Procedures and Communications Responsive to The Needs and Concerns of Districts and Schools – ebookschoice.com

The standards and responsibilities in this section describe activities necessary to administer psychometrically and legally defensible high-stakes tests efficiently and to a high standard of quality. These activities are typically assigned to the vendor but responsibility may be shared with the agency. If the agency decides to retain responsibility for an activity, the agency may seek advice from the vendor but should clearly indicate that expectation in the RFP (Request for Proposal) and resulting contract.

 

For each activity or portion of an activity assigned to a vendor, the RFP and resulting contract should describe in detail what is expected of the vendor, any special conditions or limitations, and the compensation to be paid. If a state requests changes or delegates additional responsibilities to the vendor after the contract has been signed, the state may have to renegotiate the price.

 

Where the state has delegated such responsibility to the vendor, a plan for developing and maintaining a database of student and school testing information shall be created. The plan should provide mechanisms for tracking student movement, keeping track of retests, collecting demographic information needed for data analyses and reporting, ensuring confidentiality of individually identifiable student data, correcting student identification numbers as needed, and updating files when errors are uncovered.

 

With multiple subjects, multiple grades, and retests, it is essential that test data be organized in a format that is accessible, accurate, provides all data needed for state and federally-mandated analyses, and tracks the testing history of students, items and test forms. Because most of the data collected will involve confidential or secure information, detailed policies for protecting the confidentiality of data collected and retained must be developed.

 

The RFP and resulting contract should clearly specify vendor expectations in this area. Creation and maintenance of electronic databases is expensive and the cost may be prohibitive for some small testing programs. If the state chooses to maintain or collect its own data, the contract should clearly specify the form and content of data files the vendor is expected to provide to the agency.

 

The state has the responsibility to collect and report useful data to a variety of constituencies, including satisfying federal requirements. Where permitted by state law, a database of student and school information can be highly useful. The state is ultimately responsible for ensuring that such a database of student and school information is maintained properly; where it has elected to delegate this responsibility to the vendor, the state is responsible for monitoring the work. States choosing not to use a state level database possess other means for carrying out this function that a vendor does not, such as requiring school districts to provide the data.

 

When a state chooses not to contract with a vendor to maintain a state database, the state must assume the responsibility for collecting and maintaining assessment data in a form that will produce usable information for various constituencies and that satisfies applicable law. Appropriate procedures must be implemented to satisfy confidentiality requirements and to ensure proper use and access to all data. While a state has options other than creation of a statewide database, such options limit the usefulness of the available data.

 

The vendor proposal and resulting contract shall specify procedures for determining quantities of materials to be sent to districts (or schools), tracking test materials that have been sent, and resolving any discrepancies. A mechanism shall be developed for ensuring the accuracy of enrollment data supplied to the vendor and for updating school requests for additional or replacement materials. Instructions for handling test materials and for test administration (e.g., Administrator’s Manuals) shall be shipped to districts at least one month prior to testing to allow time for planning and staff training.

 

Valid and fair test results require adherence to all standard test administration conditions and security procedures by all test administrators. Test administrators are best prepared for this task when sufficient quantities of materials are received prior to testing and training has been provided using the actual instructions to be employed during testing. In order for districts to receive sufficient quantities of materials, accurate and timely enrollment information must be supplied to the vendor and a mechanism must be established for efficiently responding to requests for additional or replacement materials. Administrator’s manuals and instructions for handling test materials are important communications for district planning and test administrator training and should be available for study prior to the receipt of test materials. By making such procedures and communications responsive to the needs and concerns of districts and schools, greater cooperation should be achieved.

 

Timelines and procedures for receipt and return of test booklets and answer sheets shall be consistent with an agreed upon test security policy and specifications in the RFP and resulting contract. Generally, test materials should arrive in sealed containers no earlier than one week prior to testing, should remain in a secure, locked storage area while in district/schools, and should be repackaged and picked up within two days after test administration has been completed.

 

The security of test materials and the accuracy of state test data depend on the timely receipt and return of test materials by schools. The RFP and resulting contract should provide detailed descriptions of all security procedures to be followed by the vendor, including procedures for distributing, tracking, and returning test materials.

 

The state may wish to delegate the responsibility for training of school and district personnel to the vendor.

States must develop and implement a policy for ensuring that schools and districts comply with the policies enumerated in the RFP and contract. When non-compliance is an issue, the state must be able to impose sanctions or otherwise compel action on the part of the local education agency. In addition, the state is responsible for the training of school and district personnel in the security policies.

 

The state retains responsibility for training, monitoring, and investigating local education agencies’ compliance with established test security procedures. Administrative rules or statute should enumerate educators’ responsibilities, proscribed activities and sanctions for violators. The state also has a duty to monitor contractor activities and to assist in the resolution of unforeseen circumstances (e.g., school closing on test week due to a major flood or storm damage).

 

Reliability for any high-stakes exam should be at the highest levels. Where open-ended response items or essays are included in an assessment, two raters shall score each response with at least 70% agreement on initial scoring. When raters disagree on initial scoring, resolution (re-scoring) by a senior or supervisory rater is required.

 

Tests that are to be used for high stakes for either educators or students should attain high standards of reliability, as may be exemplified by an overall internal consistency rating of at least 0.85 to 0.90 on a 0-1 scale. Such overall reliability will not be attained unless hand scored items, typically essays or other open-ended items, also attain adequate levels of inter-rater reliability. Trained raters using detailed scoring rubrics who are periodically rechecked for accuracy should be able to score responses with a high degree of agreement. When two raters disagree and the test is being used for high-stakes decisions about individual students, fairness dictates that an experienced third rater resolve the discrepancy. (In cases of items with a large number of score points, “agreement” may consist of adjacent scores.) Alternative procedures for computerized scoring of open response items can include one trained rater serving as the second rater, with similar procedures for resolving discrepancies. For assessments that do not include high-stakes for students, a single rater may be sufficient as long as proper procedures are in place for checking samples for rater drift.

 

Quality control procedures for checking the accuracy of all item information, student scores and identification, and summary data produced by the testing program shall be developed and implemented. The standard for the error rate of data reports provided by a vendor to an agency for review is zero.

 

The vendor has a duty to formulate and implement quality control procedures for data generation that have as their goal the production of error-free reports and summary data. All data operations should be subject to multiple checks for accuracy before being released to the state. The vendor should document its quality control procedures for state review and create detail logs that trace the application of those procedures to the state data reports.

 

Data reports released by state agencies must also be error free. The state must develop its own quality assurance policy to monitor the work of the vendor. Data reports should be examined before general release. Effective techniques prior to release include: running score and summary reports on “dummy” data to ensure that the output is correct; close examination of a sample of the reports; sending preliminary data to select schools or districts for review; or having the state TAC (Technical Advisory Committee) or an outside consultant examine a sample of the reports.

 

When erroneous data is released publicly, the testing program loses credibility and incorrect decisions may be made. It is imperative that all reasonable procedures be used to check the accuracy of all testing program data before report distribution or public release. The vendor has primary responsibility to find and correct errors, with agency staff acting as a final check. The expectation of zero errors is contingent upon the state providing all necessary information. Nontrivial vendor errors may trigger financial penalties in states that include such provisions in their contracts.

 

When an item error, scoring error, or reporting error is discovered, the vendor shall notify state staff immediately. Vendor staff should then work closely with agency staff, and technical advisory committee members or outside consultants where appropriate, to develop a comprehensive plan for correcting the error. The plan should include the provision of timely and truthful information to the affected stakeholders.

 

The way in which an error becomes public and the actions taken to correct it can have a major impact on public perceptions. Straightforward communication of information as it becomes available and immediate corrective action can help restore public confidence in the vendor and the state testing program. Error does not include reasonable differences of opinion.

 

Testing report forms shall be received by the district or other responsible entity (e.g., charter school) no later than the end of the semester in which testing occurred. Individual student reports for multiple-choice tests should be received within 2 weeks of the date on which answer documents were received by the vendor. School, district, and state reports should be produced within 2 weeks of the cutoff date for return of answer documents. For tests containing open-ended items or essays requiring ratings, individual student reports should be received within 6 weeks of the date on which answer documents were received by the vendor. School, district, and state reports should be produced within 6 weeks of the cutoff date for return of answer documents. Where an assessment is composed entirely, or almost entirely, of essays or other open-ended items, more time is likely to be necessary for scoring. The contract should specify any antecedent conditions that must be met by the agency for reports to be delivered on time.

 

For data to be useful for instructional improvement and for making decisions about enrollment in remedial classes or summer school, it must be received prior to the beginning of the next instructional semester following the date of testing. Turnaround time will vary depending on program complexity but should be kept as short as possible while maintaining accuracy. If state staff with expertise believe that these timelines do not reflect their needs, they can elect to deviate from them; however, a rationale should be provided. It is understood that there are tradeoffs inherent in the timeline process, and state policymakers should be able to explain their reasoning for allowing vendors to go beyond these timelines, if they elect to do so.

 

Plans should include rules for scoring of late arriving papers, particularly with regard to calculating summary statistics. (E.g., how long should one school be allowed to hold up the state summary statistics?) Clear guidelines in this area are especially important for tests that include open-response items; in such cases, a contractor will typically have only a limited window of time to implement the work of the human raters. The beginning date of the 2-week or 6-week scoring window should be clearly defined in the contract. Further, the scoring timeline for the contractor should be defined to include all activities that the contractor needs to perform (i.e., including all of those required to ensure the integrity of the data, not just the scoring itself once these activities have been completed).

When the RFP and resulting contract provide reasonable timelines for scoring and reporting, and the agency has met its obligations, states may wish to include contractually agreed upon incentives for performance by the vendor. Incentives may include a bonus for early completion or a penalty for late performance or errors. Administration activity timelines may well exceed typical annual state appropriations; states may benefit from multi-year funding plans and contracts across fiscal years (which may be cancelled if the budget must be reduced or the program is eliminated). States must, of course, stay within statutory constraints imposed by their respective legislatures.

 

The RFP and resulting contract should contain workable timelines that allow sufficient time for scoring and quality control. When delays occur, timely communication is vital for resolving the problem expeditiously and dealing effectively with those affected. If bonus or penalty clauses are included in contracts, timelines for agency staff to complete prerequisite tasks should also be specified. States may want to consider contract payment schedules to vendors based upon the delivery of specified products and services rather than on the basis of calendar dates alone.

 

The majority of state testing programs choose a spring test administration that results in demands on vendors to produce reports for multiple programs during the same narrow time frame at the end of the school year. States able to schedule scoring during nonpeak periods may have greater flexibility in turnaround time and may gain a cost savings. Programs with bonus or penalty contract provisions may likely be given priority in such circumstances (though other considerations are also likely to come into play). The contract should contain the same scoring deadlines contained in the RFP. States may wish to attach to these deadlines specific liquidated damages for each day of non-delivery. In such cases, the contract should include provision for performance bonds against which the agency can claim the damages.

 

Funding is not a simple issue of obtaining annual appropriations. Activities for any given assessment administration from start to finish require approximately 18 months. This means that the typical fiscal year of 12 months and the assessment “year” of 18 months will conflict unless special provisions are made in the funding. One would not want to be in the position of having to write a contract for the first 12 months of activities and then another contract for the last 6 months of work. Furthermore, there is the likelihood that the fiscal year will not coincide with the RFP/contract/implementation cycle. The solution is to create multiyear funding plans and permit the agency to contract across fiscal years. Contracts can be cancelled if budgets must be reduced or the program is eliminated. Contracts should allow for necessary audits if required by the state comptroller.

 

When a delay is likely, the vendor should notify agency staff immediately and provide a good faith estimate of its extent.

 

Immediate notification of the state when a delay is likely is always best practice for the vendor. Quick notification allows all parties involved to assess the scope of the problem, its impact, and any necessary actions.

 

Generally, use of the data is the responsibility of the state and the LEA (Local educational agency). Some of these activities might be delegated to vendors, however. It is important that the RFP and the resulting contract make it clear what is expected of the vendor. If the state requests changes or delegates additional responsibilities to the vendor after the contract has been signed, the state may have to renegotiate the price.

 

Clear and understandable reports must be developed for communicating test results to educators, students, parents, and the general public.

 

Clear communication and guidelines for interpretation are essential to appropriate use of test data. Interpretative guidelines should be reported for both individual and school level reports. Cautions on over-interpretation, such as using tests for diagnostic purposes for which they have not been validated, should be made clear.

 

The state is responsible for communicating the test results to educators, students, parents, and the general public. An important part of this responsibility is the design of reports of test data. The state might choose to do this itself, or delegate it to the vendor. If the state delegates the design of reports to the vendor, the state shall be responsible for clearly sharing with the vendor its expectations about the audience for the reports, the purpose of the testing program and the uses to which the data will be put. The state shall also make clear, in writing, its requirements for the languages of reports to parents and the community and whether the reports should be graphic, numerical or narrative. The state shall be responsible for approving report formats in a timely manner as described in the contract.

The state is in the best position to determine how the test results will be used and what data will best communicate relevant and important information to the various audiences. It is also the prerogative of the state to determine report formats, types of scores to be reported and appropriate narrative information to accompany each report. Final report formats should be approved by the state before actual reports are printed. The state may also choose to provide access to data on a website designed by the state or its vendor.

 

If specific responsibility for monitoring the use of the test data is a part of the vendor’s contract, the vendor shall develop detailed policies and procedures for promoting and monitoring the proper interpretation of test data and implement those plans. Regardless of delegation of responsibility in this area, the vendor shall have a system for compiling any information of which it becomes aware regarding the improper and/or incorrect uses of data and relaying that information to the state.

 

The vendor, just like the state, bears responsibility for supporting and encouraging the ethical and proper implementation of the assessment system. Where the vendor has become aware of inappropriate practices in the course of its work on the assessment system, these should be reported to the state.

 

The state shall determine how the test data are to be used, and develop detailed policies and procedures for the proper use of the data. The state shall use the resources of the vendor or other qualified individuals (such as the Technical Advisory Committee) as needed to ensure the proper use of the test data for the purposes for which the test is intended, and make all reasonable attempts to prevent the improper use and interpretation of the data.

 

The only purpose of the testing program is to provide data that meets the goals of the program. Improper interpretation and use of the data negate all of the activities that led to the creation of that data, wasting money and time and perhaps causing serious disservice to students in the state. Since the vendor knows the test well and often has the capabilities to assist in interpretation and dissemination, the state may want to include in the contract the use of the vendor’s resources in conducting workshops around the state for teachers and administrators, joining and assisting the state personnel in presenting the data to stakeholders, such as legislative committees and the press, or assisting in the dissemination of the data. The state should use its greater knowledge of schools and districts in the state and their needs to help the vendor in these functions. The complementary expertise of the vendor and state should be utilized to ensure that the data is use in an appropriate manner.

