Client Testimonials
Insights for Learning worked with our schools for several years to improve teacher effectiveness. I was most impressed with the high quality of expertise and the rich resources that helped move my teachers along the continuum towards becoming highly effective.
Larry Wallen, AZ Superintendent
Thank you for being a key player in enabling the development of shared leadership within teams that survive administrator turnover. Your work is producing the change agents needed to transform professional learning in Arizona schools. We are grateful
Donna
Thank you for life changing sessions on Friday and Saturday. Loved meeting new people and trying out our coaching strategies.
Dee
Thank you for planning and providing another memorable Professional Development Leadership Academy Summit. The risks you are willing to take to continually improve our learner’s experiences and outcomes are inspiring.
Miriam Podrazik, SEA Director of Professional Development
We know from professional learning research that it takes a sustained investment of time equip teachers with the ability to change instruction and improve student learning. We also know that participants learn the most from professional learning activities that are “job embedded” with the day-to day work of teaching. From our research and our personal experience, one-shot workshops have a minimal impact on long-term improvement and can even confuse efforts. Therefore, Insights for Learning provides six extended professional learning series:
- Transformation Through Innovation
- Professional Learning…to the Core
- Curriculum Design…to the Core
- Instruction…to the Core
- Capacity Building Coaching, and
- Leadership for Learning Schools
To maximize results, long-term partnering with highly skilled external providers may be crucial for moving an organization forward. We will be happy to work with you to select and organize a professional learning plan to meet your goals and needs. In addition, we regularly develop innovative approaches, programs and products for our partners.
In some cases, professional development is needed to fill the gaps in an educator’s knowledge or to lay the foundation for the deeper work to come. In these cases, specific sessions may be provided separately. These work sessions include building an educator’s awareness, deepening their knowledge, practicing skills, and applying the newly learned skills to their own work.
Each of the topics listed in the learning series is available as a professional development work session. In addition, sessions can be designed specifically for your staff’s learning needs.
Four types of coaching are provided by Insights for Learning and are described below:
Leadership Coaching
Leadership Coaching primarily focuses on personal and organizational development and is provided for district administrators, principals, instructional leaders, and aspiring leaders. Goals are developed based on an initial assessment and leaders are coached through the process of making the identified improvements.
Collaborative Learning Team Coaching
Coaching collaborative learning teams, professional learning communities, or improvement teams can ensure that the teams achieve a high level of collaboration, maximized effectiveness, and the achievement of results. In the course of coaching hundreds of teams, we have found that a coach can be a powerful catalyst for continuous growth and results. An effective coach minimizes lost opportunities and facilitates a team’s forward momentum in the midst of conflict. Coaching collaborative learning teams also ensures the team’s work stays focused on improving the instructional core, which includes content, instruction and student engagement.
Instructional Coaching
Instructional coaching is designed to support individual teachers as they work toward improving instruction and student learning. Coaches structure conversations to focus on improving evidence-based strategies, including planning, reflection, as well as goal-focused and/or solution-focused conversations. The teachers being coached are observed during planned and unplanned walk-throughs and observations.
These coached teachers may also conduct their own observations or review videotaped observations to improve instruction. These coaching conversations, application of practices, and observations with feedback support teachers to improve their practices and establish continuous growth patterns. This is a highly individualized experience that supports specific outcomes.
Coaching the Coach
The final type of coaching is designed for coaches, principals and other educational leaders as they implement and refine their own coaching skills. Coaching sessions are observed and feedback is provided to the coach to improve skills and ensure growth of the coach’s skill set as they implement coaching activities. Problem solving for coaching challenges is also addressed, and support is also provided for effectively implementing and evaluating coaching programs and establishing a culture that supports coaching.
The curriculum development lab is a design studio setting that helps to structure the curriculum work of teachers. This studio setting helps teachers to understand and use the processes and routines needed to produce high-quality curriculum products. These processes include: understanding standards, using data to drive curriculum decisions, principals of curriculum design, curriculum mapping process, aligning assessments and effective selection, as well as use of materials. The end result is that teachers learn the skills of curriculum design and mapping while designing and critiquing their own curriculum products with the support of expert assistance. Over time, this support enables teachers to develop high-quality curriculum collaboratively.
The greatest issue that schools often have regards the process of fully implementing programs they have selected. Often, several programs overlapping one another have been insufficiently implemented to make a difference in instruction. Implementation Monitoring and Support is designed to assist you as you set the importance of each approach and determine the level of implementation of any program or initiative.
In this process, we assist you in designing the measures of progress, selecting or designing instruments to measure implementation, and developing appropriate responses to increase the level of implementation. We use the flexible tools we have developed for the purpose of supporting implementation that works across programs and initiatives.
Insights for Leaning’s staff have designed, developed, implemented and/or evaluated hundreds of educational programs of various types. We can help you design and evaluate programs to specifically meet your unique requirements.
We begin with a needs assessment and analysis of the context, cultural setting and research basis for the program. During the next phase, we collaborate with you to design the innovation components of your program and how your program might work.
When a program’s design is agreed upon, to we assist you to develop the structural conditions and the professional learning content and design necessary to implement the program. During the implementation phase, feedback is collected and refinements are made to ensure desired results. In addition, a complete program evaluation may be designed and conducted to support further refinements and innovations.
Technical Assistance can be provided to assist you with specific problems or needed innovations. This can include, but is not limited to: organizational challenges, developing and supporting networks, problem analysis and strategic solutions, designing professional learning series, modules and conferences, developing tools and toolkits, and curriculum design.
