Custom Services for Districts and Schools
With over 100 years of combined experience in education, Leadership Partners can provide a wide variety of custom services personalized to districts and individual schools. These include Program Evaluation, Classroom Formative Assessment, Executive Coaching, Four Paths of Influence Surveys, and Advanced Problem Solving Methodology. Learn more below.
Program Evaluation
School districts often spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a wide variety of programming. What often goes untold or undiscovered is impact. Leadership Partners provides custom program evaluations for districts to discover the impact your programs are having and if you are getting a valuable return on investment. Conducted by Leadership Partner Founding Member Dr. Lawrence Kohn , the mixed method of qualitative critical ethnography combined with quantitative analysis of surveys and other instruments are used to collect and analyze data to give districts the answers they need about the programs they pay for. Please contact us here for more information on how we can provide custom program evaluations for your district.
Classroom Formative Assessment
Classroom Formative Assessment is perhaps one of the most underutilized and most impactful set of strategies teachers and administrators can possess. When implemented correctly, classroom formative assessment impacts learning and achievement equivalent to one on one tutoring and can dramatically raise achievement, in particular for students who struggle the most.
Participants who engage in this professional development will learn how to:
Create high quality formative assessments
Create high quality summative assessments
Create clear learning targets
Offer descriptive feedback
Teach students to self assess and goal set
Utilize sound grading practices
Ensure mastery learning
Please contact us here for more information on how we can provide professional development for your school on Classroom Formative Assessment.
Executive Coaching
Executive coaching enhances an individual’s leadership and development. Through a process of inquiry, dialogue, and other tools, our coaching model serves as a thought partner for leaders. We help leaders examine and develop their decision-making, discover with new ways of thinking and being, and commit to action steps that will move them toward their goals. We provide tools for leaders to transfer their learning into results for their organization and their personal lives.
Executive Coaching Works! The most comprehensive and rigorous meta-analysis of professional coaching ever conducted was just published in print, and the results are clear: Coaching “has significant positive effects on performance and skills, well-being, coping, work attitudes, and goal-directed self-regulation.”
A Successful Model
Our coaching is a proven model that gives you a methodology to eventually coach yourself, providing you with the resources and knowledge to continue to grow and improve long after your coaching ends.
Interaction that is Candid and Confidential
To help you get where you want to be, our communication is honest, insightful, and confidential.
Tangible Solutions
We believe whatever challenges you are facing, you have the solution. Our model helps you to help yourself.
A Personalized Approach
In partnership with you, we are here to help you to reach your goals. Our coaching is highly personalized, and we are committed to your success.
The Four Paths of Leadership Impact and Surveys
Leadership matters. The decisions and actions that campus leaders make daily shape what happens in the school and in the classroom. However, it seems the industry standard is to try to measure principal effectiveness via student achievement scores on standardized tests. Low test scores must mean a principal is not impactful in a positive way; high test scores must mean the principal is doing many things well and might be seen as positively impactful. In a broad, general sense, this may be true. However, it turns out that principals do not directly impact learning and achievement; this occurs indirectly over four paths of influence.
This model has been researched and developed over the last 15 years by Dr. Ken Leithwood, (University of Toronto) and more recently researched by Dr. Jing Ping Sun (University of Alabama). This is called the The Four Paths Model, and it is summarized in the figure above. Each path is tied to the variables that impact learning and achievement AND to variables that principals can directly impact. Once leaders know which variables need improvement, steps can be made to problem solve with precision, saving valuable time and resources. These essential variables and how they relate to the paths can be seen below.
Rational Path
Disciplinary climate
Academic Press
Teachers’ uses of instructional time
Classroom instruction
Emotional Path
Teachers’ trust in others
Teachers’ collective efficacy
Teachers’ commitment
Organizational Path
Safe and orderly environment
Collaborative structures and cultures
Organization of planning and instructional time
Family Path
Parents’ expectations for their children’s success at school and beyond
Parent’s social and intellectual capital about schooling
Forms of communication between parents and children
Tired of the multiple surveys given in schools? Leadership Partners collaborates directly with Drs. Leithwood and Sun to use a highly specialized survey to measure how these variables are working in schools, and, what to do with the survey data to improve learning and achievement in schools. A similar district survey is available that principals take that informs district leaders what they can do to better support principals, which in turn impacts learning and achievement in schools.
These two surveys replace the many surveys often given by districts and focus on what research says matters most in schools. This allows principals and district leaders to diagnose and design with precision, which saves valuable time and resources. Please contact us here for more information about using the surveys and the support we offer concerning the results.
Advanced Problem Solving Methodology
“I believe two things are true. It is true, as would-be-reformers often argue, that statutes, policies, rules, regulations, contracts and case law make it tougher than it should be for a school and system leaders to drive improvement, and, well, lead. However, it is also the case that leaders have far more freedom to transform, reimagine, and invigorate teaching, learning and schooling than is widely believed.” Rick Hess, Cage Busting Leadership, xi, 2013.
Dr. Rick Hess, one of our national faculty, emphasizes the need to identify and solve problems with precision. School and district leaders need to be expert problem solvers, especially with the complexity of issues they face daily. Leadership Partners offers a proven problem-solving methodology that includes how to properly define a problem, discover its true cause, productively generate alternatives and solutions, and how to create positive action to deal with the problem. To learn how we can offer this methodology to your school or district, please contact us here .
