Teachers often teach how they were taught, yet the past three decades of research on how people learn requires rethinking our pedagogical foundations. At Breck, we had the question, “How should teachers teach?” and that seemingly simple question resulted in the design of our Instructional Framework, an artifact that is now intended to guide schoolwide instruction, professional learning, and teacher evaluation.
As Episcopal schools, we are committed to creating communities that welcome, affirm, and sustain students and families from diverse backgrounds. As schools discern their paths forward, this resource offers guidance to heads of school, trustees, and other leaders in making thoughtful, mission-driven decisions. The article also includes a sample board agenda and a simple breakdown of key opportunities and challenges.
Leaders want their school to be rooted in mission-driven, data-informed decision making, yet many schools struggle to create strategic plans that are not only aspirational but actionable. Join Mission & Data’s Jason Kern and Mike Cobb along with NAES Heads of School as they walk through research-based processes to develop an actionable strategic plan and effective methods for communicating progress to your community. Participants will receive strategies on how to develop a strategic plan that incorporates feedback from multiple constituencies across the school community and builds buy-in for implementation by considering the school’s organizational, programmatic and adaptive capacities. Learn how to align success metrics to strategic goals and how to build dashboards to keep school leaders and the board apprised of progress toward success.
As a faculty or staff member, you likely find yourself at the forefront of supporting adolescents with increasingly complex, challenging psychosocial needs. Moreover, students are more likely to seek out a trusted teacher, advisor, or coach for support than to confide directly in a parent or even a school counselor. Drawing from her recent book, Deborah Offner, an adolescent psychologist, will provide a backdrop to Generation Z's concerns and challenges, a quick primer on "normal" adolescent development, and—most importantly—tips and strategies that teachers, deans, coaches, nurses, counselors, and other professionals can put into immediate use with students in distress. We will also consider how you can understand today's parents—and talk to them in a way they can hear—and how you can collaborate with colleagues to best support students and families.
The NAES Culture and Climate Survey for Administrators, Faculty, and Staff is one of the resources developed by NAES in response to member schools requesting tools to support their efforts to strengthen and sustain their Episcopal identity and commitment to inclusion. This survey is designed to be one element of your school's ongoing reflective process by providing data from administrators, faculty, and staff about how Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice exist in the school's programs and practices and the respondents’ experiences.
Approved by the NAES Governing Board in 2024, this document offers best practices and guidelines for the Episcopal school admissions office.
Read More » Episcopal identity informs all aspects of our school life and can be a compelling reason for families to join our communities. How schools live into their Episcopal identity often begins with the admissions process. If you are a head of school, admissions officer, division head, chaplain, or involved in any aspect of the admissions process, this webinar is for you. Join us to learn about the latest NAES Principles of Good Practice: Episcopal Identity and Admissions.
Periodically since 1986, NAIS has surveyed parents to better understand their perceptions of the financial aid process, how they sacrifice to pay tuition, and what feelings are most associated with paying tuition. Join this discussion of the new findings from the 2023-24 How Parents Pay research for insights into where behaviors and emotions have changed and where they’ve stayed the same. Consider how these parent perspectives can inform your financial aid policy, parent education, and affordability communication efforts.
Discover the keys to guiding your organization through change so that it is both effective and enduring. Whether it’s technological, curricular, or cultural, all schools are faced with the need for change, and in these turbulent times, it's even more important that leadership is armed with the skills to effectively plan for change and to avoid (or recover from) common pitfalls of change. This webinar will give you a framework through which to assess the scope and scale of the change, along with the stakeholders, organization, and culture in which the change will be implemented to create a plan that’s tailored to each situation.
Over the past two years, NBOA conducted extensive, innovative research on independent school faculty and staff compensation models with generous support from the E.E. Ford Foundation, including a landscape analysis to gather information from a wide variety of independent schools on their approaches to faculty and staff compensation. Learn about the key findings from this Mission-Anchored Compensation Strategies for Independent Schools project and the research-based resources developed to support independent school leaders as they leverage compensation strategies to attract, retain, motivate, and grow a high-quality and mission-aligned workforce of educators.
