Director's Blog

I participated in a Positive Discipline two-day workshop in the first week of Teacher Orientation led by consultant Joy Marchese. Positive Discipline is a philosophy that underpins how a school forms relationships between teachers, students and parents. Perhaps it is the term “positive discipline” that confuses people; it is NOT a behavior management system, but a way of thinking or a philosophy. It is based on the principles and tools of positive psychology originally developed post World War I child guidance clinics in Vienna, Austria. The work of Alfred Adler (1870-1937) focused on the concept that children (and all humans) have the need to belong and contribute to a community. A child misbehaving can be often thought as a discouraged child pursuing belonging through mistaken means. I think it is endearing that he broke from his contemporary, the famous Sigmund Freud, and in the long run, was more correct in his psychological beliefs and practices. Rudolf Dreikurs (1897-1972) a student and later colleague of Adler, brought Adler’s ideas to American and made them more useable for parents and teachers. The basic ideas of Dreikurs and of the modern Positive Discipline movement are as follows:

• The four mistaken goals of misbehavior are attention-seeking, power, revenge, and assumed inadequacy. Understanding the goal tells an adult how to respond.
• Logical consequences versus punishment. Consequences should be related, respectful, and reasonable, and should teach rather than humiliate.
• Encouragement over praise or reward. He saw encouragement as the central tool for building a child’s confidence and capability.
• Democratic classrooms and families. He promoted class meetings and family meetings, with children participating in problem-solving, a sharp break from the authoritarian norms of his time.

The modern Positive Discipline movement is associated with the work of Dr. Jane Nelsen and her 1981 book, Positive Discipline. The workbook details many practical techniques and activities that teachers can use immediately. The trainer, Joy Marchese, was knowledgeable, relatable, and engaging taking us through two full days of workshops. I highly recommend her!

The philosophy fits with how I approach student relationships. Adults and children show mutual respect and adults form warm but firm relationships with students. It is so natural, so human, to form a community and that is basically what a classroom is. It is one of the first communities children belong to outside of their home. In this age of the internet and digitilzation that are isolating people, schools must bring the benefits of community to all children at an early age.

I learned a lot over the time with my colleagues and Joy. She also weaved in basic good teaching techniques based on brain research. Our school has a significant number of local hire teachers new to international schools. The philosophy of Positive Discipline may be new to many of them who went to school in more traditional settings where the teacher is the “master of the universe” and the students are obedient receptacles of knowledge and skills.

I won’t share all my notes but do want to share one example of the philosophy in action is as follows:

A teacher clearly reminds students to wear a jacket for recess because of the cold temperatures. A student refuses this request and goes out for recess without her jacket. A few minutes into recess the student approaches the teacher asking to go in to get her jacket because she is shivering. The teacher applies Positive Discipline by lending a sympathetic ear, but reminds the student that they were asked to wear a jacket. The teacher goes on to encourage the student to find a solution to the problem. The student, with help from her classmates, discovers that if she runs around the playground, her body warms up and she is able to stay outside for recess. This is labeled a “LOGICAL CONSEQUENCE” in PD jargon. The teacher allows a logical consequence (student feels cold) and from a bad decision (not to take the advice of a teacher) The next time a teacher advises students to wear a jacket, the student will remember how cold she was and will wear a jacket outside. This is a better approach with the student rather than shaming the student (I told you so!) or not following through with your instructions, “this time you can go in” or rescuing the students (use my jacket) that does not foster independence, or (I brought your jacket) that shows mistrust in the student. The correct response is to show empathy “Yes, it is cold” return the agreement, “I asked all students to wear jackets and that you couldn’t return to the classroom” and then encouraging the student to solve the problem, “How else can you get warm today?”. Shivering is a logical consequence of a bad decision and by allowing the student to suffer, the teacher is showing empathy and kindness because the student is learning how to be independent.

A daily yoga practice has made me a better person and school leader. Physically, it is the fountain of youth, improving my flexibility, strength, and stamina. I didn’t anticipate the mental clarity that yoga brings me. Taking 30 minutes to an hour every morning removes the clutter of distraction and allows me to be free to let what is important come to the front of my consciousness.

