Teacher, Leader, & School Coaching

Making Change is Hard. We Can Help.

Coaching is the act of listening and reflecting back to the individual what is being said and helping the individual find her/his own solutions to the challenges leaders face. Our Instructional, Leadership, and School Coaches provide an objective set of eyes and hands to support your change goals, using tools and strategies rooted in the most up-to-date research and best practices around school change and adult learning.  Whether you’re trying to implement a single innovation or you are engaging in large-scale restructuring, we have coaches who have the skills and experience to help you avoid the pitfalls and missteps that can set your efforts back years. Let us help you develop a cohesive course of action based on not only your specific needs but also our experience with broad-based school change.

To learn more about the ways that a school coach can support your efforts, contact us.

Coaching for Teachers & Leaders

We offer customized support for New Hampshire Alternative 4 Certification Candidates!

ACSR offers a complete range of professional development services that provide on-going support for teacher improvement and growth. Job embedded professional learning opportunities focus on specific areas of school improvement efforts providing instruction, modeling, and feedback to teachers as they gain new skills. Working one-on-one with your teachers in their classrooms, we provide relationship based, customized support for improving pedagogy.

Leadership Coaching is based upon a similarly collegial relationship between a current school leader and a personal coach with experience and knowledge regarding educational leadership. School leaders have many tasks and coaching can provide the leader with an unbiased view as well as questions that need to be answered in order to maintain a positive direction in the school.

We can only support a limited number of schools in this effort. Contact our office for more information at [email protected] or 603-283-2302

Workshops, In-service Training, and On-Site Courses

We offer engaging, learner centered, customized, on-site workshops and trainings on a variety of topics including:

• Technology Integration
• Social Media
• Classroom Facilitation
• PBL
• Place Based Education
• Classroom Management & Instruction for Paraprofessionals
• Building Lessons that Push the Envelope and Engage the Learner
• Beyond Character Education: Supporting Students’ Academic and Social Development
• Creating and Assessing Extended Learning Opportunities Bringing the Real World into the Regular Classroom
• Creating and Using Formative Assessments
• Reflection as a Tool for Learning and Assessment
• Using the Cycle of Inquiry to Improve Teaching and Learning
• Teachers as Learning Facilitators

On-site, customized graduate courses can be created for any of these topics.

Our Theory of Action

A systems-based approach to change ensures that schools recognize their developmental stage and select developmentally appropriate interventions to support the school’s organizational growth, change teacher behavior and increase student achievement.

The Antioch Center for School Renewal takes a developmental view of school improvement, building on the successful efforts of colleagues from a variety of agencies and programs, (including the Rural School and Community Trust, the School Reform Initiative, the QED Foundation, the Corporate Council for Critical Skills, and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills). Based upon Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which views human development as a progression moving from most basic survival, through social and relational development and up to full self-awareness, the Hierarchy of School Needs (Smith & Sobel, 2010) aligns a school’s needs with a professional development strategy to meet those needs. The Hierarchy of School Needs “emerged out of trying to make sense of where the school/ community change process worked well and where it met resistance! (It) suggests that physical space and social fabric needs precede the needs of comprehensive curriculum and community-based education approaches.  Certainly, school works on many improvement fronts simultaneously, but without a focus on the most essential tasks, headway is difficult.” (Smith & Sobel, 2010)

An accurate assessment of the needs of the school provides for intervention at the right time and maximizes the opportunity for powerful professional growth for teachers and principals.  Developing internal capacity will allow schools to become learning organizations, ready and able to meet the emerging needs of their students while deepening the connection within and between the school, the home, and the community.

Research shows that school improvement is a process, not a single event. (Hall & Hord, 2001)  Our approach is rooted in the knowledge that the key to sustainable, continuous school improvement lies in creating learning organizations (Senge, 1990) in which stakeholders are armed with the skills and processes necessary to recognize and meet emergent challenges.  We begin our work by matching schools with specific interventions via a 360-degree administration of the School Change Readiness Tool (doc).

ACSR provides external school coaching for the duration of the project.  We engage in an inquiry-driven process by which teachers and students will implement the intervention described and assess progress via re-administration of the readiness tool each spring.  By modeling this process of implementation and assessment, we will train and coach cohorts of teachers on-site as internal coaches charged with supporting the work beyond the scope of the project.

Systemic reform “centers on a vision of all students as successful learners of ambitious learning outcomes, integrates curriculum, teaching, assessment and school organization towards a shared vision, attends to professional development, curriculum development and organizational development, has structures and mechanisms for cross-role collaboration, incorporates ongoing inquiry and reflection.” (Education Commission of the States, 1992)(North Central Regional Education Laboratory, 1992) The Hierarchy of School Needs is based upon this conceptual model, with specific, effective interventions applied at each level.

School Change Research Report

Final Report on the Springfield, VT Professional Learning Project, 2009-2011

More Information

• Visit our School Coaching page for more information about the ways that we support Schools and Districts in Need of Improvement, Instructional Improvement, Leadership Development, and Inquiry Driven (NECAP) Science efforts.
• Download our School Change Readiness Tool and begin your own assessment of your schools’ needs.
• Contact us at  [email protected] or 603.283.2302 to create a free, customized service proposal for your school or district.