Healthy and Ready to Learn
The Healthy and Ready to Learn (HRL) Initiative was developed by the Children’s Health Fund to address health issues that impact student learning and attendance. Started in 2014 as a school-based services program, it rapidly grew to include technical assistance, parent and professional development trainings, an online resource center, and advocacy efforts.
I was responsible for developing the initiative’s training program into a full suite of in-person workshops and building out new virtual learning resources such as webinars, self-paced online courses, website content and learning materials.
I met with school and city agency stakeholders to understand their pain points, conducted brainstorming sessions with our team to understand our learning objectives, and then built trainings that bridged the on-the-ground pain points with our team’s desired learning objectives and theory of change.
Skills employed
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Worked with stakeholders to identify training needs, and engaged in iterative content updates to meet those stakeholder needs.
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Work included both training facilitation and content delivery, as well as facilitation of strategic planning discussions and brainstorming sessions with stakeholder groups and product development team.
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Engage with subject matter experts both internally and externally to drive development of new training content.
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Worked with our evaluation team to develop focus group protocol and collect feedback on our online resource center from one of our target audiences - parents.
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Worked with evaluation team to inform surveys for training participants to measure impact of trainings on participants’ self-efficacy, knowledge, and satisfaction. Survey results were used in program evaluation.
Creative. Interactive. Engaging.
In all of my trainings I incorporated elements of play and interaction as much as possible, and to create artifacts for training participants to leave with as reminders of the experience as well as the content.
These stick figures are from our Single Story workshop, developed to help school professionals practice developing empathy as a skill rather than consider it as a personality trait. How much of yourself can you express on a stick figure? What do you show to others and what do you hide?
Citywide reach
By partnering with city agencies like offices within the Department of Education, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and Office of School Health I secured training engagements at district- and borough-wide professional development events. I have trained over 3,000 school professionals across New York City.
Custom workshop design
An example of custom workshop design: within New York City public schools various staff members are responsible for improving student attendance, however the central database to access these records is clunky and training for how best to use the available technology is limited.
In collaboration with Department of Education partners, we organized a working session with representatives from 4 technical assistance partner schools to outline what knowledge and skill gaps existed, what assets were present across their schools, and then shared best practices and existing data tools.
The output of this was a pilot training protocol to be tested with 5 school attendance teams on how to effectively pull, organize, and plan interventions around chronic absence data.