Authentic Education’s Services
We’ve partnered with schools, districts, governments, and foundations across the United States and around the world. We look forward to hearing more about your needs and to working with your team.
We offer a wide range of services to meet our clients needs. From one-day workshops to multi-year partnerships, we pride ourselves on delivering highly customized solutions that help our clients realize their goals.
Workshops
We offer workshops from UbD to assessment and much more
Coaching
We provide support to help our clients achieve their goals
Consulting
We partner with clients on a wide range of projects
Other Services
From keynotes to major ininitiatives and beyond
Our Workshop Offerings
At Authentic Education, we honor our belief in the individuality of schools by customizing all services to meet the specific needs of our clients.
Our workshops are interactive, combining multimedia presentation with hands-on activities, intriguing dialogue, and opportunities to apply powerful principles and tools to your particular circumstances. We provide a comprehensive set of proven worksheets, examples, and other materials for use during and long after the workshop.
Listed below are some of our most popular workshops and the services most commonly requested of us by schools throughout the world. Click on any workshop title for more information. If nothing here suits your particular needs, please call us.
Identify the elements of good design and the promise of teaching for understanding. Begin to experience the power of UbD™ in crafting curricular units that align standards, assessments, and learning activities.
We offer a one-day Introduction to Understanding by Design workshop, along with 2- to 5-day workshops that dive deep into the UbD framework and help teachers design “ready to teach” units.
What can it look like when curriculum is designed with diversity, equity, and inclusion as a guiding philosophy rather than as an afterthought, add-on, or extra layer. Starting with school-wide transfer goals related to DEI, we work backwards to redesign learning across all subjects so that it’s furthers anti-racism and anti-oppression education.
Offered as a one-day or multi-day workshop
Explore ways to engage students in active and structured dialogue designed to foster the deep understanding of big ideas. This workshop begins with Socratic Seminar but quickly moves beyond it, with approaches to improving student preparation, honing listening skills, promoting rethinking, and encouraging reflection on learning.
Offered as a one-day workshop
What role do questions play in teaching for understanding? How can we move beyond easy answers? How can we use our time in the classroom to expand, rather than constrain, student thinking? When are the questions more important than the answers?
Offered as a one-day workshop
Explore the characteristics of effective and engaging formative and summative assessment. Discover the value of pretests and low-stakes assessment for skill building. Establish a repertoire of techniques to check quickly for student understanding, to craft engaging tasks that probe and deepen learning, and to evaluate student work fairly.
Offered as a one-day or multi-day workshop
Effective learning cannot happen without frequent, accurate feedback. In this hands-on workshop, we give you models, practice and feedback in giving and using feedback.
Offered as a one-day or multi-day workshop
As we rethink the ways we assess student understanding, we must also rethink the ways we communicate with parents and others. Explore alternative approaches to letter grades and skills checklists, with models that chart student progress in light of learning goals, personal growth, and habits of mind.
Offered as a one-day or multi-day workshop
Improve student performance through the use of rubrics that identify key elements of learning and communicate them clearly to students. Discover the hidden dangers of project checklists, coded language, and secret criteria for evaluation. Design rubrics for use in your classrooms and explore their optimal use in evaluating student work.
Offered as a one-day or multi-day workshop
Rather than scheduling a formal workshop with a single direction, encourage teams of teachers to formulate their own questions and define those areas of greatest interest to them. During the course of a single day, our staff will meet with up to six teams in one hour sessions.
Our Coaching Services
We take tremendous pride in supporting teachers, administrators, and organizational leaders as they design curriculum, spearhead change, and further mission-centric work. Whether working in small groups or one-on-one, we take the time to understand needs and tailor our services to these needs.
A few of our most commonly requested services are featured below. If you’re interested in something other than what we’ve shared below, we’d love to hear more and would be honored to work with you.
We work one-on-one or in small groups to help teachers create, refine, and hone their UbD units. We’ve found coaching to be particularly effective as a follow-up to a UbD workshop to help schools ensure teachers feel equipped and supported to continue designing learning with understanding and transfer front of mind.
We offer coaching services in-person, virtually, or hybrid. UbD coaching services can be a one-time offering or set up as a series of sessions across a single or multiple school years.
We partner new teachers at your school with our network of accomplished consultants, providing them with ongoing coaching and support as they navigate their first year in teaching or at your school.
We provide coaching for school leaders as they navigate new roles, new initiatives, and new challenges. We help school leaders lead with purpose and poise, empowering them to build strong relationships, make difficult decisions, and invest stakeholders in innovation and culture change.
Our Consulting services
From authoring state standards to helping districts redesign their report cards to creating a toolkit for Inclusive Hiring Practices for a small school, our comprehensive and thoughtful approach to consulting puts student learning front and center.
Whatever the scale or scope of your project, we’d love to hear more about your needs and how we can help. Click the headings before for a few of the ways we’ve partnered with schools in the past.
We work with schools and other organizations on short- and long-term projects ranging from curriculum review projects to creating custom-units using the Understanding by Design framework.
Using tried-and-true principles from Design Thinking and Action Research, we help schools analyze current practices, set clear goals for targeted improvement, establish assessments for evaluating progress toward those goals, and design incremental steps toward success.
How can addressing “pinch points” at your school help you better serve your students and their families? We dive deep into the details, working with our clients to identify “right-sized” solutions that improve efficiency and help teachers, staff, and administrators focus their time and energy on what matters.
Apply the principles of our “Beyond ABC” workshop to evaluate your report cards. Explore teacher and parent perceptions about the meaning of grades, compare intentions against these perceptions, and use the lessons learned to craft a report card that more accurately reflects the commitments of your school or district.
We know that for many Independent Schools, the “self-study” and accreditation processes can feel like chores. We work with schools to help navigate accreditation by streamlining the process, investing the school community in the work in purposeful ways, and helping ensure that the process is both impactful and successful.
Other Services
We’d love to hear more about your school or organization’s needs and discuss how Authentic Education can support your work. From delivering an inspiring keynote to helping your school tackle an ambitious new initiative, our team of experts is ready to help.
Below are a few of the ways we’ve partnered with schools and organizations in the past. Click any title for more information.
We have spoken at numerous national conferences and school-wide gatherings over the past two decades on the topics noted above (as well as other school-reform issues).
As neutral, third-party participants, Authentic Education can lead difficult conversations around potentially contentious issues, helping you forge consensus. In addition, we can help draft committee reports, design evaluation strategies, and communicate results to interested parties.
Though teachers have always identified weaknesses in textbooks, these books remain the most common resource for instruction. We can help you analyze the strengths of the textbooks you use, uncovering big ideas and essential questions, exploring the interplay between your curriculum and the text, and adapting assessments presented.
We can help you identify sources of funding for school improvement projects, draft proposals designed to catch the attention of funders, and establish plans for nurturing growing relationships with donors.
