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Delivery Method: Contracted Service

Description:

In many schools principals are overwhelmed with applications for positions.  We’d like to take some of the time and responsibilities off your shoulders and do some of the spade work for you. We shall contract with you to review all written applications for a position and call references to gather information on your short list of candidates in the context which you give us i.e. experience, expertise, educational background, special requirements of your school or position etc.  Following our review we shall send you (within a time frame we agree to in advance) a brief report on each candidate and, if desired, a suggested order of candidates’ suitability from our perspective.

What’s in it for You?

In a word, time.  Something you never have enough of.  In addition, you receive assistance from experienced educators who will give you their honest appraisal as you take the candidates into the next phase.

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.

Delivery Method: Contracted Service

Description:

Using whatever information you can give us about the position, school and community, as well as the conditions of the interview (length, number of interviewers, duration etc.) we can prepare for you a series of suggested questions and scoring rubrics that you can use for the interview. Once you review these, we’ll make any suggested changes immediately and return the final version to you for your use.

What’s in it for You?

As in all offerings in this series, it’s time again. But you will also have at your disposal (because you’ll own this particular product) a set of questions and rubrics that you can alter and re-use over time.

Contact Us for pricing or 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 of 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: Contracted Service

Description:

Case studies are often part of most interviews. While they are useful, they are sometimes very time-consuming to create as are the rubrics that are needed to assess responses to them. We want to help you on both counts. We’ll chat with you about the situation you want to develop into a case study and then develop both the case study itself and the accompanying scoring rubric. In addition, we’ll include some questions you could pose about the case study to determine how the candidate approaches problems in a general sense, something that is not always done with case studies. Then we’ll send everything back to you for review and make any changes you want made to our draft of the case study, the rubric and the attendant questions.

What’s in it for You?

You’ll save time and you’ll be able to build a portfolio of case studies that you can use in the future. Your involvement in the review of what we have prepared for you will help you now and in the future.

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 systems 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: Contracted Service

Description:

While much work has been done in the last decade on student evaluation practices, much needs to be done in matters that are left out in official pronouncements.  Does your school teach the language of assessment?  Are expectations for assessment standardized across grades and articulated among grades?  For students entering a school mid-year, what are the guidelines for using performance in the former school as part of a comprehensive assessment at the end of the school year?  What is the policy for assignments that are late because of absence or simply tardiness?  Is this policy uniformly applied throughout your school?  These are only some of the questions that a school needs to address at a school-wide level. Dealing with these and other considerations in the form of a school-wide policy (perhaps cooperatively designed with the assistance of parents) can go a long way to avoiding difficulties surrounding report cards and parent queries.  This package includes the direct involvement of our staff to facilitate the development of the policy.

What’s in it for You?

Having a fully articulated student evaluation package for your school will make life a great deal easier for you as a principal but it is also a much more judicious system for your students.  In the end, it stops the mixed messages that go to students about evaluation rules among teachers and subjects.  It puts structure around evaluation expectations.  A school wide evaluation policy is also a great vehicle for staff development as the materials in the policy can be the basis for growth of your faculty in this crucial area.  As one of our staff (a retired high school principal) said: “When I worked with my staff on a school-wide evaluation policy, I found out more about them and their beliefs than I could ever have imagined.”  It’s a great way to get your faculty involved and it will be a fabulous basis for defending grades when the problem comes to the office for a final ruling!

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.

Delivery Method: To be determined with client depending on service required

Description:

Using materials from a cross section of American states and Canadian provinces, the work of Fenwick English, the research of Ken Leithwood and Edmonds’ correlates of effective schools, we offer an individual school a process and attendant documents to examine the following features of a school:

• Academic Leadership
• Focus on Student Achievement
• Community Relationships
• Quality and Articulation of Program
• School Appraisal Systems
• School Organization with a Focus on Intra-School Communication and Decision-Making
• Safe and Caring School Climate

This package is designed for a school to examine all seven elements for a comprehensive review or simply one or two elements as needed.  Information gathering is carried out through interviews with staff and parents and other stakeholders, document reviews, surveys and audit walks.  All information-gathering instruments are supplied and can be modified to suit an individual school’s needs, past practices and traditions.  A school selecting this package can conduct the review itself following a training program by our personnel or it can use our School Review Team to carry out the review.

What’s in it for You?

