Topics
Administrative Leadership
VJB Consultants focus on the best research-based strategies for improving the learning of every student. Ongoing coaching sessions emphasize using existing data, establishing clear benchmarks for improvement, and implementing processes that foster effective collaboration.
Training for Teacher Leadership Teams and Action Teams
Active collaboration is a critical component in school improvement, but it must be deliberate and purposeful. Working closely with the administrators, the Leadership Team works to help design the school’s improvement plan and ensure that the plan is actually implemented by building their capacity to communicate, motivate and collaborate with other stakeholders.
Managing Changes
Change generally presents challenges, and we provide you with the tools to face them. Using a variety of research-based tools, VJB Consultants helps staff members recognize and address necessary shifts in priorities, changes in morale, and challenges to group decision making.
Using Data Instructionally
VJB Consultants help teachers and administrators use available student achievement data to improve the quality of classroom instructional decisions by identifying target areas of weaknesses. School staffs learn to identify possible explanations, evaluate evidence on solutions, and plan strategies with maximum impact on student outcomes.
Positive Classroom and School Management
Student learning is often maximized when classroom and school norms create a safe and effective learning environment. VJB Consultants help school staff members identify patterns of inappropriate behaviors and their causes and to define expectations that maximize students’ ability to learn. VJB Consultants work collaboratively, teachers and administrators to establish rules, procedures, and effective practices that can be used in classrooms and common areas. Teachers and administrators build and strengthen strategies for monitoring and supporting the implementation of a discipline plan.
Successful Instructional Strategies
VJB Consultants facilitate effective professional development that provides teachers with research-based instructional strategies, an exploration of research-based, cross-content approaches that reflect current cognitive science. These sessions are customized to fit the staff’s and students’ specific needs by sharing strategies that focus on student learning needs in all content areas. VJB Consultants work collaboratively with your elementary, middle, and high school teachers to identify the needs of their students and customize learning experiences to those needs. We help educators create learning environments that encourage exploration and make students active participants in their learning. Sessions can include instructions on how to enhance classroom environments that support student learning; respect student differences, facilitate effective instructional groupings, continually pre-assess and adjust instruction. Participants also develop rigorous and engaging assessments that are aligned with standards and learn how to create and use rubrics to help direct student learning, provide reliable measures of performance, and nurture students’ understanding of excellence.
Creating and Sustaining Parent Partnerships
We help teachers and administrators build the parent relationships crucial to successful schools. Participants work with our experts to plan strategies to include and involve parents by determining which types of partnerships will meet the needs of families and enhance student learning, creating positive and long term relations with parents, and improving strategies for communicating with parents.
Additional topics include:
- Diversity Appreciation and Management
- Creating and Implementing Model Middle Schools
- Building Effective Communications Skills
- Effectively Using Brain Based Strategies
- Improving Minority Student Achievement
- Successful Strategies that Exceed Standards
- Implementing Effective Organizational Change
- Increasing Gender and Ethnic Equity
- Developing School/Business Partnerships
- Creating Effective School/University Partnerships
- Increasing Success as a School Administrator
- Implementing Standards Based Classrooms
- Fostering Teambuilding
- Closing Achievement Gaps
- Using Multiple Intelligences
- Teaching Diverse Learners
- Increasing Effective Teaching
- Designing Assessment Tools
- Designing Interdisciplinary Instruction
- Supporting Differentiated Instruction
- Improving Human Relations
- Creating Schools That Work
- Developing Leadership Skills