I was excited when the Indian Cultural Center wanted to celebrate the United Nations International Day of Yoga at our school. It is appropriate that the United Nations accepted Indian Prime Minister Modi’s proposal to mark the day. Yoga has deep Indian roots, stretching back thousands of years in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions.

The Center’s main instructor, Sharad Munde, led a vigorous and engaging session for us. One of the parents read from a script that incorporated animal sounds and movements to frame the yoga movements and postures. The younger students especially, were enthused for the entire hour lesson because of this.

I had two main takeaways from the session. The first is the importance of breathing on health and mood. In the West, there is minimal instruction regarding breathing techniques. I didn’t really think too much about breathing, but I should. Deep, slow, nostril breathing calms people; quick breathing with the emphasis on the outbreath invigorates the brain, etc. I used it all the time now in my daily life.

The second takeaway as a school leader is to consider the cultural resources an international community has to offer the students. The Indian Community has been incredible this year! They supported our Scholarship Gala’s theme of Bollywood Glam by providing a professional dance instructor who got people out of their seats and connecting with each other on the dance floor! They also advised on decorations and provided some authentic Indian entertainment. The dance instructor even choreographed our traditional Board of Trustees dance to kick off the auction.

Research shows singing and dancing with a group enhances wellbeing. Humans are social animals and creating art together is in our DNA!

Ewan McIntosh is one of my favorite consultants when it comes to communications. He helped me introduce our new Purpose Statement (We are a community of learners who challenge ourselves, explore boundaries, and connect with each other to make a positive difference) to our faculty and staff back in May 2022. It was a very successful presentation and rollout of a radically new Purpose Statement, much in part thanks to him. We started by allowing people to share the special moments that were occurring in their classrooms and celebrating our coming back together on campus after COVID. He is the technical advisor for the first minister in Scotland, and the longer I am in leadership, the more I realize that much of leadership is communications.

I also did a Middle Leaders Workshop with him, and he inspired our facilities committee to go ahead and do a prototype cafeteria redesign. Often, groups are hesitant to make a bold move due to fear of reactions from others or wanting to be perfect. His advice was to go ahead with a prototype. The color scheme and design elements we developed served us well for other interiors in the school. He is also famous for the standing meetings starting at unusual times (ex, 10:12 AM) and lasting as long as they need to (e.g., 7 minutes).

Finally, I also learned the technique of a “sprint”. Sprints are small groups of faculty and staff working together intensely for a short amount of time to develop an initiative in the school. Short amount of time can range from a full day to an academic quarter. Initiatives that drag out over longer periods of time lose their momentum with the busy life of a school and just thinking about a long period of time like that makes the task seem more complex that what is really is.

Last week I participated in an online workshop focusing on creating memorable end-of-year communications through eliminating educational jargon and institutional language (belonging, legacy, support, engage, excellence). Emotional leadership comes through concrete stories with humor (underrated – take your people seriously, not yourself) and love, and focuses on one clear message rather than overwhelming audiences with multiple priorities.

For example, “With the end of a successful and busy year…” is boring. Leaders should be thinking about what they want their audience to feel. (joy, pride, satisfaction, unity, etc.) No one wants to feel “informed”.

Ewan gave us six core principles:

1. Enemy #1 is Noise: Your audiences are cognitively overcrowded. School leaders are trying to convey information AND have an emotional hook. “Nobody remembers normal – Don’t do the expected.”
2. Ban Wallpaper Words
3. Strategy as Sacrifice: The Five Penny Piece Approach
4. Show, Don’t Tell: The Cup and Saucer Approach
5. Write Like People Are Busy: The Airport Test
6. Write in Pictures: The Filmmaker Test

