How to join the Benefits-Based Accountability Movement
Somewhere below you will find the path that is right for you
If you are a do-it-yourselfer, the Base is a good option. If you'd like some additional resources that can be used to induct new staff or as part of your professional learning agenda, look to Support. If you would like to join with your colleagues and work through the process together, look to Cohort. And once you are up and running, our Community of Practice will continue to offer everything in Support, but at a significantly discounted membership fee.
Every bravEd opportunity is made available as an annual membership.
Each level of Membership and several individual Support Efforts are available to both individuals and institutions.
Additional information on each Support Effort follows, along with a link for individuals interested in a particular Effort.
For institutional memberships, or for invoicing, please reach out to bravEd directly at [email protected].
The bravEd Center
The bravEd Center and Online Forum are available to anyone who loves and supports public education
Admittance to the bravEd Center is automatic for each membership. It is also available to those who love public education and are interested in supporting our work. We use both the Center and the Forum as a way to stay connected and work towards a policy solution at some point in the future.
Two memberships are available, an Individual and a Business Membership.
Just click in the boxes below to go to the registration pages, or find out more by clicking the green buttons that follow.
The Benefits-Based Accountability Course and Handbook—NEW
Beta Version now available
For years we have needed a way to move school leaders into this work who are interested in doing it on their own. Shifting to a Benefits-Based Accountability has historically required Cohorts and/or additional consulting, which can make for both logistical and budget challenges for many school and district leaders. The Course function means it is now available to all.
We have also long needed a place where we house current best practice. Print is a challenge because it risks perpetuating old rather than new learnings. As the discipline of accountability has taken root in education, we learn with our partners and want to be sure that we are all on the same page when it comes to this important work. An online Handbook allows us to do just that.
It's taken years to get to this point, and now it is available to everyone.
The Course/Handbook can be used by an individual leader seeking to improve their own practice, or a school or district interested in building a better accountability environment.
The Course/Handbook will be in a development version until Summer 2025, but we didn't want to wait that long to make it available given the initial interest. Enrollment in the Course/Handbook membership between now and July 1, 2025 will qualify for an 18-month, rather than the normal one-year membership.
Register for the Course and HandbookThe Accounting for What Matters Seminar Series
Multiple times a year John Tanner, bravEd's founder, hosts a graduate-style seminar in which he teaches 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 take a deeper dive into 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 six 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.
Feb 11, 2025 StartThe Accountability Mindset Online Course
In just a few hours the Accountability Mindset Online will introduce any educator to a world of accountability they had likely never imagined. Accountability in most professions is a force for good, carried out by those in it. Only in education has it been treated as a tool for compliance and control.
The no longer need be the case. Accountability is a discipline of leadership first, and a policy concerns second. Most professions suffer from policy concerns that don't match their work, but because accountability is first a discipline, the ill-effects can be blunted. You can do the same in education.
Tuition is $30, and for that small investment you can find all the tools you need to account for what matters and diminish the power in test-based accountabilities. Doing that is a great way to focus each educator why educator on why they became an educator in the first place.
Sign me upThe bravEd Cohorts
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.
Each participant is given access to our recently developed Course & Manual to aid their efforts. This is a long overdue resource with the potential to help aid and sustain this work.
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.
Schedule an AppointmentCommunity 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.
Request an Invoice