Tom Woelper, Founding Head of School
New England Innovation Academy
Tom has had a distinguished 31-year career in independent education, most recently serving as the Head of School of Far Hills Country Day School in Far Hills, New Jersey. Prior to his tenure at Far Hills, Tom served as the Assistant Head of School and Dean of Academic Life and taught history during his 14 years at The Hotchkiss School. Tom began his career in independent school education as a teaching intern at Groton School and then as a history teacher and Class Dean at The Taft School. Following a sabbatical year from Taft, Tom served as the Head of the Ake Panya International School in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He also has served on the Board of Trustees of the New Jersey Association of Independent Schools, where he co-chaired the Accreditation Committee.
“To develop an innovator, you need to have a group of people who have diverse backgrounds, experience, and thinking, and by extension, you're looking at diversity in all of its forms. It's visible and it's invisible forms. We know that diverse groups outperform homogenous groups all the time. For us to be successful in our mission and our educational mission, we have to be a diverse school, both in terms of the students and the faculty. Essential to what we're all about, but you can't stop there. Even in our acronym, Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Action. Action is the A in social justice. Many schools or institutions stop short of the action, you have to actively dismantle the existing racism. You have to actively examine your own bias. You have to actively think about how you develop a community of diverse learners.”
-Tom Woelper
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
Transform how you lead to become a resilient and empowered change agent with Harvard’s online Certificate in School Management and Leadership. Grow your professional network with a global cohort of fellow school leaders as you collaborate in case studies bridging the fields of education and business. Apply today at http://hgse.me/leader.
School leaders know that productive student talk drives student learning, but the average teacher talks 75% of class time! TeachFX is changing that with a “Fitbit for teachers” that automatically measures student engagement and gives teachers feedback about what they could do differently.
Learn more about the TeachFX app and get a special 20% discount for your school or district by visiting teachfx.com/blbs.
Organized Binder is the missing piece in many classrooms. Many teachers are great with the main content of the lesson. Organized Binder helps with powerful introductions, savvy transitions, and memorable lesson closings. Your students will grow their executive functioning skills (and as a bonus), your teachers will become more organized too. Help your students and staff level up with Organized Binder.
Copyright © 2021 Twelve Practices LLC
Sam was an English teacher, Academic Intervention Specialist, athletic coach, and School Counselor for 21 years and is currently serving as Chief Development Officer at SimpliCollege.com. He is the Author of Choose the Perfect College and Hire Education. The father of five children, his family recently moved from the Philadelphia suburbs to Denver Metro. Sam is the host of the Made to Thrive podcast and is writing Why Aren’t Men Thriving?, which is due out in early 2022.
“Simpli College says your job as a counselor is to help people create a log-in and that's it. All of a sudden you think about the people who for a long time, unfortunately, school has been about access to school. Most of the school experience is given to those who know the system. Many of our families are first generation and have not had a welcoming school experience as parents. They're not going to pick up the phone and call the counselor and figure out when they can get in and talk about whether even college is a good idea for their kid.”
-Sam Feeney
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
Transform how you lead to become a resilient and empowered change agent with Harvard’s online Certificate in School Management and Leadership. Grow your professional network with a global cohort of fellow school leaders as you collaborate in case studies bridging the fields of education and business. Apply today at http://hgse.me/leader.
School leaders know that productive student talk drives student learning, but the average teacher talks 75% of class time! TeachFX is changing that with a “Fitbit for teachers” that automatically measures student engagement and gives teachers feedback about what they could do differently.
Learn more about the TeachFX app and get a special 20% discount for your school or district by visiting teachfx.com/blbs.
Organized Binder is the missing piece in many classrooms. Many teachers are great with the main content of the lesson. Organized Binder helps with powerful introductions, savvy transitions, and memorable lesson closings. Your students will grow their executive functioning skills (and as a bonus), your teachers will become more organized too. Help your students and staff level up with Organized Binder.
Copyright © 2021 Twelve Practices LLC
Matt Silverthorne brings 30 years of high school teaching experience with him to Empowered — he introduced the program to its very first classroom in 1991.
