Category Archives: General

General

General, Institutional Flexibility

What’s in your wallet?

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The Dining Hall was buzzing, as 125 employees at Cary Academy shared stories with one another about one of their most personal of objects — their wallets. Then, with one short phrase from workshop facilitator and Dean of Faculty Martina Greene — “OK, everybody, you have 20 minutes to build your prototypes” — the din of voices was replaced with the hum of working hands.

“Can you hear that?” asked Director of Diversity and Inclusion Jason Franklin. “This is what happens when folks get engaged in the creative process. Language turns off as other parts of the brain engage.” Jason would know, as an accomplished artist and teacher who was trained in art and design at NC State.

And so it went during the opening week of employee preparation for the 2015-2016 school year. A good deal of our time during these planning days is spent getting people and spaces ready for the arrival of students and meeting to review schedules, curriculum, or goals for the year.

As a kick-off to the new Cary Academy Strategic Plan, all employees went through an introduction to design thinking as a way to lay a foundation for future conversations about innovation and creativity in our work together. This isn’t a new concept to us, as all CA 9th and 10th graders are exposed to this mindset as part of their required art and design courses. However, we believe that design thinking also can help us unlock some of the goals in our strategic plan.

The protocol we used this past week came from the Institute of Design at Stanford University. Using a hands-on project to design the ideal wallet for a partner, our employees were exposed to the five core steps in the process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.

“Building the wallet was a fun way to put the concept [of design thinking] into practice,” said one employee in a post-session survey. “Listening to my partner and then trying to design to her needs made me think about how much my students want to give their input regarding how we approach learning in our classroom. I hope that the students are ready to ENGAGE because I am ready!”

We were excited to use a design thinking workshop as a kickoff for the implementation phase of our strategic plan, which was developed over the course of last year involving input from the full community. A core planning committee comprised of board members, faculty, staff, parents, students, and alumni drove the process.

Our strategic vision is to create learning opportunities that are flexible, personalized, and relevant — cultivating self-directed and bold life-long learners who make meaningful contributions to the world.

Among some of the first tasks at hand as we start this school year:

  • To create operational structures and language to promote deeper innovation at Cary Academy. The design thinking workshop was our first step.
  • To implement a formal, cross-divisional curriculum review cycle. We will begin with an evaluation of our mathematics, science, and health curriculum this year.
  • To assess and improve our communication structure and flow. We have solicited proposals from outside experts to help facilitate this process.
  • To strengthen community by showcasing the breadth of creativity and innovation currently in practice at Cary Academy. We will do this through a full-day program on November 6, 2015. More information to come soon.

I will be sharing more information about the school’s Strategic Plan at the grade-level PTAA coffees held on campus during mornings throughout the fall. Dates and times can be found on the CA website.

In the meantime, you can check out what we’ve been up to by visiting a display of some of our prototype wallets in the library. Design thinking stresses the importance of sharing unfinished work, and I think you’ll see exactly what that means if you stop for a visit.

Appropriate Resources, General

Standing on Shoulders

We have a plan!

At their final meeting of this school year, our Board of Directors approved a Strategic Plan for Cary Academy.

Putting it together

This plan represents the collective work of our entire community, and more specifically the efforts of 24 members of a core strategic planning committee and another 36 individuals who served on four action teams. These groups included board members, employees, students, parents, and alumni.

Our planning teams relied heavily on data collected from two big community surveys last year as well as focus groups that helped provide a deeper dive into the state of our school. In addition to school-centered data, the team had a broad reading list that included reports from the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), Independent School Management (ISM), the Organization of Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD), the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the Harvard Business School. They tapped the scholarly work of Clayton Christensen, Tony Wagner, John Kotter, Michael Fullen, John Hattie, as well as local experts from UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State’s Friday Institute for Educational Innovation.

The writing of the plan took place beginning at a two-day retreat in October and ending with a two-day retreat in March. In between, action teams fanned out to research and write draft strategies and action items.

Five-Year Planning Cycle

The school has been working on continual improvement through strategic planning for the last 10 years, with plans beginning in 2005 and again in 2010. These plans did a great deal to help create the school that we have today. A quick look at the key goals from each of those plans can help us see how the school has evolved.

