Congratulations to your graduating students, School Heads! There’s just one more step you must take with them before they embark on their bright futures—getting them through commencement ceremonies. To lighten your mood during this hectic season, we’ve found what we think are some of the most entertaining, profound, or downright unbelievable commencement speeches delivered by high school students to their peers.
The Pros and Cons of Mass Alert Communication Systems for Schools
When trouble strikes your school, you need to inform your parents in a timely effort about what’s occurring. By managing emergency communications, you’re controlling the panic and misinformation that can spread like a virus through your community. How you disperse this information is a critical element in containing the situation. The advent of mass-communication systems—text messages, emails, and automated phone calls—can be both effective and damaging in certain scenarios. Here is a look at the pros and cons of most communication systems used in sync with risk management protocols.
From Toxic to Healthy: How to Move Your School’s Culture
A healthy school culture is the core of school management. ISM research shows that a healthy faculty culture significantly relates to student performance, satisfaction, and enthusiasm.1 This culture is also a top characteristic that leads parents to choose your school. As School Head, when you find your school culture is unhealthy (or even toxic), you must improve its health decisively and immediately. This article outlines a three-phase model to improve your school’s culture.
School-Based Student-Leadership Programs: An Overview
As one school year winds down to a close, the next looms only a few months away. That means it’s the perfect time to consider additions to your school’s programming that, come fall, can provide additional opportunities for your students to demonstrate leadership within the context of your school’s mission and priorities.
“How Did We Do This Year?” —End-of-Year Evaluations
As your school approaches the home stretch of the academic year, evaluations of teacher (and administrator) performances become a high priority before school breaks for the summer session. Some School Heads may approach these meetings with dread, especially if there are low-performers within your ranks. However, an end-of-year evaluation doesn’t necessarily need to be scary—particularly when approached from the coaching model of evaluation.
The Risk Management Assessment Process
As School Head, you must do your best to assure the safety of all the constituents on your campus—students, faculty and staff, volunteers, etc. This is not an easy task, and becomes more difficult without an intentional, proactive process—one that helps you and your Management Team identify, analyze, and mitigate risk.
The idea of a formal risk management protocol, separate from your daily “putting out fires,” may be new to you. But performing a risk management assessment can lead to many positive outcomes. A number of these outcomes speak directly to the ISM Stability Markers® and Success Predictors, reflective of a given school’s ability to deliver on its mission, long-term. A risk assessment (and its outcomes) can help to:
Eight Discussions from the Heads e-List
School Heads from around the world congregate on our e-Lists to find crowdsourced answers to common problems only their peers would understand. If you’re curious to see what your fellow Heads have been talking about this year, read on for the fruits from nine lively discussions ranging from arming your teachers to considering alumni fundraisers.
Three Lessons Mount St. Mary’s Can Teach Private School Heads
Higher education roiled this spring in the wake of the scandal from Mount St. Mary’s University, a private Catholic university in Emmitsburg, Maryland. In January 2016, the school’s student newspaper The Mountain Echo ran a special edition featuring the student retention plan of President Simon Newman. In addition to potentially unethical use of incoming student data to encourage freshmen to leave early, the President allegedly told a professor that “this is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies ... put a Glock to their heads.”
Self-Assessing Your Department/Team
When Department Chairs/Team Leaders meet with their Division Head, what is the basis for any conversation? Many schools that ISM visits lack any idea of what the Department Chair or Team Leader is supposed to do (outside some basic managerial items). Division Heads rarely give the Chair/Leader the authority to implement the tasks assigned. The following assessment is designed to spur the creation of the Department Chairs’ own self-assessments and should be considered a guideline. The five major principles of Department Chair/team leadership include:
Managing Romancing Employees
In this, the most romantic of months, love is in the air for student sweethearts—and maybe in your administrative ranks, as well. When people spend most of their waking hours together, it’s natural for crushes to form for admirable, available peers, regardless if your school’s policies frown on it or not. If you find that love is swamping your school’s halls and offices, here are some ways in which to keep everyone’s “head in the game”—instead of Cupid’s clouds.