What is your organization’s status in the pursuit of achieving positive outcomes for All Students? Where are you now, and where do you want to be? Is your system functioning fluidly with unified effort towards clear and measurable goals? Are your stakeholders positively engaged and supportive? What elements do you need to incorporate to best serve students and stakeholders? Heart in Mind has a variety of ways to support your enhancement efforts.
Leading for Equity
Are you seeking to more fully establish equity in your school or organization? Holistic and collaborative, we will support you in building relationships and capacity among stakeholders to implement equity initiatives. Heart in Mind will guide you in performing an Equity Scan and communicate results to stakeholders. We will assist with an analysis of organizational and community dynamics, and provide resources and activities for Implicit Bias training, perspective-taking, and developing appreciation, compassion and empathy. Heart in Mind will help you situate your process for increasing equity, identify easily obtainable components, and support you with monthly check-ins and a year-end review.
Social-Emotional Learning Integration
Social-emotional skills are foundational for all other learning and at the core of success in life. Decades of hyper focus on academic achievement testing led to these important skills being considered “soft” and largely dropped from the curriculum. Educators are now working to re-incorporate these skills into school programs and the big question is How? What SEL components does your organization have in place? There are a plethora of SEL curricula, frameworks, assessments and digital apps available. Another option is organically integrating SEL across all elements of your program. What policies and practices inhibit or deny SEL opportunities for students? Do adults in your organization understand the power of SEL and make using social-emotional skills visible? Through examination of program and practices, Heart in Mind will identify areas for SEL infusion, from hallway and cafeteria procedures to academic activities, classroom management and schoolwide climate. We will survey various approaches to incorporating SEL specific to your settings with consideration regarding successful, sustained and low-cost implementation.
Leading for Continuous Improvement
Heart in Mind can help you with a deep examination your district or organization’s data, current outcomes, policies and practices and with consideration of your hopes, dreams, goals, expectations and plans. Work with Heart in Mind to construct a path from your current practice to achieving your goals. Using Design Thinking, we will choose areas and topics of priority;
clarify desired, measurable outcomes and results; define metrics for evidence of success;
create a Knowledge Acquisition Plan to ensure the necessary skills for success, and design training sessions to meet the time frames, levels of understanding, and skill development for your staff and stakeholders to fully contribute to district initiatives.
Program Development
You understand your organizations needs and want initiatives to be successful. Heart in Mind will work with you to comprehensively design programs that include all relevant elements, increase the ease of implementation and ensure longevity and success. From scope, sequence, and resources to implementation strategies, review and analysis, Heart in Mind brings extensive insight and experience to support your goals.
Board Development and Governance Team Advancement
Good governance flows from a team that is solid, willing to have courageous conversations and come to agreement with collective effort to stay focused on what’s best for students. Working towards consensus generates unity of purpose with a climate of transparency, growth, respect and appreciation. The strongest Boards do more than regularly engage in learning about the process of education and the requirements, practices and reasoning behind policies; they regularly examine their commitment to leadership, their functional relationship to roles and responsibilities, and reflect on the connection between their governance processes and district progress. Governance is complicated, challenging work—and not for the faint of heart! How is your team functioning? Do you enjoy a positive, collaborative relationship, strengthened by common purpose and buoyed by the satisfaction of serving students well? With years of experience in governance as both a superintendent and Board member, Dr. Barbara Short understands the possibilities and pitfalls, and will help your Governance Team work better, feel better and provide the leadership necessary to support the best possible education for students and satisfaction for staff.