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

Dear Friend,

Some ideas need time to settle before they're ready to share. These past few weeks have given me plenty to chew on — from a day of generative thinking about the future of high school in Denver, to redwood forests and a regenerative ranch in Northern California, to a conversation with a head of school in New Jersey who pulled a binder out of her bag and reminded me why we do this work. Here’s where the thinking has taken me.

School Design, Regenerative Farming and Schools, and Institutional Research

A few weeks ago I found myself in Denver, where Roberto D'Erizans, Head of School at International School of Denver (ISD), hosted what he called a High School of the Future Design Day. ISD is expanding — adding a high school to its Pre-K–8 program — and rather than keeping the conversation inside the building, Roberto threw the doors open. Faculty, board members, and parents were joined by people from industry, higher education, and nonprofits. Student input was included. Because this high school is being built from scratch, the constraints on thinking were few, and that freedom was contagious. By the end of the day, something remarkable had happened: a roomful of people with very different vantage points had found significant alignment on what this school could be and how it could work. (You can learn more about how the ISD board jumped on the opportunity to acquire a new campus in Seizing a Rare Opportunity During Transition and Uncertainty from the latest issue of Independent School magazine.)

I left Denver thinking about the rest of us — those of us who are not building something from the ground up, but who are stewards of places that need regular reinvention to stay vital. What would it look like to build a cadence of asking What could our future be? — not as a crisis response, not just as part of strategic planning cycles, but as a regular practice? Schools that develop the muscles of adaptation now will be far better positioned to thrive in a world that keeps shifting beneath our feet.

From Denver I headed to San Francisco, where I met my husband and we drove north into a different kind of thinking altogether. We walked through redwood forests, sat at the edge of the Pacific, and spent a few days on a regenerative ranch. Watching what intentional stewardship can do to land that has been depleted — coaxing life back into exhausted soil, restoring balance to something that had been pushed past its limits — I couldn't stop drawing parallels to school. Too many of our institutions carry the marks of the relentless extraction that defines industrial farming: optimizing for output, narrowing what counts as valuable, wearing down the very people and purposes at the heart of the enterprise. The good news is that regeneration is possible — in farmland and in schools — but it requires a different kind of attention and a willingness to ask serious questions about what we've been doing and why. I wrote more about this in Bringing the Fields Back to Life.

After California, I headed to New Jersey to work with the board and staff of NJAIS — the New Jersey Association of Independent Schools — a group doing some terrific thinking about their organization's future. In a conversation with one of the heads of school there, I was wonderfully surprised when she reached into her bag and pulled out a binder that contained our publication on how to build a research capability at your school. She called it an invaluable resource. It was a good reminder that some ideas have a longer shelf life than we realize, and it felt like the right moment to bring that piece back around for those who haven't seen it yet.

Starting an Institutional Research Function at Your School

Two Teachers, A Salad Bar, and a Better Schedule

Redesigning schedules is one area our team is familiar with and we have seen clearly how schedules can work against the very things you claim you value. Our friend and former colleague, Dave Hamilton, now teaching at Tenacre Country Day School, has done a brilliant job writing about what it looks like when students are excited and engaged and how two teachers have figured out a way to help each other make that happen more often.

Stewarding the Board by Focusing on Engagement

Ross is just back from San Francisco and a string of board retreats and that had him thinking about keeping boards engaged. He takes a dive into board stewardship in, Engaged and Ready, Not Bored and Outmatched: Stewarding the Board.

Redesigning High Schools for Reengagement and (Re)Enrollment

The Yass Prize has been called the Pulitzer for schools. We’re currently working with a Yass Prize winning school to help redesign two of their career pathways to become more experiential and to transition them into microschools that will remain embedded within the current school. This school is engaged in the very work that Tyton Partners examines in High School Redesign as a Catalyst to Reengagement and (Re)Enrollment. This new research backed report focuses on public education, but is an important read for independent school leaders. More public schools are taking on serious redesign efforts to reinvent their offerings to better sustain themselves in the market. From the report: 

… the examples highlighted above share a common approach: They treat redesign as coordinated, execution-driven work rather than a series of isolated innovations. They focus on aligning to market needs, building coherence across initiatives, preparing operations for change, improving and nurturing the student experience, and making outcomes visible and measurable.

Importantly, they do not do this alone. Successful efforts often rely on partners… While an appetite for innovation is a crucial first step to redesign, sustained commitment to execution, backed by leadership and the capacity to follow through, drives enduring impact over both student outcomes and system-wide enrollment.

Reach out to see how EXPLO Elevate might support you in creating the conditions for reinvention, redesign, and sustained execution. 

Acting Out Because It’s Easier to be Mad than Sad

And finally, because it’s that time of year – the final weeks of school – we’re bringing back the classic and ever popular piece by David Torcoletti, Better Mad than Sad. Some great insights into what is happening in your community and why students might be saying hurtful things these days because they don’t know how to manage their full hearts.

Onward to June.

Good luck with this full and lovely final stretch of the school year.

Moira

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