 

 

Jeff C. Palmer is a teacher, success coach, trainer, Certified Master of Web Copywriting and founder of https://Ebookschoice.com. Jeff is a prolific writer, Senior Research Associate and Infopreneur having written many eBooks, articles and special reports.

 

Source: https://ebookschoice.com/procedures-and-communications-responsive-to-the-needs-and-concerns-of-districts-and-schools/

State Reforms To Develop K-12 Academic Standards – ebookschoice.com

State reforms to develop K-12 academic standards and to assess the performance of all students on these standards have resulted in a substantial increase in the number and scope of contracts with testing companies for statewide assessment programs. Many of these assessments are high-stakes for students (e.g., graduation or grade promotion tests) and/or educators (e.g., accountability programs). With high school diplomas, monetary awards or federal funding for schools and school systems dependent on test results, it is imperative that state assessments be of high quality, meet professional standards for best practice, be delivered in a timely manner, and be scored accurately. With increasingly tight budgets, it is similarly imperative that assessment programs be developed and implemented in an efficient and cost-effective manner without sacrificing quality.

 

Creating a high-quality state testing program requires both cooperation and accountability. It recalls the arms control motto, “trust but verify.” The main participants in this relationship are state agency staff and test vendor staff. To support these efforts, the participating states in developing these Model Contractor Standards and State Responsibilities for State Testing Programs must communicate more clearly today’s expectations for the development and administration of high-quality, efficient, and defensible, high-stakes state testing programs.

 

For vendors, commitment to following the “vendor standards” described herein can be cited as evidence of self-regulation and adherence to best practices. Of course, such standards are also designed for use by states in designing contractual relationships with vendors and in managing and overseeing those relationships. For states, the outlined “state responsibilities” are intended to provide a model for what is necessary to create a high-quality testing program and to serve as guidelines for policymakers enacting reforms in state testing programs. Some of the state responsibilities also describe important requirements for legal defensibility of high-stakes components within a state testing program.

 

The Preplanning Standards address antecedent activities and decisions critical to the production of a comprehensive Request for Proposal (RFP) describing the products and services the state wants a vendor to supply to its testing program. Assuming the criteria specified in the Preplanning responsibilities have been met, the Development and Administration sections provide guidelines for the specification of contract activities and execution of the contracted work. The Uses of Data section deals activities subsequent to the administration of the test, but directly connected with the interpretation of test data and score reports. Each section begins with a brief introduction that provides background and explanatory information.

 

Many of the standards herein have both a vendor and state corollary. The purpose of this document is to clarify ideal roles and obligations in a typical relationship between a state and vendor, either with respect to test development or scoring and administration. The “typical” relationship is assumed to be that the state, in response to action by its legislature, has developed academic standards and is contracting with one vendor to purchase a custom-built assessment based on its own academic standards and with another vendor to handle test administration and scoring.

 

Assumptions of some kind are clearly necessary for the design of a “model” document of this type. Of course, there are few “typical” states that precisely, or even nearly, mirror all of the arrangements assumed here. Among the many possible variations are:

– A state agency buys access to a commercially developed and published test.

 

– A state agency hires a vendor to develop a test that is then owned by the agency. The state requires the vendor to provide materials, scoring services, and reporting services.

 

– A state agency hires a vendor to develop tests that will be owned by the state and then hires a second vendor to do the test administration, scoring, and reporting activities.

 

– A state agency buys access to a test publisher by one vendor but then hires another vendor to administer, score, and report the results.

 

– A state agency develops the test with the assistance of local districts and state universities. It then hires a vendor to administer, score, and report the results.

 

Evaluating the acceptability of a process or contract between a state and vendor should not rely on the literal satisfaction of every standard or responsibility in this document, nor can acceptability be determined through the use of a checklist. Further, while retaining decision-making authority, a state may benefit from seeking the advice of the vendor regarding alternative methods for satisfying a particular guideline. Similarly, a responsible vendor will seek the state’s advice or feedback at every point along the way where important decisions must be made. Regardless of how roles are defined and tasks are delegated, states retain ultimate responsibility and authority for state testing programs.

 

Throughout this document, the terms “testing companies” and “industry” apply generically to refer to all providers of test content, printing, scoring, validation, and other testing related services, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, public or private. The term “state” applies to the educational enterprise of the fifty states, territories, and other appropriate jurisdictions and includes state education agencies (SEAs), state boards of education, and other official educational entities.

 

For a state testing program to follow standards of best practice, several preconditions should be met before an RFP is developed, a contract is signed with a vendor, and test development begins. These preconditions are important in enabling a vendor to produce a quality test that will satisfy the state’s expectations. These preconditions include actions to be taken by the state legislature (or other responsible entity) as well as the state agency with authority to implement the testing program. The purpose of these preconditions is to support production of an RFP that specifies in detail the services and products to be provided by the vendor given reasonable timelines and resources, to ensure that the state has knowledgeable and adequately trained staff competent to assign all required activities to either itself or the vendor, to ensure adequate planning and funding to produce a quality testing program, and to ensure that staff is in place to competently supervise the vendor relationship going forward.

 

The state legislature should enact reasonable timelines and provide adequate funding for the testing program. The legislation should also include: statements of purpose; designation of authority for important tasks (e.g., standard setting); responsibilities of the state agency and the local districts; types of reports of results; uses of the data (e.g., school or district accountability); contracting authority.

 

In general, the lead time for developing a new, high-stakes assessment includes a minimum of 38 months: 6 months planning, preparation, & development of test blueprint; 6 months item writing & editing; 6 months item tryouts & analyses; 6 months preparation of field test forms & supporting materials; 6 months field testing, research studies (e.g., opportunity to learn surveys in the case of high-stakes tests) & analyses; 6 months development of final test forms, edit supplementary materials, set passing standards, finalize security, accommodations, & reporting policies; 2 months administer final tests, score, equate, and report results. This timeline begins with the signing of a contract with a vendor and assumes that state content standards for the subjects being tested have already been adopted.

 

Preplanning activities leading to the development of a comprehensive RFP, vendor bid time, proposal evaluation, and negotiations for the award of a final contract will often add at least another 6 months. Unanticipated complications that often accompany implementation of a new testing program will also add additional time. Thus, legislation that creates a new testing program should allow approximately 4 years from the time of passage until the first live tests are administered. States with well-established testing programs and experienced staffs in place may be able to reduce the time required to develop additional tests (i.e., development limited to certain grades not previously covered).

 

Three to four years of lead time is also consistent with legal requirements for an adequate notice period and opportunity to learn (OTL) for tests with high stakes for individual students. OTL requires sufficient time for implementation of curricula and instruction that provides an adequate opportunity for students to have been taught the tested content before their initial attempt to pass high-stakes tests. If a state has developed sufficiently clear academic standards, notice requirements for OTL may be triggered by the publication date of the standards if a strong communication effort is undertaken and the state can demonstrate that schools have aligned instruction with the standards. When offered opportunities for input, potential vendors should alert states to unreasonable timelines and propose alternatives reasonably calculated to meet professional standards for best practice.

 

In addition to providing sufficient development time, legislation for a new testing program must provide adequate funding for agency preplanning activities, test development, test administration, and other program activities necessary to produce a quality test for each of the mandated grades and subjects. The required activities may be conducted by the state or an outside vendor, but funding must be sufficient so that no important steps are left out.

 

Development costs do not depend on the number of students to be tested. Therefore, a small testing program with limited funds and a relatively small number of students over which to spread the cost may only be able to develop tests for fewer grades and/or subjects than larger testing programs. Options for state cooperation to improve efficiency and lower costs are described in the accompanying innovation priorities document.

 

Where custom tests are to be designed on the basis of state academic standards, special care should be taken to develop high quality standards that are rigorous, clear and specific, consistent with sound research on curriculum and instruction, and well-organized to ensure that the lower levels serve as a sound foundation for the upper levels.

 

While sound standards-based tests must be well aligned with state standards, the standards should be designed so that they serve that purpose well. Consensus-building within a state is important in order to develop support for broad implementation, but consensus does not always or necessarily lead to quality. Where, for example, consensus is reached as a result of agreement on broad or vague standards statements, schools may focus excessively on the test itself for guidance on what to teach; tests are typically not designed to carry such a heavy load, leading to criticisms that teachers are “narrowing the curriculum” to what is being tested. More detailed criteria and models for high-quality standards exist and have been identified by other organizations.

 

The state agency responsible for testing should include staff with adequate knowledge and training in psychometrics, curriculum, communication, policy, special populations, and contracting to develop a comprehensive RFP, to complete all necessary activities not assigned to the vendor, and—especially—to monitor vendor performance throughout the contract period.

 

Agency staff must play an active role in the development of a quality testing program. In order to decide which services and products should be included in an RFP, agency staff must thoroughly understand the test development process and the requirements for a psychometrically and legally defensible test. Where knowledge and training are inadequate or lacking, staff should seek training and assistance from outside experts.

 

Agency staff must be prepared to complete all required steps and activities not specifically delegated by the state to a vendor and to competently monitor all contract activities. It is possible for a state agency to outsource some of the steps and activities required prior to the selection of the main test development vendor, though adequate expertise should always exist on staff to monitor the performance of all such additional vendors.

 

The staffing needs of the state agency to support a statewide assessment program are significant. This is going to be one of the more serious tasks confronting states. At the minimalist end of the continuum, a state could theoretically have one person be the assessment coordinator and simply allow the contractor to do everything. At the other end, a state agency can hire sufficient number of staff members to coordinate the work of multiple contractors, assume primary responsibility for quality control work, and provide data analysis and dissemination/training activities within the state.

 

State legislatures do not have to create a lot of permanent positions for the state bureaucracy if the agency molds together an office with a critical mass of permanent employees and out-sources tasks requiring more personnel (e.g., test development, editing, and test form assembly).

 

The state agency responsible for testing should develop a comprehensive RFP that describes clearly and in detail both the end products to be provided by the vendor and the development process.

 

The RFP is the roadmap for the creation of a quality testing program. It should contain detailed specifications for all key areas, including, but not necessarily limited to, the totality of services and products to be provided, timelines for performance, quality criteria, responsiveness criteria, mid-course correction opportunities, and the process for evaluating proposals. When developing the RFP, agency staff should be aware of all required activities for a defensible testing program and should specifically assign responsibility for each activity to itself or to the vendor. It is occasionally the case that the state is not sure how to accomplish a certain goal of the testing program and wants vendors to propose a solution. In this case, the RFP should clearly separate those requirements that are firm, those that are aspirational, and those that are simply unknown. It should be very clear to vendors whether they are responding to specific requirements or proposals for implementing general requirements. The state should also clearly spell out timelines in the development process, both for test development and for scoring/administration.

 

To provide a fair comparison of proposals received in response to an RFP, states should require all vendors to either: (a) provide costs for a fixed set of services and products specified in detail in the RFP; or (b) specify in detail what services and products they could provide for fixed incremental costs. The method should be chosen in advance by the state and clearly specified in the RFP.

 

When vendors bid on different combinations of services and products, their proposals are not comparable and it is difficult for the state to evaluate cost effectiveness. The lowest bid may have to be accepted when essential activities are missing or incomplete. When all vendors use the same method, a fairer evaluation of their proposals is possible. States with precise knowledge of the test products and services they will need are more likely to benefit from option (a), while states with less precise knowledge, or whose plans may change, are more likely to benefit from option (b).

 

Clearly, this document will apply differently in each of these different scenarios. It is hoped, however, that the model is sufficiently clear and well-defined that a state using a different arrangement would be able to determine the necessary adjustments in those sections that require adjustment. Even in cases where the relationship or tasks in a given state appear to fit perfectly with the model described here, this document is only intended to provide a framework to ensure that relevant issues are addressed. Important issues need to be resolved in a way that is consistent with a state’s political process.

 

 

Jeff C. Palmer is a teacher, success coach, trainer, Certified Master of Web Copywriting and founder of https://Ebookschoice.com. Jeff is a prolific writer, Senior Research Associate and Infopreneur having written many eBooks, articles and special reports.

 

Source: https://ebookschoice.com/state-reforms-to-develop-k-12-academic-standards/

Establishing Trust Between School Teachers and University Faculty – ebookschoice.com

The professional development school initiatives show the greatest promise in school reform due to collaborative efforts in teacher preparation. Educators in both public schools and in universities must work together in the preparation of teachers who are culturally, socially and instructionally responsive to student diversity. This lofty preparation aim begins with selecting the most promising teacher candidates for admittance into the program. The author describes an admissions procedure that has proven to be not only efficient and effective, but reflects the collaborative values of the program.

 

For over a decade, advocates of educational reform have supported professional development schools (PDSs) as a way for school and university partners to promote simultaneous renewal of both institutions. PDS aims are now commonplace: (a) provide exemplary education for preservice teachers, (b) support continuing professional development of experienced teachers, (c) engage in the renewal of curriculum and instruction, and (d) involve schools and universities in collaborative research.

 

Essential to these aims is the collaborative process. Establishing trust, recognizing cultural differences, and breaking perceived roles between school teachers and university faculty are key if partnerships are to be anything more than traditional in nature. University instructors, including teacher educators, are entering into cooperative working ventures with more frequency than ever before. Critical to the successful attainment of any partnership project are the people involved and the common commitment to program quality and coherence. In the ongoing process of developing, nurturing, and maintaining partnerships, one can expect to confront both predictable and unforeseen obstacles. Sharing information on program structures and systems will help advance the development of university and K-12 partnerships. The purpose of this article is twofold: (a) to describe, and (b) to analyze an admissions procedure, which reflects the values of the program and efficiently and effectively promotes the involvement of K-12 personnel in what is traditionally a university decision. To this end, we briefly discuss the history of this partnership and the key values that drive our work. Next, we elaborate on the admissions process and how it reflects those values in linking the university and schools. In taking stock of where we have made progress and where we have not, we examine the perceptions of major stakeholders in this process. We conclude with a discussion of recommendations to others considering similar efforts.

 

Description of Partnership

 

While the School of Education has a long history of establishing partnerships with school and school districts that have benefited both parties, the teacher preparation program was, for the most part, not involved in these partnerships. The program was traditional in nature. Just a few School of Education faculty members, and many of these adjunct or honoraria faculty, supervised all of the field experiences in schools across the states. Faculty taught methods classes in their field and rarely knew what was being covered in other classes. Students and faculty felt isolated and neither group was satisfied with the skill level of the graduating students.

