Volume 3, February 2009

Welcome to our third online issue of Executive Leader Update! We hope your school year is going well amid the serious economic conditions we are all facing. The entire team at Georgia Leadership Institute for School Improvement is working to help you and your district teams manage effectively through these challenging times.

Are you looking for ways to share your district's inspiring Success Stories? GLISI has developed a tool, called Success Cases, to help you share your district's results. Based on Robert Brinkerhoff's evaluation strategy, The Success Case Method, our template can be a starting point for you and your GLISI Performance Consultant to define and communicate your work.

At the Quarterly Board Meeting of GLISI's sponsor organization, Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education (www.gpee.org), GLISI was invited to highlight the work of three of our districts that have achieved great results and documented them through Success Cases. The superintendents and district teams from Hancock, Jones, and Dade Counties presented their Success Cases to a large and enthusiastic audience of Georgia's education and business leaders.

Georgia Public Broadcasting filmed two of the presentations. A video link will be available soon, which will be posted on GLISI's home page. If you would like e-mail notification when the link is posted, send an e-mail to dorothy.whisenhunt@glisi.org and we'll let you know.

Linked below are the Success Cases from the three districts represented at the meeting, along with two more cases - from the Atlanta Public Schools and the Okefenokee RESA/GLISI Rising Stars. Check our "Results" Web page for more that will be coming soon! To get your district's Success Story started, contact your GLISI Performance Consultant. If you use a Balanced Scorecard or other strategic management process, and have seen significant strides in organizational performance, contact me at scott.cowart@glisi.org.

Scott Cowart
Director, GLISI Executive Development Program
scott.cowart@glisi.org

Upcoming Meeting: An Introduction to the Balanced Scorecard workshop will be held on Monday,  March 2, 2009 at CSRA RESA. Scott Cowart will lead this first in a series of Balanced Scorecard workshops to be held at the CSRA RESA office in Dearing, Georgia, 9:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m. To register, or for more details, call Dr. Gloria Gabriel at 706-556-6225.

►From Deb Page, GLISI Senior Executive Director:

Georgia Moves to Identify Partners in its Cohesive Leadership System
In the months ahead, GLISI will be working with two senior state leaders – Steve Dolinger, President of the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education and Brad Bryant, member of the Georgia State Board of Education – to involve the key stakeholders in Georgia Education Leadership in a Collaborative Design Team. This team will define each stakeholder group's role in improving education leadership, their programs and services, and intended improvement outcomes. This team will also work to identify gaps in support for improvement and opportunities to make access to support easier for leaders and more understandable to those who use and fund the various solutions and programs.

The output will be a framework that documents a Georgia Cohesive Education Leadership System and our shared goals and efforts to improve education leadership. The effort will also engage K-12 leaders to ensure the "voice of the customer" is heard. As one of our valued stakeholders, GLISI will be keeping you informed of the results of this work, along with some groundbreaking new ideas we’ll be developing to disseminate this work, so stay tuned.
 

►From Mark Willis, GSBA Assistant Executive Director: GSBA’s New Electronic Strategic Planning Tool: eBOARD The Georgia School Boards Association (www.gsba.com ) has always been a proponent of strategic planning, but developing a strong plan is only part of the battle. The bigger challenge is ensuring that the plan is effectively implemented.  In that light, GSBA has worked collaboratively with the Georgia Leadership Institute for School Improvement (GLISI) and the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education (GPEE) to put together a comprehensive strategic planning process that involves all stakeholders, instills a continuous improvement process, and provides tools to assist in the executing, monitoring and reporting of the plan.

This process, focused on five key questions, engages the district, staff and community in a dialogue that not only defines the “main” thing but ensures alignment from the district to school levels. Who are we? Where are we now? Where do we want to go? How do we plan to get there? How will we know when we have arrived?

For implementation, GSBA’s eBOARDsolutions (click here to view site) has developed a Web-based strategic plan component of the eBOARD (board governance) software.  This software tool provides a central place for updating, tracking, and reporting on the plan to all stakeholders. eBOARD has easy filters that allow staff to drill down to their specific responsibilities, report on key priorities looking at a Balanced Scorecard of performance objectives, and align the work of the board through board meetings and board policies, so everyone stays focused on the education of our children.

Who knows - with this kind of leadership, maybe we might one day see a trend where folks in the business community are looking to our public schools to get ideas on how to lead their organizations. Feel free to contact me if you’d like more information on eBOARDsolutions.

Mark A. Willis, Assistant Executive Director
Georgia School Boards Association
5120 Sugarloaf Parkway
Lawrenceville, Georgia 30043
P  770.962.2985 / 800.226.1856/ Fax  770.962.5392
http://www.gsba.com  mwillis@gsba.com

►Performance Tip
Have you created a performance improvement glossary around your Balanced Scorecard and improvement plans? A performance improvement glossary will help to ensure a common vocabulary for your people to use in the improvement process. This common vocabulary will decrease confusion, bring more consistency, and increase organizational focus through better alignment.

►The Balanced Scorecard, Dashboard, and Report Card: What are the differences?
If you're not sure what the differences are among the Balanced Scorecard, Dashboard, and Report Card, here's a reprint of the article published in our last newsletter, in case you missed it. This white paper summarizes these valuable tools, give examples, and offer some useful resources to get more information on using these tools. We're very interested in how your district is using these tools, so please let me know your feedback at scott.cowart@glisi.org.   ►Link to article.

►About GLISI’s Executive Development Program
The GLISI Executive Development Program is designed to help senior leaders to plan, monitor, measure, and manage organizational and individual performance and communicate needs and results to stakeholders. The program offers assistance through training sessions, performance-based tools, demonstration site visits, Executive Communities of Learning and Achievement and individual performance consultation.