I originally wrote this article in August, 2019. 

This is an interview of Mr. Stephen Ladas, one of my personal & professional mentors. Mr. Ladas is the headmaster of a school called the International Community School Bangkok (ICS). ICS is a K-12, private, not-for-profit international school. The key questions (numbered 1-9 below) highlight different challenges and strategies in today’s complex world of educational leadership. Mr. Ladas’ answers reveal a plethora of rich insights about his organization which can be applied to leading any system.

1. How has thinking about ICS as a system helped you to improve as a headmaster? 

Zooming out and seeing the whole system has helped Stephen see how everything is very connected. He has noticed how elementary decisions may create problems in middle school and high school, by way of a “ripple effect”. He now focuses on figuring out the best solution, not simply the quickest one.

Recommendation: Focus on the best solution for the whole system, not the easiest or fastest. 

2. What is the greatest challenge that ICS is facing today as a system?

Background information: ICS is currently an international school with a single campus in Bangkok, Thailand. ICS plans to open a second campus in Udon Thani for the 2020/21 school year. Stephen is challenged with keeping ICS’s caring Christ-centered learning environment consistent even though there will be an established school in Bangkok and a new school in Udon Thani. 

Recommendation: Identify what makes an organization’s culture valuable, then cultivate those most valuable elements no matter where the organization goes. 

3. What experience do you have with professional learning communities (PLCs) working well in yours or any other organization? How have you modeled successful teamwork in professional learning communities? 

Stephen gives credit to Scott Hayden the Curriculum Director at ICS for implementing a PLC model. In the elementary school, Scott has prepared grade level teams of teachers to work together over the past few years. ICS continues to ensure that PLCs are focus driven with questions like: “what do we want to assess?” or “let’s analyse this specific element of curriculum?”. Stephen feels that PLCs at ICS result in high quality collaboration resulting in increased teacher achievement.

Recommendation: Scaffold PLCs into increased familiarity and collaboration paired with specific goals to focus on. 

4. Do you have any examples of policies/ programs you had to stop ICS from doing in order to make it a more effective organization (ie. addition by subtraction)? 

Every year the leadership team at ICS goes through what Stephen calls the “weeding list” (Stephen Ladas, personal communication, August 8, 2019) which is a list of a typical teacher’s responsibilities. The leadership team then evaluates what needs to be added to a teacher’s responsibilities in order to improve the system. If anything is added then something must be taken away to allow room for the new initiative to grow. For example, in previous years the leadership team has analysed the beginning of the year orientation schedule and weeded out some training that was redundant in order to give teachers more classroom preparation time. 

Recommendation: Regularly reflect on the roles and responsibilities of the people within the organization. Ask “how can they be empowered to be more effective?”

5. Being Intentionally inviting is so important in the cross-cultural international school setting. Out of 10, 1 being not inviting, 10 being extremely inviting, how would you rate ICS in terms of being inviting? What has the leadership team done to make ICS more inviting?  

Stephen rates ICS an 8/10 on the inviting scale. Ways that ICS is inviting include, a) all teachers stand at the front door to cheer students in on the first day of school. b) Having a member of the leadership team outside the school directing traffic and greeting everyone as they arrive. c) Improved communication of after school activities. Activities used to be mentioned in the weekly newsletter but now all information is accessible on the school website. 

Recommendation: Think from a newcomer’s perspective about every aspect of the system, physical, visual, digital, and interpersonal. 

Ways that ICS could be more inviting, a) Improve the clarity of signage on campus to help guests navigate the complex space. b) Increasing the amount of information accessible to parents via the school website rather than via numerous emails. 

6. Which 21st Century Competence is most important for youth today to learn and WHY? a) Critical thinking, b) innovation and entrepreneurship, c) collaboration, d) computer/ digital technologies?

Both critical thinking and collaboration are very important 21st century competencies for today’s youth to learn. Critical thinking (CT) is lacking in many of today’s students and it is not embedded in the curriculum at ICS. Stephen believes that if students have CT skills they are able to acquire other competencies more easily such as innovation, collaboration, and computer technology. For example, in order to be innovative one must think critically to solve a problem that exists in the world.

Recommendation: Focus on cultivating foundational competencies such as critical thinking in students through curriculum, schoolwide initiatives, and partnering with the community to solve problems (Pierce, 2019).  

7. How does ICS prepare students for the unknown future? 

Students at ICS are prepared for the future by providing plenty of opportunities for students to collaborate through team-based projects and cooperative learning. Stephen identified that ICS should focus more on IT and digital competence while educating students about the fact that they will need these skills in the workplaces of the future. 

Recommendation: Do more than simply teach 21st century skills, educate students about why the skills are essential for their future. 

8. What ways have you or would you like to improve the professional development that ICS teachers receive? 

Stephen has improved professional development at ICS through personal professional development plans focused on improving student learning. In order to continue to improve professional development at ICS, Stephen would like to implement a peer observation model. He gave the example of every teacher observing five other teachers throughout the year. Stephen recognizes the immense wealth of knowledge that can be gleaned from observing master teachers. 

Recommendation: Focus professional development on personal professional growth, while utilizing peer support with the goal of improving student achievement. 

9. Give an example of a time that you distributed leadership and it benefitted ICS as a whole system. 

When ICS adopted a Subject Area Curriculum Team (SACT) model there was a marked difference in teacher buy-in. A SACT is a subject team with its own coordinator. Curriculum development then became a shared responsibility as opposed to the responsibility of the leadership team and curriculum director. This shared leadership made some organizational changes more readily received by staff as they no longer felt like top-down decisions because they were coming from a peer (teacher). 

Recommendation: Find ways to utilize coworker’s strengths and expertise through leadership roles in order to operate more effectively as a system. 

References

International Community School Bangkok. (2019). School Profile. Retrieved from https://www.ics.ac.th/school-profile

OECD. (2008). 21st Century Skills: How Can You Prepare students for the New Global Economy? Retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/site/educeri21st/40756908.pdf

Pierce, K. (2019). ED6002 – Tuesday, August 6, 2019 7.00.33 PM. Retrieved from lms.unb.ca/d2l/le/content/166001/viewContent/1595388/View

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. It was a pleasure spending time with you today.

Peace & Blessings, 

– Josiah