 

During the last school year, a planning committee of 29 School of Education faculty, public school personnel from a number of districts, and current students in the School of Education joined forces to redesign the Initial Teacher Education (ITE) program. The goals of this committee were to develop a strong program based on research, involve more of the School of Education faculty, and provide more meaningful experiences for our students. One of the major recommendations of this planning committee was the establishment of professional development schools. The program is graduate level and leads to a state teaching license and, after at least one year of teaching, a master’s degree. During the last school year, the program courses and procedures were further developed and the first cohort of students was admitted.

 

Currently, 17 elementary and secondary schools in five metropolitan school districts are collaborating with the School of Education to engage in simultaneous renewal of schools and the School of Education. The roles and responsibilities of those in the partnership are shaped by the four functions of a partner school: (a) teacher preparation, (b) professional development, (c) renewal of curriculum and instruction, and (d) inquiry/research. Professional development or partner school and School of Education faculty collaborate to accomplish these functions as they are viewed as important in positively supporting student learning and well-being.

 

Prospective graduate students select an area of emphasis from an array of “leadership areas” within the Initial Teacher Education program. Teacher candidates (TCs) in the ITE program are aligned with one of seven possible areas of expertise: Bilingual/ESL, Inclusionary Practices, Information and Learning Technologies, Literacy, Math, Science and Social Studies, Teaching for Mental Health, or Young Child. All of these leadership areas cover K-12 except for Young Child.

 

Program Values

 

The planning committee developed a set of teaching responsibilities, which continue to be developed and refined as the program evolves. These responsibilities include the knowledge, beliefs, and practical skills we believe are essential to becoming teacher.

 

In essence, teachers must understand and be able to learn about the subjects they teach; be able to use appropriate teaching and learning strategies; be supportive of students in their attempts at learning and growing; behave professionally and continue to grow as educators; and take on a leadership role in their school. The ITE program also stresses the importance of collaboration and reflection in attaining these goals.

Description of Admissions Process

 

The planning committee decided that a paper screening was not going to be sufficient in selecting students for the ITE program. An interview was called for, but having individual interviews with 183 applicants was beyond the resources of the program. A group process was used for the first cohort of applicants. All the applicants were conducted through a series of activities in a single session, while faculty members observed their interactions. Decisions to admit were then made by leadership area. This proved to be too large a group to be either effective or efficient. Beginning with the second group of applicants, interviews took place by leadership area. This process is described below.

 

Paper Screening

 

Once a year, applications are accepted for the ITE program. Applicants rank their first three choices in leadership areas. Each leadership area forms a committee consisting of LAPs and partner school teachers to review the applications submitted to the applicant’s first choice of leadership area.

 

The criteria include grade point averages (GPA), standardized test scores, coursework in the teaching field the applicant wishes to pursue, letters of recommendation, verification of 30 hours working with school-age children and a goals statement. While all of these data are considered, the goals statement often carries the most weight. A tale of growth and change from a wild freshman 20 years ago into a responsible adult who is willing to turn his/her life upside down in order to become a teacher can make up for a very low undergraduate GPA, and the desire to have summers off can make a 4.0 GPA irrelevant.

 

The task of the committee members is to narrow down the list to close to the maximum number of students they can accept. A decision is made to either interview, reject immediately, or pass the application on the next leadership area. The reasons for rejecting applicants without an interview are usually due to incomplete documentation, lack of preparation, or other indicators that the applicant would not be very likely to succeed in the program. Often one leadership area has more qualified applicants than they can afford to interview. Applicants who are the best fit to the leadership area and have the highest qualifications are kept and the others are passed on to their next choice in leadership area. The whole paper screening takes place in one long afternoon, over lunch, with all leadership area committee members in one large room. Each leadership area is limited in the number of students they may admit, so the decisions can be difficult.

 

Interview

 

Faculty members from across the eight different leadership areas have frequently decided to join together to conduct the interview process within various partner schools. These decisions are generally made based on the organization structure of divisions and program areas within the School of Education. They may also be based on the partner schools where the students will be placed. Each leadership area conducts its interviews in slightly different ways, but all contain three common elements.

 

–    Applicants read and react to short articles. These articles tend to be controversial, related to the leadership area, education in general, sensitivity toward students with diverse backgrounds, and are no more than two pages long.

–    Applicants plan and teach a short lesson. The topic may be chosen from a list of suggestions that range from whimsical (how to eat spaghetti without getting splattered) to practical (how to pack a suitcase) to school skills (how to find a word in the dictionary), or they may choose their own topic.

–    Applicants write a short essay. These topics vary, but include a reaction to the article they read, a reaction to the group interview process, or a topic specific to the leadership area they are applying to.

 

Most of the leadership areas arrange for the applicants to complete the article and teaching activities using a jigsaw format. The applicants are placed in groups for both activities. They read an article and discuss it or plan to teach a lesson in the first group. Then each group member goes to a second group and either explains the article or teaches the lesson to the new group of applicants.

 

During this time, partner school teachers, administrators, and sometimes ITE students or recent graduates hover over each group of applicants, evaluating their performance based on the program values described above. Each observer is assigned a group of applicants to follow. The observers could also follow other groups when they feel they have enough information to make a decision. A rubric is used for each activity. These rubrics allow the reviewer to indicate the degree to which the applicants collaborate, cooperate, organize tasks, and plan. Some reviewers use the scores and others use the rubrics to categorize their notes. The rubrics are intended to be used as guides for later discussions, not to obtain hard and fast scores. In addition, each reviewer is alert to behaviors that would indicate that an applicant would have challenges collaborating with adults or working with the K-12 students we serve.

 

Selection

 

At the end of the session, the evaluators review all of the applicants, with the help of the pictures taken at the beginning of the session. It is amazing how difficult it is to describe people and the pictures help to avoid errors in identification. Each applicant is reviewed, with those who observed the applicant sharing observations and ratings.

 

The applicants usually are sorted pretty quickly into three categories: (a) those who are clearly outstanding, (b) those who clearly do not belong in our program, and (c) those we have questions about. Most of our time is spend trying to decide why an applicant in the third category gave cause for concern and whether the concern is strong enough for the student to be denied admittance.

 

Once all the applicants are placed into one of the first two categories and ranked, the highest ones are admitted until the leadership area is filled. This is accomplished during the two or so hours following the interview. Those who we feel would be successful in the program, but were ranked too low to make it into their choice of leadership area, are passed on to leadership areas which have not reached their capacity. This process continues for a few weeks, until either all the leadership areas are filled or all the successful applicants are placed. Approximately 81% of all applicants participating in this process are finally admitted to the ITE program.

 

Evaluation Process

 

The purpose of this article is twofold: (a) to describe and (b) to analyze an admissions procedure, which reflects the values of the program and efficiently and effectively promotes the involvement of K-12 personnel in what is traditionally a university decision. In an attempt to gain a more thorough understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of this admissions process, we examined multiple data sources. These sources included surveys from current teacher candidates, individual interviews with at least one university professor from each of the leadership areas and detailed notes taken at a debriefing meeting with the interviewers following a recent interview.

Anonymously, 168 teacher candidates completed surveys about the interview process. Additionally, hour-long individual meetings with representatives from each of the leadership areas were held. We used seven questions to frame those discussions. The third source of feedback was obtained from members of a recent interview team. One week following a day-long interview, members of the interview team met to discuss the process. This particular interview team consisted of school and university faculty representing the three leadership areas of Inclusionary Practices, Information and Learning Technologies, and Teaching for Mental Health. Those discussions were framed around three topics: what worked, what didn’t, and recommendations for change.

 

Data Analysis

 

Direct transcriptions from all respondents were collated by question and by specific stakeholder group. Initially, multiple read-throughs were conducted of all sources of feedback by each of the reviewers. Following this period of becoming thoroughly acquainted with the feedback content, the reviewers identified several themes present in the responses.

 

Results

 

The following discussion provides a look at the results of these feedback measures. We wanted to understand if this process was an efficient way to manage the large number of interviewees, if it was effective in selecting the most qualified candidates and if it served as a vehicle to demonstrate the values of trust, professionalism, and collaboration that the program strives for. In reviewing the feedback, specific issues related to each of these themes emerged. These included the attention to logistics to enhance efficiency, the perceptions of staff regarding quality candidates, and the illustration of program values.

 

Interview Process Logistic

 

Serious attention to a wide array of logistical issues is absolutely critical to the successful implementation of an interview process of this scope. Members of the interview team highlighted key logistical factors that contributed to the efficiency of this process. Advanced planning was identified as the driving factor in efficiency.

 

As both teachers and leadership area professors pointed out, the matrix planning that assigned staff to students was extremely helpful. The use of the scoring rubrics was consistently noted as a positive feature of the planning process. Prior to the interviews, color-coded rubrics were prepared and ready for each reviewer. It was helpful to hear from different teachers that they would have benefited from an advance copy of the rubrics as well as the articles to better acquaint themselves with the material prior to the actual interview.

 

Responses from the interview team also expressed strong support for continuing to hold the interviews in one of the partner schools. Securing a large space such as the school’s gym along with a classroom for debriefing purposes was seen as not only very convenient, but also displays the message that teacher preparation will not just be occurring at the university.

 

Representatives from each stakeholder group responded positively to issues regarding time efficiency.

 

Perceptions Regarding Candidate Qualities

 

Reflections from both partner school and university faculty indicate strong consensus regarding the value of this admissions process in selecting quality candidates: students who do well during the interview process clearly rise to the top. Collectively we are selecting students who will indeed be the most promising new teachers.

 

Opportunities to actually meet with and observe the applicants in the interview activities are noted as an invaluable aspect of the application process. One leadership area professor made the point, “Doubts in the paper screening are red-flagged to be confirmed or rejected at the interview.”

 

Another reflected, “The interview allows me to see a whole other dimension of the person. I get to glimpse how this person interacts with others and that ability to interact with others is at the core of teaching.”

 

The involvement of multiple professionals during the interview process ensures that applicants are seen by more than one person and in more than one activity. One leadership area professor noted, “I strongly feel that reliability is increased due to our high inter-observer agreement. When we sit down to make the actual decisions, there appears to be consistently high agreement among all observers.”

Illustration of Program Values

 

Feedback from all stakeholders reveals an awareness of how aspects of the admissions process contribute to establishing trust and breaking the perceived roles between school teachers and university faculty. One applicant reported, “From the article jigsaw activity, I could see that from the get-go, this program was valuing communication and collaboration.” Another student stated, “The teaching activities taught me how important it is to work together. As I now look at the actual program I see that that skill is practiced everywhere.”

 

As leadership area professors in the partner school efforts, the author has seen first hand how critical the trust building process is to maintaining and nurturing partnerships. This value was clearly noted as both an essential element of and a benefit of this application process. During the debriefing meeting, one site coordinator reported, “I can tell you that site staff felt as though they were very much part of the team.” A leadership area professor summarized her experiences indicating, “The thing that feels best about this process is that we are continuing to learn to trust each other especially regarding judgements about students. I really rely on those judgements, just as I truly believe everyone else around that table is trusting my judgements.” Another leadership area professor noted, “Having been involved in the program since its inception, I see a tremendous development of trust. Earlier, the university folk tended to dominate, but not anymore. Now we are all equal.”

 

Discussion and Recommendations

 

The application process described here is but one of The Initial Teacher Education Program’s efforts to enhance school and university partnerships. From our analysis of the reflections and feedback with regard to sustaining this five-year process, we now understand more fully the impact this has on our partnership. We are reaffirmed in our notion that this process is fairly efficient with most of the actual work being completed in two full days. There is strong consensus that the multitude of measures that staff use to select applicants contributes to the selection of the most qualified students. Finally, our analysis of this aspect of the program suggests that this admissions process serves as an important vehicle to foster the values of the collaborative process.

 

We contend that other teacher education programs as well as individual school buildings can easily replicate this teacher selection process. For those considering similar efforts, we offer the following suggestions. This process must of course begin by establishing relationships with staff in partner schools, so they can be involved in the application process. Together identify key features of your program then develop an interview system that matches those beliefs/values/attributes. For us that meant the design of three specific activities for the interactive interview. The article jigsaw provided us an opportunity to observe students’ ability to synthesize, collaborate, and react to controversial ideas. The teaching activity allowed students to be creative, to demonstrate organizational skills under time constraints and collaborate. The writing activity tapped a student’s basic writing skills in an impromptu format. This activity allowed us to examine spontaneous writing skills in contract to their more deliberate goals statement.

 

We further suggest that teams critically select and review all articles in the jigsaw activity to ensure current and controversial themes. It is also important that clear scoring rubrics be established, discussed and modeled for item clarity and shared understanding of the scales. As we have learned, it is imperative that all interviewers have a copy of the agenda, activity descriptions, articles, and rubrics beforehand. Lastly, we suggest that teams proactively plan for ways to accommodate for the differing learning styles of the applicants; that is, participation in the writing activity in a large room with background noise may be difficult for some learners and could easily be accommodated for. We encourage other teacher educators to expand upon these inquiries so that best practice models can be developed, documented, and replicated.

 

 

Jeff C. Palmer is a teacher, success coach, trainer, Certified Master of Web Copywriting and founder of https://Ebookschoice.com. Jeff is a prolific writer, Senior Research Associate and Infopreneur having written many eBooks, articles and special reports.

 

Source: https://ebookschoice.com/establishing-trust-between-school-teachers-and-university-faculty/

Opportunities For Students to Review Curricular Content and to Develop Cooperative Learning Skills – ebookschoice.com

When teachers initially attempt to redesign block-of-time lessons, they frequently ask about the format of a typical lesson. Numerous creative instructional approaches are possible within longer time frames; therefore, teachers should be cautious about relying too heavily on familiar daily instructional routines. As a general strategy, however, teachers might consider planning 3-4 activities during the instructional block, ensuring that at least one activity will involve direct and substantial engagement of students in the learning process. A block-of-time lesson could be structured in the following manner:

 

Review previous learning. In a sense, teachers who have previously employed traditional direct instruction methods should feel fairly proficient with this portion of the lesson provided, of course, that they include opportunities for direct student involvement. Approximately 20-30 minutes could be allocated for instructional input.

Student performance. Group experiences provide students with an opportunity to master the lesson content while engaging in hands-on activities. Experiments, cooperative learning, role-playing, case studies, and computer simulations can each be used to provide effective experiences. Approximately 30-40 minutes of the lesson may be devoted to this activity.

