Mindsteps inc. partners with schools and non-profits to provide practical professional development for teachers and administrators.

We can help you increase student achievement, improve your ability to help ALL students in your school be successful with rigorous coursework, and help ALL your teachers embrace equity, access, and rigor in your school.

Find out how we can work with you.

Consulting: The College Board

As a part of their ongoing efforts to promote more access to AP programs for minority students, The College Board has launched several Equity and Access initiatives. One such initiative, the AP Start-Up Grant, provides selected high schools with financial and logcistical support to start an AP program. The College Board turned to Mindsteps to help support these schools as they started new AP programs. Mindsteps worked with teachers and principals to:

• develop course syllabi and select and purchase appropriate materials
• improve their instructional strategies to help under-prepared and under-represented students access the rigor of AP courses
• recruit and support students
• develop a long-term plan to expand their course offerings and sustain their program

As a result, the five schools we worked with have successfully started over 30 new AP courses in just three years.

Workshops: Dayton Public School System

The Dayton Public School System was trying to raise the overall level of rigor in their secondary schools while at the same time, helping more under-represented students access higher level courses. They turned to Mindsteps to deliver a keynote address and a series of summer workshops for both their teachers and their school leaders. Mindsteps provided a two-part workshop for teachers on the principles of effective instruction as well as a workshop for administrators on the essential leadership behaviors they need to support equity and access in their schools. As a result, the teachers and leaders developed the disposition and strategies they needed to recruit and retain more economically and ethinically diverse students in their honors and AP courses. The teachers developed retention plans they could use to ensure that more students successfully completed their courses and the administrators developed a leadership action plan that helped them better understand their staff's needs and improve their own capacity to meet those needs.

Special Projects: Northeastern High School

After two years of not making AYP and another two years of making AYP through safe harbor, Northeastern High School wanted to significantly improve their instructional capacity to better meet the needs of all their students and help more students meet the state standards. Initially, they turned to Mindsteps to provide differentiated instruction training for its staff. However, after the initial training, they decided to partner with Mindsteps to revise their instructional planning template to include consideration for various types of learners, and to provide leadership coaching to it's administrative team. We worked with the team to help them conduct more effective walk-through observations, identify the will and skill levels of the teaching staff, and develop a plan to provide targeted support for each teacher matched to their individual professional development needs. Not only did the school come to a common understanding of differentiated instruction and what it looked like during planning and instructional delivery, but the leadership team was better prepared to support teachers as they adjusted their instruction to meet the various learning needs of their students.