Strategic Support for Leadership needs to address the ever-changing 21st century landscape for schools and districts. Visionary collaborative leadership is essential! Beyond fiscal responsibility, leaders are expected to wear multiple hats. Administrators need to be equipped with knowledge/skills to insure successful systemic reform along with maintaining focus on students. EDU Consultants offer a multi-dimensional approach to institutional change by building systemic collaborative teams that explore “soup to nuts”. We include curriculum/instruction, staffing and accountability, policies and protocols, facilities and budget.

Long-term Professional Learning Support

We worked with the Palmdale School District for long-term, sustained professional learning. Middle school science teachers were the first to implement Next Generation Science Standards. Impressively, from awareness to initial implementation, MS teachers participated in over 500 hours of professional learning. The teacher teams generated resources that would guide district-wide implementation of the preferred integrated model.

Related: Strategic Support Services

In this section, I’m going to how we began our long-term support. First, teachers developed a “year-at-a-glance” scope and sequence for grades 6 through 8. Next, teachers implemented our unique backwards-mapping design model. We helped them to develop unit lesson plans and resources for each of the four grade-level instructional segments. Throughout the journey, teachers experienced model lessons to help build their understanding of the three-dimensionality of NGSS. Teachers practiced the instructional shifts that would drive their instruction. We implemented grade level lesson study, from planning to observational lessons. Lesson Study helped them solidify “best practices” and strengthen district-wide collaboration.

After the 3 years of working with grade 6-8 teachers, we applied our professional learning model to elementary. We used revisions to our model, based on “lessons learned” with MS teachers. We established 3 grade-span cohorts: K-1, 2-3 and 4-5. Each team received 8 full sub-release day trainings.

In order to build capacity, EDU Consultants duplicated the 40-hour training during a summer institute for 20 elementary sites. This brought our current total number of NGSS-trained elementary teachers to over 300, with future trainings anticipated post-COVID.