Our goals in 2005

  1. Create an environment that attracts, develops, and retains outstanding educators committed to the mission of Cary Academy.
  2. Nurture and grow a constituency that is emotionally connected to the school.
  3. Support students and employees in establishing and maintaining a balanced life.
  4. Better communicate Cary Academy’s admission philosophy, profile of the ideal Cary Academy student, and profile of the ideal Cary Academy class.

Our goals in 2010

  1. To prepare students for their futures, Cary Academy will be a leader in teaching and learning enhanced by the creative and effective use of emerging technologies.
  2. Strengthen the development and retention of outstanding employees who will uphold and advance the mission and values of the school.
  3. Build the framework necessary to ensure the long-term financial sustainability of the school.
  4. Strengthen student development programs to include character education, leadership, ethics, global citizenship and commitment to respect, integrity, and compassion.
  5. Strengthen multi-culturalism in an increasingly diverse school community through education, experiences, and meaningful relationships.

Our vision, goals, and strategies for the next five years

When moving into a new planning cycle, we do not abandon the old goals but instead pull those accomplishments and dreams into a new vision:

Cary Academy will create learning opportunities that are flexible, personalized, and relevant.  We will cultivate self-directed and bold life-long learners who make meaningful contributions to the world.

Our goals and corresponding strategies:

  • Create institutional flexibility to facilitate innovative and dynamic learning experiences by
      • Creating institutional mechanisms to strengthen and sustain a robust culture of innovation
      • Creating collaborative time for students and faculty to engage in nontraditional, bold learning opportunities within and across divisions
      • Reviewing and revising our academic programming to reflect our commitment to student-centered learning
  • Foster the intellectual and cultural elasticity needed to adapt and thrive in the world by
      • Enabling community members to identify and delve deeply into areas of passion
      • Ensuring community members have opportunities to expand cultural awareness and develop cultural competence
  •  Strengthen existing relationships and build new connections to embrace multiple perspectives and opportunities by
      • Improving access and exposure to Cary Academy news, events, and opportunities for participation in community life
      • Establishing an accessible network of Cary Academy community members to strengthen relationships and share expertise
      • Seeking out opportunities with other schools, organizations, and individuals to gather and share knowledge, inspiration, and innovations
  • Build the professional and learning environments necessary to realize our strategic vision by
    • Identifying and implementing enhancements to the school’s culture and operations
    • Identifying and implementing improvements to the campus
    • Designing and implementing a funding program

Implementation

The implementation of our plan also will require a broad community effort. The plan is designed to be a “living document” — meaning we have clear goals and strategies in place, but the action items will be determined each year as the plan and our needs evolve.

This spring and summer, our Leadership Team will be working to develop the first set of action items that will begin in the fall. These items likely will include:

  • Creating operational language and structures to promote deeper innovation at Cary Academy, which could include expanding the use of design thinking beyond our current implementation in upper school visual arts program;
  • Strengthening community by showcasing the breadth of creativity and innovation currently in practice at Cary Academy;
  • Implementing a formalized, cross-divisional curriculum review cycle;
  • Reviewing our communication structures within the school and recommending improvements;
  • Tweaking our academic schedule to enhance collaboration opportunities between and within divisions;
  • Moving forward with the development of a campus improvement plan to create more student-centered and flexible learning spaces.

The development of this new strategic plan also involved updating the description of our mission statement and the creation of core beliefs about learning, and I look forward to sharing more about these in a future post.

 

Appropriate Resources, General, Institutional Flexibility, Strong Connections

Innovation by Design

Recently I asked all our employees to describe a time in which they felt most alive and engaged in the life of the school. Many reflected on the school’s start up days, when they were collaborating to execute on the founding vision and build something new and exciting.

The product of that labor of love is the Cary Academy we know today, and by nearly every metric we have available, Cary Academy has reached the top tier of independent schools in less than 20 years.

With the upcoming launch of the Cary Academy 2020 Strategic Plan, we will no longer need to reflect backwards to capture that entrepreneurial, can-do spirit of our founding. We soon expect to unlock the next wave of big thinking and creative energy within our community.

An understanding of the importance of innovation and collaboration is much more widely shared than in 1996, when Cary Academy was founded as “a learning community committed to discovery, innovation, collaboration, and excellence.” In the short time since our founding, the internet and mobile technology have transformed industries and upended the ways we communicate and learn. Scholars like Harvard’s Clayton Christensen and John Kotter have studied these disruptions and worked to help organizations understand how to survive and thrive in a fast moving world.

