Whether it’s a back-to-school keynote address, a series of trainings to support a department’s new curriculum, or a long-term contracts for school or district-wide initiatives, there are so many valuable educational consultants available to help educators consider new perspectives and implement new practices. The best consultants bring research and theory alive while engaging educators in their communities to help them learn how to apply evidence-based practices in meaningful ways that work for them and their students. In past schools and universities where I’ve worked, I’ve had the pleasure of learning from and with some great consultants who have brought much-needed new lenses to our schools.
On the other hand, an over-reliance on the next consultant or group of consultants is sometimes a short-cut that doesn’t get to the root of what educators really need to build their capacity, understand and apply new research, or mobilize toward a district priority. Consultants can certainly be a useful part of a school’s professional development approach, but it is also important to use professional development to empower educators to put into practice the learning they have done in pre-service and graduate programs, and to be creators of research who analyze and apply current peer-reviewed and practitioner research for themselves, without a consultant’s filter.
Elsewhere I’ve written about the need for a research-rich culture in school districts, arguing that schools shouldn’t rely too much on the shortcut of attempting to buy a research base by hiring consultants, guest speakers, or professional development programs. Consultants can provide some but not all the things that sustain a research-rich school community, so here, I share a short list of questions that I may be helpful to consider schools do decide to seek and hire educational consultants. And although my first four headings are written as a binary, I think it’s more helpful to think about each question as a continuum.
1. Internal or external?
Is the consultant proposing more of an external solution or an internal solution? That is, does their approach resemble more of a pre-determined set of practices to adopt, a sequence to follow, or a program to implement? Or does the consulant’s approach resemble more a set of principles and approaches that they plan to adapt to the needs of the community?
In many ways, this question is about how highly-defined the consultant’s approach and materials are, regardless of the audience. The best consultants enter with a clearly defined framework and menu of approaches, but they are adept at and invested in adapting their “spiel” to the needs of the community. Even better, an expert consultant organization can also support the school in taking an human inventory of the knowledge and experience that currently exists within their staff—valuable research knowledge and human experience that needs to be leveraged alongside the consultant’s contributions.
2. Questions or answers?
Like the first question, this one also focuses on how much the consultants are ready to engage with the specific needs of the community. Although all consultants come bringing new knowledge and perspectives, I think you can tell a lot about the experience your educators will have based on what kind of questions they ask before they are hired. What questions do they ask questions about your community and your staff? What questions do they ask about the assets that staff and community members bring to the work? What questions do they ask about previous and concurrent professional development initiatives?
In addition to the questions they ask, how do they respond to your questions? Do they give rigid answers, or are they open to adaptation and reconsideration? Do they respond using examples of how past consulting work has played out or been applied in different communities?
Together, these first two questions will help you get a sense of whether the consultants are primarily focused. on”rolling out” a pre-packaged, one-size-fits-all program or whether they are prepared to work in concert with your community. If the next two questions in my list are about with whom and how the consultants engage with educators in a variety of roles in the system.
3. Together or separate?
Next up: Do the consultants require school leaders and teachers to work and learn along each other during professional development sessions? Or is it a “teachers are the ones who need to learn” situation? This is such an important question to ask because it speaks to who both school leaders and consultants believe needs to do the learning.
Even if the learning that consultants provide is focused on pedagogy and is not directly related to the administrators’ roles, it’s important for them to literally sit next to teachers so that they experience the learning, see how teachers are responding, hear teachers’ reactions and questions, and have a chance to see and feel how the consultant’s approach “fits” in the community.
Certainly, there may be times when teachers and administrators receive different professional development, but there should also be significant time together to process the learning and the way the school or district is implementing it. Both groups should have a voice in giving unfiltered feedback and engaging in dialogue at every stage in the process of selecting, engaging, and learning with consultants.
4. Consumers, creators, and/or critics?
This next one is another question about how the actual learning plays out: How do the consultants help you build capacity in becoming active consumers and creators of educational research? That is, do they present their new ideas, concepts, theories and practices as ideas to be implemented without question? Or do they engage all educators in discussing, questioning, critiquing, and/or adapting the frameworks and and research that they present? Do they present multiple perspectives, critiques, and alternate viewpoints on their work? Or is it presented as a silver bullet not to be questioned?
Just as we should engage our students in reflection, feedback, and critique cycles in our teaching, educators should be encouraged to hold all new approaches up to the light for inspection, and consultants should be willing to acknowledge that every new solution can and should be critiqued. There’s always a trade-off: if we try this new idea, what will we have to change, give up, or adjust in our current practice? What are the implications of this change? What are the time demands for this new approach, and how will this fit into an educator’s already full day?
Too often, I’ve seen school districts invest in a singular program that imposes a sort of theoretical and pedagogical dogma on the staff in a way that is simply begging for educators to rebel. Sometimes leaders forget that every educator enters the profession with their own educational compass, their own theoretical beliefs about teaching in general and in their discipline. And imposing a new program or framework that everyone must follow (e.g., proclaiming that we are an Authentic Intellectual Work district, or a Schools for Rigor district, or a Charlotte Danielson district, or a Gradual Release of Responsibility district) tends to flatten the rich and diverse resources that every educator brings to the table.
