Delivery Method: Individual Coaching

Description  (Scheduled at mutually acceptable dates)

This highly individualized coaching program is designed to help individuals prepare for the principal selection process in an applicant’s district.  It is based on the process and conventions that are currently used in your system for that purpose and, of course, on elements of Ontario’s Leadership Profile.  Where we differ from others providing this service is we build our training and coaching around your upcoming experience as we gather as much information as we can with you about the details of the process. 

Our sole intention is to give you a simulated experience that is as close as possible to what you are likely to experience when you participate in the actual competition — and detailed feedback on your performance before you take part in the competition.  From cover letters, to CVs, to interview preparation and practice, to case studies, we put together an unparalleled professional training and development experience that will give you the competitive edge. 

What’s In It for You?

The most important factor will be increasing your confidence level.  With a review of your CV and cover letter and feedback from a panel of trained assessors (HR officer, a principal and a superintendent), you will gain a new understanding of the obvious strengths you need to highlight and areas you need to work on. 

In addition, because this whole process takes place outside your district and is very confidential, you will have the benefit of frank and objective feedback and productive discussion in a non-threatening atmosphere.  In addition you will receive a video of your mock interview to see yourself as others see you.

We’ve all been through many of the processes; we understand how important it is to do well and be seen to do well; and we want to help you succeed.  This process is about success — yours!

Cost:  This coaching program is currently discounted for the initial launch and consists of:

1. Initial interview 
2. Development of a mock selection process that mirrors your district
3. Access to a video recording link for self analysis
4. An oral and written final report

Tax Receipt:  As a registered company, Bendel Services will provide you with a receipt for your payment which may be used for income tax purposes.

Registration:  Click here:  Services – Employment to register or Contact Us  with any questions.

Delivery Method: Group Coaching with Individualized Feedback

Description

The Vice-Principals’ Academy is a six-part professional learning experience for a small number (limited to 7 per session) of current vice-principals who are interested in developing their skills and knowledge base in various areas set out in the Ontario Leadership Framework for both principals and vice-principals.  It is designed to help participants in their current role and to prepare them for the next one.

The program is delivered virtually and includes five two-hour sessions scheduled over five consecutive weeks from 7:00 pm. to 9:00 p.m. followed by a sixth session for individualized debriefing.  The in-class portion is built around three sessions on Cases Studies, one Leaderless Group Exercise and one In-Basket Exercise.  Participants will be given detailed feedback throughout the sessions and a final report which includes suggestions for professional growth and development.

What’s In It for You?

In addition to the obvious networking that will take place with this interactive program, you will be able to participate freely and openly with colleagues from other districts in Ontario.  (No session will include more than one person from a single district for reasons of privacy and professional comfort.)  You will enlarge your understanding of dealing with common problems, see yourself as others see you through both the debriefings and the videos of the session and practise problem solving in a made-in-Ontario In-Basket Exercise which will be of considerable help in preparing for a competition.

Finally, you will have the added advantage of receiving feedback on your performance from skilled Bendel personnel (all experienced superintendents, principals or vice-principals) which will allow you to identify areas of strength you already demonstrate and areas for possible improvement.  In addition to assisting you in your current responsibilities, the Academy will help you prepare for the next part of your journey in your district and province.

Cost :  This Vice-Principals’ Academy is currently discounted for the initial August/October launch at  and consists of:

1. Six sessions:  August 2021 (every Tuesday) or October 2021 (every Wednesday)
2. Access to video recording links for self analysis
3. An oral and written final report

Tax Receipt:  As a registered company, Bendel Services will provide you with a receipt for your payment which may be used for income tax purposes.

Registration:  Click here:  Services – Employment to register or Contact Us with any questions.

Delivery Method: Individual Coaching and/or Contracted Service

Description:

Just because we have all interviewed candidates over the years does not mean that we do it well. This offering looks at a number of dimensions: arranging the set up the room, developing different types of questions which suit the specific situation, phrasing of questions, the issue of posing and probing in the context of fair practice, selection of an interview panel and the development of scoring rubrics that don’t overwhelm you with paper work.

What’s in it for You?

This coaching service can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. We can simply go over information with you or, our preference, we can review information on best interviewing practices with you and then assign you a task of developing questions and rubrics which we can then review and use as a basis for feedback to you. We can even ask you to film an interview and provide you with our feedback on your performance. The choice is yours!

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.

