A new partnership between the non-profit group New Leaders and Pearson Education seeks to improve the performance of school leadership through the use of technology-backed professional learning opportunities.
New Leaders, the non-profit organization whose mission is to develop school leaders and promote system-wide conditions for student success, is partnering with the education services and technology company Pearson to accelerate access to best-in-class, research-based training opportunities for the nation’s principals and school leaders.
New Leaders CEO Jean Desravines said, “Research shows that effective school leaders have a tremendous impact on student achievement by attracting, retaining, and developing our greatest teachers and ensuring strong instruction and learning for all of their students. Unfortunately, world-class products and services are not readily available to help school systems identify and develop excellent school leaders.”
Desravines added, “In today’s technology-driven world, we all need on-going professional development to stay competitive – and that’s especially true for our school leaders who are charged with ensuring our students are competitive with their global peers. By combining the capabilities of New Leaders with Pearson, we can rapidly scale the critical work of transforming school performance by helping states and districts identify and develop highly effective leaders.”
New Leaders and Pearson are coming together to meet this need by creating tools and professional learning opportunities designed to support school and district leadership development efforts and build leaders’ strengths in instructional leadership, managing teacher effectiveness, and continuous improvement practices. The tools and learning opportunities will include a framework for principal excellence, evaluation rubrics to assess principals’ performance, training for principal evaluators, and web-based professional development modules.
Will Ethridge, Pearson’s CEO of North American Education, said, “This partnership is a unique opportunity for us to combine programs and technologies from Pearson’s School Achievement Services, which is dedicated to providing high quality professional learning to educators, with the ground-breaking work that New Leaders has been doing for the past 12 years. One of the key components to our partnership with New Leaders is their substantial research in high-poverty schools and work with successful principals that has led to new models to transform those schools that are serving our poorest and most underserved children. Our Pearson teams will scale and share these solutions across the U.S.”
Alison Wagner, Pearson’s School Achievement Services President, noted, “To succeed in meeting the expectations of the Common Core, we will need leaders who are prepared to provide their faculties with the regular planning, coaching, and evidence-based feedback teachers need as they make these instructional changes. The solutions we will create with New Leaders will help states and districts develop school leaders who are ready to play this crucial role.”
For more information, please visit: http://www.newleaders.org/pearson-partnership-announcement/
