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.