For several years, ISM has pushed academic administrators (typically Division Directors, Department Chairs, and School Heads) to recognize that faculty culture (defined as the pattern of customs, ideas, and assumptions driving the faculty’s collective set of professional attitudes and behaviors) is the critical determinant of a school’s “excellence.” The contention is that the top of a culture cannot escape the bottom.

In the 19th century, education in schools in the city was year-round (although it is unlikely that attendance was). At the beginning of the 20th century, the calendar moved to its present orientation—nine months on and three months off in the summer. For city dwellers, the change came about because summers were unbearably hot, disease was easily spread, wealthy people went on vacation, and too much education was considered bad for frail minds. The situation was different in rural areas where, in the 19th century, children went to school for only six months (summer and winter), leaving them free to help with the crops and animals in the spring and fall. For them, the schedule changed because the experts thought that children were not taught enough, and they wanted to come into line with changes happening in the city.

ISM has long held that the proper role of the Board is to attend to the strategic viability of a school for future generations of students, while the role of the School Head is to manage the day-to-day operational needs of the school. With that core principle in mind, the question arises as to who is properly responsible for ensuring that the school has an effective, up-to-date employee handbook.1 As employee handbooks are primarily comprised of day-to-day operating policies, we believe that the answer clearly is “the School Head.”2 At the same time, however, there is an important strategic oversight role that the Board can and should play in ensuring that organizational risk is limited—but always showing deference to the Head on the operating details.

ISM’s six-year International Model Schools Project found powerful relationships between a professional-growth-focused faculty culture, on the one hand, and student performance, satisfaction, and enthusiasm, on the other. In ISM’s review of literature accompanying one of the two books produced in concert with that project, ISM cited Stanford University’s Dr. Milbrey McLaughlin’s work. She had noted, during a 1983 presentation to the annual conference of the National Association of Independent Schools, “… [R]esearch studies on planned change and teacher evaluation give clear evidence that, when interaction of this sort (i.e., teacher-to-teacher interaction dealing with teaching-learning equations and with professional excellence) does occur, especially on a regular basis, it has a substantial, powerful, and positive effect on what and how well students learn.”

The best teaching environment for learning is one where a teacher can manipulate time/content to meet the needs of every student. This is best illustrated by lower school homerooms where teachers have blocks of 60 to 180 minutes with students. For private-independent schools, the stakes are high. The expectation is that students will succeed at and above what they and their parents can imagine. This requirement for every student to succeed, implicit in the admitting of mission-appropriate students, must now drive our concept of teaching time in the 21st Century School. The 20th century paradigm for class length was the seven- or eight-period day of 40- to 50-minute classes over a school year of 180 days—yielding 8,100 minutes (180 x 45) of teaching, or 135 hours, per class each year. The justification for this paradigm was compelling. There was an enormous amount of knowledge that students had to learn in order to participate in the industrial society. The architecture of schools emphasized this knowledge acquisition with rows of desks facing the teacher at the front “armed” with chalk and ruler, and working in isolation from colleagues. And the aristocracy of schools ensured that students not only entered a class, but entered their “class” in terms of the type of knowledge presented: abstract and university-bound, or practical and trades-bound.

When an administrative job opening occurs in a private-independent school, candidates are often sought both from within and outside the school community. The obvious intention seems to be to ensure a pool of exceptional candidates, all of whom will compete on an equal playing field. There is, however, quite a difference between an internal and an external candidate (see the table below) and we recommend that they be treated differently.

As School Head, you have long recognized that your middle and upper school divisions (grades 6-12) have a great deal both to gain and to lose from your athletic program. The interrelationships among enrollment, character development, and interscholastic sports are many and complex. The advantages of your athletic program should not obscure issues that are evident in what happens to children. Consider the following statistics. (Cited in Until It Hurts: America’s Obsession with Youth Sports and How It Harms Our Kids by M. Hyman [Boston: Beacon Press, 2009].)

As more and more curriculum and program are being squeezed into our academic days, schools are looking for creative ways to make everything fit. One practice gaining in popularity is eliminating or significantly curtailing the time permitted for recess in lower schools. In the battle for the awarding of precious minutes, academic time may be deemed more important than physical time. But studies published this year in the Journal of Neuroscience, The Journal of School Health, and Pediatrics suggest a strong link between activity and students’ ability to learn.

Knowing how effective your summer program teachers are is essential in maintaining and improving the reputation of your program, and thus your ability to sustain or increase its size. The reputation of your summer program is almost entirely dependent on the impact that faculty have on students for the brief time that they teach and entertain them, typically in one-week periods.

In ISM’s experience, the most frequently expressed administrative concern about the advisory program is unevenness in the quality of adviser functioning. Teachers’ motivation, skill, “buy-in,” and overall professionalism in this role often vary considerably. Clarity about the role—its purposes, priorities, limits, and sources of assistance—provides focus. This clarity and focus, for those with less affinity for the role of adviser, instills a sense that the job is “do-able” (i.e., not an “all-things-to-all-people” set of responsibilities). These boundaries also “rein in” any faculty who tend to overdo (i.e., become over-involved in the lives of their advisees). On a broader level, this kind of clarity implicitly makes advising more professional and contributes to a culture that values professional development in this role on behalf of students.