EXPLO Elevate shares good ideas, practices, and wisdom to help schools and their communities flourish.
Dear Friend,
This is an interesting time of year for school leaders. Hiring. Announcing tuition for next year. Fine tuning budgets. Bringing in next year’s students. Keeping the ones you have now. Planning for next year’s big projects all against a backdrop of keeping things humming with the daily life of school. But this year the backdrop has changed with a new administration taking actions that have schools wondering about whether they will be scooped up in the broader DEI related government crackdowns. (Will participation in the school milk program be enough to pull that trigger?) Schools are reporting that donors are putting pledges on hold – at least for now. (What will happen to supply chains and the stock market?) Will the tariff’s drive more inflation and do we need to rethink the 2025-2026 budget?
As if being a school leader wasn’t already challenging...
Notes From A Gathering of Heads of School
— Moira Kelly
I recently returned home from the annual Association of Independent Schools in New England Head’s Retreat. I always find it’s a couple of days of great discussion, connection, and learning.
Language Matters: Do You Continue Saying DEI at Your School or Not? Given the changes with the new administration, the question came up more than once, “Should we stop using the term DEI and instead use something else?” I didn’t hear any talk about backing off of DEI commitments, but questions certainly swirled about using a different vocabulary.
Are You Really Leaving Problems for Future Generations to Address? I had a memorable conversation with a head about school leadership – heads and boards – avoiding the difficult and sometimes bold decisions that are needed to ensure the long term health of an institution. Instead they leave a legacy of intergenerational issues that compound and become more difficult to address over time. Far too often, I’ve heard heads or boards ask, “Why didn’t they do something about this 10 years ago? Or 20?” Dropping a campus or a division, right sizing a school, eliminating a sport, sunsetting a long held signature program or an anachronistic tradition, or saying goodbye to a toxic faculty member or a mediocre administrator, these are the kinds of things we need to summon up the courage to confront now.
Average Performance Likely Means Your Students’ Job Prospects Will Be Dim The last session of the retreat was both fascinating and dense with information, ideas, and predictions. I was furiously taking notes from Jose Antonio Bowen’s presentation, but one comment particularly stuck with me. Students who can only do average level work – which Bowen describes as AI level work – are simply going to have a hard time finding a job. AI is changing the importance of being better than average. So how do we help our students be better than average? What does that mean? How do we do it? If you haven’t checked out Bowen’s books and website, I’d recommend both. He puts forth genuinely practical advice and though there is plenty to be concerned about with the rise of AI, there is also plenty to be optimistic about.
Develop Your School’s Habits of Becoming By Ross Peters, Founding Partner, EXPLO Elevate
A central concept in all our work at EXPLO Elevate is that great schools strive to become Progress Cultures. Such a school nurtures the ongoing ability to reflect on and adjust to a changing world. In addition, this school also maintains an ability to reflect on and adjust to the evolving concept of how to serve students successfully without compromising what should always remain true about the school — its mission and values.
Fundamentally, such a school does not imagine the world will reach a new normal or stasis, but rather it creates a new normal regarding how it responds to an ever-changing world. We call the habits that Progress Culture schools develop as Habits of Becoming.
“Every board chair dreads that moment: an unexpected bombshell dropped at the end of a board meeting that threatens to derail both process and relationships.”
At Smith Academy, a K-12 suburban day school, parents and seniors have been disappointed in the college admission results for the second year in a row. Two parent trustees stop by the college counselor’s office in the fall to voice their concerns. The college counselor lets the head of school know and tells her he didn’t appreciate the drop-in but he thinks in the end the conversation went well with everyone on the same page. He doesn’t think the head needs to follow up and the head decides not to bother the board chair. Then, at the end of the next board meeting, the two parent trustees raise the issue of their conversation with the college counselor and share that they are frustrated. They propose it is time to replace the college counselor.
Read more as Julie Faulstich, Principal, Stony Creek Strategy and Moira dive into diagnosing what led to this moment and what to do.
So Why Did These Families Choose Your School? Many admission teams are reading files, making decisions, putting together aid packages, and making plans for class day visits and strategizing on increasing yield. It’s a very busy time. Good admissions operations generally do survey work to explore why admitted families choose to attend another institution. What fewer schools do is explore why families who accept their admission offers do so. Some schools wait to do this work in the fall after the new family becomes part of the community. We don’t recommend waiting that long as it can significantly skew results. The more actionable data can be collected in late spring. One school I worked with hung much of its messaging on one key selling point only to learn that not a single family found that feature particularly compelling. Yet, once students matriculated it jumped to #1. (But that doesn’t help in attracting new students.) While another school had a very different finding. Not only did admitted families not name the selling point as a key feature as to why they selected the school, but they didn’t name it once they matriculated either. Getting at this information is critical and can make the difference in coming in fully enrolled or under-enrolled.
Coaching Only Works If You Are Coachable
Executive Coaching and Leadership Coaching is now really coming into its own. Thankfully. As schools become more and more challenging to lead, what got you here isn’t likely to get you there. Furthermore, with fewer and fewer people going into education and more and more departing before retirement, there are more people coming into leadership positions light with experience and job specific skills. This is where a coach can be invaluable and it’s becoming more common for coaching to be part of hiring contracts. But...
Read more including sample questions on how to get at coachability.
Shout Out for The Disengaged Teen
If you haven’t read The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better by Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, put it on your list. (And the reading list you put out to parents.) I know Jenny from Oppi. She’s an award winning journalist (former NYT staffer) and with Rebecca, the Director for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, they’ve dug into why so many children lose their love of learning in adolescence. This is a terrific book on how to develop a generation of lifelong learners and could be a wonderful common read for faculty, boards, and parents.
Drowning Not Waving February can be a heavy month for many, yet we don’t always see others struggling. (And it doesn’t help when our culture so reveres positivity that even though you think someone is struggling they tell you with a bright smile that they are fine.) A great illustration of "you don’t understand what you’re looking at" is Stevie Smith’s short poem, Drowning Not Waving. (The link is to Smith reading the poem sounding of another age, world weary, but still amused.)
We’re already booking projects for 2025-2026. Reach out if you want to talk about how EXPLO Elevate can help. Whether it’s short term or long term coaching; strategy design and implementation; quantitative and qualitative research, data collection and analysis; or helping you sort through myriad challenges, our team can help. The best thing is to just begin a conversation with us.
Moira will be in conversation with Peter Olrich, chair of McMillan Education’s college counseling practice, discussing why the middle school years often set the stage for high school, college, and beyond. Peter is the former Director of College Counseling at Gulliver Preparatory School, Brooks School, and The Bay School of San Francisco. Peter is a warm and wise educator and advisor through and through.
Will you be in Nashville at NAIS Thrive later this month? Julie Faulstich and Moira will be presenting on the complex dance between heads and boards at 11a on Friday, February 28. Moira will be in Nashville starting the 25th as part of a panel for ICAISA. Reach out and let’s find a time to connect!
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