What We Do
We work every day to support educators in their efforts to transform education. We offer a broad range of experiences, including national and regional networking opportunities, on-site coaching and consultation, and co-designed training with customized tools and materials.
At the heart of the Schlechty Center's work is the belief that if public education is to survive and thrive in the twenty-first century, schools and school districts must have the capacity to invent and adopt innovations that require fundamental changes in the structure and culture of the school. All of our work is focused on helping leaders transform school districts from bureaucratic organizations into learning organizations. Within the context of the learning organization, three essential organizing concepts frame our work: transforming organizations, redefining roles, and increasing engagement. The Schlechty Center has developed a suite of conferences and tools to support district and school leaders in each of these areas.
Schlechty Center Offerings
Customized On-Site Work: Schlechty Center frameworks are used to create a common understanding of the problems and challenges facing the school district so that a context-specific work plan can be developed. Our systemic approach and the tools we use are appropriate for developing strategies at both the level of the schoolhouse and the district level.
Regional/District Experiences: The following two-day interactive experiences are offered to teams in a region or in a school district. The purpose is to deepen understandings of key concepts such as capacity, design, and transformation, and to apply what is learned to the local situation.
- Executive Assessment of System Capacity: This experience offers an exercise in strategic thinking and collaboration with a focus on assessing the capacity of the organization to support changes needed for transformation.
- Collaborative School Investigation (CSI): Participants practice analyzing artifacts of life in a school or district using the Schlechty Center’s Six Critical Systems and other tools to understand why initiatives succeed or fail.
- Transformation 2.0: In this experience, attendees assess a school’s capacity, not its present performance, gathering evidence from artifacts and interviews to draw conclusions about the potential of this school to support school transformation.
- Design Academy: Teachers experienced in using the Working on the Work framework participate in experiences intended to increase their understanding of design and how the role of teacher needs to be redefined to that of leader, designer, and guide to instruction.
National Conferences: Schlechty Center national conferences are organized into three categories: designing engaging student work, designing systems to support the design of engaging work, and leadership development. The target audience for designing engaging work is teachers who learn to use our frameworks to design academic work that is engaging to students and that results in students’ learning what is intended. The target audience for designing systems is principals and others who are responsible for creating the conditions to make it possible for teachers to design engaging work. Leadership development conferences are intended for role groups that range from the classroom to the boardroom. Their focus is on redefining roles. Conference dates, fees, and logistical information are available on our website at www.schlechtycenter.org/events.
- Working on the Work Conference (Designing Engaging Student Work)
- Coaching for Design Level II (Designing Engaging Student Work)
- Design Team Conference (Designing Systems to Support the Design of Engaging Work)
- Teacher Leader Academy (Leadership Development)
- Principals Academy (Leadership Development)
- Leadership Academy (Leadership Development)
- Key Leaders Conference (Leadership Development)
- Central Office Conference (Leadership Development)
- School Board Conference (Leadership Development)
Our Goals
The work of the Schlechty Center is predicated on the assumption that local educators, rather than outside consultants, are the people who must reform and transform our schools. Therefore, we position ourselves as the school reformer's best friend rather than as school reformers ourselves. We provide tools, intellectual scaffoldings, frameworks to discipline action, training experiences, networking opportunities, disciplined discussions, dialogue, and advice on strategy and process. But, we know in the end it is the practitioner who does most of the really hard work that must be done to transform the schools.
Because the style of the work of the Schlechty Center is at odds with those consulting operations that come in with a pre-packaged program and a canned set of training activities, it is sometimes initially difficult for those who work with us to connect with what we do. Our goal is to learn with our clients and to leave them with tools that make it more likely that they will continue to learn long after we have departed. What we offer is more than a program; it is a new way of doing the business of schooling.
From the Library
Creating Great Schools
Schlechty outlines the six critical systems that define the norms and expressions of the school's organizational culture and shows what it takes to lead effective systemic change in order to sustain new values and direction. More from the Library »