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WHAT I BELIEVE AND HOW I WORK
1. Challenges energize me. I am a creative, experienced and enthusiastic problem-solver.
2. Through observation of behavior, questions, listening and other strategies I am able to describe, assess and analyze organizational and classroom culture, climate, relationships and behaviors in ways that make problems clear, visible, and neatly accessible to resolution.
3. The best and most stable solutions are present in the individual or community that faces a challenge. The consultant's role, in my view, is not usually prescriptive, but to facilitate emergence of those nascent ideas, to promote their articulation and development into action, and to identify resources to bring about change.
4. I believe that beneath relationship and organizational challenges and dysfunction are usually individuals of exceptional competence and good will.
5. Most people need to be a significant part of a successful and functional organization. A crucial contributor to an employee decision of how to behave is the underlying culture of that organization. If someone can not contribute in the ways they know best, they adopt behaviors that allow them to fit, or to survive by self-isolation.
6. Most organizations--including businesses as well as schools and colleges--can change their underlying culture. Sometimes this starts and spreads from one department, classroom, or unit. Cultural change requires development of a clear vision and commitment of all stakeholders to the vision. The common goals of an organizational vision energize creative change, facilitate quality decisions, and enhance community and individual performance.
MY WORK IN SCHOOLS I believe that most educators want continually to learn, to grow in professional skill, and to better their pedagogical practice. This requires personal vision and self-knowledge of personal strengths. Given opportunity and supportive supervisory structures, educators learn readily from practice of colleagues whom they trust and to whom they have access. My consulting work with individual teachers and with faculty communities is usually about building vision, building trust, and facilitating positive, stable changes in individual instructional behavior and in group and school-community relationships.
Examples follow:
AUDIT OF TEACHING BEHAVIOR An employee's crisis of personal confidence or a complaint from students or parents (or other faculty) are the worst moments to discover a teacher's instructional deficits, and the most difficult times for an administrator to manage those challenges supportively. Indeed, a key to effective supervision is to know a teacher's developmental needs early in employment, so that constructive support and encouragement can be offered. Likewise, peak performance and job satisfaction are likely only when a teacher knows his or her own strengths and liabilities, has a clear pedagogical philosophy and has devised a plan for professional self-development.
A developmental audit of teaching behavior is a process during which a teacher is supported to discover or enhance a vision and philosophy, to identify personality and instructional assets, to distinguish problems and to develop plans for fixing them on a realistic timeline. The audit process is described fully on the site page called DEVELOPMENTAL AUDIT. Click that link for details. The link WHAT CLIENTS SAY offers feedback from educators about my work.
The audit process eliminates administrative doubt and concern about performance, replacing them with planned, focused support. It reduces teacher turnover and burnout, and motivates employees by communicating positive concern and the intent to supervise.
SCHOOL DISCIPLINE AUDIT I spend a day or several days developing an observational snapshot of what is happening on a campus in classroom discipline (or any other area). I collect data in any way acceptable and realistic in that community setting: classroom observation, group meetings, shadowing, individual interviews with teachers, students, parents and administrators, and questionnaire. The data is organized and fed back to the faculty, often as an early step in making some major change (such as from punitive to non-punitive discipline) in a school. I have completed this process in one-day audits for more than twenty schools in Hawaii.
VISION-BUILDING I was once asked to help solve a complex problem of student behavior in a large school library. The school's human resources department hired me to show the library staff how to carry a bigger baseball bat. Although the discipline problem was real, the more challenging and underlying problem was absence of vision. Signs and rules (No Talking) were posted but unenforced. The staff had never asked "What kind of climate do we want for our adolescent patrons? What kind of climate do we need for doing our own jobs? What are our resources for accomplishing these goals?" After these questions had been answered, solutions presented themselves promptly. I design group process(es) to answer questions like these and to help staff articulate and develop realistic solutions.
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TRAINING TO MEET SPECIFIC GOALS I design training and group process to meet specific staff development goals.
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