This post is the fourth in a series of blog posts with Ceri Dean, Danette Parsley, and Mike Siebersma to introduce the School Improvement Consultant Framework.
One day when I was a young girl, my father was working on a project and asked me to get him a screwdriver from his toolbox. I looked in the toolbox and saw not one screwdriver but several. I guessed which one might work and proudly brought it to him. “Not that one,” he said. “I need the Phillips head.”
Back at the toolbox, I noticed that several of the screwdrivers had a flat end, but one had a different kind of end. I chose that one. Success! When I saw how my father used that tool, I learned my first lesson about the importance of knowing which tool to use and how to use it.
It’s an important lesson for school improvement consultants as well. As the saying goes, “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” School improvement consultants need a variety of process skills and tools, and the knowledge of how to use them, to help clients recognize and solve problems. Our School Improvement Consultant Framework groups process skills and tools together to emphasize the relationship between them:
- Process skills are the abilities that enable appropriate use of consultant tools. Among these skills are facilitating discussions, planning and conducting meetings, guiding clients to identify problems and prioritize actions, asking different types of questions, listening actively, and navigating conflict.
- The tools in the school improvement consultant toolbox are devices or instruments that help clients learn about topics, identify problems and potential solutions, and productively work together to achieve outcomes. Tools can include written examples or explanations, discussion protocols, templates, images, models, graphic organizers, and videos.
As a child, my father’s toolbox fascinated me, especially the way it opened, revealing layers of tools as the lid was lifted. Equally intriguing were the variations of some of the tools. The screwdrivers weren’t the only tool family in the toolbox!
Likewise, school improvement consultants use variations of process skills and tools to customize their response to client needs and capacities. As they consider the work to be done in accomplishing a client’s outcomes, they open the layers of their toolbox to find the tool best suited to the task. To ensure they use their process skills and tools well and add to their toolbox over time, they reflect on what skills and tools they have used and how well those skills and tools have worked.
As a school improvement consultant, you want to help your clients achieve as much as they can. To help you accomplish that goal, we’ve developed a new resource to guide you in selecting process skills and consultant tools. In future blog posts, we’ll help expand your toolbox by digging deeper into some critical consulting processes so that you understand how to maximize their use to help clients achieve their intended outcomes.
Download our new resource, Choose Intentionally: How to Select the Right Tool or Process for Your Client.
