“Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” – Football Coach Vince Lombardi

The Learning Forward Foundation scholarship contest encourages educators to put their good ideas into action. Participants are given the opportunity to apply their research and creativity to impact some of the most profound challenges in education. We celebrate the courageous innovators and trailblazers in teaching and learning. We are passionate about the power of education to transform lives.

 

The Learning Forward Foundation Team Grant

Each year, the Learning Forward Foundation Team Grant is given to a team of educators who are making an effort to advance Learning Forward’s vision: Excellent teaching and learning every day. Teams can consist of grade level, school, or district groups.

This year’s winners are from Northern Valley Regional High School District in Demarest, New Jersey, led by Supervisor of Professional Learning Kathleen O’Flynn, Linda Mayer, and Virginia Senande.

The Challenge

Northern Valley has traditionally recognized their leaders to be the superintendent, principal, and high school subject supervisors. With the changing demands of instructional leadership, new leadership groups have evolved within the region. Teacher leader groups identified as the Regional Professional Development Board, instructional coaches, and curriculum supervisors have begun to fill the need for instructional support.  Both leadership groups require job-embedded, collaborative, differentiated and ongoing leadership development to be able to lead teachers, teams and students.  These leaders need and want opportunities to grow and learn within their current role in the school and self-identified areas of growth.

The Plan

The grant will provide ongoing learning and personalized support to principals, assistant principals, supervisors of curriculum, instructional coaches, and teacher leaders. The current and emerging leaders in this regional school district are motivated by job-embedded growth opportunities to expand their instructional leadership knowledge and skills. This grant allows the team to enhance collaborative processes through technology, individualize learning plans, and benefit from video coaching. Participants will increase capacity to build practices that focus on teaching and learning.

The goal of this work is to enhance the knowledge and skills of the district’s leaders. This will give the winning group a chance to transform into being more effective in their instructional leadership roles in their schools and communities. Up to 15 school leaders per year will compose a cohort for this leadership development program. Participants will initially complete an ISLLC standards inventory to identify areas of growth. Additionally all participants will be encouraged to administer the Standards Assessment Inventory (SAI2) in their schools at the start of the work, midway through the project and at the end of the third year.

The Team

The Northern Valley School’s Office of Curriculum and Instruction is a shared service consortium consisting of eight school districts, serving approximately 7500 students in grades Pre K-12.  The awardees lead curriculum development and professional learning for 750 teachers, 40 teacher leaders, and teams comprised of 45 administrators.

Congratulations to our winning team!

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