School board members are often in the hot seat these days, and not just during formal meetings. This session will cover communication skills and strategies specifically designed to help you grow your capacity and confidence as a school director.

We will explore personal communication and leadership skills, as well as organizational and process-related strategies that set you and your board up for positive, productive meetings. In particular, we will focus on strategies to help you navigate conflict with dignity, efficiency, and civility.

Whether you are new to board service or a seasoned veteran, you will come away with practical tips you can use immediately. J.Marie will also share a strong philosophical approach to guide you when you're caught by unexpected situations.

When hot topics catch your community's attention, such as disciplinary action, legal issues, or labor/management conflicts, one of the hardest parts is figuring out what to say when you can't say much. Saying ‘no comment' just won't do, so what can you say?

Walk through a veteran communication strategist’s tried and true approach to engaging the community appropriately and respectfully around these kinds of difficult issues. Come away with key ideas and talking points you can share with your leadership team so everyone can approach the issue consistently and appropriately... and so nobody feels caught off guard in the grocery store produce aisle when a curious community member asks about the topic du jour.

The Johari Window model of self-awareness is built on two key principles: building trust through appropriate information sharing, and fostering self-awareness by welcoming and learning from others’ feedback. This model divides personal awareness into four quadrants—open, hidden, blind, and unknown—each representing different aspects of our understanding of ourselves and others. These quadrants are dynamic, akin to window shades that can move and shift over time.

This model is incredibly useful for enhancing self-awareness in both personal and professional contexts. It serves as a tool to understand interpersonal dynamics within teams and organizations of all sizes, offering insights into organizational systems and how these dynamics unfold.

Effective communication is essential for successful leadership. In fact, strong communication skills are necessary for accomplishing anything else you’d like to achieve. When communication is identified as an area for professional improvement, J.Marie is often called in to help leaders build their skills and deepen their capacities.

In this session, leaders will learn practical skills and techniques that can be applied immediately. If you want to become a more trusted leader and connect more authentically with colleagues, board members, your organization’s constituents, and the general public, this session is for you. We’ll focus on the areas that most often trip up otherwise successful leaders.

Public agencies often require numerous meetings, ranging from routine staff, cabinet, board, and leadership team meetings to strategic planning retreats, open houses, and large public gatherings. It can feel like leaders are always in meetings. 

However, basic, easy-to-implement facilitation techniques can transform these meetings from dreaded calendar-fillers into productive, efficient, engaging opportunities for collaboration and progress. When done well, meetings can actually energize your work! With over 20 years of proven experience in making meetings both joyful and effective, J.Marie will help you significantly elevate your facilitation skills.

In smaller school districts, it’s common for everyone to “wear multiple hats.” This session is designed for those who handle communications even though it is not their area of professional training. 

Learn the basics of effective organizational communication and how to address the needs of your audience. You will gain strategies and tips to maximize the impact of every message you write, bring consistency and efficiency to your efforts, and navigate critical incidents with calm competence. While this class stands on its own, it also pairs well with the session on simple communications planning.

A community’s ability to influence its leaders’ decisions is not just a nice idea; it is the very foundation of our society. As leaders of public agencies, we have the responsibility to facilitate this influence, making it easy for our constituents to get involved, influence their local leaders, and know they have made a difference. Doing this is not only beneficial for our organizations, but it also strengthens our communities.

In this group training, we will explore the circle of influence and discuss specific strategies to close the loop for our constituents. We will also reflect on the moral purpose of our work and identify one actionable step you can take to elevate your effort when you return to your desk. Whether you are in your first year or your thirtieth, you will leave this session renewed in your professional purpose and ready to engage your community in tackling the big issues facing your organization!

When we think about communications, we often focus on what’s being said. However, effective listening is a critical component of a leader's ability to build or rebuild trust. A good leader must also reflect back what they’ve heard, specifically noting how constituent priorities have influenced their thinking. This is the ‘secret in the sauce’ that elevates your listening from merely informative to truly strategic and trust-building.

In this course, we’ll address listening on two levels: personal leadership listening skills and organizational strategies to deepen trust in your organization and in your leadership. We’ll explore how bringing increased clarity and purpose to your listening activities not only refines your decisions but also boosts confidence in public agencies overall. 

Community trust depends on clear, compelling fiscal communications that are simple and relatable, but how do you do that when the information is so complex? School finances can be an intimidating topic to cover. The many different funding streams, legal obligations, liabilities, and board directives make finance one of the least understood areas of education. 

We will explore effective ways to talk about the business of running a school district, from budget reductions to tax collections to allocations and spending. We’ll discuss the importance of communicating about finances all year long, not just when your district has a funding measure on the ballot. You’ll come away with practical ways to relate school finances to families’ home finances, ideas for visuals that help simplify complexity, and more!

The 100 billion neurons in our brains hold the key to our personalities, knowledge, experiences, and emotional responses, shaping our individual uniqueness. We now know that our IQ is not fixed at birth; our entire brain is active (with 30% of it lighting up every time we open our eyes); and physical movement can alter the brain at a structural level. 

In this session, we’ll delve into current neuroscience findings about how the brain works, learning throughout our lives, and strategies for managing your brain to enhance your life. You’ll gather practical and enjoyable tips that you can immediately apply to maintain a healthy and engaged brain. This topic can be presented as a series, or a single session can be tailored to cover a selection of the following content areas: how the brain learns, the brain and emotion, maintaining a healthy brain, and myth busting.

From school board meetings to our homes, from television news to community centers, disagreements are more heated and polarized than ever before. Conflict isn’t inherently negative; it naturally arises from holding different views in any given situation. When it is managed well, conflict can enhance outcomes and even bring people closer together.

In this session, we will explore methods to embrace disagreement and develop skills to navigate conflicts with dignity, civility, and respect. 

The way you navigate the first 24 to 72 hours of a critical incident sets the tone for how your schools will get through the crisis. When a serious issue is unfolding, staff and families are mad or traumatized, and the media is calling ... you want to convey calm competence. Handle the situation poorly, and the negative effects could live on for years. Handle it well, and your organization can actually grow stronger.

Join veteran communications strategist and crisis response manager, J.Marie, to learn how to conduct a quick, effective situation analysis, identify the constituents you need to connect with first, develop key messages, and craft and implement a messaging timeline. You'll come away with a basic communications plan outline you can customize and apply to any critical incident, as well as tips and strategies to help you be ready to do and say the right things when a challenging issue arises.

This class combines two foundational skills in one useful session! Listening is something most of us do every day without much thought. With the constant bombardment of information, many of us struggle to be good listeners. The good news is that, like all communications skills, listening can be improved with attention and practice. In this highly interactive session, we will explore ways to increase our influence and connection with others by being more intentional in our listening. 

Feedback often makes us cringe for a couple of reasons: we tend to compartmentalize it into annual events like performance evaluations or community surveys, which can lead to an overwhelming amount of information, and we fear hearing negative feedback. In this course, we’ll reframe feedback (it really is a gift!), and discuss ways to make giving and receiving feedback less painful. We’ll share strategies and tips to incorporate feedback into our daily lives, helping us build better relationships and achieve more.

You know that strong, effective communications skills are critical to accomplishing everything else you hope to achieve on behalf of your students. But if you're like most school leaders, you were lucky to get one module of communications training in your formal education. A handful of essential skills can genuinely elevate your effectiveness as a leader.

We’ll start with a review of core communication concepts, then dig into some practical, highly scalable ideas you can use right away. Put some fresh tools in your personal and organizational communication toolkits with this high-impact session for today's school leaders. This content can be delivered for a mix of leaders or targeted to the specific needs of superintendents, principals, or central office administrators.