Culturally Responsive​/Student Driven Instructional Coach

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Before you read on, please read the Commitments to Educational Equity that AVC strives to adopt across our organization. We seek to add leaders to our team who can help us make these commitments a reality so that they influence how we lead, learn, innovate, design, collaborate, create, and serve our students, families, partners, and communities. Still interested? See below:

Assabet Valley Collaborative (AVC) is a Metrowest/Central Massachusetts educational service agency. Our services include school programs (including Orchard Street Academy, see below), wraparound services, transportation services, professional development, cooperative purchasing, and consulting. We are in the process of developing a shared leadership model to engage stakeholders across the organization in learning, leading, designing, and decision-making. To achieve shared leadership, we need to engage in continuous study of the principles of cultural proficiency, culturally responsive practices, human-centered design, design thinking, and social innovation.

AVC's Orchard Street Academy (OSA) is a small public therapeutic school (grades 6th-12th). OSA’s programming includes academics, individual and group counseling, art and music therapy, a range of high-interest electives, and community development seminars.

• Serves 62 students from more than 30 sending school districts.
• All students receive specialized services through Individualized Education Programs (IEPs).
• Students are enrolled in OSA and/or SOAR extended evaluation programs.
• Classes taken at OSA transfer as a credit to sending school districts.
• Well known for our focus on Expressive Therapies (music, art, drama).
• The building is old but with amenities - gymnasium, track, basketball court, music room, art room.
• Many faculty have had access to training in Cultural Proficiency, Restorative Justice, Shared Leadership, Trauma Informed Care, Healing and Wellness, and Student-driving/Student-centered Learning.
• A few faculty have had access to training in Culturally Responsive Teaching, and Deep Learning.
• Despite commitments to equity, OSA continues to reproduce many inequitable outcomes: limited staff diversity; disparities in student outcomes (by gender, race, sexual orientation, income level, disability type, etc.); and inconsistent family engagement in need of strengthening.
• AVC and OSA are seeking leaders to support continued transformation and redesign for teaching and learning.

The Instructional Coach serves as a leader and as a learner: a team member who is flexible, resourceful, thrives in a fast-paced, non-traditional, collaborative environment, and who understands educational and human service institutions. This person demonstrates a learning and collaborative mindset and the ability to receive feedback, self-reflect, and adapt, as well as an ability to effectively facilitate the learning of others by pushing their thinking, building their skills, and sparking their self-reflection and curiosity.

This role includes direct and indirect support of students, staff, and caregivers.

The primary role of the Instructional Coach is to support an increase in educational outcomes for historically underrepresented students; (including students with social emotional disabilities and complex learning profiles). The coach must have a lens that is able to encompass special education support in their coaching cycles, consisting of supporting teachers implementing IEPs, with a strong focus on: IEP accommodations, scaffolding of lesson plans, responsive classroom behavior models, co-teaching models and rigor within executive functioning skill teaching.

The Instructional Coach would support teachers in creating culturally responsive curriculum,…