What Your Education Plan Lacks Is Strategic Approach, And How to Fix This

Updated on Feb. 07, 2020:  We’ve stopped support of Roadmap Planner but the Roadmap feature is now available in our new goal-oriented platform – Goals by KeepSolid. This business solution provides the same opportunities to plan and execute your strategies and even more. Check out Goals by KeepSolid and stay tuned for its updates!

Should business and education sectors have common strategic planning practices? Most of the time, it’s a debatable question. There are certain major differences between a company’s strategic approach and that of an educational institution. For instance, schools and universities concentrate on long-term education investments, whereas businesses are built around shorter term financial results. Another difference is how important community engagement and support are for implementing a successful education strategy.

However, there are no doubts that strategic planning is just as crucial for education as it is for entrepreneurship. In this piece, we will explain why it is so and what tools will best help you to build an education strategy.

About strategic planning

First, let’s go in short about what is strategic vision and strategic roadmap, and why both teachers and students definitely need them in education.

Strategic vision is your long-term plan, it’s the overarching goal that all your efforts should be designed around. It is an ultimate tool to ensure that you know where you’re heading. Individuals, universities, companies – anybody trying to act without a plan at hand is doomed to fail. A proper strategy should also answer the “how?” – that’s where strategic roadmap comes into play.

Strategic roadmap is a tool that will keep you on track during your journey towards the goal. Without a roadmap, you will have no way to see the road ahead and the path that you’ve already covered. It’s like wandering around in a dark room only lit with light from the “Exit” sign. You might know where you want to get, but you will have no idea of what obstacles you might stumble upon.

Tools of trade for students and teachers

Now that you understand the importance of a thorough strategic planning, let’s discuss a neat little app called Roadmap Planner. It is dedicated to making the planning process as transparent, smooth, and clear as possible. Within this app you can craft roadmaps of various scopes and levels of detail. The main benefits of Roadmap Planner are its intuitive design, Gantt chart timeline, and versatility for planning different aspects of life.

So how exactly does education planning benefit from using this service? Glad you asked! Let us answer this question starting with the tool’s application for school leadership and then moving to teachers and students.

The ways how educational leaders can benefit from a strategy are arguably the most self-explanatory. They occasionally have to draw long-term action plans for various projects, consider numerous interrelations between subjects, interact with other schools, etc. This is the kind of strategic planning that is common for any administrative institutions. Thus, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this is the application that Roadmap Planner was designed around. Gantt style charts, timeline visualization, multi-project planning – everything an educational leader might need, we have it!

Teachers planning an education strategy can face certain challenges that Roadmap Planner excels at solving.

1. Challenge: Designing a lesson course. On one hand, it must include everything that education program demands. On the other hand, there is no way to predict which parts will your students get through quickly and which will prove complex for them and will require additional explanation. Thus, your plan must be both all-inclusive and flexible enough at the same time.
   
   Solution: You can build a roadmap of any scope and precision and easily edit any parts of it afterwards. If one of the lessons happen to take more time than expected, you can easily see how it will influence your schedule and how to make up for it. Oh, and there is a handy Backlog feature for all those great little ideas and insights that you don’t yet know where to use but would certainly want to save for later.
   
2. Challenge: Planning theoretical and practical studies. One should flow from the other and sometimes you have more lessons of one type than those of the other. In this situation, understanding which parts of information should go to which parts of the schedule can become a mess.
   
   Solution: Divide your schedule within Roadmap Planner into two projects: Theory and Practice. Include the topics or themes, add dependencies between them, set milestones such as certain educational events, etc. Now it will be super-easy to see the big picture, your end-goals, and your overall progress. This way you’ll never lose track of tasks or forget to cover an important topic. Besides, you will have a comprehensive visual presentation of your plan in case you need to showcase it to stakeholders.

Students will benefit from the app in question as well. However, their planning challenges are not as… regulated, if you will. They mostly arise from two needs:

• planning out a lot of different coextensive and somewhat related subjects
• having a single tool capable of on-the-go planning

Roadmap Planner appeals to them due to its ability to represent any amount of projects simultaneously within one page. A single glance at the screen is enough to have a helicopter view over all your studies and subjects. Additionally, the app was designed with mobility in mind, hence can easily be modified on your device.

To conclude

We hope that you now have a better understanding of the strategy planning process and its applications in education. It is a way to drastically boost your effectiveness, making it so much easier when you have a clear understanding of what’s to come. Doesn’t matter if you are a private teacher, a college dean, or a university student, building a strategy is a first sure step to your success.

What are the greatest challenges of strategic planning you have ever faced in education? Tell us in the comments! And if you are interested in trying Roadmap Planner for yourself, download this planning tool and get a 21-day free trial.