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The Most Effective and Practical School Leadership Development Experience
You’ve Ever Brought to Your School, District, or State
Products and Services
TheSchoolHouse302
We provide a number of products and services for school leaders, school districts, and state systems. We’ve delivered on each of these services from individual coaching to small district leadership development to large system professional learning to state-wide programing. Please do not hesitate to ask for additional references beyond what you can find on our testimonial page.
Successful School Leaders
Stronger School Culture
Resilient Educators
TheSchoolHouse302 can get you there.
Lead better and grow faster.
We know what School and District Leaders Need
Executive School Leadership Coaching
- Get access to a Mastermind group
- Uncover the power in 1:1 coaching calls
- Use our school culture survey
- Learn faster from on-site visits
Resilient and Thriving School Cultures
- Explore the 6 characteristics of a positive school culture
- Learn to tell your school’s story to build a stronger brand
- Find out how to hire and retain top talent
- Strengthen your school’s teacher leadership team
New Leader Capacity Building
- Get access to a new leadership Mastermind group
- Engage new leaders in a 7-session induction program for states and districts
- Accelerate new leader capacity with 1:1 coaching
- Invigorate new leaders through a 9-month development program
Effective Feedback and Communication Skills
- Take your feedback to the next level
- Improve your ability to praise and celebrate others
- Unleash the power to make change happen faster
- Get results quicker
Stronger Instructional Leader
- Learn about high leverage instructional strategies
- Develop a set of tools and resources for teaching and learning
- Create your own Principles of Instruction document for stronger lesson planning
- Uncover ways to be in classrooms more often
Better Problem Solving Strategies for School Improvement
- Uncover new ways to tackle persistent problems
- Learn about the 7 Mindshifts necessary for solving problems
- Unpack what it means to use systems thinking as a school leader
- Recognize problems as the crises that they are
Join a Mastermind with One of Our Expert Facilitators
Our Mastermind groups meet twice a month for 75 minutes. A Mastermind is structured intensive group coaching. You can join as an individual or add 12 leaders from your system to create your own district or state group. Mastermind participants are those who want to accelerate their leadership development, including assistant principals who want to become principals, principals who want to become district leaders or anyone who wants to lead better and grow faster in their role. Our Mastermind groups have proven success to help school leaders improve their skills, network with other like-minded people, and build connections that last a lifetime.
Leadership Development Experiences
We provide leadership development experiences at any length of time that you have available. We book experiences from 60-minute virtual sessions to 3-day institutes. Of course, many of our sessions deliver content associated with our books, but we also build custom content based on the needs of your school or district.
Candid and Compassionate Feedback
Participants learn how to give better feedback to build a strong school community. Too many schools exist within what we call a “culture of nice.” Break through these limitations with our models for Specific Praise, Corrective Action, and Professional Dialogue, designed to help school leaders improve instruction through highly effective frequent informal conversations. Book a 3-day institute for maximum impact (3 days can be spread out over the school year).
Passionate Leadership for Resilient and Thriving Schools
Do you know the difference between a learning culture and a teaching culture? In a learning culture, we all learn and grow, especially educators. In a teaching culture, we’re just here to impart knowledge. Kids don’t thrive in a teaching culture. They thrive when we’re all learning together. In this session, we use mantras, models, and more to help school leaders build a culture where passion is the key ingredient in how we teach and lead. This is about a school community that faces the harsh reality of some of our conditions but doesn’t back down when the going gets tough. This one is inspirational and aspirational, and we may ask our co-author, Principal-EL, to join us (depending on your budget).
Building a Winning Team
Winning teams don’t happen by chance, they’re designed by the leader. It all starts with your school’s or district’s reputation, which comes from the way we tell our stories. And, recruitment for our teams can’t be a passive bet on bringing in the best talent. We help school leaders to frame a more vivid picture of their school and community, and we develop strategies for leaders who want to hire an award-winning staff. It’s all about understanding and action.
Retention for a Change
Retention is the change we need in schools. The teacher shortage is real, and it’s not about to go away. You can’t afford to lose any of your current staff, especially those who are contributing the most. Participants in this session learn unique ways that they can build a culture where everyone wants to stay. We use our Retention Accelerators—Motivation, Inspiration, and Energy as the backbone of this workshop, including the behavioral psychology that goes into creating a workplace where people want to work and thrive in the best environment possible.