 

Guided practice/reteaching. Individual student mastery remains the foundation of effective teaching, and it is appropriate to incorporate guided practice (individually or with a group) so teachers can assess levels of student understanding. This component is especially critical for schools with alternate-day schedules, since students will most likely not have an opportunity to correct learning errors for two or more days. Teachers should reteach and reinforce the day’s objectives, provide closure, and assign homework. Time allocated for review, reteaching, and homework should be 5-15 minutes.

 

A cautionary note: Larger blocks should not be viewed by either teachers or students as a method for routinely permitting students to complete homework assignments in class. Valuable instructional time will be forever lost, with resultant decreases in student achievement.

 

Teacher Effectiveness Coach Success Factors

 

Put Students First

 

–           Analyzing student work

–           PD with direct impact on student learning

–           Is intended learning of lessons showing up in student work?

–           Observation of student and teachers

–           Ask students what they are learning

–           Interview students:  what are they learning?  Why? How are they doing?

–           Student Engagement feedback to teacher. On-task behavior, improvement over time

–           Shift focus from accountability to administration/district mandates to students and outcomes

 

Achieve Results

 

–           Utilize relevant and timely data

–           Follow through on commitments

–           Shift and enlarge or narrow focus as needed

–           Try to create ownership to achieve goals

–           Engage in difficult conversations – Have conversations that create shifts in thinking and results

–           Find sphere of influence

–           Identifies next steps and holds everyone accountable

 

Collaborate

 

–           Create sustainable structures (e.g. grade-level meetings, department meetings, administration/leadership meetings, data teams, PLCs, etc.) where teachers are able to collaborate.

–           To provide teacher with protocols, agenda-setting templates, questioning techniques, goal setting templates, action plans, etc. so that collaboration is meaningful, relevant, and impacts student achievement

–           Make sure we don’t come in with our own agenda; we need to collaborate

–           Use the team as resource/collaborative team

–           Collaborate with leaders, teachers, facilitators, administrators, TECs.

 

Deliver Excellent Service

 

–           Focus when prioritizing competing initiatives

–           Adjust role based on administration/teacher feedback

–           Prioritize focus for coaching based on teacher need/student need/data

–           Prepare when facilitating/guiding pd

–           Take initiative and raise concerns when necessary

–           Keep high-yield focus/strategy

–           Provide constructive criticism by maintain relationships and trust

–           Seek out necessary resources to enhance work

 

Make Change Happen

 

–           Be flexible…change pd plans as needed

–           Be positive! Optimistic and realistic

–           Challenge assumption

–           Move forward despite ambiguity (Keep you plan and refocus as needed to target student achievement)

–           Sense of urgency – push, “nudge”, use data, calendars

–           Be proactive – even with pushback, move forward

Instructional Strategies

 

Any rich topic can be taught in a variety of ways and teachers should consider multiple “entry points” for students to learn new information. The following suggestions are offered to assist teachers with developing creative instructional approaches in blocked classes.

 

1. Continuously engage students in active learning.

 

Teachers should embrace the concept of “teacher as coach”. Teachers should strive to facilitate student learning, rather than always using the direct delivery method of instruction. Whenever possible, students should complete the activity. Lessons should be active, with reduced emphasis on such passive activities as listening to lectures and completing worksheets. Lessons should be planned in which students learn through discovery methods or teach important concepts to their classmates. Transitional activities that require students to physically move about should also be included. For example, groups of students could be assigned such daily classroom tasks as distributing class materials, handing out papers, and collecting materials at the end of each activity.

 

It is frequently necessary for teachers to deliver brief lectures so students can fully master critical concepts. Even during lectures, however, teachers can include active student participation, using such activities as the following:

 

Think-pair-share. The teacher poses a question and asks each student to think about appropriate solutions. Students are next asked to discuss potential answers with a partner. Finally, the teacher calls on students randomly or asks for responses from volunteers.

 

Learning journals. Students can routinely write new concepts they have learned in daily journals. They should be prompted to focus on connecting this new information to previous topics or other interdisciplinary areas, and to write down the concepts they still have not mastered.

 

Guided notes. Teachers can prepare handouts that summarize the lesson’s major concepts, with significant portions left blank for students to complete during the lecture.

 

Active questioning. Asking questions of individuals is an excellent way to determine if a student understands the concept being presented, but this is an extremely inefficient method for assessing all students’ levels of understanding. Teachers can pose questions to the class, allow sufficient wait-time, then call for “thumbs up-thumbs down” responses from everyone. Students can raise their left or rights hands to answer true-false questions, or can call out or display numbers that correspond to the correct answer in multiple-choice questions. The point is, all students are involved, and the teacher has a quick and accurate method to assess student mastery of new material.

 

2. Include group activities to encourage student participation.

 

New concepts are more likely to be retained in long-term memory when the learner is permitted to state them orally or to physically engage in activities. Group activities can range from brief discussions with a partner to carefully crafted activities that may require the majority of the block. Some possible group activities are the following:

 

Cooperative learning. A substantial body of research exists documenting the effectiveness of cooperative learning strategies. Any faculty that is considering implementing block scheduling should seriously consider cooperative learning training for all teachers and make this instructional method the cornerstone of lesson planning.

 

Writing groups. Students can critique their fellow group members’ writing for errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, word choice, and sentence structure. Oral and written feedback will help students improve their writing style as they learn to write for their peer audience.

 

Case studies, role playing, and simulations. Case studies allow students to view situations through the depersonalized actions of a story character (“I agree/disagree with what he/she did because…”), rather than risking peer disapproval for personal solutions. Class discussion, consequently, remains focused on finding appropriate solutions rather than confronting conflicting student values, beliefs, and feelings. Through role plays and simulations, students have an opportunity to employ their dramatic talents, in addition to experiencing how a person in that role may actually feel or react when confronted with the situation.

 

Incorporate activities addressing the multiple intelligences. Gardner (1983) suggests the following seven categories of human intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Teachers should incorporate these dimensions into their lessons so students can experience learning through a variety of modalities. In addition, students could be offered opportunities to complete alternative assignments that explore the intelligences and capitalize on individual student strengths.

 

3. Use creative thinking activities.

 

Though teachers today are generally familiar with the taxonomy of educational objectives in the cognitive domain, they are likely to be less aware of similar taxonomies in the affective and psychomotor domains. These latter two domains include learning activities that challenge students to develop skills in such areas as organizing preferences and developing confidence.

 

Lessons that attend to the affective and psychomotor domains, in addition to the higher levels of the more traditional cognitive domain, provide opportunities to emphasize the more spontaneous and creative capabilities of students. Examples of classroom attention to creative aspects of learning include assignments to develop illustrations of solutions to current affairs problems in social studies, or to exchange and solve student-created problems in math. Having students describe how they arrived at answers to assignments that require higher order thinking is also of great value in encouraging nontraditional thinking.

 

4. Move outside the classroom.

 

Approaching instructional time with a commitment to including “outside-the-classroom” resources and processes as much as possible helps teachers and students focus on the real-life applications of their classes. Using community resources within the classroom, such as guest speakers and community artifacts, effectively ties community and school together, while simultaneously building invaluable community support for the schools. Similarly, the use of integrated field trips and assignments to gather information from the immediate community through “community scavenger hunts” helps to create relevance in the students’ learning.

 

5. Employ authentic forms of assessment.

 

Traditional paper-and-pencil tests are limited in the types of learning activities for which these methods of assessment are valid. If emphasis in classroom strategies is placed on less traditional and more creative learning, less traditional and more creative forms of measuring the results are needed.

 

Demonstrations of a wide range of student behaviors, such as cooperative problem analysis and resolution with a classroom partner, or use of technology in accessing, manipulating, and presenting information are more characteristic of situations students will confront outside the classroom, and more telling of the level of integration in multi-domain learning. The use of others besides the classroom teacher to assist in evaluating student growth, based on clearly-defined objectives also helps to make assessment more authentic.

 

6. Integrate and reinforce basic skills throughout the curriculum.

 

Students can engage in the writing process in all classes; science and math concepts can readily be integrated; and history can be infused into foreign languages, art, and music. Students can make connections and transfer knowledge more readily across these artificial disciplinary boundaries.

 

A natural progression to this concept is the development of an interdisciplinary approach to the curriculum. Faculty members can begin this process by sharing curriculum content, agreeing upon times during the school calendar when major concepts could most appropriately be integrated, and identifying overarching themes and learning activities that would connect the various disciplines.

 

7. Incorporate technology.

 

Technology is an excellent learning tool when it is purposefully crafted to facilitate student understanding of concepts, and it can be used effectively for both whole-class instruction and individual drill-and-practice. Technology should never be used as the “lazy teacher’s lesson plan,” however, sit back, and enjoy the show.

 

On the other hand, countless teachers are discovering the power of teacher-developed multimedia presentations and the benefits of the Internet as a student research tool. Teachers should exercise caution when planning activities that incorporate student use of the Internet, however, since students can spend inordinate amounts of time “surfing” and exploring areas that have little or no educational value. Lessons using the Internet should direct students to appropriate sites for specific purposes so this technology is actually used as an educational tool.

 

8. Share resources and ideas with colleagues.

 

One of the major fears of making change lies in confronting the unknown. When teachers change their instructional patterns from the tried-and-true methodology of the past to the uncharted waters of teaching in a block schedule, having the support of colleagues is invaluable. Patterns of “lone ranger” efforts to achieve should be replaced with active seeking and giving of both information and support in a collaborative forum that brings teachers together. Longer periods of time and more flexibility in the schedule allow teachers to plan and work together in ways not previously available.

 

Teachers can capitalize on this advantage by being open to sharing both successes and roadblocks that occurred in implementing new instructional strategies. Besides helping one’s colleague think through the “whys” of the situations discussed, the process can be directly helpful to the other teacher. Often, what did not go so well for one teacher may be an excellent strategy for someone else in another setting.

 

Building administrators can support this process by encouraging teachers to take risks in the classroom without fear of reprisal. Time can be set aside in faculty meetings for teachers to share both successful and unsuccessful classroom experiences, so teachers can receive suggestions and feedback from their peers. In this way, teachers begin to develop a learning community while modeling the practice of continuous learning for their students.

 

9. Plan ahead for support activities.

 

Longer periods of teaching time require longer-range thinking and planning. Informal learning activities that enrich and supplement the formal instructional objectives of the class should be readily available and carefully planned, especially for classes that include more complex learning and/or diverse student populations, or for those times when students are just not ready to engage in additional formal learning activities. Educational games of various kinds, whether commercially prepared or student created, relieve the stress of long periods of intense instruction while also supporting the learning goals of the class. “Brain-teasers” that capture the content of the class in new and unusual patterns, such as visual presentations of ideas or cross-disciplinary applications of the day’s lesson, provide opportunities for students in pairs or teams to review curricular content and to develop cooperative learning skills.

 

High Leverage Teacher Effectiveness Coach Professional Development

 

–           Time to collaborate with peers; reflect, plan, problem solve, use each other as resources

–           Deep dive into content areas in small differentiated group

–           Cognitive Coaching

–           Information about will/skill possibilities with in teachers

–           Data Team information, especially step A; the data process

–           Facilitative leadership

–           Like the time to problem solve with others; would be helpful for us to have specific time for targeted discussions

–           Support on how to improve my skills on aligning my work to impact student achievement

–           Reflection time

–           Time to collaborate on next steps towards goals; benchmarking progress

–           Time to examine data together

–           Time to problem solve and share successes

–           Continued learning / structured practice in Cognitive Coaching

–           PD/training in building and facilitating groups (Adaptive Schools or Data Driven Dialogue Learning Focused Presenting)

–           Culturally Responsive Training

–           More reflective / planning time with critical friends.

–           Plan collaboratively for PD at my school.

–           Making concrete connections between my systems building, student achievement and data analysis

–           Coaching facilitators

–           A framework for supporting principals

–           Developing a line of communication between Pos, teachers, and Admin.

–           Conversations around principal turnover; passing the torch

–           Tools to work with low will teachers

–           Cultural Responsive Pedagogy

–           Change process and implementation of new initiatives

–           School Leadership Teams (collective efficacy)

–           Principals of Adult Learning and how it can drive schools forward

–           Interplay between admin. and Directors

–           More feedback about our work and more coaching of us in terms of next steps

–           Time to reflect in critical friends

–           Work with the Framework for Effective Teaching

–           Systems thinking – roles/responsibilities; how systems work effectively together

–           Learning labs and Lesson Study

–           Framework

–           Culturally Responsive Training and Coaching

–           Protocols – problem solving

–           Asset building and cross training on differentiated needs

–           Systems thinking; elements necessary for school-wide alignment grounded; facilitation skills to make change happen; book study, action planning on systems

–           Think partners and problem solving with one another; critical friends and protocols

–           Understanding at a deeper level the adult learner and how Cognitive Coaching and coaching cycles can be successful

–           Accountability from principals; defined role in minds of principals

–           Training on school culture and our role in supporting culture, building systematic structures, and focusing on cultural competency on race and equity.

–           Continue to look at great samples of instruction and fine tune our conceptual understanding of how to duplicate those efforts in our schools

–           Differentiated pd based on needs

–           PD based on getting all of us on the same page in terms of the data we’re supposed to collect

–           Time to collaborate

–           Develop common understanding of systems and how to influence change of systems in meaningful ways. How do we measure that change? How do we know if implementation is happening?  How can we reflect upon what is working to make systems more effective?

–           Elementary writing; writing scores are low in our struggling schools

–           Common data tracking for teacher effectiveness using framework and common student data at regular intervals for a clear way to look at growth (pre-, mid-, post)

–           Regular opportunities to reflect on data and make changes to our practice. We can’t wait until now to reflect and systems

–           Differentiated small groups / breakout groups around content and/or process

–           Support, collaborative planning and problem-solving time with other small groups/pairs

–           Continue coaching support PD

–           Working through issues and celebrate successes

–           Culturally responsive PD

–           Culture of responsibility and accountability.

 

Conclusion

 

Block scheduling is a needs-driven, research-based approach to the problem of restructuring the time element in the secondary school paradigm. It is a restructuring that has been successfully implemented in many locations across the country, and indeed, internationally. This change in the time structure of the secondary school has become the springboard for both organizational growth and reexamination of instructional goals. New paradigms in one area of the educational arena call for new paradigms in other areas.

 

Such a move calls for openness to the change process on the part of all concerned, a structure for honest and open dialogue preceding implementation about the pros and cons of the change, and forward-thinking leadership with accompanying organizational support throughout the process. With this type of planning and sustenance, both material and moral, the likelihood that block scheduling will make a difference in student outcomes, and result in professional and organizational growth, is indeed great and more than worth the effort.

