Leadership

A collection of 29 posts

Interviews Featured

Effective Leadership

In this episode, Dr. White discusses the challenges of being a leader, the importance of education for underserved communities, how competition improves school performance and gives insight into teacher shortages.

Interviews

🔎 Really Understand Who You Are Serving, with Jinal Jhaveri

In this episode, we talk about Jinal's lessons growing Schoolmint, how he channeled the tailwinds of the school choice movements, and what his experience can offer for schools today.

Leadership

Parents Are Asking About Your Maths & English Programs

Parents have become more skeptical than ever about schools' ability to recover and supercharge math and English skills in large classrooms.

Interviews

Full-stack, deep learning that feels like an emoji shower 🎉🎉

A coach appears as the governor of Wisconsin, a task force is put on a major water problem. Is it a classroom or a Hollywood set? Kids get clues and reports. Curiosity and motivation kick in. They launch a PR campaign, a budget...oh, and hit all their learning goals as well.

Interviews

Product-Teacher-Family Fit, With Brian Tobal, CEO SchoolHouse

"The founding principle is that the teacher's attention is the most valuable piece in the educational brew or ecosystem. If you really want to have a high quality educational experience, you'd increase the amount of teacher attention that each child is receiving." - Brian Tobal

Leadership

Tom Vander Ark - Quotes and Thoughts

Tom is the CEO of Getting Smart, a learning design firm and one of the leading voices in the upcoming education revolution. I first came across Tom on Twitter [https://twitter.com/tvanderark], where he is very active. This encounter led me to become a loyal reader of the Getting

Leadership

For School Leaders, Loftier Goals are Easier to Accomplish

We're taught that hard goals are hard and easy goals are easy. Having worked with 300+ schools, I can tell you that this is not the case in the world of education. > We've observed time and again that school leaders with loftier goals succeed more

Leadership

School Leaders, Burnout and Wellbeing

It was 6 am, and I had boarded the plane feeling grumpy and cold due to lack of sleep. "Hopefully, Houston will be sunny," I thought to myself. It would give me a short break from this year's dreadfully long winter in New York!🌵🌞 As I

Leadership

How to Run a Balanced Scorecard Workshop For Your School's Leadership Team

The Balanced Scorecard is a workshop for establishing high-level strategic goals and metrics by which to monitor your school’s progress. It serves as a great team building activity for your school's leadership team. When done correctly, you end up with an action plan that’s fully aligned

Leadership

The Best School Leaders Believe in Themselves Almost to the Point of Delusion

Jim Collins once said that "a big secret among effective leaders is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising amount of the time —most leaders don’t even try, and end up accepting that things are the way they are." Self-belief is tremendously powerful.

Leadership

Tune up Your School

You are the first to arrive. You hook up your laptop and prepare to lead your typical Monday management meeting. Your staff starts arriving one by one whispering hesitantly an excuse for being late under their breath. Eventually, you've got everyone around the table, and you start 12

Leadership

The 3 Horizons of School Growth

Most school heads we talk to are seeking, recurring, healthy, organic growth. We've worked with schools that were consistently able to grow their enrollment and improve their financial standing year over year. Through extensive research and analytics, we've identified one fundamental framework that can explain a

Leadership

How to Prepare Your School for Continuous Change

The world of education requires us to evolve more quickly and significantly than ever before. Despite the pressure to change we've found that schools are not getting any better changing. Only 12% of K-12 schools who embark on a transformation program fully achieve their intended outcomes. In today&

Leadership

How Great Schools Align, Streamline Their Strategy, Stay Centered and Accomplish Extraordinary Results

Back in late 2015, I was visiting Mary Kay down in New Orleans to help her out with enrollment growth. She'd gone through three years of steady enrollment declines and had hired us to reverse the trend. We were helping her to boost enrollment using our signature digital

Leadership

School Entrepreneurship and Traffic Lights

I woke up at 6.30am. The rain was rattling against the shutters. My wife was sound asleep; it was my turn to take my son to school. I managed to wake him with the promise of warm porridge and dried grapes. We ate, we got dressed, and we were

Leadership

Time Management Tips

My top 3 time management habits (easy to follow with huge payoff): 1. Writing my top three priorities on a post-it each morning and sticking it to the back of my cell phone. 2. Throwing out my todo list. Placing every task directly into my calendar forces me to think

Leadership

How To Develop Effective School Leaders

Telling principals that leadership drives school performance is a bit like saying that we need oxygen to breathe. Over 40 percent of schools are preparing to increase investment in leadership development across the country. Most schools see leadership as the single most important human-capital issue they face. And they’re

Leadership

Why the Wellbeing of the School Head Matters

It can be easy to put the needs of others before your own when you're the School Head. Teachers, staff, students, parents, and board members all need your attention and care, and it feels like there are never enough hours in a day. Research proves that the well-being

Leadership

The Kaizen Way to School Growth

Over hundreds of interactions I've had with some of our nation's best schools, I've found that one of the most persistent challenges faced by school leaders is determining how best to grow their enrollment.  The quest for growth is never-ending. This is because every

Leadership

Breathing New Life Into Your School

Sitting in his brown upholstered rickety chair, Victor was letting the phone ring while he was deep in his thoughts... exhausted and overwhelmed. He was eating “lunch” (a granola bar) at 4:30 pm. Victor is a Brazilian Christian,  tall with cocoa skin, thick brown hair and brown eyes. Having

Growing Enrollment

From Day 1 to Day 30...In A Newly Created School Marketing Role

I will share the step-by-step process that Jane followed in her first 30 days. She won over her school head, created a powerful marketing engine and gained 12 new students during the 2017/18 school year.

Growing Enrollment

9 Ways To Get Your Colleagues' Buy-in In Growing Your School

1. Start by sharing your own struggles with the issue. Talk from the heart. 2. Demonstrate the impact of enrollment and/or attrition in numbers: use a whiteboard or graphs to walk them through graduating numbers, attrition rates, new student numbers, and how these impact revenue and costs.📊 3. Research

Leadership

Leap Afraid and Gather Your Courage on the Way Down

She'd bitten off more than she could chew. She decided she'd quit two weeks into her pregnancy. Raised money on maternity leave. Taking her baby with her on fundraising tours. Six months after opening the school, she was pregnant again. Her lisp never stopped her either.

Leadership

How To Run Your School Like a Startup

When researching for my thesis a while back, I analyzed more than 230 school leaders to reveal the main behaviors that explain how certain teams deliver higher  enrollment growth than others. I found that four key methods explain an astonishing 72% of the higher enrollment performance among leaders in the

Leadership

Do You Remember Your First 12 Months As Principal?

Following a 17-year teaching career, Mia Cochrae had just accepted a Principal position. Confident and optimistic, she would later understand how naive she was. She was a child of immigrants. She was the first in her family that went to college. She was also the first to become a teacher