• What is the one word your school uses repeatedly and explains almost nothing? EXCELLENCE / BELONGING / LEGACY Now your next task is to ban it. You shouldn’t tell people to belong; only share a story of how you or someone else belongs. “Think of someone who made a positive difference this year and helped you along.
• I get depressed when teachers go on about how much they are looking forward to their holidays. What a gift to be able to be with vibrant young people, doing this cool work. I want to change their mindset.
• Strategy is sacrifice. Who are you now? Who do you want to be in the future? Lessen your message to a single focus. When you are focusing on a single thing in a speech, 95-99% of the people will get it, a small number will not (ex- 3 complained about the “f-bombs” before 9:30 AM. Choose a target, and really go for it. Drawing on David Ogilvy’s principle that “strategy is sacrifice,” Ewan contrasted dustbin lid strategy (so broad that anyone could align with it) with five-penny piece strategy (tight, concrete, specific). When leaders target a narrow, specific message, some people won’t connect—but the majority will deeply engage.
• Don’t tell them (I am proud of you), show them through a story; What do you want people to feel? If you want people to be proud, don’t tell them to feel proud. The CUP is what you are saying, the SAUCER is what you want them to feel. Don’t be obvious.Leaders must distinguish between what they say (the cup) and how audiences feel (the saucer).
• “If our community remembers only one thing from this year, it’s…” ex1) every person in the community, has helped shape something that is truly special ex2) We had a plan, and we followed it. (Who is the hero of your story? – your students or to the audience – what challenges have they gone through? – Why is following a plan so hard?
• Write your speech on the one thing you want to convey and that they are super busy!
• Within five seconds, audiences should grasp what matters, why it matters, and why they should care.
• First Line in a Speech – What matters Second Line – Why does it matter? – Why should they care?
• Exercise to try is to take a paragraph of a newsletter, cut it in half without losing the meaning.
• Invisible words show, don’t tell. The more educational jargon you use, the less credibility you have.

THE GOTO STRUCTURE FOR ANY SPEECH

Hook: Start with something compelling, curious, different—the “fish pie moment”. Don’t indicate where toilets are or acknowledge everyone’s tired (which reinforces fatigue) . Slap audiences around the face with a story that makes them go “huh?”—this is a good thing.

Story: Tell a true, relatable story. Avoid references to luxury holidays in Mauritius with three kids looking at fish through clear water—this signals salary disparities and breaks trust. Choose stories that build trust and feel accessible to everyone in the room.

Bridge: The penultimate sentence explains why the story matters. Amanda’s bridge would be: “This story matters to me because it’s the moment I realized I truly belonged here, that I’d found my people. That’s how I wish I could act every day when I’m being my best self”.

Close: End with a call to action—give people a job to do. Don’t simply say “thank you” and leave audiences hanging. Options include: raise a glass (ensure they have one in hand), write a commitment on a postcard under their chair, or share their pledge aloud. When you end with their voices telling you what they wrote or pledged, you create a fundamentally different close than a head teacher monologue.

• Harold Stribbell “The Loneliest Chair”
• Kate Wadsworth “Awedinory: The Wonder of Everyday Things”

Instead of using these abstract words, can you convert them to concrete examples? Don’t say “excellence”, tell a concrete picture. These are “wallpaper” words. Replace them with an action, a moment, an image, a scene, etc.

My favorite session from the Fifth Experiential Learning Conference this weekend was a presentation by Terry Haywood from the Alliance for International Education entitled “Travellers, Tourists, and Traitors: Intercultural Learning from Intercultural Experiences”. 

The premise of his argument was that international schools need to be intentional with students to learn intercultural understanding and skills. Just by having students from diverse backgrounds in a school learn together is not enough (This is the “Playground Hypothesis”). Intercultural learning does not happen by chance, but school personnel need to mentor students through articulating and verbalizing what they are taking away from their experiences at school. It is converting the Experience Self into a positive Remembering Self through mentorship. Haywood uses Milton Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity as a framework to define and measure intercultural learning or understanding.

Haywood pointed out the differences between a tourist (brief, superficial highlights) learning about a place and culture and a traveler (long exposure, emphasis on understanding the thinking behind the culture). As you can see in James Penstone’s cultural iceberg metaphor, the thinking and feeling beneath cultures and people are what travelers learn and tourists don’t.

