About Jenn
I have been a special educator and administrator in New Mexico for 20 years. Compliance and high quality education programs are very important to me and I understand the gap that exists in support systems, especially in small districts and charter schools. My passion is providing not only professional development, but working individually with schools, administration, and teachers to develop their programs and practices to be compliant and highly effective.
Image taken at EPCOT. Our favorite place to spend Christmas is at Walt Disney World where we can be inspired and dare to dream about the impossible.
Our Core Values
-
We are a team of educational experts whose focus is to be honest and transparent with clients, by providing equity for all students, while maintaining authentic and legally compliant expectations of the highest standard.
We understand and value the great honor that schools bestow on us by allowing us to work with them and their students. We return that focus productively on each student, their needs, and by respecting the needs of the school and what we are trying to help them with.
-
JMP Academy is a team of people chosen for their out of the box thinking and creative solutions to ensuring and enhancing the needs of the student and the school.
By allowing curiosity to drive our interactions with students and staff, we are better able to:
-Understand and accept where the student is and how they got there
-Understand and accept where the school is, why they have the resources they have and don’t have, and why their staff interact with their students the way they do
-Understanding and accepting these things best allows us to think of as many solutions as possible that both meet the students where they are and also meet the organizations and staff where they are. This facilitates creativity in addressing the needs of each person, allowing us to think of solutions and paths forward that truly address the resources available and the needs at hand.
This creativity feeds more creativity. The more we allow ourselves to think of different and new ways to meet needs, the better we get at thinking of adaptable, effective solutions.
Curiosity, acceptance, and creativity lead to greater collaboration amongst all interested parties, seeking the best solutions, even if those solutions don’t look like how we thought they should.
These solutions must take into account inherent needs and requirements of all stakeholders while being conducive to positive, systematic growth of key individuals in the school community. While sometimes these needs appear to be incompatible, we use our creativity and curiosity to develop solutions that actually DO meet both legal compliance and school community needs.
-
JMP Academy develops and uses systemic, comprehensive, and sustainable approaches for educational change that results in holistic transformational solutions that lead to student success, support for school personnel and families, with legal compliance as a baseline standard.
Using Research to Design Effective Professional Development
Effective professional development for teachers has extensive roots in professional literature, despite seriously lacking in the real world. Following Jenn’s dissertation study, we developed our own model of professional development (PD) that combines the components that we know are effective and personalizes it for an individual school.
One of the major findings in professional development over the last 30 years is that workshops alone are not effective in changing student outcomes. That is why our options include personalization, opportunities for practice, and in-person follow up. We believe that we have great educators working in our schools without knowledge of the tools that will give them the results they seek for students. Our objective is to hand teachers the toolbox and provide clear instructions—then provide specific, meaningful feedback in a practical context. We also follow up because new habits can be tricky to grow. By providing these resources to teachers, we know we can improve schools and outcomes for our children.