NAIS Annual Conference, day two

What an action packed day! Three one-hour workshops, two one-hour general sessions, and a long session exploring the exhibit hall; countless conversations establishing new connections and renewing old ones with peers and colleagues from around the country (including some friendly Bay Area faces, such as TBS Board Member Janet McGarvey); more time with TBS Business Manager Mohammad Kazerouni discussing the ideas and implementation for when we return to TBS; and a feeling of renewal and optimism about the reasons for the work that we do, and the beliefs that drive our educational practices.

I began the morning hopping from a breakfast with the other Fellows, where we shared our experiences from the first day of the conference, to the President's breakfast, where NAIS leadership reviewed the past year and discussed their vision for the next. From there I went to a workshop on managing retention lead by David Michelman of The Duke School in Durham, NC. The insight of his approach is that their action plan was not simply to do more internal marketing and retention outreach, though that too is important, but rather began by identifying the drivers of attrition, and then moved to enlisting various groups in the community to address those drivers in relevant and appropriate ways. For example, because half of their attrition was from families in their first or second year of enrollment, the administration worked with the Parents Association to strengthen the way new families are included in the school community. Professor Sheena Iyengar of Columbia then gave the opening session keynote speech, in which she explored the relationship of leadership and choice. Her view is that leaders must manage four elements; distributing and relinquishing control, understanding the influence of culture on choice, manage the limitations of choice overload, and developed informed intuition. These ideas are more fully explored in her book The Art of Choosing, which Mohammad promptly purchased. You might also want to watch her talk on the TED network.

After lunch (included in the conference fee) I headed to a session of personal relevance; Life Balance and Time Management for Heads, run by Ralph Davidson, a former 20-year Head of School who is now with Carney Sandoe & Associates. His talk reinforced my own understanding that if a school leader is to be the chief caretaker of a school and all the people in the school, s/he needs to take care of her/himself for two reasons - both to model that self-care for others, and to simply last through the incredible stressors that come with being a Head. Debbie Freed, a Bay Area consultant with whom TBS has worked closely in the last three years, was also there, and afterwards she and I had a lively conversation about the challenge of new Heads in managing and helping to grow the Board of Trustees. The last workshop of the day for me was titled Contemporary Marketing, facilitated by Jeffery Wack of JT Wack and featuring Karen Bowman of Webb School (CA), Kerry Shea of Greenhill School (TX), and Beth Reeves of Friends School Mullica Hill (NJ). The three Directors of Marketing and Communications all come from corporate backgrounds, and through an active discussion format addressed a variety of important questions such as, what is marketing in the context of schools, what are common misunderstandings about what contemporary marketing is, how marketing contributes to strategic planning, and many others.

The day's closing general session was a talk by Dan Heath, who with his brother Chip is the co-author of two books, Made to Stick and Switch, the latter of which was the topic of his talk. It is not a coincidence that Dan spoke on the former at the 2009 NAIS Annual conference in Chicago, where he gave out free copies of the latter! His talk was a wonderful distillation of the key concepts of the book; that in order to create meaningful and lasting change, one has to direct the rational part of the brain, motivate the emotional part of the brain, and shape the path to change by removing obstacles. This short video, which speaks to the idea of motivating the motional, contains some of the images were included in his presentation (though it does not come close to capturing the wonderful vibrancy of his live-speaking style).