Haywood cited two studies during his talk. The first study showed that 20% of Third Culture Kids (TCK) had a 4+ score on an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) scale which is more that the 10% ACE score in the general population. He also cited Jan Restock in the Journal Research of International Education that in a 2004 study, there was no change in the Intercultural Developmental Inventory of students at the International School of Hong Kong in a variety of programs at the school. 

Haywood said that Intercultural Understanding should be a priority and placed ahead of many of the things a school does. Kurt Hahn introduced the Schooner Hypothesis. Put a diverse group on a boat in a storm, and all of them would learn to work together to get back to shore. (I see this on sports teams at schools).

He recommended three books:

• “Growing Up in Transit: The Politics of Belonging at an International School” by Danau Tanu 
• You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrique
• “The Righteous Mind” by Jonathan Haidt

I am always looking to add value to the education our international school provides to students and families. That is why I was looking forward to AAIE’s Thursday Conversation, “Beyond the Diploma: Expanding Pathways with Dual Credit.” Dr. Justin Bathon from the Educational Leadership Faculty of the University of Kentucky (USA) gave an interesting presentation on the trend he called “Blurring the Lines” between university, high school, and the labor market.

There are two types of dual credit (HS & University). The first are what he called “random acts of dual credit”. These are classes high school students take, either online or in-person that offer university credits, but are not part of a program. They do add value to a high school student’s education in that a student can pursue at a high level a special interest that is not offered at his or her high school. Some universities may also give credit to the student when applying to university as well. The second type is an “Early College Program” in which students enroll at the university and get a head start in their university education while in high school. One of the benefits is a more flexible and shorter university experience. Students will have time to take a semester abroad or get a double major in their four years because they may already have up to a year or 18 months of university credit even before officially enrolling. Research also shows this boosts retention rates in universities. I think that the student gets the confidence of what it takes to pass a university course.

Most of my experience in school leadership has been in IB World Schools. The IB Diploma Programme’s strengths are a (1) well-rounded curriculum, (2) high academic skills, especially with the Extended Essay and Theory of Knowledge class, (3) personal growth through its CAS (Creativity, Action, Service) and (4) improved university admissions chances because university admissions personnel know that the IBDP is at the same level as freshman-level university courses. The downsides to IB are (1) a heavy workload, (2) a 2-year marathon of deadlines and stress, (3) a lack of flexibility, and some universities, especially in the UK and Europe, (4) require unrealistic high scores for admission.

Ben Sheridan talked about the experience of his son, who did not do the full IB Diploma. Instead, he was interested in music production and became a music producer making soundtracks for movies, learning to play the guitar and upon graduation, had one year of university done and an internship on his resume. Another student completed 45 credit hours through the Polytechnic High School University of Kentucky partnership. An internship at a refugee ministry, inspired him to get a double major, one in international immigration law. He also had time to do a year abroad in South Africa. That is truly “blurring the lines” between high school, university, and the labor market.

Global Online Academy is a non-profit organization with a consortium of schools that offer online courses for high school students and online teacher professional development courses. Many of the courses are designed and taught by teachers from members schools (GOA pays $7,000 / class).

The Global Impact Diploma is a collaboration of 90 international schools that are developing an online diploma that would be an alternative to the International Baccalaureate or Advanced Placement.

A shrinking pool of 18-year-old high school graduates in the USA has forced universities to find alternative sources of income. Dual enrollment in the USA is exploding! Around 1/3 of all high school students in the USA are taking college-level courses. It has far surpassed Advanced Placement (AP) as the dominant way to earn university credit. That makes sense financially for universities. Why have students earn university credit with an outside service provider when you can do it yourself? The big players in this market are community colleges, which enroll almost 3/4 of dual credit high school students.

Four-year universities are now getting into the act. I see them eventually outcompeting two-year institutions. Dr. Bathon mentioned Indiana University (20,000 students), University of Minnesota (10,000 students) Auburn University, Bard College, etc. The best estimates I could find in my research indicate that around 3 million American students are taking college courses in high school. I think the IB and AP should be a little worried because these programs cut out the middleman and are guaranteed university credit. My children only earned credit from their Higher Level IB courses (3 courses), and they needed to score a “5” to get it. I don’t know where this will end. In Japan, universities are facing even more demographic pressure than in the USA and have developed high school, middle school, and elementary school feeder programs. A student can gain entry into “university” in kindergarten and go all the way through their Bachelors or Master’s degree, with a single umbrella university. Is that where this blurring of the lines is heading in the USA and other countries?

