While our Teacher-Powered Schools Initiative makes numerous collaborative leadership resources available free of charge and helps to facilitate peer-to-peer learning networks, Education Evolving also provides some specific services to schools and teacher teams.

Areas of Expertise

Education Evolving’s expertise is in collaborative leadership and shared decision-making structures in schools. We’ve worked with dozens of collaboratively led schools, and can bring perspectives and ideas about how other teams have worked through common issues. Specific areas we offer support include:

• Developing a Shared Purpose and a Culture of Collaborative Leadership. Making teacher-powered work in practice is as much about a group’s shared purpose, culture, and norms as it is about formal structure and processes. We can help facilitate group exercises to strengthen shared purpose and build trust.
• Creating Shared Decision-Making Structures and Processes. We can help your team work through the structures and processes you use to make decisions—such as dividing decisions among committees, delegating responsibilities to specific roles, defining the relationship between a principal or leader and the full teacher group, creating pathways of collegial accountability, etc.
• Building Leadership Capacity Across All Team Members. At teacher-powered schools, all members of the team are leaders. This requires a cultural shift, and a new base of skills. We can help you identify areas of growth, set leadership-building goals, and develop action plans to meet the long-term needs of your school.
• Forming Processes for Team Feedback, Evaluation, and Learning. Having a healthy and productive process for giving feedback to team members for self reflection and goal setting is a central part of a teacher-powered school. We can help your team shape the processes you will use at your school.
• Addressing Commonly Faced Challenges. There are some common challenges nearly all teacher-powered schools face at some point in their life cycle, such as: founder or leadership transitions; pressure to conform from outside sources like a district or authorizer; cultural integration of new team members; and more. We’ve seen these situations play out many times before and can help provide grounding and perspective.

Services We Offer

There are a number of ways we can help in the areas listed above:

• Group Workshops. A couple times a year we host workshops, which usually bring together three or four schools. We’ve given these workshops primarily in Minnesota, but if enough schools in a region are interested we will be happy to conduct them in other states.
• On-Site Workshops. We can arrange a session, ranging in length from two hours to two days, to visit your school on-site to work through any of the areas described above.
• Ongoing Support & Coaching. We can arrange a “retainer,” where we are available to members of your team for meetings, calls, and emails on an as-needed basis.

Interested?

If you’re interested in any of the above, please contact us at info@educationevolving.org.