Delivery Method: Individual Coaching and Contracted Service

Description:

As noted in our other offerings, the submission and review of portfolios are becoming a common part of staff selection, whether for teaching positions or administrative positions. Our service here is directed at two aspects of this phenomenon. The first is more proactive. In this offering we work with you to develop a form for a portfolio that you can ask candidates to complete and submit as part of the competition for the position in your school.  The driving force behind this offering is to be proactive about the form of the portfolio you are expecting to receive in order that all candidates will compete on a somewhat equal basis. The other reasons are time and efficiency. To prevent you from receiving huge collections of artifacts in a portfolio that will take hours to read and assess, the request for a structured portfolio with limits (implied or stated) will reduce the time you need to spend assessing.  Second, you may not want to structure the form of the portfolio which means you have to find a way of assessing them on a normative basis in a reasonable amount of time. We can develop a generic rubric for you or with you (your choice) to help you assess a wide range of portfolio types. In addition, as is sometimes the practice, we can develop a series of generic questions on portfolios which help you explore the candidate’s capabilities.

What’s in it for You?

This is both a time saver and a vehicle for your own professional development. In addition, if you are likely to be interested in other positions in your career in education, you can use the experience to develop your own portfolio. You never know when you’ll be called upon to present one, so be prepared!

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.

Delivery Method: Individual Coaching and Contracted Service

Description:

This is an offering directed to a principal of an independent school or a school in a very small district which does not have a system-wide model for teacher appraisal. As such, it can be rolled out as a coaching offering to an individual. Our approach to teacher appraisal is unique. Unlike most appraisal system which rely heavily (and sometimes solely) on classroom observation, we see teacher performance as a product of three related but discreet activities: curriculum planning, classroom instruction and evaluation of student achievement. As such, there is a need to gather data in more ways than watching what goes on in a class or two. We can help you as a principal to develop a skill set in appraising the materials produced by the teacher – and we’ll give you suggestions on what those documents might be. We also will help you gather data during classroom observations that will allow you to make credible judgments on your evaluation of what you see. Finally, we’ll work with you to analyze what is happening with classroom evaluation practices in the form of the review of assignments and student products. All of this can be done in a one-on-one coaching situation. In addition our staff can be available to work directly with you and a team from your school to put together a teacher evaluation package that is clear, fair and supported by the faculty. We can do it any way you choose.

What’s in it for You?

Whether you elect the coaching option or the contracted services option with you and your staff team, we can guaranty a growth in your (and your staff’s) understanding in this most complex of educational activities. You will be left with a document and a process that belongs to you and that can be modified over time as you and your staff face changes in research and recommended practices. As research has shown over the years, spending time talking to teachers about teaching is the most important responsibility a principal can have. This offering is built on that fundamental belief.

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.

Delivery Method: Individual Coaching

Description:

The scripting of a lesson, based on the work of the late Madeline Hunter, results in a very fertile data source for talking to a teacher about classroom delivery and management. There are, however, some key steps that the principal must master in order to make the task as easy as possible for the principal as observer. This offering includes individual coaching on the scripting process, practice and individual review and feedback to the principal or vice principal with one of our facilitators who have used the process successfully.

What’s in it for You?

Scripting is a powerful tool in teacher assessment because it puts you and the teacher on the same page – a scripted lesson with direct quotations from the teacher and students, notations on time and level of participation – everything that goes on in the lesson. The script is not what you as a principal think about what was going on in a lesson. It is “what was going on!” You can use the script to analyze the lesson and report back to the teacher what the analysis shows. For those who have used the process (and several of our associates have),they see it is an invaluable resource on which to base discussions of effective practices in the classroom.

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.

Delivery Method: Individual Coaching

Description:

In this coaching situation we ask you to enlist the help of one of your faculty members. He/she will be observed by you in a full class and then go through a debriefing with you. The difference is that the debriefing will be videotaped by your school technician -with the focus on you.  Once the debriefing is over, we shall interview the faculty member primarily to gather information on how he/she felt about the debriefing. The next stage is for us to review the video, our own notes from the teacher and then present you with a written report on your performance. This will include the presentation of the report and a discussion on further training and development you might consider undertaking.

What’s in it for You?

This is a great opportunity to see yourself as others see you and to use our report as a way of increasing your effectiveness in this crucial area of principal performance.

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.

Delivery Method: Individual Coaching

Description:

Most administrators, for good reason, find the writing of an appraisal report to be a very difficult task. This individualized coaching offering looks at best practices for writing such a report. The first task we undertake is to call you or meet with you directly and find out about the practices you use in your school or district for teacher appraisal. It would be great if you could send us in advance any written material from your school or district such as directions for appraisal, the form you need to complete and anything else that will put our coaching into your context. Once we get a handle on what you do or are required to do, we ask that you send us an actual appraisal done recently by you (with the name removed, of course). We begin our coaching with a short guideline on writing performance appraisals. You keep the copy sheet once we’re finished with it! We look at such dimensions of your report as a clear distinction between observation and judgment or evaluation, the use of data to substantiate your observations, the inclusion of suggestions for professional improvement etc. It’s a pretty comprehensive list but it gives us a focus for our discussion of your appraisal. It’s a combination, then, of our expertise in this area and your expertise and experience in your own setting.

