88. Key Takeaways from The National Small Schools Conference

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Aubrey: Welcome to Mindful School Marketing. I’m Aubrey Bursch. 

Tara: And I’m Tara Klaes. We are excited to share another conference podcast episode. We both enjoyed attending the National Small Schools Conference this year at the Krefeld School again in Philadelphia. That was in late June. This conference is always an enriching event with warm and supportive atmosphere and excellent speakers and topics.

Aubrey: Yeah, I love this conference. And this year we met with some of the presenters to hear about what they shared with the attendees as well as with some of the attendees themselves about their experience and key takeaways. We love seeing colleagues and meeting new people. It was amazing. Yes, it really was great.

Tara: And thank you so much to the Crefield School for hosting yet another wonderful event. Stay tuned now to hear more from the conference.

Guest 1: I’m Bob Thomas head of school at the Walden School, and I’m here at the National Small Schools Conference 2024. It’s been a wonderful conference to be at, and to be honest, being here is just wonderful in terms of being able to be around other heads of school and other administrators and at least some teachers and getting an idea of what we’re all kind of going through, you know, in these days of education.

And one of the sessions I went to was talking about marketing and strategic planning, which a lot of schools do go through. And just getting an idea of how one strategic planner talks about his approach to strategic planning. And we’re actually going through it ourselves in the next year or so and getting some information from the person we’re working with and seeing the differences and also the similarities of how to approach different things.

So we’re able to bring back ideas from today’s session. to the person I’m working with and seeing how it can fit into how the Walden school can approach and be really mindful and thoughtful about how they approach it. It’s been really good to know to have that kind of information to bring back to our by board and my teachers and the community as we move forward.

So this has been a wonderful experience to be really here with all these small schools from all over the nation, actually, and just have an opportunity to talk about different things and just be collegiate with a lot of different people. It’s been a wonderful experience. 

Guest 2: Hey, my name is Julia Volkman and I’m here at the National Small Schools Conference.

I spoke about teacher burnout, how administration hurts and how it helps. And I just want to say there’s hope. If you have burnout or if your teachers have burnout, don’t fret. There’s things that we can do and the evidence supports it. So I did a year long research study with mentors. with mentees and mentors to see what worked and if it influenced teacher self efficacy, which is like our self confidence and teacher burnout.

And we’re just figuring out the results of that. We’re just analyzing the data, but some big takeaways are that being positive and supportive of people’s capacities, really matters. So not just looking at everything that’s wrong, which is really hard for us because we’re like, Oh my gosh, there’s that person and they’re always this, this, this, this, this.

But to think and actually look at people, see them for what they’re capable of instead of for what their limitations are. It’s hard to retrain ourselves to do that. But there’s ways that we can, we’re not, it’s not hopeless. We can do it. It makes a big difference. And I just want to say this conference has been really powerful for me personally because of the sense of community.

There’s really time and space. during this conference to just talk with people. There’s so, it’s not, sometimes you go to a conference and you’re just like, information, information, information, information. And you’re so overloaded, you’re just like, I just want a glass of wine. It’s not like that. It feels very much like I can process and incorporate all of the really tremendous things that are coming out.

So I highly encourage you to come next year. 

Guest 3: Hi, my name’s Lukey Wells. And what I found impactful two things. One, Hari’s This presentation provoked some thinking in me that I hadn’t, I took for granted watching The Simpsons, watching Saturday Night Live, watching Conan O’Brien, and I didn’t question my own judgment or my own takeaways.

And so I appreciate what he the questions he’s raised for me. And with Jill I just love looking at burnout from a different perspective. Because I think it’s the perception is you give someone a gift, they’ll suddenly feel better. But I think she really looked at it as a more how to address the symptoms of burnout rather than how to put a band aid on them.

Guest 4: Hi, I’m Jen Court. I am a consultant working with schools across the U. S. and in multiple countries on several things. Advisory, parent workshops, teacher prep, and mostly on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. And I’m at my favorite conference, the National Small Schools Conference. conference. I missed it last year and I literally missed it.

