Collaborating consultants, LeeAnne Lavender and Aaron Moniz, occasionally team up to offer synergistic support to clients moving forward with service learning initiatives. ACS Abu Dhabi, with a community learning model at its core, is perfectly positioned to make the most of these opportunities for strategic improvements in curriculum development.

What happens when a school invests in professional development partners whose philosophies align with its own values? At the American Community School of Abu Dhabi (ACS), grade 5 educator Amy Mulvihill has experienced firsthand how the right collaborations can transform not just individual units of inquiry, but one’s overall approach to teaching and learning.

Amy has worked with two consultants whose expertise is distinct yet deeply complementary: Aaron Moniz, whose work with Inspire Citizens centers on community engagement and service learning frameworks, and LeeAnne Lavender, a community engagement and storytelling specialist who helps educators design engaging learning experiences. Together, their approaches create what Amy describes as gears that mesh together, producing outcomes that extend far beyond the workshops themselves.

Making the Most of Dedicated Time in a Community Learning Context

ACS Abu Dhabi's elementary school operates on a community learning model, where students learn from multiple educators and collaborative planning is embedded into the academic schedule. In grade 5, Amy works alongside colleagues to serve approximately 100 students across five sections, with dedicated planning time that makes cross-curricular collaboration possible.

"This has been the pathway," Amy explains of the school's commitment to student agency, mixed groupings, and teacher collaboration. "Once you see how everything is built upon this shared understanding of what the week looks like, what the unit looks like, what the day-to-day looks like, then you can see why this collaborative planning is so important."

It was within this context that Amy and her colleagues began working with LeeAnne and Aaron to reimagine their units of inquiry, including "Living and Thriving" (focused on sustainable communities) and an upcoming Sustainable Enterprise unit called “Money Isn’t Everything.”

Aggregating Complementary Expertise, Shared Philosophy

While Aaron and LeeAnne work independently, their overlapping presence at ACS created a powerful synergy. Aaron brings concrete frameworks: the sustainability compass, the Changemaker Action Plan, and the Empathy to Impact model, which helps students identify what they care about and how they can make a difference. LeeAnne brings storytelling as a design lens, encouraging educators to ask “what is the story of this learning experience” and “what narrative techniques can I use in this unit to drive engagement, deep learning, and meaningful human connections?”

"We would not have been able to reimagine these units as we have, even with community learning, without these really inspirational voices and their presence," Amy reflects.

The two consultants share an approach that mirrors excellent classroom teaching. "They have this unbelievable ability to connect very deeply in a short period of time," Amy observes. "You leave a session with LeeAnne and Aaron, and you feel like they heard you. They know you as a person. And they genuinely want you to succeed."

During planning sessions, each consultant's strengths become visible. "LeeAnne is annotating and drawing up different ways of seeing it on the big whiteboard table," Amy describes. "Aaron is kind of moving around the room and helping people type things into a common document with a rubric open alongside. It doesn't really feel like work."

Multiplying the Value Through Transfer

Perhaps the most significant outcome of these partnerships is the lasting, transferable nature of what educators take away. Amy emphasizes that both Aaron and LeeAnne design resources that are intentionally flexible.

The grade 5 team at ACS Abu Dhabi engaged in a "Head, Heart, Hands" unit redesign process with LeeAnne where team ideated together using discussion prompts and a round whiteboard table. What emerged was a powerful new vision for an upcoming unit with action options for students, experiential learning throughout the unit, and meaningful reflection embedded at key stages of learning. Team leader Amy Mulvihill is on the right side of this photo, and LeeAnne is on the left, beside the ACS-Abu Dhabi Service Learning Coordinator Mel Pubil.

"It's like a ball of Play-Doh," she explains. "You give it to this person, they make this; you give it to this person, they make something else. A lot of the resources that both Aaron and LeeAnne share are really open-ended. You feel like you can make their resources your own."

The sustainability compass, introduced two years ago, now frames learning across multiple units. Tools explored for one unit find new applications in others. "We might have met to plan our third unit [after Aaron’s and LeeAnne’s visit], but then we realized the tools and the resources we used with them can be transferred to other units,” Amy notes.

This quality of transfer represents deep learning in action, and it is precisely what makes the investment in quality professional development worthwhile.

Keeping Humanity at the Center

For Amy, the work with Aaron and LeeAnne connects to something larger: keeping humanity at the center of education in an era of competing pressures.

"What we're trying to do as humans in this interesting age is to continue finding connections," she reflects. "It really is about asking ‘how do we connect with each other as educators, how do we build that culture of trust, and then how do we model it with kids?’”

Both consultants embody a "culture of storytelling" that Amy sees as essential.

"This is the way humans have always connected. It's easy to lose it right now. And when you have consultants where it always comes back to humanity, connections, doing action, what do you care about, empathizing with others, it just makes it easy," she reflects.

A Model for Meaningful Partnership

The ACS experience offers practical insights for schools seeking impactful professional development:

1. Look for alignment. Amy recalls principal Heather Collins championing Aaron's work after a NESA conference years ago, recognizing a philosophical fit with the school's direction.

2. Consider how different areas of expertise might complement each other. Storytelling and service learning, in this case, proved to be naturally synergistic pathways to elevated outcomes.

3. Prioritize resources designed for adaptation rather than prescription. The most valuable tools are those which educators can deploy across multiple contexts.

4. Recognize that the best consultants teach adults the way great teachers teach students: meeting them where they are, offering the next step, and building genuine relationships along the way.

"There's this magnetic energy between people who want to make the world a better place," Amy reflects. "That sense of optimism, that both LeeAnne and Aaron bring, is what I gravitate to."

For schools willing to invest in the right partnerships, the returns can be transformative, not just for a single workshop or unit, but for years of teaching and learning to come.

When the Right PL Partners Spark Lasting Change