The Building Trust Seminars

Starting each September and January John Tanner, bravEd's founder, hosts a graduate-style seminar in which he teachers what it will take to gain and maintain the trust of your stakeholders by accounting for what matters.

Who: Any school leader who wants to know more about the work, is curious, or wonders if this is the right work at the right time.

Outcome: A sense of what is possible and a plan for what comes next.

Set Up: We meet eight times virtually in 90 minute sessions. Each Seminar is capped at 40 participants to enable as much dialogue and feedback as possible.

Fee: $595 per participant.

Other: Every seminar student is given complimentary entry into The bravEd Center and Community for a full year.

The next Seminar starts Jan 15, 2025.

Introductory Forums and other ways to hear about the work

Multiple times throughout the year bravEd hosts workshops and a variety of free events designed to introduce educators to what is possible when they learn to account for the things that truly matter.

We keep a calendar of these events on our website. Some are in person and others are virtual. You can find an event near you or register for any of the virtual events by clicking below.  

The Cohort experience is where accountability gets done

It is important to remember that accounting for what matters is neither a program nor an initiative. Accounting for effort is in the DNA  of leaders and organizations, meaning it isn't an option whether to do it. Rather, the option is to do it in a way that builds trust or does not.

The Cohort is a twenty-part sequence that can comprise both virtual and in-person work. Teams from each campus and the central office participate. Each team needs to commit a thirty-minute window every week throughout the process to hone their practice, and if they do, at the end of the twentieth session they will have the capability to account for their efforts and build the trust every school so richly deserves. 

Throughout the process, bravEd team members support district leaders, work with boards to ensure understanding, offers coaching, and meet regularly with the teams to ensure understanding and that the needs of the leaders are being met.

Every Cohort participant is also invited into the bravEd Center. Participation there is optional, but as part of a team learning to build trust in what a public school does, you'll be contributing to a broader trust in our profession. Engaging with other professionals is an extremely satisfying part of the process.

Included as part of the Cohort membership is a professional learning tool called the Accountability Mindset Course. Designed for teachers, this is an online, self-paced professional learning exercise that helps teachers understand how they too can account for what they do and build trust with their students and the adults in their lives.

If you are ready to participate in a Cohort, the next step is to talk to a bravEd Team Member to work through a few details. You can write us at [email protected], or, click the link below to access our calendar and find a moment that works for the both of us.

Following your Cohort experience, you join a Community of Practice

Shifting paradigms is a challenge. It requires a continuous effort that can offer additional supports and encouragement. While most of the work of building a new way to account for efforts will be completed at the conclusion of the Cohort experience, the need for some additional coaching and supports will be helpful.

Also, new leaders and new school board members or trustees will join your work and indicating them into how you now account for your work will be critical. New teachers will come on board each year and will need to quickly understand how accounting for what matters works, when the odds are they may be coming from a district that isn't yet on board. A significant part of the sustaining effort is helping ensure that everyone is alway on board and up to speed.

As with all of our memberships, those in the Community of Practice also have full access into the bravEd Center. Only now they become a part of the Center that can help those new to the work along.

Finally, the movement that is bravEd's mission to foment is intended to be grassroots, essentially led by the practitioners doing the work. That means that for the foreseeable future it will not have formal institutional leadership, and we believe that to be for the best. However, to prevent the movement from fragmenting into a thousand different pieces, which will put us at risk when one day we are ready to address the policy community, we need to stand together on what current best practice looks like. The Community of Practice enables each school to be nimble enough to create tools unique to them, while still sufficiently tied together to be recognizable as a movement.

Those who have qualified for membership in the Community of Practice can reach out directly to us at [email protected], or, simply click below and complete the form to request an invoice.

The bravEd Center is available to anyone who loves and supports public education

No matter who you are, we have a way to get you in, and we hope you'll take advantage of that. Your memberships help fund our advocacy efforts. One day we'll get to a better policy environment when it comes to accountability, and every member who joins gets us closer to that goal.

Just click in the boxes below to go to the registration pages, or find out more by clicking the green buttons that follow.