Even though I was on vacation, I was sad about it. Happy to be on vacation, sad to miss small schools. And today I’m going to be talking about election preparation. I went through all of my notes from schools that I worked with after 2016 and 2020 hundreds of pages of notes. And distilled down common themes that schools focused on that were causing problems and strengths and skills that they weren’t focusing on that also caused problems.

So in my session today, we’re going to unpack some of that. I have some tips for five things schools should do now, such as decide if teachers can talk about their political beliefs. Decide if students can wear shirts with their political beliefs on them or anything along those lines. Cause one of the things I found was schools making those decisions in the moment almost always had significant challenges and those challenges continue to today.

I can hear about them regularly of, Oh, It had this legacy of negativity. So this is particularly important for small schools to focus on all schools need to and small schools because our roles in small schools, I’m counselor in a small school. We often have so many hats at one time, and so the boundaries can get blurry for us.

and they can get blurry for our students, for our teachers, for parents, and board members. And so having some time to develop the clarity of thought really supports you in being able to be in the moment when you’re with them. 

Guest 5: Hey guys, this is Anthony Campitelli with Inquiry Tracker. I’m here at the National Small School Conference with Tara and Aubrey.

You know, we’re proud sponsors not only of this podcast, but also, you know, And there’s some amazing schools that we’re working with. And while we help schools manage their future families inquiries to enrollment in that journey, you know, I always like to share something. You know, one tip I’ll give you is make sure you’ve always got your inquiry forms on your website, because that way you’ll get more inquiries.

But another one is a bit different. And I was talking to Tara yesterday, last night, in fact, and I was talking about what we used to do when I was working at Hitech in Silicon Valley. We’d create inquiries. And for those that don’t know, NPS is Net Promoter School. And it’s simply put, is one question.

Would you, you know, would you refer, we’re at the Creffield School, would you refer the Creffield School oh sorry, would you refer a family or friend to the Creffield School? And they have to score it from 0 to 10. And you can look, Google this and find the formula for it, but basically you’re going to get a score.

You ask one more question, and that question is, Why did you give us the score you gave us? Take that data, and then what I would really suggest you do, is have your students analyze the data, prepare a document presentation, present it to the staff, and make recommendations. You’ll be amazed at what it will do for your brand, you’ll be amazed at what those families will talk about your school.

So my goal for you, or suggestion for you, is get your Net Promoter score done, and work to improve it year over year. 

Guest 6: My name is Kaylee Stewart. I’m from St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Harrisburg. I’m the Director of Admissions and one of the biggest takeaways I had from this was in the session to build an effective leadership team.

I really felt that learning all the different personality types and communication types for how to build a good team was really informative as we are still building our team. So it was really helpful to learn who’s going to work well, who has what strengths and who has what weaknesses and how we can support each other that way.

Guest 7: Hi, my name is Ed Hollinger, I represent Hollinger Group Consulting, and my work involves transitional leadership for schools, leadership development, and particularly leadership team development. And that’s what my presentation was on here at the conference this year. I talked about what I call the four C’s of healthy and effective leadership teams.

And these are things that I think, particularly in small schools, we need to pay attention to. And the four C’s are, first of all, culture. Second of all, clarity. Thirdly, communication. And the fourth one, and perhaps the most important, although they’re all important, the fourth one is chemistry. The first is culture.

And that’s just identifying the type of culture that we’re in. I, like, I’ve been drawn to, to the work of the folks at the Center for Positive Organizations out of the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business. And they’ve designed a framework of identifying your organizational culture.

And many times small schools are organ organized around the model of a collaborative culture. The folks at University of Michigan call it clan culture, and when you think about what a clan is, it’s an extended family. And small schools oftentimes are that way. And it’s important to know that because in our hiring practices, in our leadership design, it’s really important if we’re this collaborative culture, folks who are used to a much more top down cultural model, are probably not going to be a good fit for our leadership team.

And then the final is chemistry. And we looked at a number of again, number of assessment tools where we can look at our preferred leadership style our, our preferred way of doing our work and how to measure that and how to really understand each other’s preferred styles and how we can embrace a variety and diversity of styles.

In developing a healthy chemistry, but chemistry of a team is really, really important. So those the four C’s of effective and healthy leadership teams, and that’s what we talked about.