My big takeaway is that international schools need to be offering university credit to remain competitive in the market. Families will recognize the value the students are getting by earning guaranteed university credit while in high school. This significantly lowers costs, gives students something to strive for, and may improve admissions chances. My big question is navigating the myriad of options and choosing dual enrollment programs that would most benefit students at a particular school. I am not sure if partnering with a single university or a few universities is the best way to go. I need to think about creating pathways:

1. Students looking to maximize transferable university credit.
2. Students looking for entry to a particular university through earning credits from that university while in high school.
3. Students with a particular interest or developing a skill that a K-12 international school cannot offer.

I would like to thank Laura Light at the Association for the Advancement of International Education for sponsoring this online workshop!

The Association for the Advancement of International Education (AAIE) hosted Dana Specker Watts the Director of Learning, Research, and Outreach of International School Services.Dana showed the audience of heads of schools tools on how to evaluate the professional development programs for faculty and staff. The international school standard is 2% of the total revenue should be devoted to employee professional development. International schools spend a lot of money on professional development and I agree with Dana and most of the participants in the session that we don’t know how much it improves student learning or employee practice.

Dana’s framework or tool used the Kirkpatrick Model of evaluating the effectiveness of training and professional development programs. Donald Kirkpatrick developed this model in the 1950s. His son James and his wife Wendy enhanced and modernized it by publishing the “New World” Kirkpatrick Model in 2016 (see above). All schools use a survey to evaluate Level 1 reactions: Was it engaging? Was it relevant? I think many schools also look at learning, asking teachers to reflect on a new skill or mindset and maybe even to demonstrate the learning to others. I think Level 3 is where schools don’t do enough. Are teachers changing their practices? Did people try it? What blocked it? The ultimate way to evaluate any training is at Level 4. “What would we expect to see happening in classrooms and among teachers in the weeks after the training if it is working?” What are the big results does a school ultimately want? ex) Improved reading scores on MAP scores

One of Dana’s key messages was the idea of equity in professional development. Are teacher assistants and local hires able to access the PD? She adds the evaluative lens of Equity to the Kirkpatrick Model. Dr. Watts Speck also engagingly compared the Kirkpatrick Model to a TripAdvisor Review.

She kindly provided access to her slide deck and the Google Survey she developed. It would be good to evaluate a PD or initiative 30, 60, and 90 days out from the PD. She also has an Onboarding tool that schools can use to make sure the different categories of employees are up to speed with the latest PD initiatives.

Dana did a plug for the online ISS Professional Development “ISS EduLearn”. Schools or individuals can purchase a subscription and access a range of courses. She reported that in the last six months, educators completed 4,900 courses and 92 schools, with 4,774 educators registered.

I am definitely going to bring this framework to our leadership teams. Schools need a thoughtful and purposeful PD Evaluation Plan with the following areas:

1. Define the professional development goals (desired outcomes for teacher and students)
2. Identify what success looks like (leading indicators)
3. Select data sources
4. Collect and analyze the evidence
5. Adjust and iterate to optimize student learning

I am ready to move on to my next level of use of Artificial Intelligence. I’ve been hearing a lot about AI Agents/Bots or AI companions. Dr. Nick Potkalitsky (such an Americanized Polish name 🙂 ) in his newsletter article titled “The Agent Problem: Why AI’s Latest Revolution is K-12’s Worst Nightmare” considers the next stage of artificial intelligence use and how it might impact schools. He refers to Ethan Mollick’s blog post, “A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era“. Mollick’s premise is that chatting with an AI Large Language Model as a thought partner currently is the most common use of AI with most people. We are now moving to the Agentic Phase where an AI Agent will do your work instead of just providing advice. A tool like Claude’s CoWork runs on a desktop access your Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, etc., and do the work for you. It is replacing the role of an executive assistant. One challenge I see is a person’s exposure of their personal data handed over to the agent. A consenting adult allowing an agent into his/her digital worklife is one thing, but Potkalitsky wonders about K-12 students (minors) doing so as well. School’s current AI policies do not address AI agents doing the work.

