As Director of College Counseling, you are responsible for providing one of the most critical services your school can offer. While parents set academic excellence and next-level placement as high priorities when they select your school, the college-bound teenager ideally makes the primary decisions when it comes to selecting a college. It is your job to help students find the institutions of higher education that best match their interests, needs, and abilities. What are the key avenues students use today to find appropriate colleges—and what can you do to ensure your program steers them in the right direction?

As Head of School, you know that middle and upper school parents want—and students need—programs and services that extend beyond “pure” academics. Your school derives a competitive advantage from its ability to provide benefits such as caring teachers, safe environment, leadership and social opportunities, and character education.  

As with most students, teachers tend to make good progress toward achieving their goals if they are provided with both system and reward. This can be especially true when the goals relate to technology—a professional development area that still lurks as ambiguous and uncertain in the minds of many faculty members and, as well, in curricular and instructional frameworks in otherwise taut academic administrations.

At many private-independent schools, scheduling and space issues continue to frustrate school administrators. Yet, many schools also dedicate time and money to maintaining their campus grounds—space that often lies vacant during much of the school day. Why not take advantage of this available space by creating outdoor classrooms and learning areas?

The Portrait of the Graduate is one of three definitive documents (including the school’s mission statement and the Characteristics of Professional Excellence) that capture a school’s core reason for existence. This portrait was defined as “a list of five or fewer items comprising short descriptors of your product—the student you expect to have developed over the years that she/he has spent under your faculty’s tutelage.”

Faculty culture—the pattern of customs, ideas, and assumptions driving the faculty’s collective set of professional attitudes and behaviors—is profoundly impacted by conversations about schedule. The reasons for this are easy to understand. Schedule—a complex set of data around time, program, space, and people—cannot be changed without changing the parameters of each teacher’s professional life. Schedule can affect a teacher’s performance and job satisfaction in many ways.

The Board does not need to be involved in your school’s educational program, either as individuals or as a group. Discussions and decisions about the program are not appropriate topics for these volunteer leaders. The Board has hired you, as School Head, to determine programs and supervise their delivery.

The schedule might be considered half of the answer to the question: How does our school carry out its mission and support students? It tells how time is allocated (and therefore what is considered important); it shows the relationships among time, space, people, and program—and implicitly places values on these aspects of the school. The schedulers thus play an important role in ensuring that the mission can be delivered optimally to the students.

The relationship between time and student achievement is once again being examined. A recent publication, On the Clock: Rethinking the Way Schools Use Time by Elena Silva of Education Sector, funded by The Broad Foundation, notes that the "addition and improvement of the use of time was at the top of the list of recommendations in a report, Getting Smart, Becoming Fairer." Various proposals are now under consideration in public and private education to either lengthen the school day and/or the school year. Quite apart from the practical implications of such a move, what are the research findings?

ISM’s Purpose and Outcome Statements concept was developed in a series of I&P articles suggesting that mission statements alone will always fall short of their hoped-for goal of defining your school’s institutional purposes in ways that are simultaneously visionary and practical.1 Mission statements—abstract documents by nature—must be supplemented by two other documents: first, the Portrait of the Graduate, and second, Characteristics of Professional Excellence for faculty. Done well, these pithy documents supply inspiration, universality, particularity, and concreteness.