Technical Assistance & Consultation

District Capacity Building

District central offices can play a critical role in catalyzing, supporting, and assisting in district-wide improvement efforts. Employing a coherent array of strategies leveraging the resources of the district can effectively address multiple challenges that a district may face.

We have developed and use a portfolio of tools and processes that can help a district to engage in its own improvement efforts and build its capacity to engage in effective and sustained improvement efforts.

Our service offerings include:

• District Organizational Assessment:
  A collaborative organizational assessment of the district-level structures, programs, and practices that support (and/or inhibit) effective school improvement throughout the system, leading to a set of jointly determined recommendations and actions intended to improve the coherence of district and school improvement strategies.
• Strategic Mapping:
  A process for assisting a district to discern and better understand the multiple issues and challenges hindering its schools from making significant improvement in student achievement, and to identify the central challenges that are having the greatest impact on student achievement. The process assists district representatives in assessing the impact of its current strategies and use of resources, and identify new strategies and use of resources that might better support significant improvement in achievement.
• Designing Effective District-wide School Improvement Processes:
  We work with districts to develop a system for supporting and monitoring school improvement efforts through fundamentally changing how districts assist schools in areas such as needs assessment, planning, implementation and evaluation. Through our support, districts have redefined the expectations for all of their schools, the improvement process itself, and the district role in this endeavor.
• Designing Services for Underperforming Districts and Schools:
  Targeted technical assistance and professional development, focused on issues such as ELL instructional strategies, providing school improvement workshops, evaluation consultation, and facilitating the development of cross-school professional learning communities.