Small School Collaboration and Vertical Alignment

The Problem

In a school with only one or two sections per grade, there's no natural mechanism for catching whether skills are being taught, reinforced, or quietly skipped from one grade to the next. Vocabulary drifts between grades. Gaps and redundancies go unnoticed for years, because there's no department chair, no instructional coach, and no grade-level team with the bandwidth to catch them. The collaboration structures bigger schools take for granted simply don't exist here, and building them on top of a full teaching load can be a gargantuan task.

Present Education fills that gap — not with a one-day workshop, but with a partnership built to last as long as it takes to make vertical alignment a durable habit, not a binder that gets shelved by October.

Two Ways to Start

Option A: Try Us Out — Standalone Kickoff Days

Not ready to commit to a full year? Start with either (or both) of our foundational single-day sessions:

• Building a Vertical Curriculum Map — a full-staff day building the first draft of a vertical alignment map that matches your school’s grade bands

• Vertical Collaboration Routines — a full-staff day establishing a repeatable, low-lift routine for teachers to connect with the grade above and below

These stand entirely on their own — a school can take either as a single PD day and stop there. They're also a low-commitment way to see how we work together before deciding on a longer partnership.

Option B: Jump Into the Full, Year-Long Partnership

For schools ready to build — and sustain — real vertical alignment, we can hit the ground running with our partnership. This includes our foundational single-day sessions as part of Phases 1 and 2 of our system.

Year One: Building the Foundation

Phase 1 — Discovery & Mapping Full-staff kickoff day. We facilitate the hard part small schools can't do alone: getting every grade's teacher in the same room, comparing what's actually taught, and spotting the gaps and redundancies. Staff leave with the first working draft of a vertical curriculum map tailored to your school specifically. This map will be revisited and updated throughout the process.

Phase 2 — Building the Collaboration Routine A second full-staff day establishing a real, repeatable routine for grade-above/grade-below check-ins — what to share, how often, using what template. We co-facilitate the first round live, so the routine is modeled, not just described.

Phase 3 — Embedded Coaching Ongoing check-ins (see cadence options below) through the rest of the year. This is where we catch what a single PD day can't: a routine that's quietly slipping by January, a map that needs revising once real gaps surface mid-year, or a grade transition that's still not as smooth as it should be. For schools that want more hands-on support getting the routine off the ground, we also offer a higher-touch option where we directly facilitate grade-band check-in meetings for an initial stretch of the year.

Phase 4 — Year-End Review & Reset A closing full-staff session: revisit the map, capture what worked and what didn't, and update it for next year.

Year Two: Refresh & Deepen

Once the foundation exists, year two shifts from building to maintaining and expanding:

• A single combined day refreshing both the vertical map and the collaboration routines

• The Common Language Across Grades session — building shared instructional vocabulary and strategies that stay consistent as the same students move grade to grade

• Continued check-ins on the cadence that fits your school

• Year-end review

Check-In Cadence — Built Around Your School's Bandwidth

Every partnership includes ongoing check-ins at a minimum of every other month to ensure the systems being developed are running smoothly and problems are caught before they can cause issues. From there, schools can choose the level of touch that fits:

All levels include Phases 1, 2, and 4 in Year One, and the refresh day + Common Language session + year-end review in Year Two. Pricing is structured around the check-in level you choose, plus group size and travel — we're happy to build a quote once we know which level fits.