Our Approach
The 5 Dimensions of School Leadership
All of our work integrates what we believe to be the five critical dimensions of school leadership.
School & Network Readiness: We support schools to make clear and bold commitments to staff development and to ensure clear, simple plans and systems (e.g., clear goals, roles and responsibilities, coaching schedules, leader calendars, “common pictures” for lunch / dismissal / transitions, PD calendars, etc.) are in place and clearly communicated. We have exemplars with clear criteria for success for all the critical readiness items, and we guide and coach schools through a process to ensure they are fully ready for the upcoming school year.
Leader Mindset and Skill Development: Working with individual leaders and entire school leadership teams, we rapidly build skill through intensive practice and feedback in the following areas: practice-based coaching meetings, leading practice clinics (aka PD), real-time coaching, data analysis & action planning, critical conversations, self-reflection aligned to strong leader mindsets, hiring effectively, and building & sustaining strong adult cultures. We have built and refined outstanding core modules that we customize for each partnership we work with.
Winning on the Arc of the Year: It is not enough for leaders to have the core mindsets and skills. Just as teachers need strong teaching skills and a strong curriculum, leaders most effectively leverage their skills through a strong curriculum. We’ve broken the year into its natural “arc”with six week PD & coaching cycles in the following order: winning on classroom environment, ensuring excellent feedback on student work, deep thinking & discussion, “crescendo” to state & standardized tests, readiness for the next year. Each part of the “Arc” comes with an easy-to-follow leader curriculum that includes the weekly PD modules, video exemplars, coaching tools, and more. We then support leaders with pre-Arc PD and during-Arc coaching & support.
Excellent Implementation of High-Quality Curriculum: We help schools ensure that proven, rigorous, high-quality, standards-aligned curricula are chosen for each grade and subject. This is only the first step. We then help schools with the simple-but-essential tools necessary to ensure strong implementation of these curricula – roles & responsibilities, coaching guides, video exemplars, data trackers, analysis & action meetings, student work analysis processes, intellectual prep & unit unpacking processes. Through intensive PD and coaching, we ensure leaders are able to set a vision for each curricular area, coaching to excellence aligned to each Arc.
Simple and Clear Talent & Culture Systems: All the systems, coaching, and structures will fall apart if leaders don’t attract and retain top talent. We support schools to execute a clear, proven talent calendar (with clear exemplars and training for each item) that highlights the most critical action and ensures effective, simple execution. For example, gone are hours-long observations and write-ups for a dreaded end-of-year evaluation; in are clear and focused meetings aligned to agreed-upon goals and that summarize countless smaller observations and practice sessions.
The beauty of our work is that we align these five vectors into a clear, do-able job for any school leader or school leadership team. In short, we help create simply great schools.
How are we different?
We’ve delivered the bacon. (Or the super-tasty vegan sandwich.) Doug McCurry, founding partner of Simply Great Schools, co-founded and co-led Achievement First. Doug led this network of 40+ schools and 15,000+ students to the following outcomes: Math and ELA achievement of AF 8th graders (the best indication of the strength of a strong K-8 program, especially because AF back-filled students to fill any empty spot) at AF’s ten NY middle schools outperformed the average of the wealthiest towns in NY (Scarsdale, Rye, Mamaroneck, etc.) In Connecticut, AF Amistad High was named the #1 school in Connecticut by US News, and AF Hartford High was named the #3 school. In Rhode Island, AF Iluminar Elementary was the #1 school – not the #1 school serving low-income students – but the #1 school in Rhode Island. During this time of AF excellence, Riley Bauling – a Simply Great Schools founding partner – was AF’s top-performing principal before becoming superintendent of AF’s top performing group of schools.
We only play the varsity team. Every Simply Great Schools partnership is led by either Doug or Riley, and all Simply Great Schools Consultants have a track record of breakthrough achievement as school principals and/or superintendents. You will get a A player for all engagements.
We keep it Simple. We believe in getting clear about what great teaching is, but too many schools and districts get bogged down in complex tools (e.g., the Danielson rubric) and processes (lengthy yearly write-ups after long observations) that impede teacher development. We’ve been to training where the expectation was for a leader to spend an hour getting ready for a student work analysis session, and the exemplary leader's pre-work looked like an early draft of a Tolstoy novel. We focus on the simple, repeatable leader actions that work: clear, simple tools combined with shorter observations and practice-based coaching sessions.
We include the playbook. We are huge admirers of the work of educational giants that are trying to get incredible results for kids at scale. What we’ve realized is that there are three challenges many leaders face after typical school leader training: 1) While leaders may know how to lead a PD session or lead a coaching meeting, they still have to create all their PDs and build many of their coaching frameworks and tools, 2) While leaders may have the skills, their schools aren’t structured to enable them to leverage them, so deep structural readiness work is necessary to fully maximize the tools, and 3) The tools themselves can sometimes be more complex than many leaders can efficiently execute, and leaders struggle to align and prioritize the tools.
American education has seemed to understand that asking teachers to build their curriculum from scratch is too much, but we are still asking leaders to do that – and they are struggling. We know that leaders need a playbook, so we’ve spend the past three years painstakingly building a clear, simple, actionable playbook that includes the following: readiness exemplars, summer training turnkey PDs, during-the-year turnkey PDs, team meeting templates, talent processes … in short, everything leaders need to do their school job, rather than find time outside of their hectic day to plan.
We build the skill AND show the pathway AND honor the humanity. It’s not enough to know HOW to lead PD or coaching meetings. Many programs stop there, assuming that the leader will need to create every PD, coaching meeting plan, etc. Other programs get super-technical and forget that we are real humans supporting other real humans. We help build the skill, provide the tools, and help each leader figure out the “special sauce” they bring to the table.
We have fun. This work is too hard not to enjoy it. We laugh. We celebrate. We intentionally build team. One of our favorite pieces of feedback ever was when the CAO of a partner organization said to us, “We have a core value of ebullience, and you all were A+ on that today.” So yes, you’ll get fun. Ebullience too.
We make sure you practice. A lot. The bulk of everything we do is practice. PDs … lots of practice. Coaching meetings … lots of practice. Data debriefs … yes, lots of practice there, too. A piece of feedback after an intensive 4 days of PD resonated deeply: “We got so much better at all the skills you taught us, but the best thing is that we are bringing a culture of feedback and practice back to our school. That will be game-changing.” … We know that educators must be grounded in theory, but theory-based programs that de-prioritize practice are of little help to teachers and leaders in the field.
We are extremely execution-oriented. If you’re looking for a design shop to help you create a completely new school model or design out a new program or do a deep multi-stakeholder investment process to arrive at new values or a remixed strategic plan, there are really good organizations who do that work. We’re happy to connect you with them. If you are looking for support being extraordinarily well-planned for the next school year and radically increasing the amount of feedback given at all levels – superintendent to principal, principal to dean, dean to teacher, teacher to student – in service of joyful learning, we’re your organization.
We give you more bang for your buck. We work hard to eliminate unnecessary overhead at Simply Great Schools, and because our training design allows entire leadership teams to be trained at once, it is far more effective and efficient than sending each leader to separate training sessions.