In the language of our strategic plan, we have chosen to highlight the phrase “institutional flexibility” to signal our purposeful desire to design systems that can unlock innovation. The first goal of our draft plan reads: “We will create institutional flexibility to facilitate dynamic and innovative learning experiences.”

John Kotter has called such a setup a “dual operating system” — where smaller-scale improvements can be encouraged from everywhere within an organization and institutional might can be harnessed to do big things with the most relevant and proven concepts. Ultimately, the system itself can be transformed rather than be rendered obsolete.

At Cary Academy, we may take this one step further and ultimately organize around three important aspects of innovation:

  • Sustaining,
  • Disrupting,
  • Diffusing.

Sustaining innovation at Cary Academy means focusing on the core of what we are all about: excellent teaching and learning. Sustaining innovation means having a portrait of an ideal teacher and student, an articulated view of learning, processes for holistic curriculum review, a strong assessment philosophy, and robust methods of for professional evaluation and development.

Disruptive innovation at Cary Academy means having a system to allow for smaller-scale research and development and the willpower to allow new ideas room to grow. To foster meaningful disruptive innovation, we need some common language around process, access to additional resources and talent, and a way to feed back promising ideas into the core of the institution.

Finally, diffusing innovation hits at a core founding vision for Cary Academy: to be a lighthouse school that collaborates with our wider communities. To foster this we need renewed platforms for connecting with constituents and peers locally, nationally, and globally. We need communication systems that share what we are working on and methods to bring people together for meaningful conversations, through short-term methods like meetings and conferences and long-term relationships such as partnerships and exchanges.

In this structure, I hope that you can feel a bit of regular and a bit of radical. Our strategic plan is both a process for continual improvement and path to an even brighter future — but to be effective there needs to be a strong connection between the two. While we might not quite be able to see the future, it is important that we can imagine taking a road that leads us there.

I look forward to sharing more with the community after our Board of Directors endorses the plan at their next meeting.

 

Appropriate Resources, General

Learning from data

We live in a world awash with data.

Sometimes that data is helpful, like when you look down at your fuel gauge and see the needle on E and decide based on that information to pull into the nearest gas station.

Sometimes the data can be interesting but less helpful, like when you go to order a latest book from your all-time favorite author only to see that Amazon readers have given her only three stars for her latest effort. Does this stop you from buying? Who are these animals that don’t appreciate her full genius? Should you read the comments from the haters, or will that only ruin your day and potentially spoil the book you will buy and read anyway?

Data in the world of education can fall into similar categories. We live in world where it is increasingly easy to put a measurement on something. We survey, assess and measure regularly, all the while encouraging a holistic and long-term view of personal and intellectual growth. In the end, we want data to help us understand our world in better ways and inform actions and strategies in meaningful ways.

The Community Survey

Here at Cary Academy we rely on a variety of data points to gauge the effectiveness of our programs and chart plans for improvement.

One important instrument is our semi-annual Community Survey. This survey was designed by the Independent Schools Association of Central States (ISACS) to measure constituent views on the quality of programming at independent schools. We’ve used the survey for many years and find it helpful to not only measure Cary Academy against other independent schools but to also measure us against ourselves.

The latest survey was given in the spring of 2014, with 376 parents, 246 Upper School students, and most faculty and staff responding. Over the course of the fall, we shared the results of this survey with parents at each of our grade-level PTAA coffees. Here are some of the highlights:

High constituency satisfaction

Overall, Cary Academy constituents (broken into the separate groups of parents, students, faculty and staff) ranked us similar to other independent schools in 54% of the questions. In 43% of the questions, we were ranked higher than other constituents’ ranked their respective schools. In 3% of the cases, we scored lower.

The most important question on the survey was an individual’s view of the “overall quality of education” at Cary Academy. Percentages of satisfaction were based on how many people ranked the quality of education “excellent” or “very good” on a five-point Likert scale.

The breakdown of satisfaction by constituent:

  • Parents 88%
  • Faculty 97%
  • US students 83%
  • Staff 97%

In all four areas, our scores exceed the ISACS benchmark. The distance between our scores and the benchmarks were even higher when asked about the quality of education versus “comparable schools.”

