Consulting

There are four areas of work. Most engagements draw on more than one of them.

• School turnaround. Partnering with leaders in underperforming schools to stabilize operations, set priorities, and build the instructional and operational systems that move outcomes. The purpose is to leave the school with working systems and a team that knows how to run them, rather than a report.
• Instructional support systems. Turning CLASS® and observation data into a working weekly rhythm. This names what coaches do, what teachers practice, and how leaders follow up, so that the quality of adult and child interaction actually changes.
• Coaching and supervision design. Building the coaching cycles, walkthrough routines, and supervision structures that carry feedback into consistent classroom practice. Every week has two columns, what the person being coached does and what the person supervising them does.
• Leadership development. Building the skill of principals, site directors, and instructional leaders so that they run these systems themselves. This includes the tools, the weekly routines, and the year-round cycle that keeps the work going after the engagement ends.

Engagements come in three shapes. Each one names what happens, how long it runs, and what your school has at the end.

Purchase orders are accepted, and every engagement is invoiced against a written scope.

Though some consulting engagements end with a strategy document and a set of recommendations, at Growth MindED Consulting an engagement ends with working artifacts and trained people, because a system your team cannot run on their own is a system that stops when the consultant leaves.

• Written rubrics for the roles you supervise, both instructional and non-instructional.
• The scoring expectations that get two managers to the same score for the same person, along with the two columns that explain why someone would receive one score and not another.
• A year-round development cycle with named stages, owners, and the conditions that have to be met before each stage closes.
• The meeting agendas and coaching structures, with at least one worked example showing the reasoning behind each decision, so the protocol can be learned rather than performed.
• A written record of who owns each part of the system after the engagement ends.

I have sat in most of the seats inside a school and a school system. I started in 2000 teaching bilingual immersion in a DC public school, and across public charter schools since then I have been the coach, the principal, and the network vice president. The systems I build are the ones I needed and did not have.

The work is built at real scale. That includes rubrics written for every seat on a staff chart, instructional and non-instructional, and a year-round development cycle with named stages, owners, and exit conditions that a school runs from August through June. Though some evaluation systems leave the scoring to each school to work out on its own, at Growth MindED we write it down, because two managers looking at the same person should arrive at the same score.

School budget proposals are typically built between January and March, adopted by boards between April and June, and executed before July 1. If you are planning for next school year, a conversation in the fall gives you a full cycle to work with. If you are mid-year and something is not holding, the Diagnostic is designed to fit inside a semester.