Read this page if you have five to nine people interested in being trained at your school. Here you’ll learn about partially filling the training with your own staff and charging other educators in your geographic area to fill the remaining seats.
If you have 10-15 people ready to start training, please visit the On-Site Trainings page.
And if you have one to five people who want to be trained, visit the Open Trainings page.
Five ways your school will benefit from greater collaboration and trust
- Research shows that schools with ongoing Critical Friends Group®communities have greater teacher retention rates than schools not doing CFG work.
- Sharing “best practices” between teachers provides more coherence as students progress through your school, and improves student achievement across those classes.
- Educators who bond with their colleagues and have more collegial and collaborative conversations rather than just congenial ones, resulting in stronger feelings of loyalty and job satisfaction.
- Every organization has a variety of “elephants in the room,” dilemmas that may be discussed in the parking lot but seldom in meetings, and never ending in a resolution. CFG communities filled with trustworthy colleagues create a safe haven for those difficult conversations.
- Educators who learn and practice 21st Century Skills such as critical thinking, assessing, organizing information and reflection (all practiced within CFG training) will become better role models for their students.
But if you only have five (or so) people interested in CFG training…
Ideally, to improve school culture, everyone in the school should participate in at least one CFG community, but it doesn’t all have to happen at once. (In some ways, it’s better if CFG work grows more organically rather than being mandated across the board.) Having just a few people trained as Critical Friends Group coaches can still accomplish quite a lot, both in the individual coaches’ practices and classrooms, and having a ripple effect through your school..
When you have a smaller number of people considering coaches’ training, you have three options.
- We can still send you an NSRF® National Facilitator for personalized training, but your cost per person rises significantly because our main costs are fixed, regardless of whether we’re training 5 or 15 people.
- You may choose to send each person out to an Open Training (usually about $850/week plus transportation and lodging), and that will give you and them the advantage of interacting with educators from a wide variety of workplaces.
- The least expensive option for you is if you will host an Open Training at your school or district that’s already “stocked” with a number of your staff.
Here’s how the numbers work
In every New Coaches’ Training, no more than 15 participants will work with one NSRF National Facilitator. Our trainings are never a “sit and get” experience, but a week of active engagement in your real-world dilemmas and local work. Expect to have hands on, brains on, and empathy on all week.
The ideal number of participants in a Coaches’ Training is 10 to 15, so, for instance, if you have eight people on your staff ready to train, you only need two to seven more for a full training. If your organization will sign a provisional contract for the full cost of the training (usually around $12,500-$16,000 for a group of 15), together we decide what date the contract becomes solid rather than provisional, and both you and we do our best to fill 15 seats in the meantime. You’ll do your part by promoting the opportunity to other educators already within your social and professional circles. NSRF will post the training on the Open Trainings schedule on our website and also contact others who we’ve previously trained in your area to see if they have any referrals.
For more details about the logistics, please see the On-Site Trainings page.
Next steps: think about these things and give us a call
- What are your goals for CFG work at your school, or why are you personally interested in CFG Coaches Training?
- About how many people will be ready to train?
- What dates are you considering for training?
- Will you want five consecutive days or split the training into three days and then two, later? (Splitting the training most often happens during the academic year. Be aware that this option increases our travel expenses, but it’s sometimes worth it to avoid having your educators away from their regular posts for five consecutive days.)
Of course you can feel free to call us even if you don’t know all these answers yet, if you have other questions for us to answer.
If you have questions, we have answers
Our number is 812-330-2702. We’re open Monday-Friday, 9-5 Eastern Time, but we’re happy to set appointments to speak with you outside our regular business hours as necessary. If you’d like to complete a webform so we can reply by email and/or have a shorter conversation, please click the “Contact Us” button.