Strengths revealed

When we looked at the survey to help determine our strengths, the following three areas emerged with highest level of positive agreement among all four constituent groups:

  • The school supports academic achievement.
  • Both boys and girls have an opportunity for success.
  • The school has a strong commitment to moral values and character development.

Exceeding our peers

Of course, other independent schools also do well in these areas, so we then looked at only the high-performing areas where we exceeded our benchmark schools. We call these our differentiators. They were:

  • College counseling program
  • Faculty professional development
  • School resources
  • Our academic and library services
  • Our commitment to innovation
  • Our commitment to diversity and inclusion

Examining our differentiators is important during a year of strategic planning – such as this – because it helps us to better take advantage of areas that are natural strengths.

Always room for improvement

Of course, we also use the survey to discover areas for improvement. Here the survey is valuable in helping us understand areas of concern, even if the survey doesn’t tell us exactly where we’ve gone wrong. In this area, students voiced some concerns about the PE program, athletics and grading systems. Faculty shared concerns about grading and assessment. Parents voiced concerns about community service, school spirit and character development.

In each of these areas, we’ve begun a conversation to better understand what led to the lower scores and to develop plans to improve.

Overall, we are grateful for the strong community response to our programs. The survey has given us some great data to use in the current strategic planning process and also in our regular goal setting and operational improvement planning.

General

Planning Retreat

Thank you to everybody who shared thoughts regarding the next big opportunity for Cary Academy — via Twitter, directly with me through email, or by talking with members of our Leadership Team.

Let me take a few moments to update you on our strategic planning progress.

A few weeks ago, 24 members of our community gathered for two days of thought, discussion, and planning regarding Cary Academy’s future. To ensure the widest possible viewpoints, the Strategic Planning Committee consists of three representatives each from the board, administration, faculty, staff, parents, students, and alumni. The board chair, board vice chair, and head of school round out the team.

The committee: Monica Udell, Ann Goodnight, Mike Ehrhardt, Laurie Mesibov, Jeff Kenney, Jim Johnson, Martina Greene, Heather Clarkson, Marti Jenkins, Palmer Seeley, Robert Coven, Alicia Morris, Joselyn Todd, Leya Jones, Sheila Rademacher, Lisa Mathis, Andrea Weathers, Kristin Murphy, Vera W, Ava R, Kendall B, Alex Wilson, Andy Walsh, and Sharice Chandler.

The weekend included some deep discussions about the school mission and our core values. We spent considerable time unpacking our mission: what it means to be a learning community and the concepts of discovery, innovation, collaboration, and excellence. Our mission statement has been our guide for the past 18 years, and we believe that it has never been more relevant in shaping our work than it is today.

We examined the strengths and the weaknesses of Cary Academy, looking for those big opportunities or the significant threats that should be addressed in a strategic plan. We talked about how to improve our programs, but many of those ideas were put into a “parking lot” for consideration by the school’s leadership team as part of CA’s continual improvement plan. Important, yes, but not at the level that they required inclusion at the strategic level.

At the end of the retreat, we identified four major goal areas to explore over the course of this year.

• Creating institutional flexibility to facilitate dynamic and innovative learning experiences.
• Fostering the intellectual and cultural elasticity needed to thrive in an interdependent world.
• Strengthening existing relationships and forging new connections to embrace fresh perspectives and opportunities.
• Building the professional and learning environments necessary to realize our dreams.

The language of these goals has not been finalized, but we have enough of a working draft to put teams on the task of identifying strategies and action plans to make them a reality. The strategic planning committee seeded this process with many of the ideas that came up through our discussion over the weekend.

We have now turned over the work to action team leaders, who will be pulling together new groups to develop strategies and action plans. Those team leaders are: Robin Follet, Dawn Bates, Michael McElreath, Nicky Stewart, Kristi McGauley, Meredith Stewart, Laura Werner, Debby Reichel, and Michael Hayes.

Our committees will be reaching out for more thoughts and ideas through the winter. They will report their first draft of strategies to our Strategic Planning Committee and our Board in January. The final strategic plan will be approved by the Board in April.

In addition, we have launched a search for a new position at Cary Academy: Director of Technology and Innovation, to begin in July 2015. This individual will be key in helping us achieve our goal to be a leader in technology innovation and a model for schools in North Carolina and beyond.

This is such an exciting time for our school, and I’m looking forward to sharing more as the year unfolds.