“By defining the key attributes and competencies needed for transformative leadership, the Portrait provides a resource to guide professional growth and as a foundation for targeted training programs. By embedding the Portrait attributes into key areas of organizational strategic planning — such as professional development, recruitment and succession planning — organizations can cultivate a sustainable leadership […]
“Leadership can often be equal parts high confidence and self-esteem and worrying if you’re doing it right while continually searching for answers. Whether you’re a leader in an organizational setting or have high influence in some other capacity, improving your leadership begins with a focus on what you’re already good at.”
“First, warring factions must agree that some polarizing conflicts are “wicked problems,” which don’t have any easy solutions. A wicked problem is a tug-of-war between competing priorities and values… Second, school systems hurting from polarization need leaders who can skillfully listen and mediate conflicts… Moving opposing viewpoints into the groan zone is a messy process. […]
“What people tell us when they do this is that they often have never just sat with a student for 40 minutes and deeply listened to them about their experience and about what they want. That’s the first thing they say. The second thing they say is, “I cannot unhear what I just heard. When […]
“In honor of Thanksgiving in the U.S., we wanted to share a curated selection of our Management Tips on how to show gratitude and appreciation at work. We hope you find the advice useful at any time of year.”
“We are offering up ideas, strategies, new tools, fresh ways to fine-tune and improve and grow and it is all so well-intended, but to an overwhelmed teacher who is trying desperately to just keep their head above water, it’s like trying to drink from a firehose. The message ends up getting reduced down to one […]
“The goal of the final product of the work, Data-Informed Decision Making: A Guide to Institutional Research in Independent Schools, is to show the possibilities and value institutional research offers and to provide tools for the intrepid institutional researchers who are looking to grow their own skills and to foster their community’s Data Culture.”
“Reviewed 13 evaluations of comprehensive reform efforts, identified the features of the models evaluated, and categorized them to create a high school reform framework that can be generally applied. The authors hope that school and district leaders can compare their current efforts with the framework to identify how they might refine or augment those efforts.”
“If the system has to be fixed, and we can’t fix the system by adding to it, then the logical place to start is with subtraction. We need to look closely at our schools and figure out everything that we don’t need to be doing anymore. We need to find as many things as possible that we […]
“Authenticity is being true to yourself, and transparency is sharing that truth through words, behaviors and actions. Highly trusted companies tend to be radically transparent.”
“No matter what a school’s ultimate culture goal, given what we have all been through over the past two years, I would suggest that nurturing a caring culture is job one. This will ensure that as you build toward the future, you are building on a foundation of trust. Some of the middle five groups outlined above […]
“Bosses in previous generations, he says, tended to be excellent individual contributors who were promoted to management positions so they could teach teams… The changing job description of a boss and increased expectations from workers means a different type of employee will be considered management material. Those with highly developed social abilities, including “the capacity […]
“Feedback structure is often thought of as the cliched “feedback sandwich.” Not only is this not a particularly useful model, but consistently delivering positive and negative feedback at the same time may cause the key message to be missed. And it does not necessarily improve the likelihood of driving behavior change, which is the goal […]
““The Kalven Report” remains one of the most important statements describing the purpose and mission of universities, and by implication, all institutions committed to learning… It advances an argument for what the drafting committee called “neutrality” in political and social action. In order to protect mission—the “discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge” —educational institutions, the […]
“Over the past forty years, factors associated with raising a school’s academic profile include: teachers’ consistent focus on academic standards and frequent assessment of student learning, a serious school-wide climate toward learning, district support, and parental participation. Recent research also points to the importance of mobilizing teachers and the community to move in the same direction, building trust among […]
“In 2021, schools have the opportunity to stop initiatives that either no longer fit strategically or that are distractions from core work. Schools will decide if/how to keep pandemic changes as part of larger strategic goals, such as rethinking schedules, allowing for remote work, shifting grading and assessment practices, later start times, etc. Schools will make time […]
“Organizing schools in discipline-based classes that go for 45 minutes where quizzes and test assess understanding every so often works well when you’re focused on knowledge. But skills and competencies are fundamentally different. They require different contexts, different structures. Cultivating creativity, collaborative problem-solving, self-directed learning, empathy, can largely only happen effectively in rich, complex contexts […]
“The structure of these groups is key. Members say the hour goes by quickly, is energizing, and leaves them feeling inspired to enact concrete ideas. This is all because of the components that go into the Mastermind. While the structure we use is simple and predictable, the effects are powerful. The power comes from a […]
“Currently nearing the end of its second school year, this high school is the end product of a group of brave, forward-thinking educators who saw what education could be, and instead of trying to work within the system, asked themselves, “Why don’t we just build it?””
