Generation Ready’s mission is to support school leaders and teachers in order to educate a stronger, more vibrant generation of students prepared to meet life’s challenges. Since 1994, Generation Ready’s customizable, job-embedded professional development services have supported schools and districts in ensuring that greater numbers of students graduate college and are career ready.
With Districts: At the highest level, we work as strategic thought partners with district leadership to address systemic issues, typically around leadership capacity, cultural proficiency, mathematics, or literacy. Working alongside coaches, we help to build their depth and expertise in these content areas.
With Schools: The second level of work is at the school leadership level, working with principals and coaches to improve their practice to have greater impact on school environment and instruction. We help improve student learning by creating leadership management organizational systems that connect district-level and school leadership priorities to clearly defined, measurable instructional goals.
With Teachers: Finally, we provide shoulder-to-shoulder, job-embedded professional development for teachers—the cornerstone of our work. For nearly 25 years, and in thousands of classrooms around the country, we have worked deeply with teachers to improve their practice so they can have a more positive impact on children.
The embedded support from our Generation Ready math consultant has systematically changed the way we teach math. With just one year's support, our scores have soared and teachers are on board due to the results they have seen.``
– Lori Smith, Principal Crestwood Elementary, North Little Rock School District, AR
At Generation Ready, everything we do, from our methods to our instructional content and the technology that underpins all our offerings, is grounded in Six Essential Practices of Effective Schools.
The Six Essential Practices lie at the heart of Generation Ready, appearing in literal form in our rubrics and learning progressions. That means they are an integral part of your professional development, used every day by our educational consultants as well as teachers, principals and superintendents.
To enhance and focus your growth, we can combine our Six Essential Practices-based goals with your own district teaching framework rubrics, as well as recognized resources like the Danielson Framework for Effective Teaching and the Marzano Rubric. That helps to ensure that the goals you set and the practices you follow are those best matched to your specific needs for professional learning.
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Generation Ready’s Continuous Cycle of Improvement ensures that each professional learning services engagement is customized to the needs of each school and is built on the concept of shared responsibility and professional collaboration. Each engagement begins with a diagnostic process, followed by the development of a shared Plan of Action, documented in ReadyPath, with the input and collaboration of key stakeholders. Ongoing monitoring of the plan through data collection using our unique online tools ensures that we are engaged in a continuous cycle of improvement, making adjustments based on observation and outcome data. Through modeling effective teaching and leading in your school setting, we create a shared vision of effective instruction, a common goal for school success, and a higher expectation for student achievement.
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Knowing the full situation is critical to plan effectively. Generation Ready educational consultants start with a thorough review of all pertinent information to understand your school or district’s current circumstances, practices, organizational structures, challenges, level of capacity and achievement. It’s rigorous, comprehensive assessment that gives us – and you – a full view of where you are.
Generation Ready educational consultants apply their expertise and collaborate with you to set goals and create a detailed plan of action mapped to your own district/school needs, including the Six Essential Practices of Effective Schools. Using data gleaned from state assessments, teacher and principal evaluations, walkthroughs, evaluation of district and system structures and any other pertinent information to school turnaround, we can provide an individualized plan your school and district to follow.
Each plan is unique: efficient, outcomes-focused, designed to meet your specific requirements and oriented towards raising student achievement by targeting instruction. All goals are clearly actionable and achievable, supported by Generation Ready educational consultant expertise, our proprietary ReadyPath technology platform and a rich library of highly effective multimedia instructional content.
Both rigor and flexibility are built into our methodology. We know that once plans meet reality, they rarely survive unchanged. Unlike others, our execution is dynamic and able to adjust to circumstances, accounting for progress as the development plan unfolds to ensure optimum results within the time allowed. The objective is to support and guide, enabling you to reach (or even exceed) your goals as quickly and efficiently as possible, through close collaboration and focused support.
Our Education Directors monitor and execute against a defined set of engagement milestones all intended to ensure quality delivery of Generation Ready services. Our education consultants monitor results regularly, track progress towards goals and adjust the action plan as needed. Our mobile-first ReadyPath professional learning suite can also play an important supporting role, offering educators observation, monitoring and reporting tools designed for use on the go.
In all our work, we use a gradual release of responsibility model, where we introduce new ideas and strategies, demonstrate how they work and guide teachers as they incorporate new strategies into their practice.
We want to make sure that when we leave your classrooms and schools your teachers and leaders have the skills, content knowledge and strategies to sustain the positive impact on student achievement. We don’t tell you what to do, but instead we guide you throughout the process and ultimately, watch you lead successful classrooms.
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