7 Mindshifts for School Leaders
Participants in this session are exposed to up to 7 new models for thinking about their problems of practice in new ways. Depending on the length of the training, leaders can literally move through a series of activities that get to the root cause of a problem and the development of a new theory of action for how to tackle it. Get curious and ask us about how school leaders are using our Octopus Approach to Problem Solving in systems across the country.
Invest In Your Best
Participants in this session learn how to invest in their best teachers to create systems that raise the level of engagement for everyone on staff. Too often, our school improvement efforts are based on “fixing” what’s not working versus replicating what is. Learn about the 11 ways in which we can really support great teaching, including our “finding Yoda” strategy. If you think your best teachers are getting a dose of what they need (which means they may leave your school or district), this is a clear next step.
Principles of Instruction
School leadership is all about instructional leadership, but the focus needs to be clear if teachers are truly going to improve practice and try new strategies based on professional development and/or feedback. We introduce leaders to a set of high leverage strategies as well as how to think about maximum impact from pedagogical decision-making at the level of a lesson plan. Leaders will come away with a set of strategies that will move instruction in their schools to a new level and uncover a focus for a period of time as we work toward expertise with our teaching staff. If you want to be a powerhouse instructional leader or you want your school leaders in your district to be at the top of their game, this is what your school or system needs next.
Strengthening School Leadership Teams
Teacher leaders and school leadership teams have the power to impact a school in wonderful ways, but they’re often used as a platform to disseminate information. What a waste. We help school leaders to accelerate the impact of their school leadership team through a focus on teacher leader development. In this session, school leaders learn about teacher leadership standards, evaluating teachers who are in leadership roles, and how to develop teacher leaders so that they can support the vision and goals of the school. Leaders who have been through this experience are more satisfied at work and have a stronger team around them to move faster.
Customize an Experience for Your Team
You can mix and match any of the sessions from above or ask us to develop a research- and evidenced-based experience on a topic that your school leaders need today. For example, we were asked to build a two-day session on how a school (this training was for all of the staff at a middle school) could create better connections with students for a stronger community. They raved about our Building Block of Relationships and other models that helped them reach their goals with all students. That’s the kind of thing we can do for you after you’ve had a call with us for a needs-analysis.
Book Us for a Keynote
We provide interactive keynote addresses in both the virtual space and in person on whatever size stage you have. Our audiences find our content to be engaging, funny, reflective, inspirational, and practical. We keynote on any of the topics above and others, including The Five Levers for Better Teaching, The Six Aspects of a Positive School Culture, The Three Teacher Retention Accelerators, Creating Schools that Thrive, and more.
New Leader Induction Programming
For many years, we have facilitated the new leader induction program in Delaware. All school leaders come through our program for a credential to obtain a continued license to be a school leader in Delaware. This program has expanded with partnerships with the University of Delaware and the Delaware Department of Education. We base our programs on leadership standards like the PSEL standards or whatever standards have alignment in your state or region. Whether or not you require leaders to attend these trainings, make them optional, or build them for new leaders only is up to you. We typically provide 7-10 sessions at about 90 to 120 minutes with a mix of virtual and in-person learning.
Individual Coaching
We do individual 1:1 coaching via phone calls and Zoom meetings. It’s effective. It works. And the leaders we support lead better and grow faster than those who don’t have this type of access. You can book one of us for an hour, buy a set of calls (which we suggest), or interact in either way with one of our expert coaches. This is the most intense and highly effective way to improve school leadership for yourself or the system you support.
Site Visit Coaching
When we visit a school, we learn so much about what happens, what school leaders accept as “normal,” and how we can support principals to structure their day as leaders. We have an instruction-first mindset, and we’ve helped 100s of leaders get out of the trap of only being able to manage the day. This is a pretty simple process; we visit your school, shadow the principal, and offer in-the-moment coaching through probing questions and research- and evidence-based advice.
Q/A with Joe and T.J.
One of our most effective “trainings” happens when we get into a room prepared to ask questions that have either been gathered ahead of time or asked impromptu on the spot. It’s amazing what is on the minds of school leaders and how they can learn from one another by listening to questions that they have and answers from us. Our deep experiences as presenters, authors, practitioners, and leaders at so many levels allows us to introduce research- and evidenced-based thought leadership for just about any question that school leaders have. We were with you in the trenches during COVID, we both turned around schools during NCLB, and we understand the nuances and intricacies of leading a school or district, large or small. Book us to join your leaders on a virtual call or an in-person session to just share what’s on your mind and get expert responses that you can use today.
