Design

Schools, districts, and boards often benefit from an experienced, external perspective prior to and during the shift toward a learner-centered model.  Guided by a small number of prioritized queries, the needs assessment process reveals findings and recommendations that empower incremental organizational shifts on a multi-year timeline.

This practical, cost-effective and minimally invasive process provides leadership with validation in areas of organizational strength. Most importantly, they receive guidance on how to overcome institutional challenges through intentional, realizable calibrations. By focusing on a small number of critical queries, our team can draft a customized report with actionable next steps on a timeline that builds collective vision and local capacity to measurably navigate change.

ALP is honored to serve communities through a structured and collaborative process of strategic planning design and implementation. Our approach is grounded in organizational development best practices and builds local capacity to collaboratively design and implement goals, objectives, and corresponding key performance indicators (KPIs), strategy and tactics, that inform progressive and actionable strategic plans. We maintain the non-negotiable that educators, parents, community, and student voice must be purposefully engaged throughout key phases of the strategic planning process. Plans developed in isolation of the people for which they are intended often lack the buy-in and participation critical for realizing goals.

ALP facilitates the design and adoption of school, district and board-scale learning models through a multi-phase process of visioning, iterative design, and implementation. Through this process, a portfolio of assets is co-developed to define and engage stakeholders as they unpack learner-centered model features. These assets may include a learner profile, curriculum exemplars as well as an aligned coaching model.

With these resources in hand, communities are poised to communicate and model a shared belief and culture around learning and leadership.  The enhanced clarity of roles for students, teachers, and administrators is more accessible and interwoven. These benefits directly and positively impact learner-centered curriculum, assessment, and professional learning frameworks.

ALP combines a thorough review of district strategy, vision, and values with one-on-one interviews and attentive job shadowing into a validated competency model. Competency model development is customized for various positions within a district and aligns job functions with the district vision.

ALP facilitates a process whereby role incumbents and supervisors translate organizational vision into behaviorally-anchored competency descriptions with corresponding proficiency progressions. The competency model is a foundation on which to build related human resources systems (e.g., selection processes, orientation/mentoring, performance and talent development, etc.) aligned with district vision.

See Talent Development Systems for implementation services integrating competency models into a formative  performance feedback platform.

ALP partners with curriculum design teams to cleanly define student learning outcomes and then create aligned formative assessments.  These assessments incrementally foster learner self-efficacy and promote purposeful feedback from their teachers and peers.

This close collaboration results in dynamic, scalable resources that integrate directly into existing frameworks to balance authentic learner outcomes and standards.  This service is especially useful in education settings where the goal is to sustain or scale implementations of personalized, blended or competency-based learning models.

ALP curates portfolios of strategies, protocols, and resources for use by classroom teachers, school leadership teams and coaches. This personalized collection of resources is designed for the unique needs of these stakeholder groups.

Activation of an administrator, teacher and/or coach’s toolkit provides leaders with a common language framework and high-yield practices aligned to a specific district/board initiative, vision or learning model.  Through ongoing professional development support, school leaders and coaches leverage each toolkit’s protocols and resources to actualize personalized professional goals. Team-wide application of universal strategies and resources also creates the potential to longitudinally analyze the impact that their support has on instructional decision-making.