Introducing Making the Case

Insight for independent school heads, board chairs, and the teams they lead

Welcome to Making the Case — a new project from Reshan Richards and Steve Valentine. Making the Case is professional development in the format of a newsletter that offers insights for school heads, board chairs, and the teams they lead. 

If you’re reading this, we’re guessing that you’ve read our work before or worked with us somewhere along the way.  We’re now inviting you to be part of the launch of something we’ve been developing for over a decade. 

We know that learning (yours and your team’s) is often pushed aside in the face of the daily troubleshooting and problem solving that school leadership requires. Our aim is to show up alongside such necessary work, ensuring that learning about school is woven into doing school.

By preparing and framing essential topics from the independent school landscape, we will increase your team’s awareness in order to speed up decision making, elevate discussions, and promote a proactive approach to leadership. We won’t always have all the answers, and you won’t always agree with us, but we will provide consistent items for teams to see / react to / reflect on.

We recommend that you engage with this publication and use it to add value to your organization by building it into your administrative and trustee professional development budget.

Subscribers will receive:

• 📄 Content with consistency in timing, length, and structure, designed for independent school boards and administrative teams 

• 🗓 A new Making the Case article on the first day of each month

• 🕰 Access to the Making the Case archive

• 📔 Quarterly summary digests

• 🌎 Access to the Making the Case community via replies, discussions, and more

Each article will present a challenge and / or opportunity followed by steps for making the case for it from both a learning and a business perspective. We will also help you to consider theoretical and evidence-based approaches to measuring the impact of engaging with the challenge and / or opportunity. 

On May 1st, we’ll send the first issue to you, free of charge, and you can (a) choose to subscribe for future issues at that time. You can also (b) unsubscribe if you don’t want to receive that May 1st issue or (c) click the Subscribe button below to become a Founding Member of Making the Case.

ℹ️ About Steve Valentine and Reshan Richards

We have been waiting ten years to launch this subscription service, developing our own skills, context, awareness, and network that we now plan to share with you.  In that time, we have written well-received books on leadership, technology, teacher training, and the ways in which teaching skills and mindsets can drive results in marketing, sales, and innovation.  We have also interviewed and learned from some of the top creative and business minds of our generation.  On the ground, we have led schools through a variety of phases, projects, and challenges. Last, our network, assembled through writing, speaking, and business pursuits, extends beyond schools while offering new perspectives to support schools.  Our signature guarantee, at this point, is to separate signal from noise for leaders wishing to be more intentional with their resources.