What’s in it for You?

We believe you’ll walk away from this exercise with a new set of understandings of what an effective post-observation conference looks like, feels like and sounds like. This is a rare opportunity for a principal to receive honest feedback about an essential task that often results in a report that is filed away at the district office with a notation that it was completed. We’d like to think there is more to it than meeting a bureaucratic responsibility – and we know you do as well!

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.

Delivery Method: Individual Coaching

Description:

Most principals and vice-principals, for good reason, find the discussion of an appraisal report to be a very stressful duty. This individualized training offering looks at best practices for reviewing a report with a teacher. It includes ideas like how to set up the room, the use of multiple copies of the report, why it’s important to read the report together etc. and then we move into actual performance. We start off by asking you to send us a video of a debriefing with one of your teachers. We then take 3-5 days reviewing the video and then we contact you for our coaching session. As above, we’ll use a short reference paper on effective practices in this area as a basis for our discussion as we analyze your performance.

What’s in it for You?

s is the case with the early offerings in this section, you’ll be able to develop a new set of understandings of both your existing skill set in this responsibility and make, with us, some plans for future improvement. It is just another one of those opportunities to see yourself as others see you and to discuss openly what you see with a person not on staff or in the district.

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.

Delivery Method: Individual Coaching

Description:

This offering is based on the work of Jennifer Abrams in Having Hard Conversations. It seeks to build a skill set in dealing with under-achieving teachers (and other non-teaching employees) as a prelude to improving performance or, in those rare circumstances, with those employees whose continued lack of improvement may result in termination. We’ll start with your presenting issue as a test case and take you through a process with built in mini-conferences added gratis between the two formal coaching sessions. We also extend what Abrams has to say about the processes surrounding termination for poor classroom performance. In this we are aided by members of our company who have had the dubious experience of having to terminate teachers in a unionized environment. (It can be done but it takes a lot of work – and courage). Our coaching is based equally on both research and experience.

What’s In it for You?

Because this is a private coaching situation, you can talk freely and openly about the situation – and we can respond in the same manner. We can help you set out a plan for monitoring the situation with realistic time lines and clearly identified centres of responsibility.  Having a hard conversation with a person who works with you daily will never be easy. You will, however, learn what you need to do by way of record keeping, how you must involve others including the teachers’ association (if you have one) and how to brace yourself for some unkind charges but you will also find yourself in a position of making a real difference for learners – and that’s got to be the focus!

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.

Delivery Method: Individual Coaching

Description:

If you’re like some of us, you are often frustrated by annual budget cycles. In almost all cases, budgeting on an annual basis only serves to “top up” what you already have – and you never seem to get to the point where you can make more substantial purchases. This offering is built around the experience of a high school principal who successfully initiated a three-year cycle by working with his staff to separate monies into two categories (Maintenance and Major Purchase) which yielded a considerable “surplus” each year. That “surplus” was put on a three-year cycle with one-third of the departments or subject areas slated each year for a “Major Purchase” year. It means new equipment for the Science labs, the wholesale purchase of new texts in areas like English and the Social Sciences (not just “top ups” of old ones) and new equipment for Athletics – all within the regularly allocated funds. If you don’t believe us, we’ll get you in touch with one of the department heads to prove that it works. We’ll take you through the process in 2-3 short coaching sessions as we monitor, with you, how to get the department heads or grade coordinators on side.

What’s in it for You?

The bottom line is that the school and its students will be better served by a process that, in a systematic way, gets at annual budget shortfalls. It also takes budget discussions off the table for a three-year period. We’ll leave you with a written explanation that you can take to your staff in the form of a “Q and A” sheet. It worked for us; we’re sure it can work for you.

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.

Delivery Method: Individual Coaching

Description:

The ability to manage a meeting effectively is an important skill for a practising principal. In the role you have to manage full staff meetings, leadership team meetings, meeting with your board, committee meetings and parent meetings. This is, needless to say, not an easy task! This offering has several distinct categories corresponding to pre-meeting preparation, in-meeting conventions and post meeting follow-up.  In the first category we look at who should be invited to meetings in the context of the test of expertise and the test of relevance. We look at the issues of scheduling meetings, advertising meetings and determining what goes on the agenda.  In the second part of the offering we look at meetings as having three distinct parts: decision items, discussion items and information items and the inter-relationship among the three. We have for you three structured forms for these three dimensions that represent the back up to the agenda and we take time to explain what each piece of back-up should contain – all in the interest of time and effective, clear decision-making. In this section we also look at in-meeting conventions and behaviours including speaking order, language and dialogue, regulating the person who attempts to dominate the dialogue and including the reluctant participant.  In the last section we deal with the issue of detailed minutes versus the more abbreviated aide memoire and we finish with presenting you with a “task list” that becomes, in effect, part of the agenda-setting exercise for the next meeting. Once we have gone over the formalities, we leave you with a task which is to set up a tentative agenda and back-up for the next meeting of one of your groups or teams. We’ll examine this with you and give you feedback on it before you try it out.  Finally, as a finishing point, we’d be pleased to have an informal discussion with you after the meeting to see how you feel about its successes and areas for improvement.

