The 21st Century School: Strategic Schedule Review

Schedule reform is becoming one of the most important and adaptive strategies that academic administrators can lead and support—it has the capacity to shift student and faculty cultures in a dramatic and immediate way. ISM has always called for the schedule to be re-examined every eight years, but recently suggested that, with the increased strategic importance of the schedule, School Heads “require, fully engage in, and support schedule review every four years and have a standing faculty committee that continues to review the ongoing research and practice in schedule, student performance, and healthy faculty cultures.”1

Moonlighting: What to Do When Part-Time Jobs Clash With School Culture

Issue: A faculty member devotes a significant amount of his off-duty time and energy as an online writer for a controversial social cause that some feel is contrary to the culture of the school. Issue: A faculty member’s role as an instructor of adult education classes on pole dancing at the local community college comes to the attention of parents, who contact the School Head to express their concerns.

External Marketing for Your Summer Program

Recently, I&P published an article about internal marketing for your summer program. The following article shares effective ideas for external marketing of your program. The targets of your external marketing are families who have not enrolled students in your summer program in the last two years—whether the students are enrolled in your school during the academic year or not.

Paid Leave Banks: Compassionate or Risky?

Paid time off (e.g., sick, vacation, personal time) is an important element of a school’s overall compensation and benefits program.1 As a robust employee benefits and compensation program is one of ISM’s Stability Markers®, ISM encourages schools to be as generous in this area as financially possible. However, some schools extend this generosity in the form of paid leave “banks” in a way that creates risk for the school. This article examines those risks and proposes alternate paths to reach the same desired end—that is, attending to employee needs in a way that is compassionate but also significantly less risky.

Flip-Teaching for 21st Century Classrooms

In an algebra class in Delaware, students are asked to complete a short series of problems when they arrive in class. First, the teacher sees cooperative learning going on, then moves on to discuss what he calls the drill so that the students will understand what they did right and wrong. Out in Colorado, algebra teacher Karl Fisch approaches his lessons backwards. He flips what we have all come to know as the standard class. Rather than spend time providing the lesson and then having students go home only possibly be frustrated and confused trying to complete the homework, Fisch uses class time to discuss the lesson, when he is there to help them understand it. Students watch the lesson at home on YouTube. Homework, he says is problematic. In the traditional teaching model, he’s found that one group of students “get it” and go home and do the homework correctly. A second group gives up before even trying, for a variety of reasons. The third group will struggle through it and probably do it wrong, which means going over the concept again.

21st Century Learning: Can the Classroom Be a Game Space?

Early into this school year, the mom of a middle-school boy posted on Twitter: “Anyone else been told by their child's principal that because they play video games and talk of them at school they will have BIG issues later?” President Barack Obama urged families to “turn off the TV, put away video games, and read to your child.” On the other hand, the government has sponsored an application-design contest, looking for the best mobile-phone games and apps to battle the plague of obesity.

Essential Questions to Ask About Athletics and Character Development

ISM has published before on athletics and character development, including an athletics checklist for schools to employ. However, there seems to be a changed environment for athletics, certainly in the United States. Some schools seem to be getting to the point in secondary athletics (with its trickle-down impact in middle school) where they must make a decision regarding this question: To what extent are we going to allow our school to be driven off course (off mission) to meet the perceived competitive needs of our own and the next (college) level? Just as some schools are (appropriately) moving away from a mass curriculum/testing version of education encapsulated in Advanced Placement,1 so ISM believes that schools need to think carefully about their obeisance to college athletic pressures and focus on their own school cultures.

The 21st Century School: Faculty

The 20th Century School has as its educational center the autonomous teacher who exists in an egalitarian culture and is rarely, often never, effectively evaluated for impact on student performance, enthusiasm, and satisfaction. At all levels of the school, teachers are organized into silos of teaching (by grade or by content area) with little effective time within the silo to truly collaborate and professionally assess and grow, and equally little effective time to communicate outside the silo in any meaningful way. Teachers spend most of their time teaching on their own and preparing on their own to teach. Administrative meeting time, regularly scheduled, is universally disliked as irrelevant even though led by School Heads who themselves largely come from the teaching ranks.
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