Once the academy model has been in full implementation for 3-5 years and you start thinking about taking your work to the next level of transformation/continuous improvement, the Academy 2.0 Development training will provide a facilitated workshop to assist a community assess their current academy work, identify needs, and create innovative solutions to enhance the academy work. This training can be customized for your community to meet your needs, but many communities have used this space to create Academy Guiding Principles and an Academy Assessment Tool to progress monitor their academies.

This training is for those who will lead the implementation of academies in their schools. They will learn how to serve as liaisons between district, school, business, and civic leaders by developing understanding and appreciation of all critical roles within and without their schools. Academy coaches will learn to work effectively with administration and implementation teams to strategically plan for implementation of academies, with teacher leaders to promote effective teaming and transformational instruction, and with business partners to facilitate high quality business engagement. Academy coaches will lead school-based implementation with the end in mind… NCAC Accreditation through implementation with fidelity to the Ten National Standards of Practice.

The Academy Counselor training challenges the professional school counselor to consider the impact of the school’s transformation to the career academy model on their role. The counselor explores questions like: How will this impact my day-to-day work? What is different between what I’ve been doing and what I will be doing? How do I fit within the change; and, more importantly, how do I positively contribute to the transformation while supporting students at the highest level? Through this one-day training, counselors--with academy administrators and school administrators also encouraged to attend--will receive an introduction to the academy model, cross-walk the ASCA and NCAC standards with a focus on the counselor’s responsibilities, and then develop their own resources to support their academy’s specific needs for immediate roll-out and support of school transformation.

In this half of a two-part training, academy teams will work together to develop an academy event that builds academy identity through interdisciplinary, standards-based instruction. Academy members will leave the training with a plan for implementing this event. The plan will include: garnering community and parent engagement, connections to the Academy’s unique career theme(s), a calendar for implementation, establishment of roles and responsibilities, and other elements of a successful event that highlights students’ learning and builds community. This training is an outstanding springboard for building an academy identity and culture among teachers, students, and other stakeholders.

The Administrator/Leadership Training training will produce the following outcomes:

• Overview of the academy schedule and the importance of equity for both teachers and students.
• Selecting and onboarding academy team leaders.
• The importance of student/teacher relationships and activities.
• Facilitating a highly effective team and the role of the administrator.
• Agenda and SMART goal setting.
• Monitoring team performance.
• Public relation ideas.

Ambassador Training for School Staff: This training is an opportunity for schools to explore an orientation for newly appointed Ambassadors. Participants will learn fundamental components of student ambassadorship, and develop a customized framework for training effective ambassadors. These skills include: mastery of academy specific vocabulary, school tours, professionalism, and personal narratives. Additionally, this training will explore continued student ambassador enrichment throughout the school year. This training is scalable, allowing for one school or multiple school participation. Participants should leave with the knowledge and skills to implement a new ambassador orientation, as well as the skills to continue ambassador development throughout the year.

Student Ambassador Training: In this hands-on training, students explore and practice important components and skills of the Student Ambassador role. These skills include: mastery of academy specific vocabulary, school tours, professionalism, and personal narratives. Students should leave the training with a fundamental knowledge of the role of an Ambassador. This training is scalable, and can be used for one school or as a training for students from multiple schools.

The Career Academies 101 training provides an overview of the academy model. The “Why” is always the most important place to start with any community and visiting the “why” will launch this training as they reflect on their school and community needs and aspirations. Participants will understand the difference between a good CTE program and the wall-to-wall academy model as well as deepening their understanding of the benefits and features of community-connected learning to transform the secondary school experience. Participants will identify systems, structures, processes, and competencies needed to plan for implementation of the academy model. Finally, communities will have an opportunity to use their learnings to work collaboratively to reflect on the academy model and align their current high school structure to develop next steps towards possible academy implementation. This training is also used by communities to on-board new staff to the academy model during implementation to ensure all staff members understand the model.

This one-day training is for those interested in facilitating a Career Exploration Fair, either virtually or in-person, at their school, a multi-school, or a district level. Participants will learn about business partner recruitment practices, student engagement and preparation opportunities, and event organization. This training ties in well with schools offering Freshman Seminar to ninth-grade students but can be used outside of it. Participants will leave with the framework to organize their own Career Exploration Fair event.

