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

Dear Friend,

A couple of weeks ago I met up with a school leader I hadn’t seen in a long time. We caught up on each other’s lives and ended up having one of those winding, provocative, and sparky conversations about what school could be. We parted more hopeful, inspired and energized. It had me thinking that we all should have a regular cadence of these types of conversations.

In this edition we explore why board retreats are important, but often aren’t designed well, how too often strategy problems masquerade as development problems, and we examine Karina Mangu-Ward’s approach to making tradeoffs between two good things. She calls them Even Overs. We’ve got news on our friend Yong Zhao and his new initiative The Courageous Minority. What if you discovered your school was simply average? What would you do about it? And we’ve got a couple of book recommendations that we think are particularly worthy reads in this era of AI.

Most Board Retreats Aren't Bad. They're Just Beside the Point.

Ask any head or board chair how their retreat went, and you'll almost always hear "good." Engaged trustees, solid facilitation, nobody checked their phone. But good isn't the same as necessary — and most retreats, however well-run, never actually connect to the board's strategic work. They happen, they feel productive, and then the board goes right back to where it was. Ross examines the difference between a retreat that's pleasant and one that moves your school's strategy forward and why that gap is easier to miss than you'd think.

Sometimes All It Takes Is Someone to Help You Take a Fresh Look

We’re on the road this summer with everything from board and leadership retreats, to launching or continuing projects and initiatives on strategy development, program redesigns, and all school PLs. Reach out if you have a challenge, want to get started on a new idea, or need an outside perspective to help you think about what is possible. 

Your Development Program Doesn’t Need Another Event

Last year, Jill Goodman and I started comparing notes — her from development and leadership, me from strategy and governance — and realized we were watching the same thing play out in schools across the country. Hard-working teams putting forth real effort. We saw a fundamental mismatch between the program they were running and the future they were trying to fund. And we decided to join forces and wrote, You Don’t Have a Development Problem. You Have a Strategy Problem.

We Don’t Like Choosing Between Two Good Things

The inability to make genuine trade-offs can be the Achilles heel of independent school leadership. Decisions get relitigated because there's no settled hierarchy to appeal to. Initiatives stall because faculty can't tell what actually matters. Identity drifts because a school that refuses to choose becomes a school that stands for nothing in particular. Talented people burn out waiting for clarity that never comes. And boards and heads develop subtly different assumptions about what the school is trying to do — gaps that surface at the worst moments. None of this is the result of bad values or weak leadership. It's the result of having no shared practice for choosing between good things. That's what Karin Mangu-Ward’s Even Over practice is for. We've written a discussion guide for independent school leadership teams and boards that introduces the framework and walks you through the conversation your school has probably been avoiding. 

What If We’re Average?

Atul Gawande's 2004 New Yorker piece The Bell Curve is one of those articles that reframes how you see your own institution before you've finished reading it. Written about cystic fibrosis care centers, it's actually about the distance between average and excellent and why that distance persists even among well-trained, well-intentioned professionals following the same protocols. I've been using it with leadership teams for nearly twenty years because it asks a question most of us would rather not wrestle with: What if we're average? More importantly, it asks what we'd actually do about it. To help prompt the post-read conversation we’ve put together some questions your team could wrestle with. 

The Courageous Minority: Carving Out the Space and Time for Experiments this Coming Year

I’ve had the privilege over the years of spending time with the wise and very funny Yong Zhao. He’s launched a new initiative worth watching: The Courageous Minority, a global cohort of roughly 20 schools across different countries, systems, and cultures who've committed to a shared premise — that education must change because the world already has. What makes this initiative distinct isn't a single new model or mandate. It's the belief that transformation doesn't require whole-system permission to begin. These schools aren't blowing up their structures; they're carving out small, protected spaces — a group of students, a capstone project, a redesigned advisory period — where a different kind of learning can be tried, studied, and shared. For school leaders who've felt stuck waiting for the "right" moment or the full mandate to change, this is a reminder that serious change can start small.

Experimenting and Iterating as a School Posture

This summer, David Torcoletti – Elevate consultant, longtime independent school teacher and leader, and serious practicing photographer – started something he'd never tried before. He began lifting epithelial cells from cheeks and mouths with tape and swabs, running them under a microscope rigged with a digital camera, printing what he found, and then working back into the images with charcoal, pastels and acrylic paint. He had no idea what would come of it. The results are otherworldly — cellular structures transformed into something between biology and abstraction, seen through a lens no one designed for this purpose. What strikes me isn't just the images themselves, but the posture behind them: David didn't know what he'd find. He had a hypothesis, not a plan. He tried something, looked at what came back, and adjusted — again and again. That's not a project with an end date. It's a practice. And it's exactly the posture our schools need more of: not a single bold initiative, but small, iterative experiments — try something, see what surfaces, adjust, try again. You don't need to know where it leads to start.

Summer Reading Recommendations

No doubt many of you are digging into AI reading and learning in some form or another this summer. What I have to recommend are a couple of books that are not directly related to AI, but the advances in AI are making them more relevant with each AI passing headline. The Art of Critical Making (RISD's faculty on their philosophy of hands-on creative practice — an all-EXPLO read back in 2014) and Dacher Keltner's Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder, on the research behind the emotion that pulls us out of self-focus and into connection. Neither will make you faster this fall — that's the point. As AI gets better at speed and output, our edge as leaders lives in what it can't touch: noticing, making meaning by hand, sitting with wonder instead of resolving it into an answer. Consider these books this summer's reading maintenance on that equipment.

I hope you are finding time for rest, rejuvenation, and inspiration during this liminal period.

Moira

• From the EXPLO archives.

• Best selling author, EXPLO parent, and writer-in-residence, Kelli Corrigan on helping students imagine their futures.

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