Today Matt is the Strategic Growth Director. His job entails inspiring and growing a movement that attracts and motivates Empowered educator customers to become principled social change entrepreneurs.
“We believe real change happens when we transform the classroom into a deeply experiential environment and we power those experiences with the undeniable power of markets. It means deemphasizing, tests, grades, and material. It doesn't mean deemphasizing their importance. It means deemphasizing those as the outcome in the classroom. Not getting the student to focus on the test, the material, but to focus on their own transformation, their own learning, their own transformation in terms of knowledge and skills. It means shining the spotlight on each individual student, helping each individual student discover, develop and apply their unique gifts.”
-Matt Silverthorne
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
Transform how you lead to become a resilient and empowered change agent with Harvard’s online Certificate in School Management and Leadership. Grow your professional network with a global cohort of fellow school leaders as you collaborate in case studies bridging the fields of education and business. Apply today at http://hgse.me/leader.
School leaders know that productive student talk drives student learning, but the average teacher talks 75% of class time! TeachFX is changing that with a “Fitbit for teachers” that automatically measures student engagement and gives teachers feedback about what they could do differently.
Learn more about the TeachFX app and get a special 20% discount for your school or district by visiting teachfx.com/blbs.
Organized Binder is the missing piece in many classrooms. Many teachers are great with the main content of the lesson. Organized Binder helps with powerful introductions, savvy transitions, and memorable lesson closings. Your students will grow their executive functioning skills (and as a bonus), your teachers will become more organized too. Help your students and staff level up with Organized Binder.
Copyright © 2021 Twelve Practices LLC
Jeff Becker’s an award-winning school counselor and teacher with a Master's in Secondary Counseling and a second degree in communications- so he's a boots-on-the-ground leader and entrepreneur. Jeff is also an adjunct professor at National University for their Master’s program in Social and Emotional Learning. He's the founder of two revolutionary products that help principals to deliver much-needed SEL to their kids without taxing their teachers. And it looks like something from Netflix, so kids love it.
“The thing that keeps me up at night is all of these fires that we're constantly putting out as ed leaders. The more fires we're putting out and jumping around and being reactive, the less we're proactive about the skills that we're given to our children.”
-Jeff Becker
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
Transform how you lead to become a resilient and empowered change agent with Harvard’s online Certificate in School Management and Leadership. Grow your professional network with a global cohort of fellow school leaders as you collaborate in case studies bridging the fields of education and business. Apply today at http://hgse.me/leader.
School leaders know that productive student talk drives student learning, but the average teacher talks 75% of class time! TeachFX is changing that with a “Fitbit for teachers” that automatically measures student engagement and gives teachers feedback about what they could do differently.
Learn more about the TeachFX app and get a special 20% discount for your school or district by visiting teachfx.com/blbs.
Organized Binder is the missing piece in many classrooms. Many teachers are great with the main content of the lesson. Organized Binder helps with powerful introductions, savvy transitions, and memorable lesson closings. Your students will grow their executive functioning skills (and as a bonus), your teachers will become more organized too. Help your students and staff level up with Organized Binder.
Copyright © 2021 Twelve Practices LLC
Hilary L. Link, Ph.D., is the first female President of Allegheny College — one of the nation’s oldest and most innovative colleges where multidisciplinary learning breaks the conventional mold. She is a recognized leader, scholar of Italian Language and Literature, and globalist. In more than 20 years of experience across a broad range of institutions, she’s provided students with a cross-disciplinary path to think critically and communicate creatively.
“One of the interesting things is that people are still trying to sort out as with me as a woman, where the line is between being a strong, determined, authoritative decision maker, but also someone who arrives at those decisions in a very non authoritative way. I like to describe my decision-making process as really iterative and collaborative, but the reality is once I arrive at a decision, I don't change it as long as I know how I got there, why I got there, and I can explain the ‘why’ behind it.”