 

 

Jeff C. Palmer is a teacher, success coach, trainer, Certified Master of Web Copywriting and founder of https://Ebookschoice.com. Jeff is a prolific writer, Senior Research Associate and Infopreneur having written many eBooks, articles and special reports.

 

Source: https://ebookschoice.com/opportunities-for-students-to-review-curricular-content-and-to-develop-cooperative-learning-skills/

Creative School and Community Leaders Are Discovering That They Need Each Other – ebookschoice.com

Throughout both urban and rural America, school reformers and community builders are beginning to discover each other. Mutual interests and benefits abound. On the one hand, community organizers work to re-situate the school at the center of the community development process. On the other hand, creative school reformers activate community residents and resources as vital partners in the educational enterprise. These two growing movements recognize the powerful advantages of bridge building.

 

The following brief observations are meant to serve as discussion-starters for people who are exploring the school/community bridge. How did schools and communities grow apart?

 

As school reformers and community builders probe new possibilities for creative collaboration, it may be helpful to recall briefly some of the historic factors that contributed to the separation of so many schools from their immediate communities. This short look at the past will provide a basis for understanding some of the challenges and possibilities evident today, and for suggesting a few ideas for strengthening the bridge in the future.

 

The critical social invention of the 21st century should be a social mechanism whose job it is to find and mobilize the gifts of people in the community. This is not just school reform or community organizing, but a revitalization of democratic postulates.

 

Schools and Communities: The Past as Problematic

 

During the later nineteenth and through at least the first half of the twentieth centuries, both urban and rural schools were inextricably linked with the communities that surrounded them. Parents, community residents, employers and educators knew generally what roles were assigned, and what to expect of each other. Schools had important but relatively circumscribed functions as socializing agents and labor-force preparers. Those young people who, for whatever reasons, left school early were absorbed into lower skilled jobs, or into the agricultural work force. For the most part, schools and communities understood each other, and supported each other’s functions and roles.

 

But in almost every city neighborhood — and, for somewhat different reasons, in some smaller towns and rural areas as well — schools and communities have grown apart over the last half century. In fact, in many areas, schools and their local communities now constitute separate, often mutually mistrustful worlds. Understanding at least some of the factors contributing to this divorce is critical if the rift is to be closed. While no one on either side of the divide raised the wall consciously, its construction represents an important, if unintended, consequence of the development of modern schooling.

 

Historically, the rise of professional education and the increasingly professional definition of the school has altered the power relationships between schools and communities. Formerly, some school “outsiders” — employers, political and community leaders, etc. — wielded considerable influence over the school’s personnel and practices. With the development of the professional class and ethos, power shifted significantly. Clearly, decisions were now in the hands of those who were credentialed, and who knew better. This shift in decision-making authority was accelerated and reinforced by the racial and class differences that often divided the professional educator from the immediate community. In many rural communities, severe economic crises and the movement to consolidate smaller schools also contributed to this separation. The establishment of a professionally defined class of educators also meant that the school became increasingly “institutionalized” in the manner of many other modern professions such as medicine, law, etc. This professional institutionalization led, in turn, to an increasing separation from the more voluntary impulses of “community.” This separation of institution from community as “types” is deep and profound. At the risk of overstating and oversimplifying this dualism, and recognizing that the contrasts are never this pure, think for a moment about these “two cultures.”

 

Below are a few of the characteristics that distinguish “institutional” problem-solving techniques from less formal “community” problem-solving techniques.

 

These sketchy comparisons, which obviously exist in real life on a continuum, should serve to highlight some of the reasons that formally organized schools and less structured communities often have difficulty understanding and working with each other. The differences evolved over time, and now represent divergent strengths and weaknesses.

 

A Legacy of Distrust

 

One legacy of these historic developments is the still prevalent tendency of both schools and communities to regard each other, from a distance, with a great deal of distrust. Thus, it is not difficult to find professional educators who characterize communities, including parents and other residents, as ignorant “amateurs,” hardly qualified to contribute systematically to the growth of young people. In addition, the communities outside the school often appear to be unpredictable and messy. Finally, school professionals often experience community activists as expecting far too much from the school, and as appreciating their hard work far too infrequently.

 

This legacy of distrust is, of course, a two-way street. Parents and community leaders often regard the schools within their neighborhood as fortresses that are intimidating and closed to their participation. Even when entry is gained, community residents frequently report encounters with inflexible, bureaucratic procedures that are often reinforced with racially and culturally inappropriate attitudes and responses. These barriers are substantial and powerful obstacles to community participation. When such barriers are stacked upon a parent’s own painful memories of failure in school, they become virtually insurmountable.

 

A Present Filled with Possibilities

 

Given this legacy of mutual distrust, it is particularly noteworthy that the present moment is one in which creative change agents in both school and community settings are probing new possibilities. Put simply, creative school and community leaders are discovering that they need each other. Both worlds face daunting challenges. Only by exploring creative ways to strengthen each other can schools regain their vitality and communities rebuild themselves.

 

What do these promising current experiments look like? The five clusters of activities that are defining new school-community collaborations are:

 

– Services Collaborations: From Individual Programs to Comprehensive Integrated Services. This approach concentrates services for young people in the school setting.

 

– Schools and Community as Educational Partners. In this approach the ties among students’ homes, schools and communities are strengthened through joint activities and programming, often highlighting and celebrating the cultural and racial backgrounds of the families.

 

– Schools and Communities as Partners in Youth Development. These strategies involve a range of community and school-based partners in activities that build the competencies of young people so that they can become ever more effective and knowledgeable actors and citizens.

 

– Schools as Assets for Community and Economic Development. This approach recognized that schools are in fact valuable “treasure chests,” filled with the physical, spatial, financial and human materials out of which stronger local communities and economies can be built.

 

– New Schools/New Governance: Community Redefining Schools. Many of these emerging collaborations inevitably led to restructuring. Solid bureaucratic governance systems are beginning to give way to more democratic and inclusive arrangements at the level of the local school and community.

 

Taken together, these current probes into new school/community relationships provide a substantial launching pad into the future. Schools and communities have entered into a mutually transformational process, and if the creative experimentation continues, both will emerge stronger and more democratic.

 

For the past forty years or so, many of the most effective community builders in urban America have called themselves “community organizers.” Today, an increasing number of these trained change agents are working with schools and school reformers. For that reason alone, it might be useful to recall some of the critical skills that good organizers bring to the community. Clearly, these are not the only skills needed; nor are professional organizers the only people who have them. But perhaps these skills could be utilized even more extensively and effectively to build the school/community partnerships of the future. Among their many skills, good organizers know how to:

 

1. Discover “natural leaders,” people whose stature and skills may not be visible to a broader public, or to school leaders, but who have a respectful following within the community.

 

2. Develop and train leaders, providing tools and experiences that build peoples’ competencies and confidence.

 

3. Interview skillfully, listen attentively, utilizing a set of basic “one on one” interviewing techniques, good organizers establish trusting relationships, uncover what people care most about—their “self-interest” — and what makes them angry. Increasingly, organizers also discover their subject’s skills, capacities and hopes for the future.

 

4. Analyze and decode power relationships, researching and clarifying for citizens how lines of authority work, where responsibility lies, and who has the capacity to act.

 

5. Transform a “problem” into an “issue,” thus making a condition about which people complain into a situation that people can analyze, act upon and change.

 

6. Build “strategic alliances,” strong but often temporary relationships with other organizations whose interests coincide and whose resources can contribute to the success of an action or a campaign.

 

7. Organize and carry out effective “actions” and other public events that dramatize a community’s issues and push forward its larger agenda or campaign.

 

8. Link small “victories” with larger goals and strategies, thus keeping hope alive in the short run and commitment strong for the longer haul.

 

9. Build and sustain an effective organization, one that reflects participants’ interests, remains flexible as contexts change and continues to mobilize and develop local leadership. Evaluate and learn from experience, inviting leaders and other participants to assess virtually every meeting or action, and to look for ways to improve in the future.

 

We identified three areas that needed further analysis and consensus building in order to put exemplary ideas and collaborations into the mainstream:

 

– What indicators/measures are needed to gauge success that go beyond traditional test results? There are powerful interests in the country that already have indicators in place that shape our understanding of measures. We need to have conversations about what they are, how they are used, how they need to be supplemented and how teachers/communities can articulate what they want and how to measure it. We need indicators of “what counts” in community efforts to strengthen the education of young people.

 

– How do you connect and engage communities, parents, students and educators around an understanding of the purpose of school-community collaborations to improve schools and develop communities?

 

– What are the mechanisms and strategies that will ensure that community-based school reform becomes a popular movement with the opportunity to be long-term and sustained and to spread across communities? This begins with conversations, reaching out to people who may not share our thinking. Are foundations ready to support such a movement and can they see this as constituency building, not organizing?

 

Accountability Measures

 

The issue of measuring “the work” cropped up continuously and there was general dissatisfaction with the inadequacy of current measures, especially the total dependence on student test scores. An increase in student achievement is the ultimate goal of reform efforts, the achievement is more than test scores and should include additional ways to assess learning as well as other measures of community and leadership development.

 

Developing indicators for educational progress has a history, while creating indicators for community-based support does not. Some schools and communities are beginning to put the two together in ways that can be measured.

 

Other indicators included:

 

Are schools and communities coming together and having conversations around the needs of children? Is the bureaucracy reorganizing to include communities? Are there changes in teacher practice from passive to active learning? The debate over accountability is one of values. If relationships are of value, it is possible to measure them, even though understanding the outcomes is difficult.

 

Despite the awareness of the need for broader indicators than currently used, we acknowledge that the existing political context gives extraordinary weight to test scores. All of us are using achievement test results because of political pressure, even though the best reason for having indicators is to make mid-course corrections. How do we find a political proxy for what we consider important — a community that is democratic and students who are whole in mind, body and spirit? We need a broad set of measures, a sub-set of outcomes for public consumption and process measures for diverse outcomes.

 

Local conversations about these issues are the way to get people engaged in community-based school reforms. The goals of education belong to the community itself. However, the decisions about schooling and goals for children must be made close to communities, such decisions are not always in the hands of local communities.

 

Creating and Sustaining a Movement

 

Community-based school reform is not anywhere near being a movement at the moment, but action to create it is needed now. This would focus on: developing a language for it that is comfortable for all involved, obtaining foundation support within communities to bring others to the table, and encouraging discussions within and across affinity groups within the foundation community that lead to bigger conversations. The effort also needs to identify who should be connected to a movement — parents, faith communities, educators and key organizations.

 

The movement should begin by organizing working groups that develop plans, present them at future meetings and build on the knowledge base through site visits.

 

School reform currently is not owned by parents and the public but, rather, is more a concern of business and government leaders. A constant theme is that public education is not public.

 

For some, it is sufficient for schools to be paid for by taxpayers and run by an elected board. For most of us, that definition falls far short.

 

It was this perception that urban communities see schools as too isolated while rural communities see schools as being too insulated. In both cases, however, they are both shielded from their constituencies.

 

Many of the successful examples of schools and community working together have found that making student work more public serves to help the community see the value of the school. Unless schools are more public, they will never be successful institutions.

 

Can we learn from each other? Can we work on what it means to lower this wall between school and community? Let’s keep the focus on what is working and why.

 

What is the future we want?

 

This process is a “work in progress” but to begin the process, we identified the next steps. These points fell into three categories:

 

1. The need to develop indicators of success for community-based school reform;

 

2. The ability to access and provide information;

 

3. The need to organize a movement.

 

We need to develop indicators of success:

– Develop success indicators beyond standardized test scores that can measure progress in student achievement and school/community change so that funders, schools and community members all are on the same page.

 

– Create a true paradigm shift to an environment in which parents, students, communities and schools are equally valued.

 

– Be willing to break the mold and challenge the status quo in how schools view communities and vice versa.

 

– Be prepared to explore and consider adopting different definitions of education.

 

We must work on accessing and providing information:

 

– Educate community and school constituents about each other’s goals and strategies through access to the learning opportunities within each sector.

 

– Foundations should share their knowledge of “best practices” research with communities, and communities should share their knowledge of emerging “best practices” with foundations.

 

– Continue to build a knowledge base about what counts in this work of community-based school reform, what evidence exists and what resources are needed to do the work.

 

– Build the capacity of parents to assess the effectiveness of their schools and to work constructively for school improvement.

 

We must work on organizing a movement:

 

– Focus on creating an infrastructure for change where one doesn’t exist and on sustaining them where they do exist.

 

– Bring the educational establishment into the conversation.

 

– Establish a commitment from funders to identify two or three additional foundations that should be informed about the work and a commitment from community organizations to engage two or three other such organizations not currently involved in education reform.

The Future: Strengthening Ties Between Schools and Communities

 

Where might the promising work of the present lead creative educators and community builders? What are the underlying attitudes and jointly held agendas that are now becoming recognizable, and that hold promise for the future?

 

As schools and communities reconnect, leaders in both arenas begin to transform the ways in which each regards the other. School leaders, for example, might begin to think of the entire community as an extension of the classroom, filled with skilled and knowledgeable residents with teaching and learning agendas and capacities of their own. Parents and community residents often represent particularly rich cultural and racial/ethnic resources which are critical for building respect and understanding.

 

School professionals might also develop an appreciation of community organizations and residents as potentially powerful political and economic allies, ready to support the school in its quests for resources and authority. Such a partnership sets the stage for mutually beneficial investments in each others’ futures.

 

Similarly, community leaders have already begun to rethink their conception of “school.” They might develop further the idea of a school as a “treasure chest” filled with riches to invest in community building — available space for community meetings and events; purchasing power to support existing local businesses, or to seed new enterprises; equipment and materials that could be critical resources for neighborhood development; talented adults (teachers) who might be constructively connected to community groups and agendas; and most important, energetic young people, often eager to contribute to community building projects.

 

Out of these new sets of attitudes will surely emerge newly defined, jointly held agendas and priorities. These cooperatively forged efforts will join educational goals with community building and teaching/learning with development. Here, for example, are six critical agendas which schools and communities could address more powerfully together. Each agenda is, in fact, already being explored in both urban and rural contexts.

 

– Schools and communities could strategically address the challenges of economic development, enterprise and job creation. School and community resources could be combined to invest in and rebuild local businesses, and could be linked for market studies and job training. Both students and teachers could be productively connected, as apprentices or trainers, to the world of work.

 

– Schools and communities working together could greatly expand the educational resources and opportunities available to students. Parents and community residents represent rich stores of knowledge and experience, often just waiting to be tapped. Community spaces, both natural and human-made, invite study and understanding. The growing experiences educators are developing with “service learning” reconnect community building work with sound educational objectives.