What’s in it for You?

You should feel more confident after completing these discussions and tasks with us and you may find that people are generally happier with meetings which are a) more efficiently run, and b) actually yield firm decisions which will be the basis for change. No more of “Let’s come back to this at the next meeting!”

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.

Delivery Method: Individual Coaching or Contracted Service

Description:

This is a natural follow-up to a school self review. Are you tired of so-called planning experts who leave you with elaborate planning documents with arrows and feedback mechanisms as well as terms like deliverables, key performance outcomes, quality indicators etc. etc.? So are we! We pride ourselves on a planning model that is built around three simple questions: a) What do we want to achieve? b) How do we want to achieve it? and c) How do we know we have succeeded? We’ll review with you our simplified materials on aligned goal setting, annual objectives over a three year period and specific action plans for the first year that are easy to follow and monitor. In short, we take the complexity out of planning and leave you with something that is achievable and measurable. It will result in a substantive change which should be the essence of any plan.

What’s in it for You?

Both our methods (individual coaching or contracted service) will see a growth in your knowledge and skill set in this area of principaling. It will also leave you with a model which you can use in any school you may find yourself in the future. Beyond that, it will put your school and community on the way to a series of directed activities that will result in real change. Finally, involving faculty and parents in the planning process will enhance your staff skill set and will put your community on the one side they should be – yours – as you move your school forward in directions they have all had a part in creating.

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.

Delivery Method: Individual Coaching or Contracted Service

Description:

Virtually all schools have a range of policies and procedures on every conceivable subject. But the problem is that these are rarely codified or in one place. Some are in the student handbook, others are in the school profile, still others are in the faculty or parent handbook. And, to state the obvious, many are in the minds of experienced counsellors or teachers or administrators but have never been written down. This offering is set up to codify what you already have.  Using our “Policy and Procedure Assessment Rubric” we’ll take a look at your various documents and try to come up with a list of policies and procedures that are written or implied and then suggest other areas that should be in your manual. It’s a kind of “policy audit.” We’ll also give you a suggested form both for a policy and a procedure and suggestions on how to organize the manual as a whole. We could, of course, write these for you too but we think that the best persons to do that are faculty members or administrators.

What’s in it for You?

Fenwick English of UNC Chapel Hill equates the presence of policies and procedures with an organization being in control of itself. A comprehensive policy manual is the first step in establishing that control by codifying practices and decisions. It supports clear communication among faculty, relieves you from making “decisions du jour” but, if written properly, allows you to make consistent decisions while still respecting the need to adjust in individual cases. Finally, a codified set of policies and procedures is an excellent resource for new staff seeking to understand “the rules of the game” in a new location.

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.

Delivery Method: Individual Coaching or Contracted Service

Description:

Virtually all states and provinces have legislation pertaining to accessibility for persons with disabilities for all companies and organizations including schools. It is also true that many administrators do not have enough information and tools to review their school settings in the context of accessibility. We can help you out with this responsibility. The basis for this offering is Alison Grant’s Access Audit Handbook which has a wealth of suggestions on this matter. Unfortunately, for your purposes, it includes over 1100 indicators. We know that, as a busy principal with a host of other responsibilities, doing an access audit of this magnitude would be simply impossible. To that end, using both Grant and other materials from social science research, we have developed an abbreviated form which includes only 52 items in the most common categories: walks, stairs and hallways, washrooms, signage, furniture and equipment etc. We also include a short manual which looks at such issues as data sources, audit walk team composition, training for the team, nature and distribution of the final report etc. It’s a very usable resource. This offering includes a coaching session and the provision to you of the materials, followed by the opportunity to have informal discussions with our staff before, during and after the audit.

What’s in it for You?

You’ll get some real assistance and direction in an area with which most principals are unfamiliar. You’ll also be able to see your school in a way that you’ve likely never seen it before. You’ll be, and be seen to be, a more inclusive leader as members of the student body and the wider community show their appreciation for the attention you are paying to this often overlooked dimension. Finally, you’ll have a usable short resource that you can modify to suit your own needs and take with you through your various assignments.

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.