-Dr Hilary Link
“I believe firmly that the advantage I have had of living outside my country, my cultural context has taught me that there are multiple ways to see the world. Multiple ways to approach everything from how you express yourself, how you say things, how work is organized, how education is organized, so that carries through and drives everything I do. Whether I'm doing that from Boston, where I grew up, or New York City or Rome, or now Meadville, what it's taught me is that you can always take a step to another side and see something from a different angle, and you can often see it differently once you've moved yourself.”
-Dr Hilary Link
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
Transform how you lead to become a resilient and empowered change agent with Harvard’s online Certificate in School Management and Leadership. Grow your professional network with a global cohort of fellow school leaders as you collaborate in case studies bridging the fields of education and business. Apply today at http://hgse.me/leader.
School leaders know that productive student talk drives student learning, but the average teacher talks 75% of class time! TeachFX is changing that with a “Fitbit for teachers” that automatically measures student engagement and gives teachers feedback about what they could do differently.
Learn more about the TeachFX app and get a special 20% discount for your school or district by visiting teachfx.com/blbs.
Organized Binder is the missing piece in many classrooms. Many teachers are great with the main content of the lesson. Organized Binder helps with powerful introductions, savvy transitions, and memorable lesson closings. Your students will grow their executive functioning skills (and as a bonus), your teachers will become more organized too. Help your students and staff level up with Organized Binder.
Copyright © 2021 Twelve Practices LLC
Dr. Joseph Jones is the Superintendent in the New Castle County Vocational-Technical School District. A passion to provide all students an incredible and valuable learning experience Dr. Jones started teaching World and US History in 1996. A few short years later he found himself within the ranks of school administration hoping to make a difference on a larger scale. That desire and pursuit continued as he worked as a principal for seven years striving to reach two major goals: One, give teachers the best scenario to perfect and practice their craft; Two, provide students every opportunity to learn in a secure, enriching environment. As a school they made great strides and received various awards and accolades that enabled them to grow even stronger as a school community. Being the first high school in Delaware to receive the academic achievement award for closing the achievement gap was a hallmark of their relentless pursuit. His efforts continue now in a central office role as he oversees assessment and accountability. The combination of precision, best practices, and passion forges his educational ideals and provides a clear path to reaching our goals. Educationally, he believes time spent within the walls of schools has been his best teacher.
Dr. T.J. Vari is the Assistant Superintendent of Secondary Schools and District Operations in the Appoquinimink School District. Dr. Vari is an experienced school administrator and adjunct faculty with a demonstrated history of working in schools and in higher education. Skilled in K-12 education, online learning, literacy, classroom culture, curriculum & instruction, district operations, human resources, change management, and education reform. Strong education professional with an Ed.D focused in Leadership and Innovation from Wilmington University.
Dr. Jones and Dr. Vari, along with Salome Thomas-El are co-authors of the new book: Retention for a Change: Motivate, Inspire, and Energize Your School Culture
“As a leader, we sometimes become more and more distant from the ground floor and all the work going on. You have to build mechanisms so that you have opportunities to really know what's going on. The last thing you want is to be disenfranchised from the actual work. The distance between the position and the person sometimes is too great and that is what builds disconnect within.”
-Dr Joseph Jones
“We believe deeply in the educational system. We want leaders to have the tools that will build a culture in every school that can make it the best that it can be. It's a ‘law of the lid’, nothing rises above the capacity of the leader. When you build a leader's capacity to do great things, we're going to have great cultures in schools, and that goes down at the student level.”
-Dr TJ Vari
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
Transform how you lead to become a resilient and empowered change agent with Harvard’s online Certificate in School Management and Leadership. Grow your professional network with a global cohort of fellow school leaders as you collaborate in case studies bridging the fields of education and business. Apply today at http://hgse.me/leader.
The SMART Learning Suite Online allows teachers to create, store, and deliver lessons from anywhere – no SMART Board required – and your students can access and engage with your content from any web browser on any device. And it connects with tools you already use like Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams.
The research-backed EdTeach Assessment Tool will help Ruckus Makers discover their strengths and best area of focus across 5 different modules, including leadership and remote learning. You’ll get a personalized report that shows where you stack up against other leaders, and maps some areas of focus that will have the greatest impact for you.