 

– Schools and communities could cooperatively acknowledge and address racial, ethnic and gender conflicts and tensions. They could work together to confront racism, to empower people of color, and work to build bridges across current divides. Schools might become the center of community celebrations of race and culture.

 

– Schools and communities could invent together new and more powerful forms of local authority to leverage outside resources from, for example, government or the financial sector. With schools as powerful partners, community organizations could significantly expand their already impressive leverage and bargaining capacity.

 

– Schools and communities could create together new institutions and ventures which ensure that local citizens join together to solve problems, e.g., through skills banks, small business incubators, neighborhood technology centers, community forums, community cultural celebrations, etc. Each of these ventures represents enormous potential for realizing both educational and community building goals.

 

– Finally, schools and communities working together could help to restore a meaningful, shared “sense of place.” This rootedness — the feeling that this community is unique, important and belongs to us — is the foundation on which vibrant schools and communities rest. Too often, in both rural and urban America, this sense of place is missing, or much weaker than it was. Clearly, this restoration of a sense of place is already at the center of many school/community agendas. In each of these communities and in scores of others, reclaiming this place as ours links schools and communities in powerful new alliances.

Recognizing the enormous potential for schools and communities to work more powerfully together raises urgent practical questions about both resources and leadership. These six sets of strategies and examples represent an immensely promising start. But to grow these efforts and to build others, visionary educators and creative community builders will have to work together both to free some part of existing resources and to reach funders.

 

And who will lead the inventive organizing processes that will call these still fragile partnerships into ever more powerful activity? Where are the school/community leaders who will focus the partners on each others’ assets and potential contributors? Who will work incessantly to see that racism and classism are exposed and overcome? Who can help convene people across existing barriers, creating new space where educational and community building agendas are melded? Where can we find the leaders who will find new leaders?

 

These leaders will no doubt emerge from very different sources in different communities. Many kinds of skills are needed. In some cases, perhaps, these are challenges for a new kind of school/community organizer, a facilitator/mobilizer who understands both worlds, and whose skills can be directed toward bringing those worlds together in new and powerful ways. Though not the only relevant set of attributes, certainly the core skills of an experienced community organizer will be critical. Beyond those, perhaps, what’s needed most are dreamers and visionaries.

 

 

Jeff C. Palmer is a teacher, success coach, trainer, Certified Master of Web Copywriting and founder of https://Ebookschoice.com. Jeff is a prolific writer, Senior Research Associate and Infopreneur having written many eBooks, articles and special reports.

 

 

Source: https://ebookschoice.com/creative-school-and-community-leaders-are-discovering-that-they-need-each-other/

Healthy Communities Must Have Healthy Schools – ebookschoice.com

Healthy schools and healthy communities depend on and nourish each other. Healthy schools aren’t sustainable if their surrounding communities are in peril. Healthy communities can’t exist for long if they fail to nurture productive, committed, engaged, aware, and resourceful citizens for the future.

 

It is an appropriate way to begin a conversation about bridging two groups with much in common – those who work hard to make schooling much better for children and those who are just as committed to revitalizing communities, especially in our poorest urban and rural areas. These groups need bridges to each other if their hopes and work are to flourish. The deep changes that are needed in schools and communities will not happen until all segments of the community work together and together hold the systems accountable.

 

Despite having the same goal – the well-being of children, families and communities – community-based education reformers and community builders and funders often do not connect. Many community organizations play a crucial role in reforming schools, but is that role well understood and appreciated? Many funders support efforts either for school reform or community renewal, frequently both, but do they realize how much these initiatives need to connect (both within the community and within their own foundations) to be effective and sustaining?

 

What Strong Schools and Strong Communities Share

 

Community renewal and school reform are shared work. Strong schools and strong communities are similar in many essential ways:

 

– They are guided and energized by clear values – core convictions about what every person deserves in a democracy. While “values” can be a loaded term, the concepts at the heart of flourishing schools and communities are those such as equity, excellence, inclusion and respect, all of which are inter-dependent.

 

– Their visions grow out of the values they hold and can be assessed through measurable outcomes. Strong schools and strong communities can answer such questions as: “What is the future we want? How should students, teachers, learning conditions and community conditions be different in 10 years? What is “success” and how will we measure it? What outcomes are “nonnegotiable” for us?

 

– They live by a spirit of accountability to results. Strong schools and communities cultivate a capacity for self-assessment and are able to ask and answer such questions as: “Are people becoming better off because of our efforts? Are we making progress toward our vision? If the results are not acceptable, who and what must change?”

 

– They nurture a spirit of efficacy, a prevailing sense of confidence that human action, however small, can have a positive impact, that people have the power to shape their environment, their choices and their future.

 

Underlying this spirit is a belief in the basic intelligence and capacity of people to prevail in the face of challenges. Strong schools and communities invest in leadership development. They encourage disciplined reflection on the reasons behind successful and unsuccessful change efforts, and they use the lessons learned.

 

– They seek alignment between the values they hold and the actions they take. They use their values to scrutinize institutional attitudes and practices, and they act when there is tension between what they believe and the policies/practices of the institutions around them.

 

– They struggle to bridge the fault lines of race, class, culture and power inequality. They know that divisiveness and development—of people and of communities—cannot coexist.

 

There are two caveats to the effort, however. The results obtained by the initiatives represented here took time to blossom and flourish and too much funding is still short-term in duration and small in scale.

 

Furthermore, the cultivation of trust between schools and communities is the lubricant for sustained change and enduring reform, but it is also often subterranean. Its benefits are seldom immediate and usually are visible only to the faithful. Are funders patient and trusting enough to fund work that produces visible results only after years of effort?

 

Community determined to create a learning environment based on common values:

 

– How do we help funders increase their attention spans? Find out who is setting short deadlines for results. If it is the trustees, appoint ones who take a long-range view.

 

– Can we get a developmental mentality in schools and in communities? People in the schools have to start from the basis of community values but they are tired of being second-rate remediators, they want to be educators and champions of development. Go find examples of where people have come together around developmental goals for children and learn from them.

 

– Can building a bridge start within a school system? There are a few that have started within schools, but they could not be sustained without community support. Also, sometimes it is an issue of power, and sometimes that is so bad that the only thing to do is organize our communities to end the school’s monopoly on power.

 

– How do you reconcile standards and standardization with the desire for community values and a sense of place? Some of the community-building work is deeper and older than the school-reform work. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. We refused to seek waivers from the standards because that would be seen as going the easy way. Just do it. Then do what you want. If you don’t like the standards, try to change the standards.

 

– How does the bridge go two ways, with schools informing communities and the other way around? A bridge implies two camps, so you must keep people working toward the same ends, day in and day out.

 

– How do parents make decisions about what will happen in classrooms? The aim is not to focus on content but to get heavily involved in the program for their kids. A strong parent base will move politicians and give parents a school that the community owns. Parents are able to model the kind of growth and nurturing they wanted for their children in school.

 

– Are there any places that have achieved all the components of the framework? Communities have come closer than schools because they deal with economic and social issues as well. It is easier to talk about equity, for example, on a broader scale, much harder when the issue gets down to the classroom and to specifics. It is important to bring people to the table around values, which is a role foundations can play through incentives and the means to sustain such an effort.

 

What are the Essentials?

 

To obtain better outcomes for students and to strengthen communities – the focus of most reforms – the efforts depended on building strong, trusting relationships between schools and parents and between parents and community advocates. These necessarily came before more traditional, measurable outcomes.

 

Where that has occurred, student achievement is rising, but equally important results are just as visible – more parents are involved in the schools and there are more activities after school for children that are created and directed by teachers and parents together.

 

Student achievement measures are important to parents and the community but what we heard most from both parents and the business community was the need for measures that showed change in the level of respect between the community and the schools. These became the basis of the indicators developed by parents and the community. Similarly, the most significant accomplishment was the transformation of the relationships between teachers and parents. The process made it possible to have people in the community who can organize around issues and use the political system.

 

The Money Factor

 

Sufficient funding is not the most important ingredient for the success of community-based reforms, but it is critical. Money gave us time to have dialogues together during the day, to find networking support, to tap into knowledge. Pointing out that transforming schools and communities is not charity work, funding was needed to provide support, give teachers time to work with communities, and build a culture that will persist through turnovers and other changes. Funding is necessary to strengthen community activism; it gives parents access to professional staff who support them as they develop their leadership skills. More funding is needed to stabilize such support.

 

Finally, community-based reform is exciting and meaningful work, requiring both money and time. It can take 20 years – or two generations – before communities see the results of wholesale change. However, benchmarks could be established along the way. Determining what it takes to be successful, knowing how to establish an ongoing and dynamic effort and developing benchmarks are ways funders and community-based school reformers can chart their progress. Some of the possible benchmarks for success include such things as seeing more parents participating at schools, establishing networks among change-oriented schools and communities, changing teacher preparation, providing greater support for students in and out of school time, and creating systemic changes at district and state levels.

 

Conversation with those who practice community-based school reforms. Generally, the discussions made these points:

 

– Building leadership and constituency must come from the community and schools themselves and be grounded in them. People need opportunities to do leadership.

 

– Organizing for quality and improving student achievement must take standardized test scores into consideration as an indicator but go beyond them to develop ways to measure success in schools and in communities over time.

 

– Going beyond parent involvement means working across schools and communities to create networks and developing an inclusive environment. The goal should be to achieve mutual accessibility between the school and the community.

 

– Building school system capacity and overcoming resistance depend on strong relationships that will last over time and empower constituents. We struggle with the idea of blowing it all up and starting all over again, but we always keep coming back and trying to find an entry into reform because the school system is the only player in equity.

 

– Expanding educational resources will require going beyond standard measures of quality and engaging the community in deciding what the educational experiences for children will be. Parents, once vested in a school, increase the quality of the school. Education and community have to be one thing.

 

– Developing new structures, policies and funding requires recognizing the value of community organizing – and funding it sufficiently.

 

– Making the community the site for “school work” is an important lesson urban communities can learn from rural ones.

 

We asked difficult questions and prioritized the most urgent issues in community-based school reform that need to be addressed.

 

Building Leadership and Constituency

 

– What are the roles of parents and community leaders in leading school reform and community development agendas? How are leaders identified, developed and supported? How is a broad constituency developed to support the work? Why is this important? How do you identify allies and partners and what are their roles?

 

The only way to create real change in education is to capitalize on the self-interests of the community and to build indigenous leadership and self-determination. Leadership exists within schools as well, but in both communities and schools, leaders are vulnerable to being “eaten up.” That’s why efforts to build leadership need to support those who are indigenous to communities and schools—often they have done more and offer more than is assumed. Also, effective leaders understand equity issues, and at the local level that frequently means moral leadership derived from a spiritual base.

 

Parents who are encouraged to become leaders need to have this grounding in community because they have the ability to influence others. Parents need help in various ways when they assume leadership roles in change understanding their rights even if they cannot express them eloquently, or being prepared for the obstacles and barriers they may encounter. Parents also need to know that they are not alone in wanting a better education for their children. Such efforts at building leadership among parents needs dedicated time and resources. These efforts cannot be conducted “on the sly.”

 

Foundations need hands-on experience in learning how leadership works in communities. Instead of putting out a Request for Proposals for leaders, they should hang out in communities and see where the leaders are and learn what support they need.

 

Organizing for Quality and Improving Student Achievement

 

– How can the skills of good organizers be used on specific school/community issues? How do we measure student achievement as a result of relationships between schools and community? Why is organizing an important strategy in low-income areas for engaging the community in schools? What strategies of community/school partnerships are most likely to result in improved student achievement? How can data be used to support the work?

 

Organizing communities to support school reforms takes place along a continuum that builds from people’s immediate needs to more complicated academic achievement issues. The end of the continuum, however, is not test scores. Rather, such traditional measures must be expanded to include other measures of educational achievement and community development. What community-based school reform must construct is a parent/community vision of what it means for a young person to be prepared for continuing education, work and citizenship.

 

Existing definitions also are different for different folks. Affluent parents, for example, demand more than results on standardized tests, but even though there is an “over focus” on test scores in low-income schools, parents in these schools usually favor “doing well” on standardized tests as a fair measure of their students’ success. Use of such data can expand people’s ideas about what is quality, such as exposing the extent of academic tracking. Schools and communities need to collaborate on deciding the markers for student success and realize that these markers change over time.

 

Still, to have a real impact on learning and teaching, schools need a critical mass of organized parents. The development of groups of organized parents also occurs along a continuum that begins small, is sensitive to local needs and builds into informed leadership.

 

Basically, the improvement of student achievement and the assurance of quality schools depend on answering two questions: What are the indicators for student achievement beyond standardized tests? And, what are the conditions that get parents to focus on teaching/learning-success issues and encourage them to take action?

 

Building School System Capacity and Overcoming Resistance

 

– How do you prepare and support schools so they can be effective partners with the community? How do we find and develop the necessary resources of time and capacity to carry out critical reform agendas? How do we motivate resistant systems to reconnect with the community?

 

The education institution’s capacity right now to outlast change agents’ agendas, such as from the community, makes it necessary for reformers to build relationships with each other and with educators that will last over time. The discussion at first focused on barriers – the tendency for outside reform efforts to become marginalized for various reasons. However, the experiences of practitioners in the discussion argued for articulating the benefits of change to those running school systems. They don’t want to fail, either, it was pointed out. That effort needs to be supported by building a political constituency that addresses power issues. We have to be smart about power. You cannot just go into discussions about what is right. You have to get into conversations about what we can bring to the table.

 

However, confrontation is not the best way to create change. Power analysis is not a set up for conflict but, rather, a means of understanding power relationships in schools and knowing how to leverage them. Organizers are learning which levels of the school bureaucracy to focus on, and schools are beginning to learn to include all stakeholders. Change might occur because of competition to the public schools or through legislative mandates, but equally important are patience and long-lasting relationships among leaders.

 

It also is important for funders, reformers and school leaders to admit failures when they occur and learn from them. This can help build relationships. Finally, students should be given a voice in reforms.

 

Expanding Educational Resources

 

– How do we help instructional leaders understand the value of building on students’ experiences, using community expertise as starting places for successful educational achievement? What is required to help school staff and community members rethink their conception of “school”? What are strategies for teaching a real community curriculum?

 

An important outcome is that community people not just engage in conversations, but that the conversation shifts to new ideas that can change the community. Currently, the conversation is constrained by the importance given to standardized tests, which serve political purposes, are based on old paradigms of success and encourage limited teaching focused on the test.

 

When students do their “work” in the community, they draw upon the experience of elders, and the school becomes a venue for saving their experience and wisdom. Similarly, starting conversations between schools and parents must start with recognizing that parents have powerful interests and knowledge that need to be used.

