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.

With your unique mission as the foundation, there are educational benefits for moving beyond Advanced Placement, including: freeing up your exceptional faculty to optimize their skills and exercise appropriate educational autonomy; and creating a curriculum that fits your school’s culture, mission, history, geographic, and political modalities. A third strategic benefit is: distinguishing your school from its competitors to improve your profile (over time) from a college-counseling standpoint.

ISM recommends that private-independent schools provide one-year contracts to faculty members to: support and enhance the faculty culture by providing employment safety and security to faculty for the academic year; and maximize continuity of instruction for students by creating a mutual obligation between the school and the member, reducing the potential for disruptive mid-year faculty departures.

ISM uses a tripartite classification for examining a private-independent school’s marketing platform: price-value: We offer a transformational (nearly always religious) experience for your child at a cost you can afford; product: We offer the best academic "product" (graduate) in our market area; or process: We offer "more" for your child (more electives; more levels of electives; more teams; more levels of teams; more individual attention, and/or a unique pedagogy) than others in our market.