We believe effective leader learning is comprised of equal parts discovery, discussion, and doing. Portico offers discovery through our Blueprint modules and Crowdsource, a webinar series featuring leading school changemakers. Portico also includes two discussion platforms: Copilot 1:1 coaching, and Counterpart, a networked learning community that connects school leaders in small cohorts to exchange ideas. Action, the doing, is supported through coaching and a library of off-the-shelf resources in Toolkit.

Progress starts day one, but we encourage school leaders to commit to at least a three-year process for the transformation of the student experience to take root. Our model of school improvement is built around supporting principals. We offer them a platform for learning best practices in organizational change management and help them make continual improvement second nature. Positive school change—making learning more relevant to all learners, improving students’ college and career readiness, and creating greater equity—does not happen overnight. Our clients often find the results they get through Portico compelling enough that they extend beyond year three to keep making progress.

We help schools track traditional, lagging indicators like reading/writing/math at the individual level, course completion, discipline rates, enrollment in AP or IB programs, graduation rates, and the like. But we also measure progress during the course of the school year through systemic responsibility markers. These are the elements that underlie traditional school metrics: students’ ability to self manage, relevance of classwork, adult connections, and student self-awareness, for example. These are important behavioral science metrics that lead to genuine increases in learning. When students feel a sense of belonging, they feel connected. When they feel connected, they feel engaged, and when they are engaged learning happens.

Accountability and measurement is part of our work with every partner. Schools we work with improve across demographic and socioeconomic group on student college and career readiness, suspension rates, and other metrics.

Some Portico services are available asynchronously and some are delivered live. Portico subscribers get full, on-demand access to Blueprint training modules, which are self-directed with some guided support from Inflexion. Counterpart videoconferences and Crowdsource webinars are recorded and made available to both participants and others. Shorter video recaps of these sessions are also produced and posted for viewing by any subscriber. Copilot sessions are conducted live and recorded, with recordings made available solely to the participant.

Before 2020, Inflexion’s services were delivered in person only. While Portico is modeled on that professional development program, it’s built for the distance learning era. Schools have the flexibility to make progress on school equity, student readiness, and leadership development whether educators are in the building, fully remote, or a hybrid of the two.

The Inflexion Approach online helps schools/districts with the nuts and bolts of creating multi-tiered system of supports. It’s a systematic approach to putting social-emotional and critical thinking skills on par with academic skills, so every student is seen and known. And it addresses specialized student needs through strategies aligned to universal instruction.

Portico can help all types of schools and districts deliver better for their students. Our clients include very large, diverse districts and small, rural schools. Our approach is not a good fit when:

• Leadership doesn’t see the work as a pathway to their goals.
• The board/district/another administrator is resistant to change on equity and student-centered design.
• There’s a lack of collaboration culture.

Yes. Portico can help your school or district make the case for LCAP funds. It keeps your school’s purpose and performance highly visible over time to the local community. It helps assure that what the local community wants is heard then translated into what’s delivered to students.

The program amplifies a holistic vision for student readiness as part of the IB learner profile. It integrates academic and social-emotional skill-building. It connects your program to community voice and student voice and makes sure IB benefits extend to all students.

Our approach can connect your AVID program to community voice and student voice. It assures AVID’s school-wide strategies extend to all students. And it ensures WICOR and other key elements of AVID are aligned across the curriculum, so students see the relevance of instruction throughout the school day.

Learning loss is a big concern, but it won’t be solved by adding “event”-oriented solutions like summer school or tutoring. If those approaches worked, they would have been broadly adopted to remedy chronic, non-pandemic learning gaps. Portico helps schools tend to issues like belonging, connection, and instructional relevancy. When classrooms are connected by more than hallways, schools share a common language for student success and school identity, and students manage their own learning, instruction hits home and learning can happen faster.

Portico couples leader learning with organizational capacity building. When a school community shares a vision of student readiness and school identity, a school system can more easily keep momentum even during changes in leadership. There are many leaders aligned on what the school stands for. Incoming principals and teachers can get up to speed in a hurry, and catch up with where a school is.