Customized Professional Development Offerings
Based on the Breaking Ranks framework, NASSP offers a wide variety of professional development opportunities for school administrators and school teams. Customized training sessions can be delivered in schools, districts, regional service centers, or at our headquarters in Reston, Virginia. For information about program details, learner outcomes, customization for your school or district, pricing, or scheduling a program, contact NASSP Leadership Programs and Services at (800) 253-7746, ext. 330.
Topics currently available:
Collaborative Leadership/Professional Learning Communities
Success in creating and sustaining positive change in secondary schools is based in large part on the actions of stakeholders who have a shared commitment to a moral purpose, capacity to effectively perform their roles and tasks individually and collectively, and data of inform their efforts through all stages of the change process. Sustainable comprehensive reform efforts require not only the approval and support of all stakeholders in the school community, but also their orchestrated action in carrying out the reform plan. Building the team, developing their capacity, securing their commitment, following the progress with data, making adjustments as needed, and sharing in celebration of successes—large and small are essential activities in building a community of collaboration.
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Curriculum Instruction and Assessment
Making learning personal involves more than ensuring the alignment of the curriculum, the instruction, and the assessment. Ensuring the success of each student requires curriculum that is appropriately challenging and real-world relevant, instruction that is designed to meet individual needs and learning styles, and assessment that not only measures progress towards standards but also serve to inform instruction in terms of the unique characteristics each student brings to the learning process.
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Personalizing the School Environment
If high achievement for all students is the goal of reform, leaders seeking to maximize each student’s learning potential must collaboratively establish structures and practices that create an environment supportive of learning. Personalization may mean different things to different people; however, definitions from the Breaking Ranks framework converge on a few common principles: developing students’ sense of belonging to the school community, building students’ sense of ownership of and responsibility for the direction of their learning, and increasing students’ ability to recognize choices for their futures and to make choices based on their individual experience and understanding of the choices.
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Improving Teaching and Learning
School leaders have long known that schools cannot exceed the quality of their teachers. As one researcher stated, “All we need to do is hire great teachers.” The reality is that teaching is a profession and professionals are constantly improving their skills. The responsibility for recruiting, selecting, and developing quality teachers falls on school leaders. In this age of accountability and high-stakes testing, we want all students to graduate and to graduate college-, career-, and workplace-ready. No longer can we rely on a few all-star teachers to set the gold standard. All students need high quality instruction in every classroom and it is up to school leaders to build the capacity of their teachers to meet the needs of each and every student.
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Mentoring and Coaching
Every great leader is asked, how do you sustain change? What will happen when you leave? How do you get buy-in? Great leaders grow leaders. Distributed leadership is the key to continuous, incremental change and sustained improvement over time. In great schools, everyone is a leader and every leader has a succession plan. In great schools, every leader is training a replacement. This flexible one or two day program provides participants with the knowledge, skills, and tools to coach middle level and high school leaders and other school personnel as they engage in implementing school reform strategies as recommended in the Breaking Ranks framework.
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Transitions
Planning and implementing strategies to facilitate students’ transitions as they move along the continuum is essential to helping insure their success. If communities begin to treat education as a continuum in which the needs of each student must be addressed, the potentially unsettling transitions from grade to grade and school to school will be far less traumatic for students as well as for those who guide their learning and development. Another important consideration when planning for smooth transitions is the movement of students in special education programs from formal schooling to work or further education.
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