Strategic Consulting
Professional support for individuals and
organizations:
· Assessing
professional potential of employees;
· Eliciting,
structuring and classifying technical, procedural and organizational knowledge;
· Designing
strategies and procedures for achieving complex or inexplicitly defined goals;
· Assessing
textual logical consistency (e.g. what parts of a report contradict each
other).
Two
decades of successful consulting.
For
setting up a meeting, please contact
Dr.
Valentin Voroshilov
Education
institutions and agencies, please visit Education Advancement Professionals for more
information.
When a professional
practice needs a change/modification/optimization it requires the designing of
a specific project.
There are only five types of
projects:
1. An idea that represents an
expansion of already well-known practice. Scaling up an activity that is
already present (for example the GroundTruth project: there are places in America
without local news – let’s install there a reporter).
2. A modification of an existing
practice. For example, instead of lecturing switching to a “flipped classroom”
model.
3. Transferring existing
practice from one technological platform to another. For example, modification
of teaching using the Internet (transition from no technology to the use of
technology), a combination of WWW and teaching; MOOCs (only the first MOOC was
an exception and fell into the 5th category). Another example is transitioning
from using coding algorithms to so-called AI.
4. Some combination of 1, 2
and 3.
5. A brand new original idea.
It has no roots, no history, it does not grow from any previous project, it is
basically based on an insight. Hence, there are no experts who could really
assess the idea. Ninety-nine of a hundred experts would say “this is just crazy”, and one actual expert would
say “I cannot say it will work; but I cannot say it will not”. The decision to
support or not is based on a gut feeling, risk-taking ability, and a personal
attitude toward the applicant(s). A project is often based on an idea of
combining two already existing practices in a new non-existing yet. An example
is x.com – an online bank
co-funded by Elon Musk, i.e. the combination of banking and WWW.
______________________
One
of the most revealing signs of the intelligent development of a person is the
language one uses for describing his/her activities, plans, and achievements.
That is why a professional analysis of the texts written by employees can be
very helpful for a manager to identify the most creative and knowledgeable
personal. Text analysis shows how clear one can layout his/her thoughts, how
often the writer makes false statement, statements that make no sense or
contradict each other.
When
the analytical phase is over, a manager can require the second phase of the professional
potential analysis. That phase includes face-to-face and/or group
interviews/discussion based on the previously done text-analysis and allows to
gauge various personal qualities and professional abilities.
“All that glisters is
not gold”. Our intelligence tells us that the opposite is also true: not all
dull things are meager. Appearances can be deceiving.
Intelligence is an ability to
design a solution to a problem which has never been
solved before and represent that solution in a textual or
symbolic form.
Professional
designing is an intellectual procedure that employs scientific and heuristic
patterns of human practice of discovery,
and applies those patterns to developing solutions required for achieving
individual and organizational goals.
An
excerpt from my generic
Cover Letter on my professional roots:
I started my teaching career as a tutor. Tutoring may
be very helpful for gaining a deep understanding of numerous reasons for
different students to have various difficulties with getting a good
understating of math and physics.
Some tutors would help a student to do the homework,
and then a student would come back with a new homework, and then again, and
again. For me it felt like cheating. I wanted to teach my students how to do
their homework on their own. My goal was to help a student reach that level of
understanding so he or she would not need me anymore. It may have looked
counterproductive – money-wise. But in reality, it worked for me very well,
because parents of my students told about me to other parents, and I had plenty
of clients.
Tutoring helped me to initiate the development of my
teaching toolbox tailored to students with different background. People usually
are eager to talk about gifted students, and how to help talented students to
realize their potential. Struggling students do not often attract the same
attention as gifted ones. Tutoring is like having a clinical practice. All good
students are good due to mostly the same reason (a good background), but when a
student struggles there might be numerous possible causes for that.
Teaching and tutoring physics, algebra, geometry,
trigonometry, problem solving, logic helped me acquire an integrative view on
various difficulties students may have and effective approaches to guide
students through those difficulties. My Doctoral work was focused on the
approach for igniting and supporting teacher’s sustainable desire to grow
professionally, and on methods for helping educators to design the most
effective path for their continuous
sustainable professional development (teaching teachers about teaching
requires deep and wide understanding of learning, teaching, and of the teaching
subject).
In Russia I was a member of “Moscow – Perm Socratic
group” – a collaboration of educators dedicated to promoting the Socratic
Method of teaching.
I have a long and successful experience in teaching
various mathematics and physics courses, courses for pre-service and in-service
teachers and school administrators. I have been teaching Mathematics and
Physics to almost all possible categories of students (i.e. to middle- and
high- school students, 2-year and 4-year college students, university students,
to students with learning difficulties, and to school teachers). I also have
been teaching various curses for in-service teachers (in parallel with teaching
math and physics).
For a number of years, I had been working at a
regional institution for teacher professional development, providing various
courses and training to teachers and school administrators.
Individually and as a member of a team I was
consulting and auditing individual teachers, schools, and school districts
regarding educational policies, teaching technologies, learning outcomes, and
quality of education in general. Alone and with my colleagues, I was traveling
to towns and villages of the Perm Region to meet with teachers and
administrators and helping them with adjusting teaching and administrative
strategies and techniques in order to achieve better learning outcomes of their
students; including preparing strategic plans for systemic development of a
school, a district and a regional education system.
My administrative experience involves running a
department of computerization at Perm Institute for Continues Teacher
Education, working as an assistant to the Director of the Institute and as an
administrative assistant to the President of the Board of the Institute, and
later running the Center for Development of the School System of City of Perm, which
was an analytical branch of the City Department of Education (my last position
before moving to the U.S.).
I was hired by the Perm State (a.k.a. Region, a.k.a.
Oblast') department of Education as a consultant to help draft the “Program of
the Development of the State Educational System for the five-year period”. This
was one of the highest levels of the recognition of me as a professional
educator and a consultant.