Our Approach to Consulting for Sustained Change
Educators today often speak about student-centered learning, but how do we really define it and how do we shift classrooms so they’re places where it’s taking place? The Idea Institute will help your school turn this buzzword into a reality, while honoring your school’s particular mission, culture, and academic program.
Using Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), The Idea Institute provides schools with a personalized and teacher-centric professional development (PD) experience that results in educators expertly implementing student-centered learning.
Our Five Step Process:
Step One: The Listening Tour: TII will spend 1-2 days at your school, meeting with all stakeholders: administration, department heads, teachers, students, and parents. This listening tour will determine what your professional development (PD) needs for TII PLCs are. After the tour, we’ll meet again with your educational leadership team or administrative contact to make sure all stakeholders’ PD needs are aligned.
Step Two: The Implementation Plan: We’ll create an implementation plan, review it with your educational team and any key educational leader involved in the PD plan, and refine it twice based on those conversations.
Step Three: The PLCs: We’ll begin the Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) your school has selected, meeting 1-2 times a month with each PLC and communicating in between with your administrative contact and any educational leader involved in the work. We’ll provide resources for the PLCs relevant to the teachers and departments we’re working with and, depending on the package, meet 1:1 with teachers.
Step Four: The Mid- and End-Year Progress Reports: After each session, we’ll record our progress with the PLC and send it to you. Mid-year, we’ll review your PD goals with you, making sure we’re on track to meet them. At any time during the year, you can also schedule a meeting to discuss adjustments to the PD you’d like to make. At the end of the year, we’ll issue an end-of-year report with a review of the year and all data we’ve collected and collated. We’ll work with you to make an evidence-based decision on what next PD steps you want to take.
Step Five: The Exhibition of Learning: We encourage the schools we work with to have a showcase of student learning and/or of teacher learning in order to share the accomplishments of students and staff with the school community. For student exhibitions of learning, parents should be invited as well. For teacher exhibitions of learning, faculty share with administrators and peers what they’ve achieved. All are encouraged to reflect on their accomplishments, areas of growth, and areas for further exploration. We’ll incorporate these findings into the end-of-year report, using them to determine what the school’s next PD needs are.
