MANILA, Philippines — Championing the cause of development management for school success, I am currently focusing the substance of my school seminar engagements on the following subject areas: how-to-be leadership, creativity in teaching, and social marketing.

School Leadership Styles

There are three leadership challenges school executives are facing: leadership, workforce and relationships.

A cutting edge leadership style is to highlight the fact that the leader of today and in the future will be directed on “how to be” — how to develop and enhance quality, character, mind-set, values, principles and courage.

The “how to be” leader is aware that people are organization’s biggest asset and it is in word, action, attitude, and relationships that he or she manifests this philosophy.

Teach Beyond the Curriculum 

A cr i t ical chal lenge to educators is to teach beyond the curriculum by teaching the compassionate heart, not just the thinking mind, and nurturing character not just thinking skills.

Each school must have a curriculum focusing on real life education programs like: educating for humanity; honoring individual learning diversity; role of experience; holistic education; teachers as edu-tainers; earth literacy, spirituality in education, and global citizenship.

Strategies for School’s Sustainability 

A lot of schools are experiencing the following concerns: a decline in enrolment; difficulty in maintaining and retaining talented staff; stiff competition brought about by the mushrooming of schools; making teachers creative in their instructional strategies, and many more. Social marketing is the missing answer to all these woes.

Social marketing a unique discipline in which public or commercial marketing principles applied for offering products to consumers are used to “sell” or promote ideas, behaviors, and attitudes that will improve the well-being of its target audiences.

It is “social” in the sense that it focuses on the betterment of the society as a whole (social good), and at the same time “marketing” because of i ts use of commercial (though not profit-driven) marketing approaches.

While it follows the elements o f a typical marketing mix focusing on the four P’s (product, price, place and people), social marketing adds a few more P’s to better communicate to its target audience. These are: public, policy, partnership, and purse strings.

Transforming Schooling and Education

In today’s so-called Conceptual Age when the stakes on innovation and creativity are immensely high, even the task of preparing our children and youth for success becomes a daunting task because of so much information available on a myriad of outlets to choose to get it from.

It is also not a secret that schooling isn’t the same as education; therefore, everyone concerned — parents, teachers, school officials, researchers, psychologists, lawmakers and policy makers, government and private educational institutions — must pour concentrated, conscious, and continuing efforts to consistently review and reformulate management and instructional styles in educational institutions. And what better way to influence this change than by social marketing?

(The author is the president of the Center for Learning and Teaching Styles and MINDful IDEAS, an affiliate of the International Learning Styles Network, based at St. John’s University in New York.