Explore practical tools, frameworks, guides, and research developed through Elk Willow Consulting’s work with schools, organizations, and communities. These resources are designed to support meaningful inquiry, strengthen collaboration, and help turn ideas into purposeful action.
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Youth-Led Community-Based Research Resources
Curriculum Framework
A flexible curriculum framework that guides young people through listening, investigating, designing, acting, and learning with their community. It provides a nine-module journey from community curiosity to evidence-informed action.
Assessment Toolkit
A complete assessment companion featuring 18 reproducible tools and six adaptable rubrics for gathering evidence, providing feedback, holding learning conferences, building portfolios, and assessing authentic project learning.
Community Partner Guide
A practical guide for community partners who are listening, mentoring, advising, and working alongside young people. It offers guidance for contributing knowledge, connections, questions, and support while protecting youth leadership.
Mini-Lesson & Provocation Decks
A collection of 45 just-in-time teaching cards, including 18 mini-lessons and 27 provocations. The cards help educators introduce important concepts, spark discussion, and support inquiry, action, evidence, and reflection.
Project Toolkit
A collection of 36 adaptable canvases, organizers, protocols, logs, and reporting structures that support the complete youth-led research process, from mapping and listening to acting, evaluating, and sharing.
Project Toolkit: Grades 5–9
A student-friendly edition of the Project Toolkit featuring 36 pages for asking questions, planning, listening, interpreting evidence, taking action, checking progress, and reflecting on learning.
Student Researcher Handbook
A field guide that helps young researchers listen deeply, think carefully, act responsibly, and learn openly. It includes practical research moves, checkpoints, and quick guides for working with community.
Student Researcher Handbook: Grades 5–9
A clear, age-appropriate guide that helps students in Grades 5–9 listen, ask questions, take action, and learn with community. It provides accessible steps, checkpoints, and quick guides for the research journey.
Teacher Handbook
A practical companion for educators planning, facilitating, assessing, and sustaining youth-led inquiry with community. It includes guidance on ethical practice, assessment, documentation, pacing, and facilitation throughout the nine-module journey.
Research and Reporting Scaffolding
A research companion designed to help school leaders build an ethical and evidence-informed approach to improvement, formal research, and shared learning. It distinguishes routine school-improvement evidence from formal research while connecting both through one coherent learning system.
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Publications
Scenario Planning in Educational Leadership
Cultivating Future-Ready Mindsets, Shared Language, and Symbolic Anchors for Innovation in Complex Systems
This integrative literature review examines how scenario planning can help educational leaders develop future-ready mindsets, shared language, adaptive capacity, and new ways of navigating complex change.
The Leadership of Innovation in Education
Findings from an Environmental Scan
This global environmental scan explores how innovation in education is defined, supported, and constrained through educational leadership. It highlights the conditions that enable innovation, the tensions between system-level direction and local responsiveness, and the need for relational and adaptive leadership approaches.
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Resources to Support Leaders
Practical tools, reflection activities, and leadership resources designed to support school leaders as they navigate complex decisions, strengthen professional learning, foster innovation, and create conditions for meaningful improvement.
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Resources to support leaders
Executive Leadership Coaching Model
A framework for job-embedded executive coaching focused on reflective leadership, staff learning, and school improvement.
Identifying Core Values
A reflection activity that helps leaders identify the values that guide their decisions, priorities, and leadership practice.
Leadership Reframing Tool
A practical tool for reframing school challenges as design challenges and shifting from implementation to thoughtful innovation.
Leadership Scenarios to Support Innovation
Scenario-based prompts exploring assessment, student engagement, and artificial intelligence through an innovation lens.
Stop Managing Change. Start Designing Innovation.
A leadership workbook for reframing challenges, testing ideas, gathering evidence, and planning next steps.
Aspirational Struggle
Personalized learning, AI tools, and unresolved tension.
Fragmented Futures
Stability, local control, and the risk of fragmentation.
The Adaptive Weave
Schools as community-embedded learning hubs.
The Snapback
A return to pre-crisis norms and lost momentum.
Office Referral Decision Matrix
A practical decision-making tool that helps distinguish classroom-managed concerns from issues requiring office support.