About Donyall Dickey

Donyall Dickey, founder and Chief Academic Officer of Educational Epiphany, LLC is recognized as an authority on curriculum, instruction, organizational development, and administration of schools. Donyall Dickey's career is characterized by the promotion of unparalleled levels of student achievement and school improvement. His ideas for closing the achievement gap and accelerating learning are used in schools across the nation, making the goals of academic achievement attainable for tens of thousands of children.

As a practitioner of site-based school leadership, Donyall Dickey has led several failing schools from lackluster standing to high-performing exemplars for the region and the nation. In his work as a consultant /trainer of site-based and central office school leaders, Donyall Dickey’s work consistently results in double-digit gains in reading and mathematics for all student groups, regardless of race/ethnicity, special needs, English proficiency and scoio-economic status.

Our Mission

With an emphasis on building teacher capacity and instructional leadership, Educational Epiphany aggressively mitigates the disparity of performance between and among student groups in urban, rural, and suburban schools (K-12), regardless of race/ ethnicity, socio-economic status, disability, or special needs. Educational Epiphany's unique purpose is to make the process of student achievement and school improvement actionable, measurable, and replicable.

Our Vision

The primary goal of Educational Epiphany is to establish an Exceptional Culture of Instruction (ECI) in public and charter schools across the nation through seven guiding tenants:

Expert Knowledge of the Curriculum
Students achieve at high levels and schools demonstrate accelerated and sustained improvement when teachers and school leaders possess expert-level knowledge of the curriculum. Without such knowledge, schools/districts become susceptible to a reliance on programs and textbooks to do the intuitive work that all good teachers do by instinct.

Dynamic Instructional Leadership
Schools of the 21st century require principals, assistant principals, and department chairs that are connoisseurs of instruction. The high performing schools/districts of the future will be led by a collaborative, yet critical team of administrators and teacher leaders who co-plan and to-teach, and co-evaluate the impact of their work.

Common Language and Instructional Tools
The most significant predictors of underperformance are not race, class, English proficiency or disability, rather it is the absence of common instructional language and tools to make the use of common language actionable among teachers in a given cluster of schools, individual school, content area, and/or grade.

Purposeful Planning and Delivery of Daily Instruction
To promote high levels of achievement teachers must have a short term and long term map of the scope and sequence of instruction that begins with the end in mind complete with an introduction of key terms, a teacher model, guided practice, cooperative practice (formative assessments), independent practice, and a variety of summative assessments

Universal Teacher Expectations
Unfortunately, teaching can be an isolating profession. In order to ensure that all students are exposed to rigorous, student-centered, performance-based instruction in an environment that is conducive to teaching and learning, teachers and school leaders must have an opportunity to dialogue and make decisions that relate to ways of knowing and doing.

Systematic Assessment of Student Progress
Schools are data rich; that is, teachers and school leaders have access to multiple data points regarding student performance. High performing schools not only have access to data, but they use data to improve the quality and delivery of instruction for groups of students and individual struggling to demonstrate proficiency as well as for those who have the ability to perform well-beyond the standard. Schools that demonstrate record-breaking levels of performance, take the use of data a step further by involving students in progress monitoring of their own ability and performance.