A school self-review is an excellent vehicle to start off your principalship.  It gives you, at any time, a data-based report that can be used for your school improvement plan.  In addition, the involvement of your staff in a self-review will be a tremendous growth experience for those on the team; similarly, using parents on a team, if history proves correct, will result in a renewed confidence in the school which they will now see as being more open to scrutiny.  They will, we are sure, be equally impressed with what faculty and administrators do on a regular basis on behalf of their children.  Don’t be afraid to let your light shine!  N.B. The materials for this offering are currently undergoing revisions and will be available in the early spring 2021.  That doesn’t stop you from contacting us to see if you want to book us in.

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.

Delivery Method: Contracted Service

Description:

Most organizations have strategic plans.  The problem is that many of these plans may not be either “strategic” or achievable.  They are often put aside until the next reporting cycle calls forth a flurry of activities in an attempt to confirm the plan was achieved, even though many of the materials used to justify actions that have little to do with the achievement of strategic initiatives. We have a two-fold approach to strategic planning. Our approach looks at the process for developing the plan as well as ensuring that the product reflects characteristics not often extant in strategic plans.  In the case of the former, we look at five features of the strategic planning process.  These include varied input from a diverse group of stakeholders, analysis of internal capabilities, deep analysis of external environments and potential impacting factors, competitive advantages and disadvantages of the organization and the early and active involvement of those who will be charged with the plan’s implementation.  In the case of the latter, we ensure that the final plan will be aligned to the organization’s mission and vision, will result in changes of substance in product and work flow, will be supported by detailed action plans, will be measurable, realistic, properly sequenced and will be aligned to the lifespan of the governing board. Our personnel are skilled in facilitating the development of such plans.

What’s in it for You?

Your board or district will have a simple, aligned and achievable plan of which you can be proud.  With the addition of an operating plan for each of the years the plan is in operation, you’ll be able to control the work flow of the organization, direct resources appropriately to the right places and see your district change in substance as you move forward along a very integrated front. This isn’t just a paper plan; it’s a strategic action plan in the fullest sense of the word.

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.

Delivery Method: Contracted Service

Description:

The existence of governing boards in large and small school districts, in independent schools and in other types organization within the education sector such as community or regulatory colleges is a fact of life across North America and beyond.  The most effective organizations are those which display a productive and trusting relationship between the professional staff and the board. Good governance is a prelude to effectiveness. Using the Carver model as a basis, we have developed, with staff from Wilfrid Laurier University, our own governance assessment instrument or GAI which can be used by school districts, colleges and other organizations to analyze the governance structure to assess its effectiveness.  The GAI includes four target areas as follows:  Planning and Direction, Governance Structure, Board-Staff Relationships and Client Orientation.  The application of our GAI along with fact finding through the analysis of board minutes and interviews with staff and board members is designed to be a basis for a report to the board on its functioning, and includes recommendations for improvement.  As we do with some of our other offerings, we can complete the review itself or it can train a team of board and staff members to carry out a self-review with the same purpose in mind.  The choice is yours!

What’s in it for You?

Our experience has shown that a well-constructed review of governance does lead to real changes in structure, direction etc. Because we look at all four target areas, the review is comprehensive in nature.  You can, however, choose to review only one or two areas at a time.  Finally, by looking at multiple data sources, we feel that our methodology makes a strong case for both validity and reliability.  Try us!  We guarantee you’ll like our new approach.

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.

Delivery Method: Contracted Service

Description:

We use a unique process for both selecting and evaluating principals and vice principals. Its approach is based on the work of Fenwick English who espouses the principle of multi assessors and multi data-gathering techniques to assess both potential and performance. In both cases this could involve analyzing the candidate (for selection) or an incumbent (for appraisal) through a variety of lenses.  We recommend three from the following techniques: the standard interview, the 360-degree feedback mechanism, the site visit, essential task observation, self-evaluation, third party structured or non-structured interviews and the submission of a professional portfolio.  For selection of a principal or vice-principal from a group of applicants, we also offer an assessment centre, a process designed by the American military but now used in many organizations to gather data on personnel for selection, appraisal and training.  In all these cases, the emphasis is on data collection and triangulation to produce a report (for appraisal) or a recommendation (for selection) that is data-based, fair and justifiable.

What’s in it for You?

Selection and appraisal of principals and vice- principals are thorny tasks for a principal or a board.  If the first is not done well, the second will cost a great deal more time and money.  What you’ll receive from us is a an air-tight, defensible process that uses your criteria and your school’s/district’s criteria to ensure the best fit.  In addition, depending on which options you choose, we can do a good deal of the information-gathering for you which frees you up to review carefully the final reports on performance in each of the areas you have chosen for information-gathering.  We can spend the time gathering information.  You can spend the time doing the most important part – making a good decision!

Contact Us for pricing or with any questions.