An end of the year check-up – looking back, looking forward

As originally posted on Nuturing Faith blog (May 19, 2009)
Click here to view the original post.

For most of us it’s time to put things back in the cupboards and close the book on this school year. As a school leader, it is good to reflect back on the school year, and worthwhile to ask yourself some reflective questions:

1. Did I move my school closer to meeting our mission this year? What evidence do I have? How do I know?
   
2. How did I as a leader improve the school this year? Did my words and actions encourage faith and motivation to learn in my staff and students?
   
3. Did I settle for only visible improvements of bricks and bucks or did I also improve the less visible aspects such as the quality of instruction, the distinctiveness of the curriculum, the quality of instruction, and the bondedness of the staff and parent community?
   
4. Was my focus on how successful my school was or how much students and staff understood how to be bringers of shalom?
   
5. What must I commit to in the next school year?
   

Recently McKinsey & Company put out an interesting report “How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come Out on Top.” In the report they make this summative statement: “The available evidence suggests that the main driver of the variation in student learning at school is the quality of the teachers.” They go on to say that high-performing schools consistently do three things well:

• Hire the right teachers – “The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.”
• Develop teachers into effective instructors.
• Put in place systems and targeted support to make sure that each child benefits from excellent instruction.

According to their synthesis of research, each principal’s time in effective schools is focused on instructional leadership. In our schools spiritual leadership is even more important. What implications does this have as you make plans to foster spiritual and instructional leadership growth in your school next year?

Spread Too Thin: The Peanut Butter Syndrome in Christian Schools!

Are You Spread Too Thin?
How to THRIVE and not merely SURVIVE as a Christian school!
Originally posted by Dr. Barrett L. Mosbacker
The Christian School Journal

I recently read an interesting article by the CEO of Yahoo! titled The Peanut Butter Manifesto. For the purposes of this blog article I want to focus on the following statement from the memo because it is instructive for us as school leaders.

"We [Yahoo!] lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything -- to everyone. We've known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don't talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn't to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics ...

I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular."

The Christian school movement is not particularly healthy. Based on recent statistics that I have seen, the number of Christian school and overall enrollments are stagnant or declining.
Although there are external forces beyond our control that affect our schools, many of our problems are self-inflicted.

One of our self-inflicted wounds is similar to that articulated by the CEO of Yahoo!--we are often not strategic in the allocation of our tangible and intangible resources and as a consequence we are not offering a substantial marginal value to our current and potential clients. I am referring to our parents a clients because notwithstanding our missions as Christian schools, our parents are essentially paying clients who make economic calculations in deciding whether to enroll or re-enroll their children in our schools.

If our schools are to survive, much less thrive, we must stop "spreading the peanut butter too thin." We need to think far more strategically. Where should we place our resources? What is the basis for our decision? What programs should we eliminate? What programs should we add? The the marginal value of our schools been stagnant or declining?

These are important questions that we must answer with ruthless honesty.

Click here to read the rest of the post on The Christian School Journal.