The lead article in the most recent issue of The Trustee's Letter (May/June 2013), "Many Views Lead to One Voice," identifies what any board candidate should share in common with the school: "each candidate has to be committed to the school's mission, vision, and strategic plan." What if the strategic plan is bad? Continue reading

We're all faced with the perennial question of how we might motivate others in our schools. In a recent interview with Karen Christensen (Rotman Magazine, Spring 2013), David Rock, founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, shares that "they key is to create an atmosphere that promotes Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness. We call this the SCARF model." I find the model worthwhile because so many independent schools are positioned to implement it; some already do, without knowing it. Status - "Within the brain, feelings of low status actually provoke the kind of cortisol elevation associated with sleep deprivation and chronic... Continue reading

MIssion does not equal strategy. Your school will want to make certain that its strategy is informed by its mission, i.e. that it passes through some kind of filter that ensures alignment with mission, but the two terms are not synonymous. For some reason, though, many folks are using the terms as if they were interchangeable. Mission is what you do; strategy is how you accomplish it, relative to your competitors. Continue reading

Poignant piece in Chief Learning Officer magazine (online version) today. The topic is talent development + learning, and the excerpt is below (it's "business-y" in terms of feel, but the principles apply to schools). Of particular interest to me is the second paragraph. In order to be impactful vis-à-vis strategy, though, schools would benefit from a greater number of folks with broad experience rather than siloed experience. Otherwise, how does a school anticipate needs in the various areas? Professional development shouldn't be just about faculty, it should be about all adult learners in the community...and that would look fairly different... Continue reading

Recently, I started to participate in spinning classes at my local YMCA. I've always been a fan of bicycle racing, especially the Tour de France, because, to me, there is much to be learned about leadership when it comes to cycling. I've discovered these leadership lessons exist even in spinning classes at the Y! For those unfamiliar with such classes, imagine a room full of stationary bikes with an instructor seated on his/her own bike in front of the group, where s/he can control the music, ventilation, and encourage participants by means of a portable microphone. It's a serious calorie... Continue reading

I'm a fan of Andrew Hill's "On Management" weekly column in the Financial Times. This morning, I was delighted to come across his piece on "the hardest innovation." Q: What is the hardest innovation? A: Killing off projects. As anyone in schools knows, it is tremendoulsy challenging to sunset projects that really ought to fade away. Hill states that the struggle involved in persuading any company [school] to stop doing certain things is downright painful. We tend to use nice terms, such as "concentrate our focus" to refer to the notion of stopping a project. His point, quite simply, is... Continue reading

Trends in Talent Continue reading

Dr Charles Clark and I co-presented a session, "Rethinking Leadership," at the NAIS 2013 Annual Conference in Philadelphia last week. For those who are looking for the slides or for those who were unable to attend, you can find the SlideRocket presentation below. Most of the slides are image-only, as I use my slides to illustrate a story that I deliver verbally. Continue reading

Abductive reasoning, i.e., imagining what might be, is something that most schools have never been good at, for years and years. We tend to operate in the camp of deductive and inductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning is anathema to us. And so, even as online learning continues to gain traction in the larger K-12 market place, we continue to espouse our traditional business model of ever-increasing tuition for a product ("education") that is delivered (no, I don't like that term, either...) in the same way. As Vasant Dhar, a professor at NYU Stern School of Business, writes in the January 7... Continue reading

Heads Speak for Themselves (January 2013) Every few years, my school conducts a market research survey to better understand what parents seek in their selection of a school for their children. In each and every survey, “safety” appears near or at the top of the list. This is understandable, given all that we read about violence in schools – from bullying and harassment to school shootings. In the first two years of my tenure at my current school, I’ve paid a lot of attention to campus safety. I’ve heightened the security presence at our main entrance; improved the fencing that... Continue reading

Does the chronological résumé hold the same value it once did? I am not convinced. Personally, I think that the traditional résumé serves to obfuscate useful information due to being held hostage by chronological linearity. In other words, potentially useful information is passed over easily because we are trained to look at a resume in a linear fashion. From a left-brained perspective, if you will. So, as a resolution for the New Year, who is willing to craft a contemporary résumé whose sections highlight experience according to skill set(s) rather than chronology? There has to be an aesthetically pleasing way... Continue reading

As the end of the calendar year looms in front of us, I've been reflecting on Will Richardson's inquiry regarding "bold schools" back in January on his blog (Jan. 7, 2012). Will wrote, "We need schools that are bold in their practice right now. And by “bold” I mean schools that make sure their kids pass the test and get “college ready” because, unfortunately, that’s about the only definition of “success” that people want to talk about right now, but also schools that prepare their kids for a world that the tests and the definitions of “readiness” or “achievement” haven’t... Continue reading

Scott Anthony's work in innovation interests me very much. Recently, I've been pondering the notion of "the innovator's paradox," which goes something like this: when they are in a position to innovate, most organizations don't; then, when they find themselves needing to innovate, they cannot do it. Some schools got slammed by the financial crisis | economic downturn; others have continued to muddle along, with a slight decline in enrollment. There is a third group, as well: those schools that have either maintained their enrollment or grown it during the last few years (call it a flight to quality). A... Continue reading

