With close to 20 years experience leading Gateway High School and Gateway Middle School, we are committed to serving our own students well while also supporting the success of public school students and teachers beyond our walls. In an effort to share Gateway’s best practices, Gateway leaders Sharon Olken, Executive Director, Chris Hero, Chief Operations Officer, and Suzanne Herko, Middle School Teacher and Student Agency Coordinator, recently presented at the 26th Annual California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) conference in Sacramento.
Sharon Olken and Chris Hero hosted a session called Re-Engineering Teacher Compensation to Save Our Schools, to share Gateway’s new and innovative teacher compensation model. The new Career Stages Model is an initiative that reflects Gateway’s commitment to pay educators a liveable wage, to support excellent teaching and to ensure the retention and recruitment of expert teachers. Gateway hopes to be a catalyst for other schools in thinking about how schools show the incredible value educators have in our society, and how we support the trajectory of their career growth and compensation.
Suzanne Herko’s poster presentation titled Fostering Student Agency & Family Engagement with Student-Led Conferences to share how Gateway helps students grow as learners through a set on non-cognitive skills and school-wide student-led conferences. She shared student agency resources and tools from Gateway Impact, Gateway’s free online professional development platform.
In April, Gateway will expand the conversation around how student agency is implemented in our classrooms and schoolwide at this year’s National Partnership for Educational Access (NPEA) conference in Chicago.
Suzanne Herko and Sharon Olken’s workshop - Building Students’ Agency and Noncognitive Skills: A Framework for Classroom and School Implementation - will explain how Gateway achieves equitable outcomes for students by focusing on students growing their agency as learners. Teachers and school administrators attending the workshop will build on their current practices with strategies and tools to integrate into their lesson plans and classrooms, and frameworks that can be implemented on a school level to support all educators.
Gateway’s model of change is to contribute to the success of other schools and educational organizations by serving as a model provider and by creating venues and opportunities for collaboration, conversation, and celebration. Presenting at conferences such as CCSA and NPEA is just one way that Gateway is sharing best practices and having an impact on the educational community around the country.