Tessellations School - Head of School
: Job Details :

DRG is pleased to work with Tessellations School in this search.

Mission

Tessellations provides challenging experiential education that recognizes and nurtures the individual strengths of gifted learners, empowering them to confidently express who they are and pursue a meaningful life.

Vision

We are a community of imaginative, empathetic, productive, and passionate lifelong learners who advance an equitable and sustainable world.

Values

• Wonder, curiosity, and deep learning
• Rigor, resilience, and courage
• Kindness, generosity, and integrity
• Open-mindedness and adaptability
• Acceptance of self and harmony with others
• Connection with and respect for nature

The Program

At its core, Tessie is designed to serve gifted kids well and meet their needs at a high level. Progressive education principles guide all decisions around Tessie's program. The resulting curriculum is student-centered, project-based, experiential, and innovative. As the school moves into a more established mode, additional work is needed to ensure the curriculum is appropriately challenging and sufficiently skill-building for its students at each age and stage. Tessie has developed strong socioemotional programming throughout the curriculum. The student body shows up as kind, curious, all-in students who exhibit humility and lack the peer-to-peer competition or one-upmanship that can be prevalent in highly academic communities.

In the preschool, the curriculum is play-based, following best practices to foster empathy, collaboration, communication skills, and a love of learning. From the Lower School upwards, project-based learning with an emphasis on social justice and outdoor education is a throughline. Notably, Tessie is designed with differentiated education, including math and literacy groupings by ability rather than grade. Top-notch music, fine arts, drama, math enrichment, and debate programs bolster the core academic areas.

Tessie's high school just opened this year and is still evolving. Opening a brand-new high school avoids the problems of wrestling with tradition. Thus, Tessellations High School is already being heralded nationally as a progressive school to watch. Having attracted an impressive group of founding faculty, the approach to curriculum is even more progressive than in K-8, with the school leaning fully into Competency-Based Learning, Mastery Transcripts, and the findings of Challenge Success (a Stanford-based research group dedicated to improving the well-being of high school students). The inaugural 9th-grade class only numbers 8 and will expand yearly until an eventual enrollment of approximately 300.

Opportunities and Challenges for the Next Head of School

Consistent with the high demand for strong progressive gifted education in Silicon Valley, the school has grown tremendously over its first five years. While growth is the first stage for long-term success of a start-up school, even more important is how a new school transitions to its next stage of development. The key transition pieces are multi-layered. First, the new Head will need to understand the school's history and do a quick audit of the entirety of its programs. While striving for sustainable excellence, they will need to set up the systems, policies, and organizational structure to ensure that Tessie is delivering a consistently high-level experiential program for its gifted learners and a joyful learning-focused and excellence-aspiring environment for its teachers. Tessie currently has 16+ directors or program leaders; the Head will need to examine roles and program needs to make sure they are appropriately distributed and defined. As the focus moves from building to honing the school's programs, a different balance of teachers and leaders will likely be needed. Similarly, in the development stage, both parents and board members have contributed greatly to Tessie's programs and departments, and a reevaluation of appropriate roles and boundaries in sustaining a school will be crucial.

Devoting the time to determine a communications strategy will be vital, as the Head determines the appropriate cadence, transparency, and tone of the school's messaging. The Head should think about exuding professionalism, reassurance, connection, and deep knowledge of the school and programs.

The admissions process at Tessie is already highly developed and honed, and the hiring process needs similar attention. The school needs a Head who can establish rigorous and efficient hiring practices both to bring in excellent teachers—in skill and in mindset—and to establish the needed onboarding and professional development practices to support their transition and growth throughout their hopefully long tenure at the school. Ultimately, the Head should prioritize freeing teachers from organizational and parental distractions, so that teachers can focus on the student experience, and work to grow and develop teachers to be the most effective possible.

Having gained the appropriate knowledge of Tessie's culture and history, the new Head will be able to bring the focus back to creating and systematizing a high-quality, student-centered, academically challenging school that fosters curiosity and love of learning in gifted students of all ages and stages. This will help them ensure mission and programmatic alignment across and within divisions and limit or remove siloes. The Head will then be able to provide clear messaging for role responsibilities while also fostering a universally respectful working culture.

Responsibilities

• The next Head of School will primarily be responsible for establishing and collaboratively designing the school's trajectory in order to ensure the highest quality of gifted education across all four divisions. They will be responsible for setting, communicating, and upholding the school's standards and expectations while also building and maintaining a positive and vibrant student-centered culture.
• Serve as the face of the school.
• Shepherd the school community through its first WASC Accreditation.
• Return the focus to the day-to-day running of a school by spending time in classrooms, learning what is currently happening on campus, and establishing a widespread culture of faculty development and excellence.
• Develop the administrative team; delegate to and empower them appropriately; and determine their best organizational design and structure.
• Guide and lead the school's marketing and fundraising strategy and execution in conjunction with the Executive Director.
• Solicit and consider feedback from all stakeholders (teachers, parents, administrative team, Board, and students) to build relationships and advance the school in a unified way; provide appropriate pastoral care and instill confidence in parents, teachers, and students.
• Evaluate and set/reset, uphold, communicate, and adhere to budgets.

Qualifications

Experience and Skills

• Advanced degree and at least ten years of experience in a senior administrative position in an education setting preferred.
• A student-centered and proven people manager who can empower others, make them feel safe, and hold them accountable.
• Deep experience with and commitment to progressive education.
• Understanding of the complex needs of gifted population.
• Experience and skill with a deeply invested, highly educated, and high-achieving parent community.
• Proven track record of turnaround success, building or growing a school, or experience and success navigating and improving a complex, cross-divisional, cross-program school.
• Significant classroom experience.
• WASC or other similar association accreditation experience.
• Someone who has worked at and learned multiple schools and systems.
• Successful fundraiser preferred.

Personal Characteristics

• Kind, empathetic, collaborative, and curious.
• A charismatic, open, friendly person who enjoys being with people.
• Resilient, unflappable, and skillful at calming and connecting during times of high stress or conflict.
• A flexible and adaptable relationship builder.
• Someone who loves to fix problems with strong follow-through.
• A systems thinker.

Benefits and Compensation

The salary for this position aims to be competitive and commensurate with experience, falling within the range of $300,000 - $500,000 annually. Tessellations School offers a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, and vision insurance and a matching 403(b) retirement plan.

Application Requirements and Search Process

DRG is conducting this search on behalf of Tessellations. Interested candidates should submit, as soon as possible, materials including the following:

• A cover letter indicating why they are particularly interested in and qualified for the position
• A current resume
• A statement of leadership philosophy
• A second writing sample of your choice (newsletter, article, talk, parent email, etc.)
• A list of references (references will not be contacted until the finalist stage of the search and only with candidate permission)

Application materials should be uploaded directly on the DRG website (www.drgtalent.com) by visiting the Tessellations listing.

Application Deadline: November 25, 2024