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10 MIN READ

Author: Steven Dahl, M.Ed.
Director of Professional Learning & Content Development
The Center for Educational Effectiveness

“If you’re not telling your story – who is?”

Doug Kaplicky  

Answering this question is the driving force behind the development of a new online course by the same name – Marketing Your School – Who’s Telling Your Story?

This course is the first of many planned through a partnership between CEE and Randy Russell to provide a suite of courses that tackle a range of thorny topics head on. These Next Level Leadership Courses are designed to elevate the skills of educational leaders and provide participants with the confidence and evidence they need to take their leadership to the next level.

Where did the partnership idea come from? Randy Russell pointed to the high level of trust already evident in his work with CEE as a valued partner in his role as an educational leader. 

“The idea for the partnership really just flowed out of an already existing partnership with CEE. As superintendent in Freeman School District, I have partnered with CEE as a customer since 2016-17 to continuously build my district culture. I rely on CEE’s tools to gather data, gain insights, and engage students, parents and staff around our district’s mission, vision and values. I’ve benefitted from CEE’s expertise which serves as the foundation for this current effort to co-develop high quality, standards-aligned professional learning opportunities in the form of online courses.”

“Exactly” echoed John Steach, CEO of CEE. “We jumped at the chance to partner with Randy Russell in the creation of something we understand busy educational leaders really need as they work to continuously improve their systems while contending with a constant flood of change and complexity. We wanted to cut through that and get to what matters most. We are excited to partner with Randy to positively impact educational leaders in any setting nationally.”

Learning Connected to Professional Leadership Standards

Course participants will appreciate the connection in all of the Next Level Leadership courses to professional standards for educational leadership.

John explained, “Since we designed our L360 around the PSEL (formerly known as ISLLC) standards and the School Leader Paradigm (SLP), it made tremendous sense to extend that commitment to high-quality professional learning through our course content.”

Randy echoed, “Without some type of professional leadership standards to connect to, a course can just become a list of great ideas. We decided that if we were going to provide online professional learning courses, we would make those connections explicit.”

What Matters Most?

There are so many competitors for the attention of educational leaders at all levels – but especially at the school level. We set out to design courses that would be relevant for leaders in any context, but especially for school principals.

This is in response to national trend research conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics on the alarming rate of principal attrition. It should concern us all that 1 in 10 (11%) public school principals left the profession during the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years.

More recently, an article in EdWeek to kick off the 23-24 school year indicates that framing principal attrition as a “principal pipeline” issue is misguided. Instead, the authors suggest that leadership development through pathways is needed to attract, grow, and individualize the leadership journey for current and aspiring leaders. As the authors assert, “Think about it, whatever commodity enters a pipeline at the beginning (e.g., water) is the exact same thing that exits the pipeline at the end. There is no growth or change. This can’t be the way we think about leadership development.”

The partnership between CEE and Randy Russell to develop high quality learning opportunities is in direct response to what matters most to current and aspiring leaders.

Insight-Driven Professional Learning

The challenge for any leader in any setting looking to grow is not merely finding ‘more information.’ Information is readily available through any internet browser. The real challenge is to locate meaningful opportunities to engage experts who have acquired insights into even the thorniest of challenges a leader can face and then experiencing a process to contextualize and apply those insights.

Transformative insights are the lens through which the Next Level Leadership courses are being developed.

Randy’s work mentoring administrators spans those in his own district as well as an entire network of leaders who engage him through the Next Level Leadership webinar series. These virtual, real-time sessions are designed to address challenges facing busy administrators who desire just-in-time collaboration and resource sharing but understand the downside of being away from their primary work site.  

“If I’ve learned one thing in my career,” Randy shared, “it’s that the last thing you want to do is waste the time of a busy administrator who is looking for the one good idea they can implement today (or possibly even yesterday!). I center my live webinars on the premise that everyone genuinely wants to grow and is looking for partners with the expertise to help them take their skills to the next level.” 

Similarly, John pointed to the work that CEE does nationally in its work with administrators to provide a range of solutions including executive coaching and strategic planning. “We are rare in that we don’t just ‘do surveys’ but we also roll up our sleeves and engage leaders around proven leadership strategies that make a positive impact when implemented. Our data visualizations provide the insights leaders might otherwise miss and make it possible to move from data just being ‘informative’ to data being actionable and ‘transformative’.”

To amplify these insights for both current and aspiring administrators, CEE developed the EES Leadership 360 Survey™ which is a comprehensive online tool that adapts to a leader’s self-reported effectiveness and feedback from peers, colleagues, supervisors and staff.

The survey questions follow a progressive path of leadership development, and the result report shows the relative strengths of leaders against both the School Leader Paradigm (SLP) intelligences and the Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL) standards.

Centered on a Cycle of Inquiry (PDSA), this professional growth tool ensures that leaders will have the data and insights needed to plan forward. 

Increasingly, leaders understand that CEE’s surveys are designed to synergistically provide a 360-degree understanding for the individual leader and their system to action plan around any problems that are keeping them up at night. 

Regarding focused professional learning for leaders, John added, “CEE also provides Mastermind cohorts where educational leaders engage in a virtual learning experience unlike any other. We’ve experienced a tremendous response to this format of professional learning. We provide a group of like-minded, similarly situated educational leaders a set of facilitated sessions to tap into the expertise in the room and generate real, practical, and proven strategies to problems of practice shared by members of the group as the basis for each session. It eliminates the time spent driving to isolated PD events and replaces it with a Community of Practice (CoP) approach.”