5. Who benefits?
The final question is a broader question about who will benefit from the consulting. Ideally, the benefits of the new learning make their way to classrooms and student learning as quickly as possible, but we also know that there’s a consistent gap between changing teacher practices and changing student achievement results. I’ll leave those questions aside for another post, another day.
Here, when I ask who benefits from the educational consultant’s work, I’m thinking about both financial profits and power/influence benefits. It can be tempting to hire out a district’s or school’s learning to well-known individual or organizational consultants…but resource-strapped districts need to be
First, who profits from the consulting fees? Just as many consumers are critical of millionaire and billionaire business owners who don’t pay their employees well, stewards of public education funds should question to whom the consulting fees are going and what the school gets in return. A few things to consider when we’re talking about financial profits:
- What are the consultants “selling”? Is it programs? Materials? Access to well-known people? Connections to important educational buzz-words? Or, beneath the names and titles and jargon, does the organization sell a partnership approach focused on agentic, evidence-based, teacher- and school-centered learning experiences that center the needs of the local community?
- How close to the research are the consultants? That is, are the consultants the original researchers or their partners? Or will the consultants be others hired by a large consulting firm like SchoolKit who are trained to to present a consistent script developed by people higher up that big organization? These organizations are large and scalable, but they often draw on others’ research for their own purposes (sometimes misapplying research in the process) while cutting the actual researchers out of both the conversation and the financial benefits? In another post, I talked about primary, secondary, and tertiary research; which will these consultants center? For a cautionary tale on why we should hire consultants as close to the actual research as possible, read this 2004 summary of Marilyn Jager Adam’s 1998 book chapter that tracks down the sad story of how the reading research was misapplied by consultants and administrators in a way that led to the entrenchment of the “three-cueing system”. TL:DR: Reading researchers didn’t recognize what consultants, curriculum companies, and schools were peddling. Enter Emily Hanford & company. See my longer post about reading science research.
- How sustainable is the learning after we’re done paying? When the consultants go home and we’re no longer paying for their services or materials, will we have built the capacity to continue the work on our own? Is this a teach-a-school-to-fish kind of situation? Or when we’re done with these consultants, will we be looking for a new set of consultants to fill the void in our professional learning and our district’s research base?
And perhaps even more importantly, when we think about who benefits, we also need to ask whose voices or expertise might be marginalized because of the decision to hire particular consultants over others? Just as a librarian would never buy new books for the library before doing a thorough inventory of what’s on the shelves, what’s not, and what patrons are asking for, schools need to do a robust inventory over what internal resources (human and material) are currently available and under-utilized. Just as the U.S. wastes a ridiculous amount of food every year, I would argue that most school districts waste a ridiculous amount their own staff members’ skills, knowledge, and expertise because they go shopping for consultants before checking their own staff’s resources. How many
Here’s an example of a what it might look like for a school district to go grocery shopping without checking its proverbial fridge:
In partnership with a local university, a large school district has paid for hundreds of teachers to earn a graduate degree centered on culturally responsive teaching and leadership, in return for remaining in the district for five years after finishing their degrees. The district also hires an external educational consultant organization to a lead a structured professional learning initiative about culturally responsive teaching, but does not also systematically leverage the knowledge and research skills teacher leaders have gained in their graduate education. How empowered or disempowered might these teachers feel when their school leaders, newly trained by the external consultants, lead professional learning that positions them as novices in culturally sustaining pedagogies? How might these teacher leaders receive this new professional learning that sometimes replicates and sometimes conflicts with what they have learned in their graduate studies?
Putting my cards on the table
Yes, this post has been about questions to consider for anyone considering hiring an educational consultant, but of course, these questions are informed by my own educational history and experiences. If it wasn’t clear before, here are my related biases:
- I am be skeptical of high consultant fees that provide access to well-known keynote speakers because I worry about sustainability.
- I’m also wary of programs or materials presented as one-size-fits-all or off-the-shelf programs that the consultants offer to every school, with minor modifications only.
- Instead, I want to work with educational researchers who come to share their original research and/or evidence-based practices with teachers and leaders.
- AND (yes, I know I’m demanding), I want these researcher-consultants to be focused on building teachers’ and leaders’ capacities to consume and create research, rather than simply adopt a the consultants’ framework.
And here are some examples of great professional learning experiences I’ve experienced:
- Grinnell College professor Dr. Stephanie P. Jones led an interactive workshop for my colleagues, based on her own research about curriculum violence, tailored to the questions submitted by teacher before the workshop.
- When the Iowa Department of Education invested in training for schools with the Authentic Intellectual Work framework, I worked in a school that was able to collaborate directly with several of the primary researchers, including Dana Carmichael and Bruce King, over multiple years.
- A week-long seminar on critical participatory action research at the CUNY Graduate Center was led by experts on critical PAR and current practitioners connected with the Public Science Project. Participants applied to attend and were encouraged to bring their own research to workshop.
- While completing my doctoral work, I designed a dissertation study that applied the critical PAR methods I learned from the Public Science Project folks to a small teacher research collaborative in which all members (myself and four high school teachers) were both consumers and creators of research. Although my co-researchers in the study often spoke with disdain about school professional development offerings, they reported that our inquiry-based collective approach was a new and important type of professional learning for them.
Kate Lechtenberg, PhD 
Leave a comment