Service 2 of 3
Breakout Training Sessions
Strategic planning, Professional Learning Community development, and school board & cabinet governance training for leadership teams and guiding coalitions. Built to produce lasting change, not just a deliverable.
About this service
Strategy built with your team is strategy your team will actually carry.
The most common failure mode in organizational improvement work is not a bad plan — it is a plan that nobody owns. Rise Up’s approach to training and consulting is built on a different premise: the people closest to the work know things no outside consultant does, and the best strategic plans are built by bringing that knowledge into conversation with research, best practice, and an experienced external perspective. Diana works alongside your team to develop plans and build skills that your organization will sustain long after the engagement ends, because they were built with your people, in your context, for your students.
Education-Based Strategic Planning
$--- / hour / hour · Teams & guiding coalitions
A strategic plan that sits in a three-ring binder until the next accreditation cycle is not a strategic plan. It is a compliance document. Rise Up’s strategic planning work produces something different: a living document, built collaboratively by the people who will implement it, with clear goals, specific actions, designated ownership, and measurable outcomes your whole organization can actually rally behind and sustain over multiple years — not just the first semester when the energy is still high.
Strategic Plan Development
Work directly with your leadership team or guiding coalition to develop a clear, actionable strategic plan. The process includes identifying your current reality with honesty, articulating a compelling vision with specificity, writing goals that are ambitious but grounded, and designing action steps with the kind of clarity that turns strategy into daily practice. Diana facilitates the conversations that leadership teams often avoid — the ones where assumptions get named, disagreements get aired, and genuine alignment becomes possible.
Professional Learning Community Training
PLCs are one of the most well-researched school improvement structures in education. They are also one of the most commonly misimplemented. Rise Up’s PLC work builds from the foundational question — what do we want students to learn, how will we know if they learned it, and what will we do when they have not — through the team structures, protocols, and leadership habits that turn collaborative time from a scheduling obligation into a genuine engine of instructional improvement. The goal is not a PLC that works well when Diana is in the room. The goal is a PLC that works well because your team has internalized the practice.
Travel note: Non-local consulting engagements (beyond approximately one hour from Parker, CO) require coverage of flight, rental car, lodging, and meals in addition to the $200/hour consulting rate.
School Board & Cabinet Training
$--- / hour / hour
The superintendent-board relationship is one of the most consequential and most fragile partnerships in public education. When it works well, it creates the conditions for bold, sustained improvement. When it breaks down, it consumes enormous organizational energy that could have gone toward students. Rise Up’s board and cabinet training is designed to build the shared understanding, the communication habits, and the procedural clarity that makes the partnership work — before a crisis makes it necessary, and as a recovery tool when one already has.
Governance Training
Clarify roles, responsibilities, and the superintendent-board relationship at a foundational level. Build a shared understanding of what governance actually means in practice — where the board’s authority begins and ends, how the superintendent’s professional judgment is protected and respected, and how the two bodies work together to set direction without the board managing and without the superintendent hiding. Build a culture of trust, transparency, and strategic focus that ultimately serves students and community, not the people in the room.
Procedures & Policy
Establish or revisit board policies and operational procedures for alignment, legal compliance, and consistent, principled decision-making. Good policy is not bureaucratic constraint — it is the infrastructure that allows a district to operate with integrity across changes in board membership, superintendent tenure, and community pressure. Rise Up helps boards and cabinets build policy frameworks that are strong enough to protect the work and flexible enough to serve students in a rapidly changing environment.
Why this work matters
The difference between a team that executes and a team that sustains.
The research on school improvement is consistent and clear: schools that get better and stay better are characterized not by a single heroic leader but by strong teams with shared vision, clear roles, and disciplined collaborative practice. Strategic plans fail not because the goals were wrong but because the team did not own them. PLCs collapse not because the structure is flawed but because teams never developed the trust and the protocols to have the hard conversations that the structure requires. Board-superintendent relationships deteriorate not because the people are incompatible but because nobody built the shared language and the communication habits that keep the relationship functional under pressure. Rise Up’s training work addresses all of these root causes.
What distinguishes Rise Up’s approach from most organizational training is where it starts. Rather than beginning with a framework and adapting it to your context, Diana begins with your context and identifies the frameworks and structures that will actually fit. That means the process of building a strategic plan or establishing a PLC structure becomes a development experience for your team, not just a deliverable. Your people leave the engagement with new skills and new habits, not just new documents. That distinction — between a team that produced something and a team that learned something — is what determines whether the work holds when the consultant is no longer in the room.
Build a stronger team.
Let’s talk about what your leadership team actually needs right now — whether that is a strategic plan, a PLC structure that finally works, or a board-superintendent relationship that stops costing everyone energy it cannot afford to spend.