In an earlier I&P, we detailed results of a yearlong study conducted during the 2010–2011 academic year. Titled the Student Experience Study (SES), the project measured the effects of student-perceived predictability and support from their teachers on student performance, satisfaction, and enthusiasm. The results were clear. While there was a positive correlation between predictability and support and performance, there were extraordinarily strong correlations between predictability and support and both student-reported satisfaction and student-reported enthusiasm (each measured separately).

In the 2010–11 school year, ISM conducted a one-year partial replication—using a stronger research design and a more exacting statistic—of its original six-year International Model Schools Project, a research project that focused on student performance, satisfaction, and enthusiasm. The results of the 2010–11 project, titled the ISM Student Experience Study (SES), were published by ISM in complete form as a white paper in January 2012, and summarized in Ideas & Perspectives in Vol. 37, No. 4. The following article, featuring one of the instruments derived from the SES findings, is designed to be read in the context of either of those two documents. Readers are asked to take note of the fact that the Characteristics of Professional Excellence II, shown in this article, supersede ISM’s original Characteristics of Professional Excellence, first published in Vol. 31, No.8, and then expanded upon in Vol. 32, No. 16.

In the 2010–11 school year, ISM conducted a one-year partial replication—using a stronger research design and a more exacting statistic—of its original six-year International Model Schools Project, a research project that focused on student performance, satisfaction, and enthusiasm. The results of the 2010–11 project, titled the ISM Student Experience Study (SES), have been published by ISM in its complete form as a white paper in January 2012, and summarized in Ideas & Perspectives in Vol. 37, No. 4. The following article, featuring one of the instruments derived from the SES findings, is designed to be read in the context of either of those two summary documents. Readers are asked to take note of the fact that the Faculty Culture Profile II, shown in this article, supersedes ISM’s original Faculty Culture Profile.

As Division Head, your primary objective is to improve the already excellent faculty at your school through carefully focused professional development and evaluation—which supports the school mission, the strategic direction of the school, and excellence in student achievement. Further, if you don’t actively engage with teachers in “managing” performance, faculty capacity will only increase at random, thus severely limiting the likelihood of maintaining and enhancing student performance, satisfaction, and enthusiasm over the long term. Coaching and mentoring is “the thing itself”—without it, an administrator’s role is reduced to merely bureaucratic functions.

A recent article by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper, Dean of the Center for Modern Torah Leadership (MA), introduces the issue of pricing as a moral issue.1 Rabbi Klapper suggests that Jewish communities should view their widespread consternation about rising costs as less of a “money issue” and more one of “moral costs.” He notes, for example, that large numbers of Jewish parents feel they are being increasingly forced into an impossible-to-solve conundrum: financially ruinous tuition levels for their children, on the one hand, versus their deeply felt moral commitment to Jewish education on the other. Those in leadership positions in Jewish day schools, thus, are pulled into an agonizing financial and moral whirlwind.