Guest 8: Hi, my name’s Kim Michigan. I’m the head of school at Hudson Lab School. One takeaway, I am taking away from this conference. There are many but this morning I attended a session around strategic planning and especially as it relates to your working with the board. A board of trustees and they introduced some tools that were very useful for taking a big goal and breaking it down into very measurable, doable, measurable parts to get achieved.

And they introduced it in both a low tech way and a high tech way, which I really appreciated because it can work for many schools. 

Guest 9 + 10: Hi my name is Simon Holtzapfel. I’m the board chairperson of the Montessori School of the Berkshires. My name is Todd Colbert. I’m a founder and head of the school of the Montessori School of the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts.

Our topic today was about what small schools can do to really keep their governance practices crisp and clear, so that board members can be engaged without becoming meddlesome in the tactical parts of the school operations where they do not belong. The helpful piece of this from a head standpoint is the it provides a framework, an adaptable framework, So that as heads, we can kind of pivot between the work of the board and also delivering on tactics with our teams and being able to kind of change and adapt because as we know, things are changing and the rate of things are changing.

So how can we as an organization, as a board, as administrative team, keep up with some of those changes that are happening sometimes? in our session, what we showed everyone where the specific set of tools that allows the board to have visibility into all the kind of major high level strategic objectives, while also letting the board see what’s going on other layers so that they don’t feel tempted to get into the head of schools sandbox.

Yeah, and some of the competencies that we focused on are kind of creating purpose and having that purpose being able to flow from the strategic Perspective down to the tactics. So as our teams and our in small schools, sometimes our teams are a team of one Are working on things on a daily basis.

They have that sense of purpose and they know why they’re doing things also creating the flow of value both to Us internally from an admin standpoint and a team standpoint, but also our external customers So our parents our children and our families can get value out of something. And then also visualizing the work so that we can create the sense of transparency sense of safety and all become aligned from an admin team standpoint and a staff standpoint to a board, board perspective as well.

Guest 11: I’m Melissa Carroll. I’m serving as the Interim Division Director for the Lower School at the Philadelphia School. And prior to that, I was Head of School at Princeton Friends. And it’s wonderful to be here in collaboration with folks, talking about small schools and some of the unique challenges that we have as administrators in these little sweet little schools.

places. It’s one of the things I find most refreshing is that when you come to these conferences and joining conversation, you realize you’re not alone and that the challenges that you face are not unique to your school. And it’s wonderful to come away with ideas and be inspired by colleagues and With our efforts, we lift every boat.

I was really excited to present on adaptive change and how to create within your schools opportunities from circumstances that may be complex. Each of us brought ideas about how to respond to programmatic shifts and how we might incorporate those ideas into our teaching and learning and doing so in such a way that it, it’s free to us, that we use all of the resources that we have within our communities to impact the program and ultimately impact student learning.

Guest 12: Hi, my name is Rod Stanton. I’m the head of school at the school in Rose Valley in Rose Valley, PA. We’re a progressive preschool through sixth grade enjoying my time at the conference. Really enjoyed the session, the Hollinger session today on leadership, a great reminder of the importance of humility in leadership and a lot of great information taking from that.

In addition I’m reminded of the power of small schools at this whole conference. And it’s just really amazing that in Southeastern PA, the most densely populated independent school market in the nation, we have such a highly collaborative group of small schools here. And so it’s just really nice to network and see all my friends here.

Tara: Hello, I’m Tara Clays and I not only am here as part of the Mindful School Marketing Podcast at the National Small Schools Conference, but I also am so fortunate to be presenting. So I’m talking about AI and how you can use AI for your school website. It’s a really fun topic and what I really, really enjoy about presenting about AI is seeing people who have been afraid of it.

Become familiar with it. So we like to have fun and do some things that are low stakes, not anything that you’re going to be putting out in the public, like maybe writing a bedtime story or something like that. So starting out with some easy, fun things and committing to one tool and getting to learn how to use it, how to write prompts, how to follow up with additional information and have it revise what it’s given you.

And just looking at the, the array of things that AI can do for you and just starting small and not being scared of it. So there’s great things coming for AI, and there are already great things here, and it’s, it’s wonderful to share 

it.