One of the main reasons teachers leave the profession is the lack of structured support. That’s why it’s essential to ensure your staff feels supported, guided, and challenged to grow, as it plays a critical role in your organization’s long-term success. A proven way to achieve this is through regular, well-structured staff evaluations. But how do you create a process that’s efficient, comprehensive, and beneficial for both you and your team?

Enter the Staff Evaluation Template, a tool designed to streamline the evaluation process while promoting constructive feedback and development for each member of your staff. Let’s walk through this simple, yet powerful template to see how it can transform the way you approach staff assessments.

As charter school leaders prepare for the 2024-25 school year, ensuring that all operational systems are ready and effective is crucial for creating a smooth, efficient, and calm school environment. Not all systems will function perfectly as planned (because of the number of humans involved). However, Week 1 offers a critical opportunity to identify issues and make improvements before they negatively impact learning. We created the Week 1 School Operations Readiness Audit to support this work. Download the template and refer to the information below for additional context if needed.

Summer is just around the corner, and it brings equal parts relief and stress for school administrators! While summer provides a break from the daily challenges of managing students and families, it also brings pressure to address past year's issues and prepare staff for the upcoming year within a compressed timeframe. That’s why It’s essential to have a clear and organized plan in place. At Checkbox Pro, we've crafted a comprehensive Summer List and Professional Development Template that will help you streamline your tasks and set your team up for success. First, download the template. Then, if you have any questions, follow our guide to make the template work for you.

Effective school leaders understand how important professional development can be for their staff. But also know that finding a worthwhile development opportunity is rare. In Episode 2 of the CheckBox Pro Series podcast, Steven Ward, a master of professional development, shared his process for selecting PD opportunities. We turned his advice into a template that you can download and use within your school. Download the template to make the most out of PD opportunities for you and your staff!

If you as a school leader are striving to lead your team forward, mastering effective check-ins should be at the top of your priority list. CheckBox Pro believes this for three main reasons. First, check-ins dominate school principals’ and superintendents’ schedules. To spend that much of your time being underproductive can hamstring your entire week. Second, poor check-ins easily sap your emotional energy, leading you to dread time with the staff members who are looking up to you most. And finally, we believe there’s no better way to build rapport, offer support, and continue progress on goals than weekly check-ins. Leaning on our experience with incredible school leaders across the nation, we’ll cover how you can enhance your check-in processes, using resources like Asana, structured agendas, and a human-centered approach to make every meeting count.

Being a school leader is a demanding and rewarding role in itself, but when you add parenting young children to the mix, the challenges and joys of life reach new heights. The juggling act of managing a school and a family can be overwhelming, but it's also an incredible learning experience.

As we approach the holidays, and the pressure to perform both at work and at home increases, we reached out to some of our talented and humble school leaders for advice.

Welcome to travel season! An exciting time for school leaders to grow and discover new opportunities (with the perk of getting off campus). Whether traveling for conferences, workshops, school visits, or partner retreats, booking travel can be a time-consuming process. Here are five lessons we’ve learned from booking travels for school leaders that will help you maximize your trips without detracting from your key responsibilities.

If you're like the average charter school leader, you're clocking in over 60-hour work weeks. An outsider (or spouse) might assume that by working the equivalent of two full-time jobs, you should feel on top of your workload. But that couldn't be further from the truth! The feeling of perpetually running out of time isn't just a sentiment; it's a reality that nearly all leaders face.

A colleague recently shared a podcast episode by John Acuff called "Why you're always out of time and how to fix it." In the episode, Acuff lays out a formula to audit your time and then take meaningful action to regain control of your workload. We think this practice is dynamite and created a template to make the audit easy to perform. So, you can listen to the episode (1.5x speed) or read this article to audit your clock and get the work done that matters most.

A Dashboard to Help Charter School Teams Gain Traction

When charter school leadership teams struggle to gain traction in their work, it is rarely to blame on their vision, intentions, or effort. Rather, it's often because they haven’t established a consistent operating system to set meaningful goals, monitor results, and empower team members to solve the right problems. Last month we shared a Strategic Planning Template to help your leadership develop meaningful goals. If you haven’t downloaded the Strategic Planning Template yet, we recommend diving into that work first. However, once your objectives are set, you’ll need to monitor your progress in real-time. That’s why we’ve created a Charter School Leadership Dashboard to give your team an accurate picture of how you’re measuring up to your goals.

When surveying charter school leaders, a common theme that emerges is their desire to work more strategically. Now, leaders may hold different perspectives on what it actually means to "be strategic." Visionary leaders emphasize the importance of establishing a clear vision and setting ambitious goals. Data-driven leaders prioritize utilizing school data to drive decision-making and facilitate continuous improvement. Community-driven leaders prioritize building strong relationships and fostering shared goals between leadership, staff, and the community. Regardless of their leadership style, all leaders want the daily actions of their departments to yield a significant annual impact—one that fulfills the school's commitment to the state, its community, and, most importantly, its students.

Great teachers are the driving force of exceptional charter schools. But with so many organizations (and businesses!) competing for top talent, how can you make your school the obvious choice for educators? We've compiled a list of the top five factors that teachers consider before accepting a job offer.

Fundraising. Depending on how you’re wired, that word either fills you with excitement or sends shivers down your back. Whether or not you enjoy fundraising, there are two fundraising truths across the board: 1) Fundraising is essential to the development of your organization, and 2) Every school leader feels they are not doing enough.

Since we get to work with exceptional school leaders from across the nation, we have learned three essential steps for any leader looking to improve their fundraising operations.

At CheckBox Pro, we serve incredible charter school leaders from all over the country. These working relationships give us a behind-the-scenes look at what makes these successful leaders (and all-around impressive humans) tick, both personally and professionally.