“[These leaders] learned how to work together with others who have different backgrounds and different ways of thinking, and they emphasized collaborating together to lead their business despite all their differences.”
“It’s being secure enough in your strengths to acknowledge your weaknesses. Having enough faith in your knowledge to recognize your ignorance. Being so determined to get it right that you’re willing to admit when you’re wrong.”
“Many schools will keep online learning offerings, and a few will invest in these programs in a big way. Some will move to online parent-teacher conferences held on a more frequent basis. Others will have a group of teachers and staff who are full-time remote and possibly part-time. Some will run virtual classes for some students, […]
“Pottinger’s White House experience has made him acutely aware of what he calls “the fading art of leadership.” It’s not a failure of one party or another; it’s more of a generational decline of good judgment. “The élites think it’s all about expertise,” he said. It’s important to have experts, but they aren’t always right: […]
“The contents of this “playbook” are the result of an eight week effort during May-June of 2020 to inform a subset of CIP’s return-to-school planning… This document provides… A compendium of case studies, research, and expert perspectives meant to inform and support CIP’s thinking regarding select elements of its return-to-school planning; A snapshot in time […]
“For many companies, the only option is to accelerate their digital transformation. That means moving from active experimentation to active scale-up supported by ongoing testing and continuous improvement. These moves should happen across two dimensions: at the core of the company and through the development of new businesses.”
“Scientific evidence is not the only source of knowledge nor is it the source of knowledge that always holds high ground in decision-making. Two other important kinds of knowledge are what might best be labeled craft knowledge and moral knowledge. Craft knowledge stems from the understanding gathered over time by practitioners, including through stories, ad […]
“To answer the question, “What are the mindsets and practices of excellent CEOs?,” we started with the six main elements of the CEO’s job—elements touched on in virtually all literature about the role: setting the strategy, aligning the organization, leading the top team, working with the board, being the face of the company to external […]
“This pattern extends beyond music and sports. Students who have to specialize earlier in their education — picking a pre-med or law track while still in high school — have higher earnings than their generalist peers at first, according to one economist’s research in several countries. But the later-specializing peers soon caught up… The early […]
“Colleges and universities are increasingly turning to CRMs to track the life cycle of their engagement with students—from initial marketing outreach to financial aid, applications, enrollment, course registration, retention, alumni and donor relationships.”
“As one learns about so-called liberal arts institutions today, one swiftly encounters a wide range of aspirations, many of which have little to do with academic or even cognitive aspirations. Colleges are expected to produce good citizens; kind and empathic human beings; happy persons who are self-realized; individuals who want to lead the world, change […]
“Isolated examples of professional learning based on individual educator needs are a poor substitute for engaging teachers in ongoing collaborative learning that draws on their expertise to examine student data and design learning agendas that benefit everyone in the school… when teachers or schools have too much control over PD decisions, there tends to not […]
Only one leadership personality, the architect, delivers sustained improvement—by balancing all four roles. In the words of the researchers, they’re insightful, humble, visionary leaders who believe schools fail because they’re poorly designed, so they work with teachers to develop a collaborative school vision and engage directly in professional learning, coaching, mentoring, and peer collaboration.”
The seven tenets of globally competent school leaders fall under four domains: (1) vision setting, (2) pedagogy and practice, (3) situated action, and (4) systems and structures. These domains reflect general best practices of educational leadership, while recognizing the ways in which one’s local professional context is interconnected to a broader global environment.”
“Our purpose in sharing this report is to spur much-needed dialogue about the shift to competency-based education and how that shift can be done in ways that advance equity, ensure teachers have the tools they need, and open up new opportunities for truly effective high school learning. There are no prescriptions here. Instead, we hope […]
“When it comes to developing strategy in a rapidly changing world, it’s no longer enough to just make a plan and stick to it; organizations instead need to learn to set a direction and make adaptations to it.”
“Our next step is to work together to create a written record for what happened, why, its impact, how the issue was mitigated or resolved, and what we’ll do to prevent the incident from recurring.”
