Facilitated by T.C. Roekle

More than a leadership workshop...an unprecedented experience for educators to discover new ways to:

• Accelerate Learning
• Maximize Professional Performance
• Improve Organizational Effectiveness
• Save Time and Resources

We Took the WORK Out of Workshop
Designing Thriving Schools is more than just a learning experience...it's a doing experience.

Designing Thriving Schools is unlike any seminar or in-service meeting you have ever attended in the past. It's a fun and energizing process that uses an innovative deck of cards to stimulate the free flow of ideas.

Designing Thriving Schools combines concise information about new and existing technologies, new insights into current, research-based teaching, learning, and organizational strategies, the creativity and brainpower of your educational stakeholders, and the consultative input of our experienced professional facilitator to generate actionable solutions to the unique challenges and opportunities facing your schools today.

The Process Is Dynamic Because You Have Input

Your short list of unbelievably powerful strategies and enabling technologies holds the potential to transform your district's ability to achieve educational goals at virtually every level - individual, classroom, department, school, district, or state. Designing Thriving Schools employs an exclusive set of cards - describing educational technologies and strategies - to stimulate and direct creative thinking among participants. The cards use easy-to-understand definitions and thought-provoking examples to unleash high-level dialog that is collaborative, interactive, and solution-oriented. In groups of four to six people, participants read through the cards and interact as a team to gain new insights into educational technologies and strategies. They then explore how these ideas can be used to accelerate learning, improve staff performance, or increase organizational effectiveness. Reflection questions act as catalysts to ignite and encourage the spontaneous exchange of new and powerful ideas. Teams then select the technologies and strategies that are most relevant for resolving their current issue, putting their school on a path to thrive in the years ahead.

Goal: To create a unified vision of countywide Career Focused Education, integrating academic learning and work place skills.

Four technical campuses operate to deliver the Career Focused Education Curriculum to high school students of the county’s twenty-eight school districts. The central office administration of Oakland Schools (ISD) has direct responsibility for operations, aligning instruction and curriculum, and coordinating career development initiatives. Oakland Schools looked to the Designing Thriving School Process for the structure of the two day Summer Institute wherein faculty from all campuses came together to clarify a countywide vision for career focused education.

Dr. Dan Austin, Deputy Superintendent describes how Designing Thriving Schools met their expectations: “The ability of the game to produce deep dialogue between teachers, teaching assistants, building administrators and central office is brilliant. The “right on” strategies and technology tools described on the cards laid a strong foundation that reinforced our efforts to create productive 21st Century learners, prepared for the world of work.”

Outcome: Participants opened their minds to new standards, assessments and pedagogies to help integrate academic content with workplace technology. Over the following school year, staff used Michigan Curriculum Benchmarks, National Teaching Standards, National Technology Integration Standards and their own ISO 9001 Quality Certification Standards as guidelines to create an extensive repertoire of methods, strategies and resources for their classrooms. The Oakland Technical Campuses serve as a model for high skill, high tech programs throughout the state.