In the strategic roles given to various functions within a private-independent school, teachers are not left out. The Board provides the resources (money, facility, and management structure) to support the School Head and Management Team, and the School Head/Management Team provides a predictable and supportive environment within which exceptional faculty can thrive. The faculty's strategic role is to be aware of and drive successful student re-recruitment and new student recruitment. During these uncertain economic times, teachers must understand how critical their roles are in the admission process.

ISM has long recommended looking to military personnel—either retirees or those rotating out of service—as a source of quality employees. Veterans are typically highly skilled, professionally trained workers who can perform efficiently under pressure, possess proven leadership and management capabilities, and are accustomed to working with diverse populations. This makes them a potential fit for your school’s operational facilities, coaching positions, and other managerial openings.

As a School Head, there is no more pivotal, important task than ensuring your school hires mission-appropriate faculty. Whether you interview all candidates, delegate initial interviews to someone else and then interview the finalists, or delegate full responsibility to a member of your Management Team, the quality of the faculty is inescapably your responsibility.

As School Head, you are aware that your success in developing a growth-focused faculty culture is the most critical ingredient in the long-term quality of the student experience—that is, the central determinant of your students’ performance, satisfaction, and enthusiasm. You are aware, as well, that the qualities of "predictability and supportiveness" in your students’ environment (the conditions most closely associated with high-level performance, satisfaction, and enthusiasm) are most reliably generated by establishing those same two qualities in your teachers’ environment.

The ISM Standards for Professional Growth and Renewal provide private-independent schools with a way to assess whether their investment in faculty professional development is focused clearly on students, clearly articulated as a systems activity, contextually meaningful in building professional relationships among faculty, and accountable for the results achieved. This article, the third in a series, recommends a set of metrics related to the Process Standards.

Faculty evaluation is, by and large, an individualized exercise. Evaluation is rarely considered within the context of the faculty as a whole, i.e., what is this teacher’s impact compared with others in the school? In this context, "impact" means the level of effectiveness demonstrated by the teacher in delivering the mission of the school to the students.

The ISM Standards for Professional Growth and Renewal provide private-independent schools with a way to assess whether their investment in faculty professional development is focused on students, clearly articulated as a systems activity, contextually meaningful in building professional relationships among faculty, and accountable for the results achieved. This article, the second in a series, recommends a set of metrics related to the ISM Culture Standards.

ISM has previously suggested that you, as School Head, consider the advantages of positioning your school based on one of three marketing platforms: the price/value platform, the product platform, or the process platform. In view of a probable increase in the use of character education as a differentiator among schools, an examination of your approach to marketing your character education program(s) is in order at any time, but especially as you approach such significant opportunities as (a) your quadrennial strategic planning event, (b) creation or revision of your Purpose and Outcome Statements, or (c) major Board and/or administrative committee charges derived from your existing strategic plan (e.g., creation of a fresh strategic marketing plan or fundamental revisions in an existing strategic development plan).

In working with schools, ISM Consultants often are asked to provide recommendations that will help a school’s Board and Management Team "think outside the box." School administrators instinctively know that improvement and progress will result from modifications in how they function.

For over a decade, ISM has connected professional growth and renewal with evaluation. We are now publishing the ISM Standards for Professional Growth and Renewal, which private-independent schools can use to assess whether their investment in faculty professional development is focused clearly on students, articulated as a systems activity (or framework), contextually meaningful in building professional relationships among teachers, and a measure of the results achieved.