Developing a deep understanding of the reasons behind the academy model and what it can bring to schools, teachers and staff, and most importantly students, is at the heart of this training. It is designed to introduce district and academy leaders to the guiding principles of the academy model and the evolution of roles when building a distributive leadership culture. The concepts of scheduling, effective teaming, data driven decision making, utilizing advisory boards, and supporting project-based learning through the lens of the administrator are also discussed. During this one or two day training, leaders learn what to look for in selecting academy principals, counselors, teachers, and team leaders and how to build systems that onboard, develop, support, and monitor their academy teams without taking over their meetings. Deliverables include: Overview of academy scheduling, Equity for both teachers and students, Philosophy and best practices for leading academies to implement with fidelity, Distributive Leadership roles and responsibilities, Fundamental approaches to supporting an academy, Developing leadership pipelines, Selecting and onboarding academy teams, The importance of student/teacher relationships and activities, Facilitating a highly effective team and the role of the administrator, Agenda and SMART goal setting, Ideas and successful practices for continuous improvement monitoring of team performance, Public relations ideas, Advisory Boards and the role of the administrator.

Experiential learning is learning through actions, doing and experience. This training will focus on both students and teachers in a classroom setting beginning to learn from each other in using a semi-structured classroom environment approach by using experiences, projects and more hands-on learning to give students experience in real-world applications and situations.

An engaged student is a present student in your classroom. Too often are our students preparing and entering the w​​orkforce without the durable skills and didactic knowledge necessary to navigate high-quality, high-wage positions, and post-secondary. Teachers and Business Partners are the catalyst to increase learning experiences that connect students to their learning, prepare students for college and career opportunities, increase graduation, and equipping students with competitive employability and post-secondary skills that positively impact the workforce. The Externship Training provides a guide for teachers to reimagine their curriculum through the lens of real-world industry practices to improve rigor, relevance, and sustained learning. How are you transforming the students’ critical thinking skills and knowledge into industry practitioners?

Consultancy in developing, implementing, and sustaining Freshman Academies is the scope of this offering. It will include leading a collective group through exploration of the model, showing successful practices that have been implemented in Nashville, and staging and sequencing what a community wants to implement. Documents and videos will be shared as part of the consultancy.

Freshman Seminar focuses on the transition of ninth graders to prepare them for success in high school, post-secondary education and careers. Learn how to prepare students focus on learning more about themselves and their interests and aptitude as well as learning study skills, life skills, employability/professional skills, and career knowledge. Learn how to customize around the career pathways students will be choosing in their high school or tech center after ninth grade. This course begins by focusing on how to direct students to explore, gain understanding about the career itself as well as the courses in the pathway that lead to those careers through a blended learning experience.

Implementing Freshman Seminar allows students dedicated time to focus on their future, understand what it takes to be successful in high school, post-secondary and careers. They make educated choices about their pathways based on research and experiences, and they begin to understand why some of the content courses are important for their success.

This training can be modified and is available as a multi-day consultation to begin implementing Freshman Seminar or can be completed as an initial 1-day workshop to begin discussions around Freshman Seminar or as a “refresher” to schools with existing Freshman Seminar programs.

The goals for Interdisciplinary Planning include: identifying concepts and skills students will master, determining summative assessment(s) focused on mastery of the standards and skills, crafting a driving question that focuses the learning, determining formative assessments, and determining a learning progression and instructional activities.

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-THE TWO DAY TRAINING- Teams start by developing identity and establishing productive, professional relationships that maximize individual’s strengths. Teachers create a vision for their ideal team and student graduate that culminates in the posting of team norms and Academy mission statement. Teacher teams will use their established mission statement and norms to guide their work toward developing sample Academy and team SMART Goals aligned to teaming focuses: teaming processes, standards-based interdisciplinary teaching and learning, and responsive academic interventions. Teacher teams will then brainstorm about an Academy-specific event that celebrates student growth and achievement based on student data, involves community and business engagement, and builds Academy identity and ownership. Finally, teacher teams will explore data-driven student intervention protocols and lay the foundation for interdisciplinary instruction. The training culminates with each team conducting an abbreviated mock team meeting.

-THE THREE DAY TRAINING - Starts with teams developing identity and establishing productive, professional relationships that maximize individual’s strengths. Teachers will create a vision for their ideal team and student graduate that culminates in the posting of team norms and Academy mission statement. On the second day of training, teacher teams will use their established mission statement and norms to guide their work toward developing Academy and team SMART Goals aligned to teaming focuses: teaming processes, standards-based interdisciplinary teaching and learning, and responsive academic interventions. Teacher teams will then create a plan for an Academy-specific event that celebrates student growth and achievement based on student data, involves community and business engagement, and builds Academy identity and ownership. On the third day, teacher teams will develop a structure for data-driven student interventions and lay the foundation for integrating interdisciplinary skills and themed content into daily classroom instruction. The training culminates with each team conducting a mock team meeting.