“In general, higher education institutions have sound and rigorous processes for known, incremental, and precedent-setting change. What they lack is a valued parallel process for true bottom-up experimentation when the outcomes are unknown.”
The source of the trouble is that when people are judged by performance metrics they are incentivised to do what the metrics measure, and what the metrics measure will be some established goal. But that impedes innovation, which means doing something not yet established, indeed that hasn’t even been tried out. Innovation involves experimentation. And […]
“What I mean by my above claim is that knowledge work management cannot stop at the boundary of the black box: providing workers only shared objectives and the tools/information needed to act on these objectives. It must also consider what occurs inside the box — setting up cultures, workflows, and environments optimized to help the […]
“Policies aimed at standardizing classroom practice seldom produce homogeneous lessons.”
Our research has repeatedly shown a concrete link between having a best friend at work and the amount of effort employees expend in their job. For example, women who strongly agree they have a best friend at work are more than twice as likely to be engaged (63%) compared with the women who say otherwise […]
Reflexive feedback conversations involve both parties in talking, listening, reflecting, and taking action. The idea of reflexivity, which comes from the social sciences, suggests a two-way street—a feedback relationship that runs in both directions. Leaders who use reflexive feedback are more effective at changing teacher practice because they’re willing and able change things other than the teacher, in […]
We are certainly obsessed with innovation — there’s this rather nebulously defined yet insistent demand that we all somehow do more of it and sooner… We should question this myth of the speed of technological change and adoption (and by myth I don’t mean lie; I mean story that is unassailably true) if it’s going […]
Much like colleges and universities, costs at independent schools have grown as they provide more services and amenities. Micro-schools seek to trim expenses in ways easier to do as a smaller, nimbler operation. They may rent a storefront, for example, rather than maintain a campus. They can hire fewer faculty who would wear more hats, […]
I’m working on a quarter that is going to happen in 2020, not next quarter. Next quarter, for all practical purposes, is done already and it’s probably been done for a couple of years, and so if you start to think that way it changes how you spend your time, how you plan, where you […]
Behavioral science has identified four discrete accountability mechanisms: evaluation, identifiability, reason-giving, and the mere presence of another. Good professional accountability practices will employ all four behavioral mechanisms, though in various ways. Consider the practice of medicine: Doctors must pass a series of exams to be certified for practice (evaluation); board certifications for specializations are publicly […]
My sons are avid soccer players, so I spend a lot of time watching the “beautiful game.” The thing that makes it beautiful is not leadership, though an excellent coach is essential. Nor is it the swoosh of the ball in the goal, though winning is noisily celebrated. It is instead the intricate ballet of […]
Of course, not all conformity is bad. But to be successful and evolve, organizations need to strike a balance between adherence to the formal and informal rules that provide necessary structure and the freedom that helps employees do their best work… Let’s look at the three main, and interrelated, reasons why we so often conform […]
After decades of strengths research, Gallup understands how leaders of top strengths-based organizations help their companies achieve the best outcomes. Here are their key strategies…”
Throughout the board’s extended discussions, several messages resonated. One trustee pointed out that we should not look at a tuition freeze as a cost, but rather as a forgone revenue opportunity, and that we should realize that raising tuition has a cost as well — a more restricted applicant pool.”
