in a multidivision school, you have to think beyond your own area. You must understand how your particular “cog” turns in the overall “machine” of the school, and how your students’ needs change as they age.
Seven Excuses That Don’t Matter—And One That Does
Successful educational programs require hard work and (occasionally) difficult changes. It can be daunting to keep and sustain the sort of drive needed to make them take hold and become permanent. But, that doesn’t mean you should allow excuses or circumstances to prevent you from trying new initiatives to improve your school. Here, then, are seven common excuses that shouldn’t stop you from starting difficult changes—along with the one reason you should halt any initiative before it gets off the ground.
The Student-Centered Department
Over time, all schools become adult-centered. Adults have all the power and students have none; faculty and administrators may stay around for three or four decades while students keep passing through. Put power and longevity together and it is clear why the evidence for adult-centeredness is so profound. Being student-centered, thus, is not a given, although it is always assumed in schools. Who would suggest otherwise? The Department Chair (or team leader) as a middle manager has a responsibility to lead a student-centered conversation. As School Head or Division Head, inspire your teams to reflect on your own department culture.
Grading Your Report Card Communication
Report cards: One of the few things that parents are guaranteed to read. It’s a unique opportunity for your teachers to communicate—clearly and authentically—with both students and families. This semester, evaluate your students with more than a letter grade or a percentage; it’s time for teachers to tell families what they really need to know.
Unleash Your Inner Monster: An Interview With Katie Johnson, Founder of the Monster Project
Source readers, we’d like to introduce you to Katie Johnson. By day, she’s an art director from Austin, Texas. By night, she’s the founder and CEO of the Monster Project. Her organization fosters imaginative play by sending student-created drawings of monsters to professional designers all over the world. These designers then create their own versions of the students’ prototypes and return them to the schools, so students can see how their monsters—and their own creativity—can “grow up.”
Scheduling the 21st Century Service Learning Program
In 2008, the National Youth Leadership Council articulated “The K–12 Learning Standards for Quality Service Learning Practice.” ISM both endorses and replicates them here, recognizing that such standards have to meet and be influenced by your school’s mission.
Service learning is now a norm in upper, middle, and lower schools. Most Division Directors believe, as a result of each school’s and division’s mission statements, that service learning is a key part of children’s education. Scheduling the program, however, can be challenging. It competes for time with the school’s primary task of providing an academic education, asks teachers to carry out yet another function, and can be disruptive as students miss class or use class for tangential projects. Clearly, the school has to articulate its position on service learning and agree to standards that may mirror those of the National Youth Leadership Council.
The Advisor as Positive Coach
If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur.
– Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961)
This quotation from a counseling and personal growth “classic” book by one of the past century’s most influential psychologists states that “a certain type of relationship” will itself be seen as a “usable” context for positive change by the recipient of the help. ISM has emphasized the importance of mentor and coaching roles—especially in the teacher-to-student and administrator-to-teacher relationships—and has grounded its counsel in ISM research regarding “predictability and support” and on the work of others. This article describes and recommends a newly focused perspective on and conceptualization of an important professional role in many private-independent schools: the teacher as advisor to students. ISM has emphasized the importance of a mission-basis for advisory programs and, the strategic importance of faculty professional development. This article offers guidance in support of both.
The Strategic Academic Plan
The words “strategic” and “academic” are not comfortable partners. Academics is, by definition, an operations responsibility and rightly the province of the School Head. Strategic implies the Board is involved and has a hand in direction and planning. Still, since 2014, schools have been thinking divergently about academics and asked ISM to assist with and partner in developing strategic academic plans, and the demand for this is growing.
Placing the words “strategic” and “academic” in juxtaposition could suggest that ISM’s long-held position about separating strategic and operations is compromised. In the 20th century, that would indeed have been true. Then, academics was a fairly straightforward pursuit that required schools to choose between textbooks printed in Ontario, Texas, and California and ensure that teachers were competent to use them in the classroom. The word itself had a limited reach, being typically applied to the disciplines of math, English, social studies, and science, with foreign language included as a suspicious addition. The arts were clearly not academic, and athletics were not connected to academic pursuits although there was obeisance paid to the scholar-athlete (the two words appearing in opposition to each other). In this world, teachers were polite to one another, but rarely worked together outside their silos—whether by grade or discipline. Budgets were based on last year’s expenditures. Curriculum review was incremental. Students were usually the object, not the subject, of the sentence. Rocking the boat was considered both unnecessary and opposed to tradition.
Fielding Parent Complaints
It happens to every Division Head at some point. A father flags you down in the parking lot for a “quick chat,” or leaves you a voicemail on your office machine, or shoots you an email with his child’s name in the subject line. Within moments of the interaction, it becomes obvious that the parent needs to vent about his child—and he expects you to do something about it—immediately. How do you handle this?