Shanna Parry
Co-Founder and Senior Managing Partner, Global Services in Education
Shanna co-founded GSE and has led much of its work from the start. She ran schools before she advised on them, and her focus is the part of the job that lasts longest: coaching and mentoring the leaders of existing schools, developing curriculum, and turning underperforming schools around.
She spent more than a decade in school leadership in the United States. As a principal in Nevada she took a school rated as needing improvement under federal measures to strong academic gains, the kind of turnaround GSE is now brought in to deliver. She worked at district level too, recruiting and training school administrators and helping build the leadership development programme for one of the largest school districts in the country, and later served as a director and dean of academics in higher education. Across those roles she led teams ranging from small departments to bodies of close to 200 staff.
Since 2011 she has led much of GSE’s project work, across its footprint of schools in the GCC, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Her side of the work sits closest to what happens inside a school once it opens: curriculum built for the setting rather than lifted off a shelf, the coaching and mentoring of heads and senior staff, and the improvement of schools that are not yet where they need to be. She led GSE’s curriculum initiatives, among them an independently developed Confucius Six Arts curriculum, an IT curriculum written for a GCC school, and a bespoke mindfulness model built for a school whose vision called for one.
Her preference for staying close to the work is literal. Rather than directing from a distance, she embeds in GSE schools during their most demanding phases, and she currently serves as Director of Teaching and Learning at a national school in Bahrain, building the academic systems of an inclusive K-12 American curriculum school ahead of its opening: curriculum, assessment, teacher observation and development, and the policies that hold it all together.
She is also a scholar of the field she works in. Shanna is pursuing a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction at Texas Tech University, with a concentration in Language Diversity and Literacy Studies. Her research examines how women are marginalised and erased from modern US history textbooks and how that shapes gender norms in the classroom, an interest that took root during her principal years, where she watched capable girls doubt themselves in maths and science and responded by building programming designed specifically for them.
Her counsel is not reserved for GSE’s own schools. Leading education institutions have sought her guidance on curriculum and language development, on how they develop their leaders, and on turning around schools that are not yet performing. That work has been recognised internationally: she was named a Top 30 Global Guru in Education in 2018 and 2019, and Business Women in Education honoured her in both 2021 and 2022.
Her background is in educational leadership: a Masters of Education in Educational Leadership from Nova Southeastern University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Elementary Education.
She co-authored A+ Interviewing for Educators and The A to Zs for Teaching Overseas, the two books GSE’s founders wrote for educators working internationally.