We recommend spacing out the four one-day Balanced Leadership sessions over a semester or a school year to allow for effective learning, application, and reflection cycles. We know that every school is different, so we contextualize our sessions to meet your specific needs and goals, and we’ll create a scope of work that matches your schedule and budget. In addition to on-site sessions, our team can also deliver online learning and coaching to sustain your team’s momentum and continued growth.

Day 1: Leadership for better school performance

In this initial session, you’ll gain in-depth understanding of the vital functions of effective school leadership, including 21 specific research-based responsibilities that drive higher levels of student learning. You’ll also learn the importance of—and a process for—helping everyone at your school define and embrace a shared moral purpose for their work as individuals and a team, including equitable outcomes for all students. You’ll leave with knowledge and skills to lead better decision-making processes using goal-oriented analysis and collaboration focused on your students’ needs.

Day 2: Focusing on what matters most for student learning

During this session, you’ll explore our What Matters Most^® pathways and insights from research on effective schools and continuous improvement cycles. Using your own identified high-leverage area(s) of need and school data, we’ll help you identify what matters most right now for your school to improve student outcomes and begin to develop real action steps aligned to your school’s specific contexts. You’ll also learn about a powerful new brain-based model for student learning that can drive your teachers’ professional learning and lesson planning to better engage students and deepen their learning.

Day 3: Inspiring and leading change

Any change worth making at your school will require your staff to alter behaviors, routines, and habits. Even the best school improvement plans can go awry if leaders don’t inspire people to change, support their understanding and adoption of new practices, and sustain the initiative long-term. In this session, you’ll learn the vital differences between 1st and 2nd order implications of change, and you’ll practice using specific leadership responsibilities related to successful change implementation. You’ll leave this session with a better understanding of the phases of change and how to develop action plans for monitoring implementation and proactively supporting stakeholders through the change process.

Day 4: Cultivating a purposeful school community

When school communities coalesce around a shared vision, mission, and values, great things happen for student learning. Researchers have found strong links between student outcomes and the levels of collegiality, professionalism, self-efficacy, and collective efficacy that exist among teachers, support staff, and school leaders.
In this session, you’ll discover how to engage staff, families, and community together to create a shared moral purpose and empower their voices in important decision-making processes. You’ll develop plans for creating a positive, continuous-improvement culture at your school, using the power of asset-based thinking and community engagement.