“Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.”
–Mark Twain
If you want something different, you have to do something different.
Efforts to forge new paths don’t necessarily falter due to poor leadership or decision making.
More often, change requires replacing a fixed mindset, disrupting the status quo, and thinking outside traditional solutions.
Too frequently, we are advised to pursue solutions that:
- Follow the latest trends and movements
- Aren’t aligned with the particular needs of our people and circumstances
- Focus on compliance rather than competence
- Are unsustainable because they don’t get to the heart of school culture
- Are difficult to measure and harder to communicate to our stakeholders
Effective educators learn from their experiences, good or bad.
If fixing these issues were easy, everyone would have already done it.
Like a strong and enduring relationship, developing a healthy education system takes regular and focused effort. Maybe it’s from years of teaching science, but I see working and living almost as experiments. Learning is about prodding, testing, dissecting, mindfully observing and experiencing the world and our work through different lenses. New discoveries are fed by keeping an open mind and thinking outside the box.
I strive to build environments where people of like and unlike minds feel willing and able to create and solve problems together.
Services for Success
Program Development
The key goals of developing new programs and evolving existing ones are to empower students, strengthen teaching, and build community. Programs may be sustaining or “single use.” They can be events, classes, courses, pathways, curriculum units, or extra- and co-curricular activities.
This process includes mission and goal alignment; evaluating needs and resources; developing a plan with timelines, parameters, responsibilities, and communications; establishing measures of success.
Professional Learning
Professional development (PD) and training should be specifically aligned to staff needs and mirror the kinds of learning practices we know work with our students. My offerings are designed with a view of educators as skilled and knowledgeable professionals. They are personalized, capacity-building, measurably productive, and fun.
Leadership and Operations Consulting
Successful school districts have more than working programs and well trained staff. They are organizations that function effectively, ethically, collaboratively, and transparently. I help leaders maximize efficiency and organization, strategically plan, improve organizational identity (“branding”), access grants and sponsorships, develop partnerships, and improve community involvement.
“Dr. Natanagara’s comprehension of technology environments makes him the rare administrator who understands when and even more importantly when not to use technology to solve an issue.”
Jay Attiya, Director of Information Technology, Toms River Regional Schools
What I Can Do with Your Organization
Examples of recent projects
- A grant writing process that brought in over $3 million in five years from dozens of benefactors
- Twice-a-year professional learning days providing more than 200 choices for over 2000 staff members scheduled through a custom mobile app
- Summer camps and programs for learning through STEAM, coding, art, and maker activities
- Eight summer leadership retreats for Board of Education members and over 75 administrators
- Nine career academies in one year that included dual college credits, internships, industry recognized credentials, and partnership commitments
- CTE pathways and programs of study that earned $100k in Perkins funding in their first year
- The Jersey Shore Makerfest, bringing together thousands of educators and community members for five years as the largest free/non-profit STEAM event on the east coast
- Innovative learning environments, including over two dozen makerspaces
- Media campaigns for initiatives, special projects, and funding, like a $147 million referendum, that included identity and mission branding with logos, slogans, tee shirts, flyers, press releases, web pages, speeches, and social media
- Technology initiatives that supported authentic learning and expanded access for all students, even before COVID funding.
- Processes for promoting, expanding, and streamlining kindergarten registration
- A model soup-to-nuts pandemic emergency operations plan
- The “Roadmap for Remote Digital Learning,” a guidebook commissioned by Sustainable Jersey and incorporated into the NJ Department of Education’s recommendations to help schools function seamlessly during pandemic school closings
- aiVermont, a multi-year nonprofit initiative to help Green State educators use and help their students manage their use of artificial intelligence
“Marc is a master of communication and creativity. He has always been generous with his knowledge and skills, whether working with K-12 students, graduate candidates, or seasoned educators.”
Harvey Allen, former Dean of Education, Monmouth University
Like you, I’ve worked with guest speakers, corporate trainers, and prepackaged solutions that didn’t take root.
I’ve seen us all spend millions on technologies, programs, and platforms that weren’t the best fit and didn’t stick.
I’ve listened to the advice of what I saw as trusted sources, some of my closest peers, and found they didn’t apply to my particular students, situations, or communities.