There are many issues in education that attract our attention, but I'm convinced that "the" issue of our time is that of assessment. Whether it's a question of ERB scores, SAT scores, AP scores, or the like, we as a society are focused intently on the notion of assessment. We need to take a step back and ask ourselves and our communities: "What do we value, and why?" The follow-up question becomes, "How might we measure that?" In short, we would benefit from re-assessing assessment itself. I'm not arguing for no assessment; I'm arguing for assessment that provides us with... Continue reading

I don't know about you, but I'm so tired of "producing scholars." I think it's a terribly trite phrase, and I don't think it's what we ought to strive to "produce" in schools. Mind you, I happen to be a scholar of medieval religious theater in (what are today) France and Germany, specifically during the 15th century, and even more specifically in plays that deal with soteriology and the notion of the devil's rights. That's what being a scholar is about: undertaking studies in a special field. It has another meaning, related closely to the original Latin, that is the... Continue reading

Many schools are trying to innovate right now, some for good reasons, others for the wrong reasons (e.g., keeping up with the Joneses). In a good-faith effort to show attention to innovation, some schools are creating innovation committees. The problem? Innovation, like good design, is a behavior, not a committee/department. Is one committee going to change behavioral and cultural norms? Continue reading

Pablo Picasso once said in an interview, regarding computers, "But they are useless. They can only give you answers." Technophile that I am, I am inclined to agree with him, from a pedagogical point of view, when thinking about what skills our graduates need in today's world. We in independent schools need to STOP asking kids to give us answers. Answers are so yesterday. Independent school graduates will be valued because they know what questions to ask. Continue reading

I found a term in the October 2012 issue (p. 65) of the Harvard Business Review that I just love -- one that I want to make use of, if I can just remember to do it! HiPPO -- the Highest Paid Person's Opinion The term is mentioned in an article dealing with management having to make sense of big data. Toward the end of the article, the authors talk about a new culture of decision making in a section called 'muting the HiPPOs': "One of the most critical aspects of big data is its impact on how decisions are... Continue reading

October's guest post for "Heads Speak for Themselves" is from Brad Rathgeber, Director of the Online School for Girls. We know innately in independent schools that relationships are central to the learning process. That is something that we have done well for decades and centuries -- and, not incidentally, something that we should not lose sight of as independent schools move into work with online learning (as Michael Nachbar and I noted last year: click here). And yet, do we really listen to our students voices about the relationships forged in classrooms? We hear teachers describe it. We can sometime... Continue reading

So, Stanford University has instituted a new requirement that begins with this year's freshman class: Thinking Matters. A student can meet the requirement by choosing from among some 35 courses that allow freshmen to cultivate "the critical and analytical skills required for rigorous university-level work." What's fascinating (to me, at least) about the requirement is what I as an independent school person infer from the following description from Stanford University News in Aug 2012: Thinking Matters is one of the cornerstones of the university's new approach to undergraduate education. That new approach stresses the development of intellectual growth through critical... Continue reading

SAT, AP, ACT, ERB...you name it. Standardized assessments still abound in independent school culture. We become obsessed with higher and higher SAT and ACT scores, touting our averages to families; and, when they're not as high as we'd like, we obsess about how 'low' they are. We worry, we fret, we bite our nails. We wonder if our standards are slipping. How ought we to assess in this, the second decade of the 21st century? Standardized tests were born in a culture that was focused on the 'benefits' of industrialization: uniformity, standardization, predictability. With all the research we have at... Continue reading

Roger Schank recently released a tome that is very worthwhile: Teaching Minds - How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools. Schank is admittedly provocative, yet in a very good way. From the jacket: "Schank argues that class size, lack of parental involvement, and other commonly-cited factors have nothing to do with why students are not learning. The culprit is a system of subject-based instruction, and the solution is cognitive-based learning. This groundbreaking book defines what it would mean to teach thinking." Schank outlines 12 cognitive process that, in his estimation, underlie learning: it's hard to see how it could be... Continue reading

I've been doing much research on innovation lately, which is the reason behind my sporadic posts. Today, an event of such ironic proportions occurred, that I feel that I must share it with readers. There are two US cities with chief innovation officers: San Francisco and Philadelphia. Since I'll be presenting this fall and next spring on innovation, I thought it would make good sense to reach out to these CIOs in order to learn about their roles and responsibilities, etc., so that I might share that information with school leaders. Scene One I perform a search for the Philly... Continue reading

Tom Peters wrote a great piece in yesterday's (August 27, 2012) edition of the Financial Times, "Manifesto for the new rules on human capital." Many of his points would resound with independent schools. Permit me to highlight several below. "Development of 'human capital' should always be the top priority [...]. [T]his is an inescapable imperative in an age in which imaginative brain-work is de facto the only plausible survival strategy for individual enterprises of consequence [I'd suggest "schools"]... Generic 'brain-work', the traditional and dominant white-collar activities that now employ the bulk of us, is increasingly undertaken by exponentially enhanced artificial... Continue reading

Reward behaviors, not outcomes. Think about it. Continue reading