EXPLO Elevate shares good ideas, practices, and wisdom to help
schools and their communities flourish.

Dear Friend,

This month we’ve got a bit of everything. What you deliver versus what families need. They should align, but there are far too many schools where they don’t. Is your mission up to its work? (And what is its work?) Bringing more student voices into strategy development. Job crafting. A case for assessment ruining teaching. A remarkable masters scholarship opportunity. And introducing our newest Elevate colleague.

The Gap: What You Deliver and What Families Need

Declining enrollment is rarely about your website, marketing budget, or competitors' facilities. It's usually about something harder to name: the gap between what you deliver and what families actually need. Elevate’s Senior Consultant, John Barrengos takes a dive into this subject with The (Only) Equation That Matters: What You Deliver vs. What Families Need.

At the NAIS Annual Conference, John and Michael Peller, Head of Vermont Academy, are leading "Dancing Near the Precipice"—sharing diagnostic frameworks that help school leaders face this reality with honesty and courage. We hope to see you there.

Why Student Voices Belong at Your Strategy Table

There's an irony at the heart of independent school strategic planning: the people who understand most viscerally what the school is and isn't delivering — the students — are too often not genuinely invited into the conversation. Schools spend considerable energy teaching young people to think critically, identify problems, and articulate solutions, then don’t bring them into the heart of the most important institutional dialogue. Ross examines the contradiction.

What Is The Job of a Mission Statement?

Is your mission statement working? What does that mean? I took a dive into these questions and others in What Is the Job of a Mission Statement?

What Is Job Crafting and Why Does It Matter?

At a recent staff meeting, we explored a research round up from The Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship at the University of Michigan called What is Job Crafting and Why Does it Matter?, and then discussed whether any of us had experience job crafting, how to do it, and why it’s important for it to be a win for the employee and the organization. This exercise had me thinking that in this era of high faculty attrition and challenging faculty recruiting, it’s a topic you might want to visit.

Is Assessment Ruining Teaching?

According to Andrew Davinack, “Assessment is no longer merely a tool for evaluating learning. It is becoming an infrastructure that reshapes what learning is allowed to be.” Davinack is not shunning assessment, but is raising questions about the nature of how we assess, learn, and teach. His article strikes me as a good short read for senior leadership and department meetings.

We Have Been Lied To

Russell John Cailey has a gift for exposing the assumptions we never knew we were making. In a recent piece on the British school invasion in the Middle East, I found myself nodding at the following. 

We have been lied to that education is about content. It is about character. We have been lied to that school is about exams. It is about learning to be human in the company of other humans. We have been lied to that a good school is one that produces good grades. A good school is one that produces good people, people who can listen, resolve conflict, give and receive feedback, approach confrontation with courage, take accountability, and express empathy. These are not soft skills. In a world where machines handle the hard ones, these are the only skills.

Full Scholarship, Master’s Program in Character Education

I’m increasingly becoming more and more convinced that character development is something we need to focus on more at schools. In the fall, I was at a gathering hosted by the Kern Foundation where we heard from Prof. James Arthur, OBE, the founder of the Jubilee Centre (University of Birmingham, UK), a world-leading pioneering interdisciplinary research hub focusing on character, virtues and values in the interest of human flourishing. Kern is underwriting a full-scholarship for a Master of Arts in Character Education at the Centre. It’s a three year part-time, online program enabling those in full- or part-time employment to study alongside professional responsibilities. The eligibility criteria includes being a citizen or permanent resident of the U.S. and living and working in the U.S. This is an extraordinary opportunity that you can learn more about here. 

Announcing Lindsay Whitman, the newest member of the EXPLO Elevate Team

After working on a variety of projects with Lindsay over the past year, I’m thrilled that she is joining us full-time. Lindsay brings 20+ years of experience in strategic planning, market analysis, and go-to-market strategy across both for-profit and non-profit education organizations. She has identified millions of dollars in growth opportunities for a range of clients through rigorous market segmentation and product/service market fit analysis. She's worked with K-12 curriculum providers, postsecondary publishers, foundations, schools, associations, and higher ed institutions on everything from equity-centered grant-making to product/service development strategy. 

Lindsay earned her MBA from Cornell and has deep expertise in using data to gain actionable insights to inform decision-making. She’s led cross-functional teams at Harvard and Pearson. Lindsay’s already jumped into Elevate projects and we couldn’t be more excited to have her expand her role with the team.

The Olympics and the 46th Anniversary of the Miracle on Ice

Today is the wrap up of the 2026 Winter Olympic games and the 46th anniversary of the ”Miracle on Ice” hockey game where the U.S. beat the Soviet Union, 4-3. I vividly remember watching that game with my siblings on a small black and white TV with rabbit ears. We didn’t have great reception living in a very rural area on the Canadian border, but it was good enough for us to follow the amazing upset of the professional hockey players of the Soviet Union by a bunch of young amateurs from the U.S.. I’m not sure the bed on which we sat while we watched the game was ever the same again. The last two minutes were amazing. Take a look.

Ross, John and I are soon to hop on flights to Seattle for the NAIS Thrive conference. Ross and John are presenting. (Ross with Dr. Damian Kavanaugh. The DEFCON Scale for Independent Schools: Strategic Response Through Clarity.) I hope we’ll see you there. Reach out and let’s find some time to chat. Many of you have been readers for some time and we’ve never met. Let’s rectify that in Seattle.

Moira

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