EXPLO Elevate shares good ideas, practices, and wisdom to help schools and their communities flourish.
Dear Friend,
The end of the school year can bring forth strong emotions and opinions about someone’s impact on an institution whether that’s a retiring head or a faculty member leaving for another school. That’s why we recommend reading Ned Hallowell’s Who Do They Think You Are? Transference in the Teaching Life to help sort through how reasonable people can see things so very differently. (Thanks to NAIS for allowing us to republish.) If you’ve attended board meetings – or you’d like to in the future – altitude agreements are a useful tool to change the dynamics of board meetings. Ross writes about when to foreshadow – and when not to – in order to make strategic progress. We look at anxious parents + kids and overparenting. We tap into some AI news that sounds a bit like the foreshadowing of Skynet and Terminator. Current website data analytic tracking will soon undergo a dramatic change as websites will be visited by AI agents more than people. This has big implications on how successful websites will be built and what data should be tracked. And some recommendations on educating yourself around generative AI and angenic agents. (You need to put aside some time to experiment this summer.)
Strategic Choices: Foreshadowing and Not Foreshadowing
By Ross Peters
In an era of genuine disruption, school leaders face a critical strategic challenge: when to carefully prepare their communities for change through foreshadowing, and when to act decisively without extensive consultation. Ross explores how effective foreshadowing builds essential buy-in for major initiatives, while recognizing that some moments demand bold, immediate action to maintain momentum and demonstrate resolve.
The Altitude Problem: Why Smart Boards and Heads Still Talk Past One Another
By Moira Kelly
Too many independent school boards and heads find themselves stuck in meetings where strategic discussions get bogged down in operational details, or where trustees lack context to make informed governance decisions. One way to address this common problem is to approach board meeting discussion through an altitude lens. Learn how explicit agreements made before each board meeting about the purpose and altitude of each discussion can transform board-head partnerships, creating more effective meetings and clearer role boundaries.
A recent study of 200,000 mothers found a sharp decline in the self-reported mental health of mothers ranging from the parents of newborns all the way up to age 17 and across all socioeconomic groups. Could a contributing factor to this decline be overparenting? My friend and fellow independent school board member Meredith Elkins has some thoughts. Meredith is a licensed clinical psychologist and co-program director of the McLean Anxiety Master Program at McLean Hospital, which serves young people with anxiety and OCD. Meredith speaks with Kara Baskin of the Boston Globe about what she is seeing and how parental accommodation is harming kids and parents.
Meredith and I have had a number of conversations about overparenting, kids, anxiety, and what’s needed to help kids build independence and resilience. One organization we both think is doing terrific work in this area is Let Grow — When Adults Step Back, Kids Step Up. They’ve got some great resources for parents and schools.
Daria Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the company producing the blackmailing AI, predicts 50% of entry-level white collar jobs will be eliminated in the next five years. Who knows if his prediction will be true, but even if he’s off by half, that’s still a lot of entry level job losses. No doubt there will be new types of jobs created, but we’re talking massive disruption. If entry level positions are eliminated, how does one develop the skills and gain the experience to be a senior level something?
I ran across the following graphics as part of a larger report on AI. They paint a picture of AI’s trajectory and can be useful to help prompt conversations around imagining different futures. If the future will look quite different, how will your school meet the change?
Slides from Bond Cap Report: Trends – Artificial Intelligence, May ‘25
If all this has your head spinning, I recommend diving into Eric Hudson’s excellent summer playlist of resources on generative AI.
Finally, the future of websites is changing. Just as you were wrapping your head around conversion rates, SEO, and session duration, understand that you now need to be thinking about how you will optimize for AI. Shelley Palmer lays out where things are going.
I recently returned from England where I became fairly adept at not only driving on the left, but driving down one lane farm roads with oncoming traffic. I learned to pull up close to hedgerows (amazing things) and to back up for long distances. The first couple of days driving were a bit nervewracking, but once I got the hang of it, we found ourselves eschewing highways and taking roads less traveled. While at one country house, we saw a regal and aloof black swan – aloof until he glided past me, looked at himself in my patent clogs, then jumped out of the water and started pecking at my feet. I’ve written about handling black swans of the Nassim Taleb variety, I just never imagined I’d be defending myself from an actual feather clad version.
We’re in the midst of booking board and leadership retreats for late summer and early fall. We’re kicking off strategy work and scheduling this summer with a number of schools. Reach out to see if there’s a way we can help your community move forward and perhaps take a path less traveled.
The Dean’s Roundtable annual conference June 23-26, 2025 at New England Innovation Academy. EXPLO Elevate Senior Consultant, David Torcoletti will be a keynote speaker and is on the faculty for the new dean pre-conference.
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