 

States may rely on standardized scores, but students and parents can learn to assess both the problems they face and the solutions. They can learn to become actively involved in the community. As a result of reform efforts that go beyond standardized tests, such as exhibitions and/or portfolios that reflect students’ actual work in their communities, a lot of students’ expectations are raised, as are those of some teachers and a few district superintendents. The value of using alternative assessments needs to be understood by everyone from parents to university professors. Superintendents, for example, often don’t understand that exhibitions demonstrate student knowledge more authentically than standardized tests.

 

The central issue, then, is: there must be mutual accessibility between school and community to develop definitions together and achieve common aspirations. In this endeavor, funders can use their expertise to broker contacts among communities. They also can provide “political space” by influencing policymaking.

 

Developing Policies, New Structures and Funding

 

– What policies and funding at the school, district and state levels should be changed to support the community’s role in schools more effectively? What are strategies for making such policy changes? Should the work of school and community be institutionalized through new structures? If so, what might they be?

 

Again, the issue of unequal power pervades the issues of structures, policies and funding. Unless parents are organized, they will be out-maneuvered. The challenges are to:

 

– Maintain a critical mass of organizers who are training parents, holding public officials accountable and getting results. Qualified talent is needed, but the pay for them is insufficient. Stable, diverse funding streams are necessary to provide parents with the support they need.

 

– Determine the proper role for government. The legislature can provide strategic entry points and a structure for meaningful social change. But we also must have an organized community to take advantage of this structure. Similarly, charter school legislation might strengthen the hand of community organizations, but it also could draw off support for systemwide change.

 

Jeff C. Palmer is a teacher, success coach, trainer, Certified Master of Web Copywriting and founder of https://Ebookschoice.com. Jeff is a prolific writer, Senior Research Associate and Infopreneur having written many eBooks, articles and special reports.

 

Source: https://ebookschoice.com/healthy-communities-must-have-healthy-schools/

Improved Student Learning and Strengthened Communities – ebookschoice.com

The new Project on Education is a collaborative action research project to examine and make a case for the roles and results of community organizing in reforming schools, improving student achievement, and revitalizing communities. We used collaborative inquiry processes to bring parents, community members, educators and students together to examine and reflect on their efforts and has conducted both local and national studies on parent and community participation in school reform.

The audiences for the project include funders and educators, as well as community organizing groups themselves. The project asks what indicates success in education organizing and how is it measured. It also asks what support community organizations need to do the work well.

A set of beliefs shapes the direction of this research effort. The data that is collected is meant to make visible and credible the basis of those beliefs to the funding community and to educators. Overall, the project is grounded in the belief that parents and other community members’ participation in school reform is critical to change schools and to sustain reform.

Another belief is that education organizing contributes to making communities stronger through its dual emphasis on strengthening public institutions and building public leadership. The engagement of parents and community members in school reform requires that the walls between schools and the world outside become more flexible and porous. An assumption is that permeable boundaries ultimately benefit both students and communities. Parents and educators become directly accountable to each other for children’s success in school. When schools value what parents bring, teachers can better engage students in their work.

Community organizing challenges the traditional separation of school, family and community domains. Another benefit is that community organizing redresses social, economic and political inequities with the goal of supporting the educational achievement of all children.

It also serves as a catalyst for reform, reinforcing and sustaining school improvement through active connections between schools and the outside community. Through the processes of community organizing, parents and community members gain skills and power and build networks that strengthen their neighborhoods and their participation in schools. The depth of such reform should be measured, in part, by the extent teachers, administrators, and community leadership work together and sustain dialogue and effective reform activity.

In seeking to identify indicators of success of community organizing, this project documents the work of these groups and identifies evidence that their efforts are making a difference. In looking for indicators, we ask what measures of success are credible to what audiences? Two related questions are what kinds of financial, staffing and other resources are needed; and, what are the indicators of organizing capacity necessary to carry out this work?

This report is based on data from a telephone survey, the second phase of data collection in this project. Prior to selecting sites for the telephone interview, we carried out an inventory of groups doing community organizing around education issues and found over 162 groups doing such work. Out of those groups, we chose to interview by telephone a sample of nineteen, representing variation in terms of key characteristics. We chose five sites from among the telephone interview sample for intensive case studies, and analysis of data from the first round of visits will be presented in a forthcoming report.

The telephone interviews were conducted with executive directors and/or lead organizers of the sample groups. The interview data provide an opportunity to identify the range and breadth of the work going on in the field and a first step in developing indicators and measures of the difference the work of these groups make. Our understanding of the work and of indicators and measures will continue to develop through the five case studies.

The questions asked in the telephone interviews fell into five categories: 1) the issues the groups address and how the issues are determined; 2) the variety of strategies the groups employ for addressing the issues; 3) the support the groups need to carry out their work; 4) what the groups have accomplished and how they measure their success; and 5) the challenges and barriers the groups face. We conducted the interview questions with two groups, slightly revising the survey for the remainder of interviews.

In two sections of this report – the description of the groups and the presentation of indicators – we represent our data and analysis with introductory narrative. Part II describes the sample of telephone interview groups through a series of key variables. Part III presents an inductive analysis of indicators, strategies, data sources and measures derived from the telephone interview data. Part IV presents the major needs the groups. It lays out a beginning framework of indicators of success. Part V offers a brief summation of the major findings.

Part II: Description of Community Organizing Groups

As noted above, the nineteen groups selected for the telephone interview sample came from a database of community organizing groups working on school reform nationwide. The groups are active in urban and rural neighborhoods and areas with a concentration of low-income, often racially, ethnically and linguistically minority families; the schools these populations attend are frequently under-performing schools. The groups use social processes of relationship building among parents and community members in order to identify shared concerns about children’s schooling and take collective action that challenges inequity. Their purpose is to develop a powerful membership base and develop local leadership that can leverage change to improve children’s school experience. The relationship building promoted by community organizing, both within and across communities, schools and school districts is geared toward transformation at individual, community and institutional levels.

The database is not comprehensive of all groups that share these features and ways of working, but is a work in progress. We located the groups through lists provided by funders, organizing networks and personal referrals, Internet and website searches and references in journals and articles. The data on each group was crosschecked directly with the group. In making the selections, we aimed to create a sample that was well distributed regionally and included several rural groups. The target constituencies or membership of the sample groups were to represent racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse populations. The interview groups were also intended to represent the major community organizing traditions.

The groups are distributed across every major U.S. region and include groups in both urban and rural locales. The major community organizing networks are represented as well as independent groups. Two groups have significant university connections. Notably, the interview sample includes a significant number of “mature” groups: Forty-two per cent have been doing community organizing for more than 11 years. Members or constituents of the groups are residents of low-income neighborhoods or areas and include African American, Caribbean, Chicano, Latino, Asian American and white populations. Seventy-four per cent are multi-issue groups. The majority began organizing around other community issues, e.g. affordable housing, homelessness, drugs, and living wage, before engaging with education issues. They reported, however, that they turned to education issues at the insistence of their members, who were concerned about their children’s lack of success in school. A common perception among the groups is that education is the most difficult arena in which to organize for change. Several respondents suggested that the difficulty stems from the mystique of educators’ specialized knowledge. This mystique works to reduce the confidence of community members and parents in their own knowledge and their legitimacy to critique the institution.

With only slight exception, both staffing and funding levels of the groups are relatively small. All but two groups have less than nine on staff including executive directors, grant writers, office support staff and organizers; a typical community organizing group has 2-5 organizers. Forty-seven per cent operate on annual budgets of less than $250,000. Consideration of indicators of success needs to take into account both staffing and budget levels of these groups and what can realistically be accomplished by such small-scale efforts.

Part III: Indicators of the Contribution of Community Organizing to School Reform

The telephone survey data provide the foundation for a framework on “indicators” of the success of community organizing for school reform. It is in these indicator areas that community organizing groups make their particular contributions to school reform. We drew on a number of conversations and readings about developing and using indicators to help organize our information in the format presented here.

Work on indicators is evolving in a variety of domains, particularly in examining neighborhood and education quality and child wellbeing. The neighborhood indicators project specifies several “benchmark” areas of neighborhood quality, and then asks – what measures exist that would provide a way to judge progress in each benchmark area? Here we identify indicator areas associated with the end goals of community organizing for school reform – improved student learning and strengthened neighborhoods and communities. As several of the people we interviewed told us, these two goals are inextricably linked – good schools contribute to strong communities and strong communities support schools to succeed as institutions. Through our analysis, we identified eight indicator areas in which the work of community organizing groups falls – all areas, which have been associated with the improvement of children’s learning and/or strengthened neighborhoods. Some of these areas are familiar language in school reform, but we did not pick them abstractly. These indicator areas best characterize the set of strategies and outcomes the groups in our sample use to judge their own progress towards meeting the goals of improving student outcomes and strengthening communities. The indicator areas are:

1) Equity
2) Accountability to parents and community
3) Positive school climate
4) High quality instruction and curriculum
5) Social capital
6) Tight-knit community school relations
7) Community power
8) High Capacity Organizations

Some of these indicator areas are directly associated in the research literature and in practice with improving student learning, such as high-quality instruction and positive school climate. Others are more directly associated with building strong neighborhoods and communities – such as building local leadership and power and developing high-capacity organizations. There are also some indicator areas that contribute to both student learning and strong neighborhoods and communities directly – equity, social capital, and tight-knit school-community relations, and accountability to parents and community.

Several of these indicator areas are not uniquely the domain of community organizing, but also are on the agendas of state and district level educators and other non-profit organizations. Even where there is overlap, however, community organizing adds a critical dimension. For example, state or district-initiated reform efforts may also aim for improved school climate and instruction, but community organizing efforts customize, support, and add momentum. States and districts may consider equity among their goals, but community organizing contributes persistence in pursuing equity, as well as political momentum. Other indicator areas are more uniquely the focus of community organizing, including social capital, leadership and power, and accountability to parents and community.

While the strategies themselves come from the interviews, the data sources and measures listed do not strictly come from the interview data. We draw on our own knowledge and logic to suggest both how to measure success within the indicator areas and where data might exist. In addition, we should note that groups are at different places developmentally as far as their education work and there is no absolute standard that we can draw or that we mean to imply. The measures have to be considered in light of the number of years a group has been in existence, the size of its staff, and the scale and scope of the group’s work. Defining standards offers another opportunity for participation of the case study groups, as well as the advisory group.

Representing the indicators areas schematically runs the risk of oversimplification of social processes and dynamics. These areas are not discreet, linear, or sequential; in practice, they are overlapping and interactive.

Indicator Area 1: Equity

A common focus of community organizing is addressing the uneven distribution of resources, often a result of long-standing economic and racial segregation. Community organizing groups have documented disparities and seek parity for minority and low-income communities, in terms of funding, staffing, facilities, and program quality.

STRATEGIES

Gaining funding for:
– after school programs, i.e. recreational programs, homework clubs, academic learning centers
– adult education programs, i.e. GED classes, ESL classes
– community annexes and/or parent resource rooms
– renovations and/or new facilities, e.g. playscapes, clean bathrooms
– increased safety measures, i.e. new lighting, additional crossing guards, stop signs, rerouting traffic
– parent participation in classrooms, i.e. paid mentor program
– new schools, small schools, alternative schools, charter schools

Forming partnerships to bring services and expertise into schools:
– post-secondary education institutions that provide adult education classes
– legal aid groups that bring court action, e.g. to limit corporal punishment, to ensure bilingual education programs
– university programs designed to attract minority teachers for urban schools
– school reform groups to bring new ideas/pedagogy into schools, e.g. small schools, placed based curriculum

Invoking new policies to: – curtail the assignment to low-income schools of substitutes, uncredentialed teachers and teachers not teaching in their subject area/at their grade level – reduce class size – eliminate overcrowding – bring minority teachers into urban districts

DATA SOURCES
– school/district policies and budgets, e.g.,
– classroom assignments
– teaching assignments
– grant budgets
– interviews and/or survey of students, parents, administrators and teachers: numbers served, persistence in program, perceptions on effect on homework completion, on making school safe and secure; incidents of problems before and after school
– survey # and nature of school improvements and/or safety measures
– survey # of new schools
– survey # and nature of partnerships
– school district data on classroom size
– survey of distribution of credentialed teachers

MEASURES
– new funds flowing into schools
– #s of adults graduating from GED classes
– increase in parent and teacher perception of homework completion
– # and range of new and/or renovated facilities
– reduced # of traffic accidents, gang incidents, fights in school area
– increased perception of safety in the school area
– equity in distribution of credentialed teachers
– reduction and equity in class size
– reduction and equity in overcrowding
– equity in distribution of funds
– equity in suspensions/expulsions across schools in a district
– availability of courses, 8th grade algebra, languages
– equity efforts are sustained over time

Indicator Area 2: Accountability to Parents and Community

In the current era, accountability is enforced through top down means, from state and city officials through high stakes testing and school (and sometimes student) sanctions and rewards. Community organizing adds a critical dimension to accountability. By making schools responsive to students, parents, and community members – the public they serve, community organizing both broadens the measures and strengthens support for change.

STRATEGIES

Parent and community participating in decision making, e.g.,
– participation in hiring and firing of principals or regional superintendents
– oversight of school budgets Monitoring programs, policies and children’s progress, e.g.,
– citizen review boards, community oversight committees
– parent notification programs, i.e. early warning notices
– “honesty” sessions with teachers, principals and parents around grades and standardized test scores

DATA SOURCES
– school/district policies
– observations of meetings
– interviews with parents, community members, school personnel
– minutes and attendance records of meetings

MEASURES
– institutionalized role of parents in key decision-making bodies in district
– expanded parent perception of roles in the school, i.e.,mentors, committee members
– parents included in professional development
– parents knowledgeable about student/school progress
– increased sense of ownership of local schools by parents and community
– teachers and administrators perceive parents as partners in children’s education
– meetings focus on programs, policies, children’s progress
– parent satisfaction with administrative staff and policies
– representation of community organizing group members on panels, oversight committees, etc.
– Parents see and act on school data
– Strong voter turnout for governing board elections

Indicator Area 3: Positive School Climate

Many of the issues community members identify as important are concrete features of the school environment that affect students’ and parents’ sense of order and safety. These school climate factors determine how comfortable people feel in the school, that is, whether the school is welcoming and open. Facing them often challenges the school to rethink its role in a community.