Access to expertise and individualizing the leadership learning experience are the crux of what makes professional learning powerful. That’s why Randy has personally selected all of the NLL Courses subject matter experts (SMEs) as course instructors to share insights, strategies and a rationale for approaching challenges in a particular way based on proven results.

NLL Course #1 - Marketing Your School – Who’s Telling Your Story? SME, Doug Kaplicky.

One of the most dizzying aspects of being a leader at this time is keeping up with the many options for engaging stakeholders through digital content and social media. A related challenge is ensuring that everyone in an organization knows how their interactions in person with each other, students, families and stakeholders collectively ‘tell their story’ one interaction at a time.

To address these challenges, Randy knew just who to call: Doug Kaplicky.

Doug was thrilled as addressing these challenges has been a focal point of his professional journey as an award-winning school principal, a sports psychology and marketing pro, and through the consulting firm he founded, Positive Focus Group, that focuses on team and culture building in any organization, including schools.

Doug’s response says it all, “When Randy asked me to share my expertise and journey with colleagues on how to effectively ‘market your school’ I was ecstatic! He knows this is one of my passions and that I can share from personal experience just how this ties into everything else on the priority list for a busy administrator.”

Randy added, “Doug brings such a rich background to this conversation but more important than the information he shares is that he has lived out everything he’s sharing. He’s seen the results that are possible when you follow his approach.”

A central task for all leaders is to build a positive and productive organizational culture whether it be a small rural school, a central office role, or as the superintendent of a large urban district.

Relationships matter… and adult relationships in education matter even more. This isn’t really news. As renowned educational researcher and expert Roland S. Barth (2006) noted in an ASCD article, “One incontrovertible finding emerges from my career spent working in and around schools: The nature of relationships among the adults within a school has a greater influence on the character and quality of that school and on student accomplishment than anything else.”

At CEE we like to punctuate Barth’s conclusion with a Peter Drucker quote: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” The truth is that all the improvement strategies on the plate will have limited success unless leaders keep the main thing the main thing – a healthy organizational culture – which turns out to be the plate.

Randy’s commitment to building quality relationships is so important to him he wrote a book about it. The 3 Ships encapsulates Randy’s approach to educational leadership and offers any current or aspiring leader a head start on setting their sails to accelerate their growth.

This is also why the Next Level Leadership courses are designed to address the most pressing needs facing leaders through relevant content.

Relevant Content for Every Leader to Elevate their Skills

Let’s face it, staying current on the topic of how best to engage stakeholders through digital resources such as websites and social media channels can be overwhelming. Finding the intersection between posting a video on an amazing student activity and an administrator’s ‘real job’ can be a challenge.

“The course design really mattered to me because we know that PD is not all created equal,” Doug shared.  “We’ve created instructional video content, reflection activities, handouts and additional course resources all intended to equip educational leaders to understand how ‘marketing their organization’ is a core component of their role – and to help them generate evidence of their actions aligning with recognized leadership standards.” 

Here are some examples of what is in the course to help make those connections:

• Course video instruction on how to market an organization and why it matters.

• The many benefits for “ed-vertising” an organization by sharing positive examples of success by students, families, and staff using digital and in-person opportunities.

• Strategies for creating a favorable ratio of positive social media interactions and how to avoid common pitfalls.

• Strategies for turning potential “objections” to ed-vertising into “solutions.”

• Activities such as a Website and Social Media Audit and Analyzing a Recent Community Event for course participants to contextualize their learning.

• Connection to articles and resources by leading educational associations (AASA, NASSP, NAESP) to solidify understanding of current trends around leveraging social media.

• Sample Parent Letters about the Value of Website and Social Media Communications.

• And so much more…

Next Level Leadership Courses are accessed through CEE University. 

Connecting Ed-vertising with Culture Data

While the Next Level Leadership Courses will be available for individuals to complete independently, the course is also designed to be completed in a group or with the facilitator.

“We recognize that many will decide to take courses as individuals,” Randy explained. “But we also know that one of the biggest needs in education right now is access to current content that can be used in leadership PLC’s. Our leaders want – and need – to connect with one another. We factored that in and included a Next Level Leadership Facilitator Guide that mirrors the course and provides the facilitator a roadmap to help contextualize the content for any setting.”

John, Randy and Doug agree that telling an organization’s story requires collaboration and being intentional around the techniques used to market the organization. More importantly, to improve the story an organization can tell about itself requires cultivating a healthy culture on a continual basis.

As Doug emphasized, “It’s hard to tell a story about your organization if that isn’t your story to tell - yet. I tell the districts I work with that I can provide techniques and strategies for telling their current story well, but rewriting their story or changing their narrative is all about relationships and culture. That’s also why I emphasize both aspects in this course.”

Elevating Your Leadership

Randy summed up the opportunity that busy and beleaguered administrators will now have as a result of this partnership and the launch of the first Next Level Leadership course. 

“It’s not about ‘taking another course.’ It’s about changing your course through professional learning.’

We look forward to supporting current and aspiring leaders taking their leadership to the next level by applying the strategies learned through Marketing Your School – Who’s Telling Your Story?

To register for this course, visit CEE University

With content that is relevant to the work you do, be sure to check out the Outliers in Education podcast.  

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