Organized Binder is the missing piece in many classrooms. Many teachers are great with the main content of the lesson. Organized Binder helps with powerful introductions, savvy transitions, and memorable lesson closings. Your students will grow their executive functioning skills (and as a bonus), your teachers will become more organized too. Help your students and staff level up with Organized Binder.
Copyright © 2020 Twelve Practices LLC
Formerly a high school English teacher and a new teacher coach in Palo Alto Unified School District (Palo Alto, CA, USA), Jennifer Abrams is currently a communications consultant who works with educators and others on new teacher and employee support, being generationally savvy, effective collaboration skills, having hard conversations and creating identity safe workplaces.
Jennifer’s publications include Having Hard Conversations, The Multigenerational Workplace: Communicate, Collaborate & Create Community, Hard Conversations Unpacked - the Whos, Whens and What Ifs, and Swimming in the Deep End: Four Foundational Skills for Leading Successful School Initiatives. Her newest book is Stretching Your Learning Edges: Growing (Up) at Work.
Jennifer has been invited to keynote, facilitate and coach worldwide from the USA to Africa, from Asia to Europe, from Australia to South America, and she is honored to have been named one of the “18 Women All K-12 Educators Should Know,” by Education Week’s ‘Finding Common Ground’’ blog.
“Your development isn't an indulgence. You don't have time not to develop yourself. If you don't, you're not going to have as fruitful a life as a Ruckus Maker, as thoughtful of a life, and you won't live in the world with the same amount of ease.”
-Jennifer Abrams
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
Transform how you lead to become a resilient and empowered change agent with Harvard’s online Certificate in School Management and Leadership. Grow your professional network with a global cohort of fellow school leaders as you collaborate in case studies bridging the fields of education and business. Apply today at http://hgse.me/leader.
School leaders know that productive student talk drives student learning, but the average teacher talks 75% of class time! TeachFX is changing that with a “Fitbit for teachers” that automatically measures student engagement and gives teachers feedback about what they could do differently.
Learn more about the TeachFX app and get a special 20% discount for your school or district by visiting teachfx.com/blbs.
Organized Binder is the missing piece in many classrooms. Many teachers are great with the main content of the lesson. Organized Binder helps with powerful introductions, savvy transitions, and memorable lesson closings. Your students will grow their executive functioning skills (and as a bonus), your teachers will become more organized too. Help your students and staff level up with Organized Binder.
Copyright © 2021 Twelve Practices LLC
Mary Grassa O’Neill
Monique Burns Thompson:
“I deeply believe that every single person on this planet has superpowers, and it is our job as educators to tap into them and unleash them."
- Monique Burns Thompson
“Leadership is joyful work, empowering others to do their best work. Principals do that with teachers and teachers do that with students and empowering others to educate themselves or to be educated is just one of the most important things we can do in this world. We're building people, we're building the next generation of leaders and educators.”
- Mary Grassa O’Neill
Mary Grassa O'Neil and Monique Burns Thompson Transcript
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
Transform how you lead to become a resilient and empowered change agent with Harvard’s online Certificate in School Management and Leadership. Grow your professional network with a global cohort of fellow school leaders as you collaborate in case studies bridging the fields of education and business. Apply today at http://hgse.me/leader.
School leaders know that productive student talk drives student learning, but the average teacher talks 75% of class time! TeachFX is changing that with a “Fitbit for teachers” that automatically measures student engagement and gives teachers feedback about what they could do differently.
Learn more about the TeachFX app and get a special 20% discount for your school or district by visiting teachfx.com/blbs.
Organized Binder is the missing piece in many classrooms. Many teachers are great with the main content of the lesson. Organized Binder helps with powerful introductions, savvy transitions, and memorable lesson closings. Your students will grow their executive functioning skills (and as a bonus), your teachers will become more organized too. Help your students and staff level up with Organized Binder.
Copyright © 2021 Twelve Practices LLC