School Improvement: 10 Questions for Leader Reflection

Dan Beerens
Director of Instructional Improvement, Christian Schools International
Click here to read the original post on the Nurturing Faith blog.

Through my work with schools via accreditation and school improvement visits, I often come away impressed by how much individuals can make a difference in the decision making process and how much one individual can impact the direction of an organization.

This is undoubtedly one of the more difficult times of testing in the history of Christian education. So, how does a leader keep an organization from retreating into just thinking about budgets, enrollments, and marketing?  May I suggest 10 questions for reflection and discussion?

1. Is your mission strong, understood by faculty and parents, and actionable? How do you know you are meeting it?
2. Do your teachers know how to articulate a Biblical perspective at the unit level?
3. Does your entire staff model and develop Christlike relationships with students and parents?
4. Do your staff development and teacher evaluation processes reflect a balance between grace and truth, between helping people grow and holding them accountable? Do you regularly encourage your teachers?
5. Do your budget choices keep teaching and learning in the forefront and are funds administered justly?
6. Are you reaching out to, and impacting, your local community where God has placed your school?
7. Are you asking students, teachers, parents, alumni, and broader community if you are meeting the mission of your school?
8. Are you encouraging teachers to collaborate, share ideas, and are you providing  opportunities (time) for them to discuss and improve their practice?
9. As a leader are you building capacity into, and developing the skills of, the next generation of those who can lead our schools?
10. Are you committing to a process of improvement such as accreditation?

Equipping Teachers - A Balancing Act

Is the Picture in Balance?
Originally posted on Nurturing Faith (Christian Schools International)
April 20, 2009

Do your teachers know Piaget, Kohlberg, and Erikson better than Cavaletti, Stonehouse, Fowler, and Dean? Are your teachers as equipped to nurture student faith as they are to help students reach academic success? Do your teachers possess a common foundation in distinctively Christian philosophy and classroom practices that nurture faith? Do you believe that a high quality faith-integrated, truth-revealing curriculum is the highest need in schools that bear the name Christian?

Do you have a plan to equip your teachers to nurture faith? Perhaps a start is take 5 minutes at your next faculty meeting, ask them how they have been equipped in the two ways shown below, and then discuss the results.

Equipping for Academic Instruction
List the top 5 ways your teachers have been equipped to help students reach academic success.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Equipping for Faith Nurture
List the top 5 ways your teachers have been equipped to encourage student faith development.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Redemptive Leadership: Nurturing Faith in Community

Dr. Bruce Hekman, Adjunct Professor of Education at Calvin College
Posted on Nurturing Faith ~ February 16, 2009

At a workshop I attended a couple of years ago a speaker asked, “What was Jesus’ main message?” Lots of answers come to mind: the good news that Jesus has come to provide forgiveness for our sin, enabling a renewed relationship with God. While that’s true, that actually isn’t the most common message in the gospels. Jesus most often spoke of the new kingdom he was bringing into existence. “The kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe the good news.” (Mark 1:15) “…strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness.” (Matt. 6:33) “Jesus went through Galilee…preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness.” (Matt. 4:23) In the first three gospels there are at least 114 references to the “kingdom of God,” including the Lord’s Prayer, in which we corporately pray that “…your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” (Matt. 6: 9, 10).

This kingdom prayer is a call to redemptive leadership, to making things down here the way they are up there. Donovan Graham says, “Redemption through Christ restores our relationship with God and empowers us to once again fulfill our calling in creation as he intended. The distortions of the fall still plague us, but we are no longer bound or ruled by them. We are called to live according to the truth, and living redemptively means living by that truth.” (Teaching Redemptively, p. xiv.”)

Redemptive leadership holds up a biblically-based vision of what schools ought to be. That vision is most visible in the relationships among all members of a school community. School leaders play a major role in establishing the culture of a school, that set of often unarticulated “rules” about the way things are done. The culture of a school, its context, is a deeply influential dimension of the content of schooling for all those who participate in it. When asked what we remember most vividly about our own school experience, we most often call to mind a relationship—usually positive, but not always—that has influenced us long after we’ve forgotten what we were studying. School culture is our corporate witness of the new life we have in Jesus as a faith community.

Redemptive leadership is intentional about creating a school culture that is a community of grace.