Managers need to know that working to get one woman or minority considered for a position might be futile, because the odds are likely slim if they are the lone woman or nonwhite candidate. But if managers can change the status quo of the finalist pool by including two women, then the women have a […]
Van Haren often uses shadowing as a way to dig into data she may have come across in a different format. For example, she noticed that on the most recent student survey, Asian and Pacific Islander students reported very low levels of belonging to the school community. That concerned her, so for her shadow day […]
Leaders, moreover, used to command; now they suggest. Conceptually, at least, leadership and power have been decoupled. In 1927, Personnel Journal cited an expert who defined leadership as “the ability to impress the will of the leader on those led and induce obedience, respect, loyalty, and cooperation.” But after the Second World War the concept […]
First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had […]
More than eight in 10 of the nation’s chief K-12 education leaders say that student engagement with classwork, their hope for the future and the percentage of them who graduate from high school are very important measures of a public school’s effectiveness… Superintendents are less likely to highly prioritize the paths students take after high […]
These schools are moving out of the “getting-the-technology-to-work” phase and beginning to think deeply about the best ways to support student achievement. They are running their own internal evaluations of edtech effectiveness, training teachers on emerging best practices, exploring better ways to put data in the hands of teachers and students, and consolidating all their […]
Are you counting on your high-achieving student body, challenging curriculum, and learning- conducive environment to continue to attract families to your school? …In every case, there is a cheaper, and often more innovative, educational alternative out there… We have defined and focused this report on four major categories of educational choice options for families: Academically […]
Hunches make people over-confident. But if the hunch runs in the opposite direction to everyone else’s certainties, then over-confidence can be a strength… It’s not as if data solve the over-confidence problem, anyway. Indeed, they can exacerbate it, especially when people get hooked on the wrong measures… The hunch and the data can educate one […]
the school’s principal… challenged a few members of the student council to find someone completely different from them—to ensure that the group had broad representation—and to bring those students to a series of lunchtime meetings. When the students arrived, [he] distributed copies of the survey and asked them to find a problem and come up […]
“Sharing information and creating strong horizontal relationships improves the effectiveness of everything from businesses to governments to cities. His research suggests that the collective intelligence of groups and communities has little to do with the intelligence of their individual members and much more to do with the connections between them.”
The status of teaching depends on the knowledge base and its acquisition by teachers… There’s an inverse relationship between our ability to produce well-informed, thoughtful, objective teachers and our intention, as a society, to micromanage their work. The more we entrust the people in the schools the more we’re willing to give them the collective […]
Somewhere between the tiny vision of innovation and the arrogance of grand progress lies a vision of collective destiny and confidence that with the right investments, a strong consensus, and patience we can generate a more just and stable world. We passed right by that point in the rush from the 20th to the 21st […]
Pioneering efforts… to expand noncognitive development fall into four broad categories: collaborations between researchers and teachers; professional development for teachers; systemic reforms in school districts; and complementary efforts between in-school and after-school or expanded-learning time. Some initiatives are primarily in service of developing students’ social and emotional competence, while others aim to build academic mindsets […]
“[Growth] required figuring out what a modern Lego should even be, which Knudstorp accomplished in part by investing in a kind of research the company had never done before—deep ethnographic studies of how kids around the world really play. Today, Lego may know as much about that subject as any organization on earth.”
“When someone hatches an original idea, it may be ungainly and poorly defined, but it is also the opposite of established and entrenched—and that is precisely what is most exciting about it. If, while in this vulnerable state, it is exposed to naysayers who fail to see its potential or lack the patience to see […]
“Vision… Culture… Transparency… System-wide alignment.”
“There must be ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness… If a single individual present is unsympathetic to the foolishness that would be bound to go on at such a session, the others would freeze. The unsympathetic individual may be a gold mine of information, but the harm he does will more than compensate […]
“To be nimble and innovative, part of the key is pushing decision authority as low as possible (but not lower). What’s as low as possible? That’s going to change from situation to situation. But the key is acknowledging that the more senior you make your decision makers, the more waste you’ll require of those looking […]
“When people were treated as though they were working together they: persisted 48 to 64 percent longer on a challenging task, reported more interest in the task, became less tired by having to persist on the task… became more engrossed in the task and performed better on it, and finally, when people were encouraged to […]
“Seeing the problem through another discipline’s lenses gives one the permission to think outside the norms and boundaries of one’s own… In most large organizations, this is a fundamental challenge. Coming out of your functional silo to roll up your sleeves with colleagues from another one is often an exercise in defensive posturing, rather than […]
“While these reformers talk a lot about markets and competition, the essence of a good education — bringing together talented teachers, engaged students and a challenging curriculum — goes undiscussed. Business does have something to teach educators, but it’s neither the saving power of competition nor flashy ideas like disruptive innovation. Instead, what works are […]
“Graduates who said they had a mentor who encouraged my hopes and dreams, professors who cared about me and at least one prof who made me excited about learning are three times more likely to be thriving and twice as likely to be engaged at work.”
“Paradoxically, in spite of the seemingly endless resources, innovation inside of an existing company is much harder than inside a startup. That’s because existing companies face a conundrum: Every policy and procedure that makes them efficient execution machines stifles innovation.”
“When people really get a chance to think, to have the space… they can quite easily discern between the things that are essential to them and those that are not. The problem is not our ability to discern, it’s that we don’t have the space to take the time to discern.”