None of them contemplate what happens when a student uses Claude Cowork to autonomously research and draft a history paper by reading their own files, browsing the web, and synthesizing across both, in a process that happens faster than a teacher can observe it and leaves no legible trace of how it happened.

Mollick’s advice for Claude users, “For Claude, you need to pick Opus 4.6 (though the new Sonnet 4.6 is also powerful, it is not quite as good) and turn on the “extended thinking” switch.” I want to start using an agent to do the mundane things of my workflow (set appointments / attach meeting notes to my meeting appointments in Google Calendar, etc.) and do some tedious research.

I listened to Ezra Klein’s interview with Anthropic Co-founder Jack Clark “How Fast Will AI Agents Rip Through the Economy” that gave me a better understanding of Claude’s CoWork. I am going to learn more about CoWork by listening to the podcast again and seek out YouTube videos or take a class about using AI agents.

I think it is important for an international school director to understand the history and culture of the host nation. I am taking Stanford University’s Political Science 177, “Demystifying the Middle East” to prepare for my transition to Egypt. In the first lesson, the professor gave a good explanation of the differences between the two major traditions of Islam, Sunni and Shia. After Muhammad’s death in 632CE, the elders gathered and named Abu Bakr to take over the movement. While this was happening, Ali, his cousin and the man closest to Muhammad, was preparing his body for burial. A group of his supporters advocated for Ali to be named the first Caliph or Imam, as the Shia call their leader, after the death of Muhammad. That started the split between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

I didn’t know that Ali eventually became the fourth Imam/Caliph. This was a turbulent time as Muhammad’s group was militarily trying to control the Arabian Peninsula. Ali was assassinated in 661, his reign only lasting 6 years. Ali’s son Hasan, took over as the fifth Caliph/Imam after his death. Hasan abdicated to avoid more Muslim deaths in the series of civil wars. The definitive split occurred in 680 in Karbala, Iraq, when Sunni forces definitively defeated Shia forces and took over, beheading the Imam Husayn and starting the hereditary Umayyad Caliphate.

I found this course a bit dry and I already know quite a bit about the region, I hope it picks up as we go along. I did note a few ideas/facts/things to explore.

• I wonder what the Middle East would be today without Islam. The Sasanian Empire (224-651 CE) were Persians who practiced Zoroastrianism. What would that religion look like today?

• The Muslim lunar calendar is in the year 1477 (549 years behind) and “islam” means submission to with will of God
• The five pillars of Islam are 1) prayer 2) Koran 3) alms 4) fasting 6) Hajj
• We watched a short from the 1976 movie starring Anthony Quinn “The Message” about the start of Islam.
• It is really difficult to translate the Arabic of the Koran. It is above a Shakespearean level of Arabic.
• Sharia law is used in divorce, death, marriage situations and not practiced widely.

abū / abī	father of
umm	mother of
ibn / bin	son of
bint	daughter of

Ian Symmonds is a former admissions and marketing strategist for independent K-12 schools and universities who is now a strategy consultant for independent and international schools. I listened to his interview on the Moonshot podcast entitled, “What 1,600 Schools Can Teach Us About Strategic Readiness“. Symmonds explains that patterns and trends emerge from what works and does not work when your job is to come into a school for a short time for an analysis of their strategy and repeat that over and over again.

My big takeaway from the Symmonds is the quote from the Father of American Progressive Education, Francis Parker, when he said THE WORK OF SCHOOLS IS DETERMINED BY THE NEEDS OF SOCIETY. Schools need to look outward to change their programs while remaining anchored in their core values. School leaders and boards need to ask the question, “What problem do we solve better than anyone else?”

Symmonds developed a framework to classify schools based on how they see the future. Symmonds calls it the Strategy Continuum.

