Professional Greatness

NYC Public Schools Professional Development

Professional development is essential to the upgrade of any organization, but it also requires a substantial investment of time, energy, and resources. Your school especially deserves maximum returns on its investments! Here’s what you can expect:

Professional Development:

  • Well-crafted experiences informed by industry research, tailored to your unique contexts, history, and needs, and geared towards action and measurable outcomes.
  • Experiences that foster social-emotional literacy, growth mindset, and personal development such as self-awareness, confidence building, and strengths cultivation (so-called “soft skills”).
  • Coaching to habituate thinking, problem-solving dispositions, and self-management as well as interpersonal skills development.
  • The ultimate goals of all professional development experiences are advanced learnings and increased performance. Together, we decide on performance indicators.

Professional Development Offerings for New York City Public Schools

DOE Vendor ID: GLE329597
Focus Areas: Personal Development, Team Building, & Social-Emotional Literacy

We are pleased to offer professional development services for public schools focused on personal-interpersonal development.

AIW conceptualizes personal development as the ongoing process of development towards self-realization and effective self-management. The offerings aim to cultivate in participants advanced self-awareness, self-knowledge, and interpersonal skills, as well as foster a sense of collective well-being, all of which are essential qualities for personal and professional competency.

Listed below are the description for each PD offering. To request an offering for your community or to have your questions answered, please contact Glenda at 929-466-2498 or email glenda@audaciousnnerworks.com.

“Sawabona”: Centering Staff Wellness

“Sawabona” is an important value that comes from the South African Zulu nation; it connotes, “I see you. I accept you. I value you. You are important to me.” This workshop series is intended to center the voices, experiences, humanity, and resilience of staff and to engage them in envisioning and planning for a sustainable culture of staff wellness.

Team Building

Team building is an essential, ongoing process for improving relations among staff and cultivating a more engaged, proactive culture and work environment.

Leading with Character Strengths

This workshop series is predicated on a strengths-based model developed by the VIA Institute on Character™ and designed to bring to participants’ awareness the role that character strengths can play in transforming the quality of their lives and work performance.

How Do You See?: The Role of Mindset in Shaping Experiences

This workshop series explores mindset from the lenses of professional coaching and neuroscience. Participants will investigate their own mindset orientations, consider personal and professional implications, and explore teacher practices that promote a growth mindset in students.

Virtual Power Sips™: Group Coaching

The Sips’ facilitated discussions attune participants to their unique ways of being and core values, surface underlying beliefs, and offer tools to better equip them to operate from the strength of who they are.

Customizing Your Professional Development Experience

In addition to the offerings listed above, AIW welcomes an opportunity to partner with you to design bespoke PD experiences to meet the wellness and personal-interpersonal development needs of your school community. Contact Glenda to explore possibilities.

Recent Professional Development Projects

“Sawabona” & Team Building Professional Development, Community School 134X

In partnership with Principal Martín Alvarado, AIW designed and facilitated a series of bespoke professional development sessions focused on re-engaging and building community in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Key Performance Indicators:
  • Community bonding—sharing stories of hardships, compassion, and resilience, and acknowledging colleagues for support shown
  • Creating space: Openness, active listening, showing empathy, offering support
  • Creating art and artifacts for the “Sawabona Appreciation & Gratitude Wall”
  • Interdependence: engagement of all group members (e.g., fulfilling roles), active
    brainstorming, respectful conflict resolution, openness to feedback
  • Ideating for a Sawabona community year-round

“Exploring a Growth Mindset in Equitable Teaching,” YMCA of Bogotá, Colombia in Conjunction with Unicompensar

Our CEO Glenda M. Francis was invited to participate in a speakers’ series targeted for YMCA youth coordinators and university level students, many of whom were educators. She designed and facilitated a workshop on growth mindset predicated on Dr. Carol S. Dweck’s groundbreaking scientific research. It aimed to develop participants’ awareness of their own mindset orientations and to explore teacher practices that promote a growth mindset in students.
Key Performance Indicators:
  • Heightened understanding of mindset as a framework and awareness of the role of the teacher in influencing mindsets as assessed through pre- and post- tasks.
  • Newfound understanding about their students’ reluctance to learn and speak English and how approaches rooted in a growth mindset framework (e.g., teaching intellectual dispositions and using rich, relevant tasks) could facilitate their English-language acquisition.

Testimonials

Monica
Monica

We must all acknowledge the parts of our mindset that are fixed and only then will we be conscious enough to start promoting the shift to a growth mindset. We also need to foster in our students their metacognitive competence in order to help them embrace their own learning process and take control over it.

Angélica
Angélica

I loved the session. It was an invitation to evaluate the way we learn and the way we think. Also, it was very helpful to learn and think about other ways to think, learn, and get challenged.