The complexities of building an academy master schedule can be overwhelming, especially for those with little or no master scheduling experience. This workshop provides participants with the understanding of how educational philosophy is just as important as planning and process when developing an academy master schedule. The mechanics of building the master schedule for cohort scheduling allowing for common planning time is covered.

This PBL Splash professional development is designed to provide district & school administrators with an introduction to project-based learning. Participants will leave with an understanding of the differences between just “doing projects” and Project Based Learning. In addition, participants will be able to learn “look fors” to know if the teachers are teaching using the design principles of PBL. Learning Outcomes for Administrators: 1. Identify characteristics of a Project Based Learning classroom. 2. Demonstrate an understanding of the key design considerations of Project Based Learning. 3. Discuss PBL classrooms look fors based on the project design rubric. 4. Articulate actions steps to ensure the support of the implementation of the key design considerations

The Nashville Hub offers training to help teachers learn to design transformational instruction units. Through this approach students will demonstrate mastery by applying the content standards to create authentic products. The training is designed to mirror the experience of a project. The training will specifically discuss how to unite academy teachers—both CTE and general education instructors together to collaborate to create meaningful interdisciplinary projects.

Through an inquiry-based approach, participants will be challenged to design a unit, while being attentive to different phases of implementation including management and assessment. At the end of the two or three day session, participants will share their final product, receive feedback, and make improvements before taking it to their classrooms. When appropriate, districts can work with local business partners to engage them in the project planning and implementation.

The session is designed to offer schools flexibility of their resources. The outcome will be the same for both options—participants will develop a project that can be used with their students.

The following options are available:

A two-day face-to-face session (with an optional third day of project feedback that can be completed virtually or face-to-face.)

A three-day face-to-face session that will allow for more participant work time before presenting their project to a public audience.

At the completion of the Transforming Classroom Instruction through PBL, participants will have a better understanding of:

• -The difference between a PBL experience and simply “doing projects.”
• -The components of PBL and HOW to make sure you are doing authentic projects that focus on content standards.
• -The need to provide students with alternative ways to show mastery of content standards.
• -How to manage a project in the classroom without having chaos.
• -How to assess a project using multiple sources.
• -How to use PBL resources to create PBL unit plans.
• *PBL also offers the following connections to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI): PBL demonstrates DEI in the nature of it work—each and every student gets voice and choice in how they choose to master an authentic task. Many projects that come about are around real-world social issues that leads to better understanding of equity and inclusion. One of the key design considerations is “connectedness” and that is at the heart of DEI

The PBL Splash professional development is designed to provide all content area teachers with an introduction to PBL. Participants will leave with an understanding of the differences between just “doing projects” and Project Based Learning. In addition, participants will be involved in discovering how to move towards a more student-centered classroom by demonstrating an understanding of the key design considerations of PBL instruction.

An instructional method where general education teachers (ex: math, English science and social studies) teaches their content standards using the industry theme of the academy. Using application, context or examples, teachers help students understand how their content standards come alive in the world of work. This can be done simply with a hook (entry event) at the beginning of a unit or introduction to a new standard or topic or it can be a deeper application where students create authentic products using content standards in the application of real-world work. General education teachers should ask themselves, "how is this content standard used or applied in industry?"

Teachers—individually and in teams—will overcome many of the challenges of teaching in the modern classroom. From building a toolbox of instructional strategies to working in content (or interdisciplinary) teams to develop and deliver high-quality instruction aligned to standards, teachers will learn to maximize every moment of classroom instruction. With a focus on creating depth of skill and content knowledge through scaffolding and chunking, using proven organizational tools, transitioning with ease, integrating technology for student engagement and assessment, and accessing a variety of learning modalities, the trainer will lead teachers toward mastery of the instructional period by modeling those same tools during this one-day training.

This training will give teacher leaders tools for leading their teams through inevitable reactions to change. Team Leaders will develop an understanding of the stages of teaming and strategies for building a culture that values continuous improvement. They will learn how to the distribute leadership, in order to empower members and develop a sense of ownership. They will learn about the Team Planning Template and its relationship to the National Standards of Practice. In addition, they will learn to set goals, prioritize them, document progress toward achieving them, and assess their outcomes. They will develop leadership strategies and facilitation skills that will make them effective leaders in their teams.