Frustrated with the quality of political debate in this country, I have some questions: “what do fully formed, competent politicians look like? Where might we find such people? What characteristics should politicians have regardless of party affiliation? How might we identify appropriate candidates?” I say this not as a condemnation of all people currently filling […]
Avoiding a Strategy Archipelago: Pre-work for Strategic Planning
A well-constructed strategic plan, among other things is cohesive, and as I have written before in a post entitled Strategic Plans and Luxury Cars: They Look so Good on the Lot, schools create some lovely, shiny plans with muscled language and bold vision. The exercise of creating a plan–the detailed and focused process that leads […]
The Increasing Relevance of Great Schools in a Technology-Driven World
Teachers have never been more necessary for young people, for we are moving into a time when the primacy of content delivery is waning, and the role of teaching skills, such as collaboration and synthesizing disparate pieces of data are ascending.
Taking PROGRESS CULTURE and TWO, FIVE, TEN into the World
I work with leaders and faculty members at independent schools to help them frame out a process for change… I am most interested in the means–a smarter process to hold the ambition of complex schools striving to make impactful change.
Creating a Progress Culture One Pilot at a Time: An Idea Revisited Through a New Example
Today I am making a pledge to abandon that metaphor (“Abandon Ship!”) as it seems to give us a ready-made excuse for slowing down, or giving up on, priorities we have named as being mission-driven and strategic. The metaphor slows us down because it traps our thinking—it becomes an accurate metaphor because we have chosen to believe it. From now on schools are not big ships. Schools are challenging enough without having them have to be ships as well.
Differentiating Traditions From Bad Habits #tbt
It may be helpful to think of it this way: imagine that every school has a ledger that marks the long-term debt of bad habit against the revenue of tradition. My fear is that an audit of that ledger in many of our institutions might reveal that bad habits are costing us more than we choose to recognize.