1. Adaptors – best state to be in; sustainable; mix tradition with innovation; slip to Preservationists when healthy
2. Preservationists – look internally, may miss storms brewing outside; (+) remind us if it is a crazy initiative
3. Innovative Disruptors – schools with limited resources need to make radical changes to survive; lots of casualties; wears people out; not sustainable; every school wants to be this, but well-resourced, waiting lists in every grade,
4. Fatalities – with fewer school-age children coming through the system, schools die

I was particularly interested in the advice he gives to new heads of school who need to assess where their school is on the continuum. “Trust your gut”, intuitive people often rise to leadership positions in schools. Heads new to the school need to pay attention closely and “write down anything odd and things that make you scratch your head.” Do this before you are in the job for 6 to 9 months, and you normalize it. If things seem odd, trust your gut before you lose it. Besides this, new heads can use the traditional 1:1 conversations with employees to get the context. Remember that “more is caught than taught” and behaviors say more than what people verbalize.

Heads also need to think deeply about the belief system that drives this culture. Why are certain attitudes prevalent and why do things persist in the culture? Maybe what some schools think is true about their school and culture is actually a myth because they have been doing it for such a long time. New heads need to act like consultants and try to understand the 3Cs, Culture (healthy or dysfunctional) Context (competitive market?) and Change (how much do they need to change). There are probably pockets of the continuum through a school.

Below are some other things I took away from the interview:

• International schools are under a lot of pressure these days. Finding and retaining strong teachers, political polarization, birth rate decline, tuition pressures, and what to do with Artificial Intelligence are some of the challenges we are facing.
• The strategist role is to help see the future and navigate towards it, not school improvement.
• The shiny object is the acquisition of the next head of school; the vision belongs to the school, not the new head; many schools moving to succession planning.
• Example of why no drive through in banks in Southern California – reason – land is too expensive for a drive-through
• The single most important element schools is effective, strategic governance with a great CEO

I value the support of the Central and Eastern Europe Schools Association (CEESA). They offer a lot of online workshops to improve their member schools. One of the main responsbilities of school leaders or leaders of any organization is risk management. CEESA brought Kristi Williams on Wednesday to introduce an easy way to begin thinking about risk. I like that Kristi gave us a structure for a leadership team have a risk management plan in 90 minutes. I found last year in our work in positive psychology last school year, I scored low in “Prevention” trait in my Strengths Profile. This woke me up to the importance of looking ahead and preventing bad events.

Kristi defines RISK as anything could DISRUPT learning, safety, staffing, finances, operations, or trust. She categorized risk into three types:

• Sudden Impact Events (bomb threat, data breach, earthquake, snow storm, measles outbreak)
• Known and On-going Risk (currency fluctuations, teacher rentention, geopolitics, enrollment shift)
• Operational and Reputational Risk
  • Inadequate or failed internal systems (staff misconduct, vendor not delivering)
  • Credibility (mishandle safeguards, poor crisis comms, conflict of interest, community disatisfaction)

Kristi then broke down a 90-minute Risk Management Starter. Step one is to do a 30-minute brain storm on the prompts above. The goal of step one is to come up with 10 to 15 risks.

Step Two is 20 minutes to prioritize the 10-15 risks. Rate risk for potential impact and the likelihood of occuring. Your team is now about halfway through the Starter. The next step is to take 30 minutes for each top risk and fill in the following four details of the risk:

1. What are we already doing to mitigate or prepare for this risk?
2. What else should or can we be doing?
3. What is one indicator to know we are improving?
4. Who will be the owner or champion of the risk?

Step four is to establish a cadence. Kristi suggests to schedule the following semester a meeting to review the progress of top priorities and refresh the list. You will then annually revisit the Risk Management Plan to add domains, a fuller register, or enhance scoring.

I asked Kristi if she is seeing any trends globally and she answered geopolitics at a grand scale impacting schools. Our school experienced the Russian invasion of Ukraine and DOGE cutting USAID as two examples of geopolitics impacting our school.

This Risk Management Starter is a useful exercise for a school leadership team. It may be something I do for me to get familiar with the crisis response program at my new school.