Our Core Services. REDi intentionally integrates research and thoughtful consulting to help accelerate effective innovations in learning and to rethink the systems in which learning occurs. Our team brings an entrepreneurial lens to our partnership work, understanding that internal and external drivers make the delivery of today’s learning environment a unique challenge. Together we examine, understand, and plan for actions that make needed and sustained improvements. We offer seamless services across five core areas of impact.
School improvement agendas have pushed educational leaders to serve as the jack-of-all trades. But in high achieving organizations, the functions of leadership are cultivated and shared. The days of school boards, superintendents, executive cabinets, or principals riding as the Lone Ranger are over.
We help school districts and schools examine their capacity for leadership work. As an evolving, spontaneous concept, capacity-building requires re-alignment of authority and responsibility based on current goals and priorities. REDi’s focus is to guide the organization in its expansion of formal and informal leadership roles that support a stronger community of practice.
REDi team members provide the following core services as a vehicle to promote broad-based, skillful participation in your leadership work:
Several “new normals” have emerged in education. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) upped the ante on preparing world-wise graduates that are ready for anything. There’s an urgent need to respond to the changing view of what students should learn in schools and how they should learn it.
REDi can help your team venture outside prevailing norms to navigate this “new normal.” Infusion of innovation is a cornerstone of this work. We offer easy-to-implement ideas that create empowered learners with a clear path to success. Concepts such as personalization, design thinking, collaboration, and environment as a “third” teacher serve as the framework for REDi’s expertise.
REDi support goes beyond off-the-shelf initiatives to provide provocative actions that change the way school is done. These actions include:
Changing mission and vision statements or modifying a logo can cause discomfort in an organization. REDi can help you make the case for a refresh project and assist in obtaining commitment from key stakeholder groups. Together, we will create the visual language that matches the advancements your district is making.
Making changes to systems within a school district, empowering local schools to implement the digital pedagogy, and creating a supportive community environment for those changes takes time and requires changes to teaching methods, content management and teaching culture. Through a collaborative approach, REDi can help you build equity with all stakeholders to move into a systematic change in the education of all students.
REDi works with school districts, schools, program managers, and education design architects to develop intentionally designed physical spaces that structurally support these new kinds of personalized and technology-rich blended learning environments. Through research and evidence-based practice, REDi brings the needed resources to engage a new conversation about facilities design that is driven by the organization’s own core education principles and guided by its approach to the delivery of learning and teaching.
REDi helps schools/districts retool learning activities that address students’ employment future—not our employment past—and guide students on a journey to find their place of impact in the world.
Through research and marketing strategies, REDi will collaborate with districts, build or rebuild confidence in your school system, and bring back excitement in neighborhood schools. Using an entrepreneurial approach, REDi will collaborate with district and school leaders to redefine the school experience for families in order to support the growing need to compete for student attendance.
REDi supports school leaders find ways to point cross-age arrows in the same direction. Recognizing the generational forces that drive staff morale and parent expectations enables administrators to effectively manage change—with an eye on achieving better results for students.
Education—public and private—is in a constant struggle to secure adequate funding for all its programs and learning targets. Inconsistent state and federal dollars make it difficult to keep up with growing expectations and expenses. Despite limited revenue streams, schools and school districts must learn to leverage human, fiscal, and external resources for maximum impact.
REDi helps organizations make the most of local dollars by securing investments from outside partners. Made strategically, outside investments instill confidence that creates a ripple effect around a specific initiative or need. Our work is focused on helping districts and schools re-allocate, re-purpose, and re-think the resources they have to get the resources they need.
REDi services assist clients:
While educators agonize to write meaningful mission statements and lofty goals, by the time these ideas travel through the community, their impact is watered down. Experts call this the “dilution dilemma.” Dilution occurs because most messages lack the robustness necessary to generate value. After all, our messages compete with hundreds of other daily sound bites. Schools are hard-pressed to keep the art of communication from becoming a lost art.
REDi helps school leaders find multiple entry points to deliver messages that resonate and stick. We also know that social media can be a mixed bag in our messaging plan. Facebook is not face-to-face and emails and hashtags can portray us in ways we don’t want to be portrayed. REDi guides clients in balancing digital tools with human emotions to carry our messages along.
Using the right tone, metaphor, or story are just a few things that make our messages matter. We work with clients to:
School leaders are on a quest to discover and disseminate information that will strengthen outcomes. Although proven practices are readily accessible, these practices only make sense after they touch upon the philosophy and guidance that resonates with people. More training, more research, and more data won’t shrink the knowing-doing gap. What will shrink the gap is understanding the virtue of simple language, simple structures, and simple concepts that connect talk with action.
Using research and evidence-based approaches, REDi helps your team engage in new conversations about data and assessments. Best-practices are aligned with best-thinking to narrow the focus for maximum impact. REDi believes that a few measures directly related to strategic goals are far more useful than a plethora of measures that create confusion about what’s important and what’s not.
With your team, REDi is poised to: