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What We Do
An
executive or educator coach helps people identify what their
real goals are, encourages, even inspires them to attempt
to achieve those goals, and stays with them, helping them
to solve the problems associated with achieving those goals.
Executive
and educator coaching is provided primarily by Len Lubinsky.
EC&C is working with clients in school
districts in Massachusetts and Connecticut. When EC&C
provides coaching services, a coach meets or speaks weekly
with a principal or superintendent to review his or her most
important issues and help him or her identify what they need
to do next and help them see how to do what they need to do.
Educators
who have either been coached by members of EC&C
staff or have worked with them in other capacities appreciate
the experience. Ted Hallstrom, recently retired as principal
of the Acequia Madre Elementary School in Santa Fe, New Mexico
described his coach/supervisor as a “joy to work with.”
Recalling her experience, Pat Guild, now a faculty member
at the University of Western Washington said she learned how
to be a principal by working with Len. Cynthia Caporaso, currently
director of the Springfield, Massachusetts Community Partnership
Program says, of her work with Len Lubinsky that “it
was an honor to work with him.”
Len
Lubinsky is an experienced school superintendent and former
executive director of the Northeast Foundation for Children.
Using the techniques of Coaches Training Institute (CTI) and
a lifetime of experience as an educational leader, Len schedules
an introductory visit to your school or school district, meets
or speaks with you three or four times per month, and helps
you take steps that are intended to make your work life more
satisfying and more manageable.
Christine
Lewis also provides coaching and mentoring for school principals
and for teachers. An outstanding teacher and principal with
experience in urban, suburban, and rural schools, she sees
coaching and mentoring as an approach that is both helpful
to the recipients of that support and a mechanism by which
school districts can reduce problems with the retention of
valued teachers and administrator.
How
a Coach Can Help You
•
Be supportive while providing an "outsider" perspective.
• Help you see what you haven't been able to see
• Be a colleague in the very best sense.
• Share your challenges and get pleasure from your success
• Be a sounding board for new ideas and better decisions.
• Really be listened to.
• Give you honest and unconditional support.
• Tell you what they hear without being judgmental.
• Help you set goals that are yours.
• Appreciate what you can do.
• Stay with you as you work to achieve those goals.
• Know that getting there is no easy matter.
• Stay with you to help you make good judgments and act
efeffectively.
• Be with you when you have the need
• Help you balance your personal goals with your goals
at work.
• Know just how important that balance is.
• Help you achieve those goals more quickly and more
easily.
• Encourage you not to do it the hard way
Grant
Writing
The
staff of EC&C are experienced grant writers.
During the past thirty years, the founders of EC&C
and their associates have written or participated in grants
worth more than $30 million. Successful grant applications
to the public and private sector have funded services that
supported early care and education, targeted and general remedial
support services, professional development for teachers, curriculum
and instruction alignment, health support services, school
safety, social skills instruction, and social support.
More
important than EC&C’s success in
obtaining grant awards is its distinctive approach to assisting
school districts in grant implementation. EC&C
takes particular care to help schools and school districts
integrate grant funding and funded programs into regular program
services so that existing grant funds can be used in ways
that get the most from every dollar. With this distinctive
integrative approach, funded programs are indistinguishable
from locally funded programs. Grants are used to achieve local
goals and grants are sought and used only when local goals
can be achieved through those grants.
EC&C
staff are also practiced in assessing the achievement of grants.
EC&C looks to see
•
if grants achieve the goals for which they are written
• if grants are well integrated into a school or school
system
• if grants support the achievement of school or system
goals
Program
Creation
EC&C’s
approach to the creation of new programs is different from
the way most people approach these efforts. EC&C
does not simply “tack on” new programs as discrete
and separable undertakings. EC&C helps
schools and school districts integrate every new idea and
program into what is already being done.
This
integrative approach is intended to minimize the extent to
which new programs become objects of resistance. We are not
change agents. We help schools and school districts improve,
to do their work better, to adapt to new movements while retaining
their strengths and character, to adopt new programs in ways
that serve children rather than adopt new programs to permit
adults create new fiefdoms.
Christine
Lewis had an admirable record at the Swift River School of
introducing new science, new arts and theatre, new community
building programs. Len Lubinsky claims that in twenty-five
years as superintendent he never “named” a new initiative
and, as a consequence, rarely created a target for people
to aim at, but created time and resources for teachers and
principals to create programs that fit the needs of the school
community.
Charter
School
Support
for organizations or individuals seeking help with creating
charter schools will be provided primarily by Christine Lewis.
She has had a particular interest in charter schools since
working with the Massachusetts legislature's joint committee
on education when the current Massachusetts reform law, including
the introduction of charter schools, was first considered.
As
a public school administrator, she has worked in urban and
rural districts that were plagued by scarce resources. Despite
the lack of resources, these schools also represented the
experiences that are possible when bureaucratic limitations
are minimized. She was assistant principal in Chicago's Disney
Magnet School and principal of the Swift River School in Western
Massachusetts.
During
her tenure as principal of the Swift River School, she brought
her school through the complexities of Massachusetts’s
education reform while also managing some extremely difficult
and unusual personnel and collective bargaining issues. Her
successes at Swift River mirrored her success in Chicago where
she helped to bring order and stability to a school serving
a population that drew on the entire city of Chicago.
Christine
Lewis has worked with Friends of the Greenfield Center School
and of the Responsive Classroom Approach to draft proposals
for a charter school. She continues to explore the possibility
of charter school submissions with other groups as well.
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