STRATEGIES
– Parents participating in
– school discipline policy
– classroom mentoring programs, etc.
– Improving safety in and around the school
– additional police and parent patrols
– improved lighting
– improved traffic routes, stop lights and stop signs
– order on buses
– Improving facilities
– Establishing dress code

DATA SOURCES
– survey: perceptions of increased safety measures
– interviews
– observation
– school district budget and policies
– neighborhood crime statistics
– school/district discipline records
– accident reports

MEASURES
– Increased parent, community, student pride in neighborhood schools
– Youth participating in peer mediation
– Reduced # of discipline problems
– Increased parent perception that they are respected and welcome in the school
– Decreased # of accidents
– Decreased # of incidents & violence
– Schools clean and orderly

Indicator Area 4: High quality instruction and curriculum

Instructional change is one of the most difficult areas for community organizing to influence because of the prevailing assumption that only educators understand what goes on inside classrooms. The interview groups targeted instruction in a variety of ways, from making curriculum relevant to urging districts to adopt particular teaching approaches. While improving test scores is an important measure of the impact of improved instruction, these groups also looked for other tangible measures of impact – children’s engagement and greater appreciation of one’s community and culture.

STRATEGIES
– Pushing schools to implement culturally relevant curriculum and teaching
– place based curriculum
– school to career
– bilingual education
– Bringing a focus on reading
– direct instruction
– community and school reading/literacy campaigns
– Facilitating the implementation of rigorous curriculum
– E.g. Young Scientist program
– Promoting teacher and administrator professional development
– teacher “incubators” as part of small schools campaign
– cross school collaboration among principals and teachers
– teacher ed. schools bring new minority teachers into urban district
– Promoting small intimate learning environments
– end consolidation of rural schools into large regional schools
– small schools

SOURCES OF DATA
– new curriculum
– surveys of students’, parents’, and teachers’ perceptions of curriculum relevance and rigor; on improvement in reading; and on strong teacher-student connections.
– standardized tests
– records of teacher attendance and staff turnover
– school/district policies and programs

MEASURES
– increase in student perception that school is “relevant” and that their culture is respected
– improved test scores
– acceptance in magnet programs
– improved teacher attendance
– stability of professional staff (low turnover)
– increase in teacher self-perception as respected professionals; sense of efficacy
– schools use multiple measures to make high stakes decisions for students
– availability of challenging courses
– increased instructional resources, e.g., computers, textbooks, libraries, etc.
– implementation of small schools; class size reduction

Indicator Area 5: Social Capital

Social capital is based on citizens having experience and engaging in practices of democratic participation, building what is often referred to as a strong “civil society.” A growing body of research suggests that strong communities support children’s school achievement.

STRATEGIES
– Promoting personal growth
– parents gain new knowledge and perspectives
– parents become leaders in schools and communities
– Strengthening school and community networks
– development of visible, vocal, knowledgeable parent groups
– stories emerge of parent and community participation in school change
– Building reciprocal and complementary parent/educator relations
– parents and school staff join together for neighborhood walks, campaigns for health clinics in schools, increased safety measures
– joint professional development
– regular parent/teacher interaction around academic issues

DATA SOURCES
– interviews and perception surveys about parents’ sense of efficacy, that trust is developing between parents and school staff, that home/school interactions are focused on academics and achievement
– observations
– stories that record school, parents and community working together

MEASURES
– increase in parent sense of efficacy in multiple domains: family, school, neighborhood
– # vying for Local School Council elections or other school organizational roles
– Attendance at and leadership in neighborhood organizations
– increase in perception of trust between professional educators and parents and community
– funds directed to joint professional development
– higher voter turnout, higher civic participation (e.g., running for local office, membership in associations, running for local boards)
– parents and community members informed about local issues

Indicator Area 6: Tight-knit community school relations

In places where there are tight-knit relations, the school is open to community use and the schools use the community as a resource in both political and educational realms. These efforts build both stronger communities and foundations for children to make the most of school opportunities.

STRATEGIES
– Creating multi-use school buildings
– school used for after-and beforeschool programs
– community health center in the school
– adult community learning centers in schools, i.e. ESL and GED classes
– Positioning the community as a resource
– Community groups work with schools to help gain resources, i.e. new facilities, needed renovations
– Community groups sponsor LSC candidates
– parents and community patrol to ensure safety of area surrounding the school
– Building collaborative relations
– principals, teachers and parents go on neighborhood walks together to identify parent concerns
– parents and teachers participate in professional development together

DATA SOURCES
– observations
– grant proposals
– interviews with parents, community members, and school staff about perceptions of the relationship between schools and community
– enrollment numbers
– survey of perception about the community/ school relationship

MEASURES
– variety and # of community oriented programs
– level of participation in programs
– shift in perception of schools as open to community and parents
– discourse among school professionals and within the community that reflects perception of relations as collaborative, mutual and trusting
– discourse reflects appreciation of community assets

Indicator Area 7: Leadership and Power

Community organizing groups saw the goal of “building power” as basic to their missions. In practice, that means that politicians and school district officials acknowledge the role of parents and communities, especially low-income people and community members of color in decisionmaking about schools and children. They influence how resources are allocated or what programs are adopted.

STRATEGIES
– Drawing political attention to under resourced schools in low-income communities
– Opening decision-making about resource allocation to parents and members of low-income communities
– Forming groups of parents and community representatives that monitor new initiatives
– Transforming school “culture” so that parents, teachers, and administrators are involved with each other in new ways
– Forming partnerships to increase the scale of impact

DATA SOURCES
– Interviews with politicians, district officials, foundations, business community
– Policy
– Participation records of decisionmaking groups and meetings
– Interviews with teachers, principals and other school staff
– Interviews with parents
– Observations of school change teams, school improvement teams, neighborhood walks, etc.

MEASURES
– Community group is acknowledged as a “power” player
– Resources are redirected to low-income schools
– Politicians are responsive to the issues and exert their influence
– School professionals perceive that they are accountable to parents and community
– Parents feel respected in the school

Indicator Area 8: High-Capacity Organizations

Usually working with limited budgets and small staffs, community organizing groups must use their resources well and work smart. They must also develop a solid reputation and track record. Strong community organizations are better able to hold public officials and institutions accountable and sustain initiatives.

STRATEGIES
– Developing and maintaining a staff or organizers treating them as professionals
– Identifying and developing talent in leaders
– Developing a strong membership base
– Forming partnerships with service providing organizations/etc. for legitimacy and expertise
– Cultivating media and political contacts
– Carrying out reflection and research
– Sustaining sufficient levels of funding to staff organizing efforts
– Gaining recognition and acknowledgement for the organization’s work
– Generating enduring stories/histories that tell of the contribution the group/parents are making to changing schools

DATA SOURCES
– Community organizing group documents
– Budgets
– Minutes
– Attendance records
– Media coverage: press, radio, TV
– Interviews with politicians, journalists, school, community and political leaders
– Observations of meetings and events
– Stories

MEASURES
– Consulted or included in policy decision making
– Programs and accomplishments are sustained over time
– Media coverage gives credit to the community organizing group for accomplishments
– Perceptions that the group has strong capacity
– numbers of leaders
– Membership turnout
– Steady or growing funding levels

Part IV: Needs of Community Organizing Groups

The needs of the community organizing groups in our sample generally reflect the challenges of limited budgets and complicated policy contexts. Funding levels for the majority of groups range between $150,000 and $400,000, with a few groups having significantly larger budgets. Those with larger budgets usually were running programs, although in one instance the larger budget was connected to a systemic reform effort where the community organizing was included in the reform plan.

Most of the groups would use additional funding to hire more organizers as a way to work both at greater depth and at a larger scale. One group noted, the most precious resource that we have is organizing talent. A good organizer is going to develop hundreds of grassroots leaders who are going to participate in public life and in changing the systems such as school systems. Additional funding allows us to attract talent and it’s a luxury to be able to go deeper into communities and give them the foundations so that they’re much more long term and self-sufficient.

A group in the mid-west saw the need to hire more organizers in order to be more effective in building leadership and increase their capacity and effectiveness as an organization, Additional staff would enable us to do everything we’re doing, but better. To get more involvement and sustain our leaders. Another organizer would enable us to train more leaders and increase our capacity to continue our work on these issues.

A few of the groups noted that they would like to hire organizers dedicated solely to education work. There is a huge unmet demand for more outreach at the schools. We want organizers dedicated to education in order to develop more parent leaders. We are reaching less than half of what is organizable if we could do more. Groups also talked about the need for staffing besides organizers. Among the roles mentioned was staff to assist in self-assessment, documenting and reflecting on the group’s efforts, support staff, and fundraising staff. A few groups also emphasized organizers’ need for supervision, support and training to be able to carry out their work effectively and maintain momentum.

Most of the groups were funded through a mix of internal and external sources, although a minority was primarily or solely externally funded. Those with mixed funding, however, recognize that internal sources (mostly in the form of dues from members or member institutions augmented by raffles, barbecues and other types of fundraising) would never be sufficient to support them. Reliant on foundation and other external funding as they are, the groups noted the mis-match between typical funding practices and the requirements of their work. For one thing, funding is usually targeted at starting up an initiative or for programs rather than for organizing. Respondents noted that while their groups could get funding to initiate a new campaign, it was difficult to get multi-year funding for the long-term, “follow-up work” that needs to be done. They believed foundations needed to have a greater appreciation of the necessary length of time to develop organizers and to the range of needs of organizing. One group, for example, explained their need for funds to help pay for the costs of transportation for its members.

While some groups were willing to obtain funding for and run programs, most were not. They saw their roles solely as pushing for new programs then holding educators accountable for their implementation, and they pointed to the challenge in framing their work for funders. The challenge is finding funders who will fund organizing in particular. Community organizing groups have to sell a process with outcomes that other institutions achieve.

A number of the groups talked about the need to expand their work in a variety of ways. For some, expansion meant being able to continue an initiative over several years despite the turnover of school administration.

Taking into consideration the time it takes to bring about change in schools and in student achievement, groups felt the need for multi-year funding that appreciates the need to build relationships and leadership over time among parents and community members. Other groups were concerned about how to “position” themselves and their work in the school districts to make a wide impact. While proud of the depth of their work in several district schools, two community organizing group representatives talked about the need to work at the district level or higher in order to have an impact beyond individual schools. One executive director was hopeful about his invitation to sit on a district wide committee, saying it was important to go beyond “modeling this work” if they are to bring about school change “on a meaningful level district wide.” An organizer from another group said, “we are ready now for a concentrated effort. We have the relationships among the upper administrators and district and the depth of relations too, so this could really grow.” Many of the groups saw the need to form partnerships with school officials or other groups in order to gain position, expertise, and/or legitimacy to expand their reach. Issues of staffing, funding, scale, and depth are interrelated for these groups. Several noted that the more organizers, the more leaders who could be identified and trained to take on larger issues.

Part V: Summary and Implications for indicators research

The community organizing groups included in the telephone interview sample represent considerable variation along a number of dimensions – geographical location, context, affiliation, and strategy. We were struck by the generally small staff size of the groups, especially the number of organizers, given the size of their territories and the scale of impact they aim for. All of the groups struggled with how to have wide impact, while achieving depth in their work with schools and parents, and they used different strategies to resolve this tension. The eight indicator areas represent areas in which community organizing groups measure the success of their efforts as they work towards improving schools, student learning and strengthening communities. The task before them is ambitious, especially if taken together and considered in light of the groups’ limited resources and the significant challenges they face. The education context presents particularly daunting challenges to initiating and sustaining change, such as rapid staff turnover, a rigid bureaucratic culture, a volatile political context, and the precariousness of school-community connections. This analysis call attention to considering the level of resources of these groups in proportion to their goals and accomplishments as we refine how to measure their success in influencing school reform and the results for students and communities.

The framework presented here is an attempt to make sense of the stories of community organizing we collected in the telephone survey in light of the particular focus of the project. While the groups worked toward change in each of the eight indicator areas, the particulars of their school and community contexts led them to different emphases and approaches. We found that many of the areas in which these groups work supports school district efforts while adding important dimensions. We are beginning to tease out what are the unique contributions of community organizing to school reform. They make strategic decisions, work on many levels at once, and stimulate citizen education – both political and in terms of skills and experience. All of the groups organize around some or all of indicator areas, but only a few have penetrated to the level of classroom instruction. Our analysis of the first round of case study research will also help us to refine indicator areas, strategies, data sources, and measures.

This framework also will contribute to planning for the fall visits to case study sites. We look forward to further refining our sense of what measures best exemplify each of the indicator areas and the availability and comparability of data across sites. In order to connect these indicator areas more directly with the outcomes of improved student learning and strengthened communities, we will continue to identify research that makes the case for each indicator area, especially as the area is uniquely associated with community organizing.

 

 

Jeff C. Palmer is a teacher, success coach, trainer, Certified Master of Web Copywriting and founder of https://Ebookschoice.com. Jeff is a prolific writer, Senior Research Associate and Infopreneur having written many eBooks, articles and special reports.

 

 

Source: https://ebookschoice.com/improved-student-learning-and-strengthened-communities/

Creating Schools That Are Successful In Teaching And Learning – ebookschoice.com

Nationwide, low-performing schools are high on the agenda of urban school reform leaders. The current focus reverses the neglect that has plagued these schools for years. Many of them are situated in distressed communities that show the results of years of disinvestment, communities where a growing concentration of poverty and its consequences has taken a social and economic toll. These issues spill over into the schools. These schools, nevertheless, must teach all children to high standards of achievement and mastery, with no excuses.

 

Most urban schools are vulnerable to society’s preconceptions or biases regarding race and ethnicity, income, and class. But problems affecting academic achievement are just as likely to begin in the schools. Teachers’ low expectations for student performance, whether out of misplaced sympathy, burn-out or frustration, are self-fulfilling prophecies. Low expectations produce a correspondingly low level of curriculum that is taught in an unengaging manner, that results in low levels of student achievement.

We believe that reciprocal accountability is critical to creating schools that are successful in teaching and learning.

 

Urban schools, and public education in general, have been undergoing fundamental review. Broad and accelerating changes in society are demanding higher standards of performance than ever before from the nation’s public schools. In response, national, state and local leaders are developing academic standards for what children should know and be able to do at specific stages in their education. Almost every state has adopted or is in the final stages of adopting standards, and many states are aligning teacher certification, testing and accountability provisions to the standards. Within this context, school districts across the country have decided to intervene and take an active role in addressing low school performance. The educational interventions are long overdue and welcome, if done well. The high visibility, take-charge leadership of some urban superintendents has a broadly beneficial result of increasing public confidence in urban public education. It is important, however, to explore these interventions to see if they result in serious improvement in teaching and learning in schools. It would be unfortunate if the only results were slightly improved standardized test scores that provided a positive “spin” for political leaders.

 

As school districts across the country began aggressive interventions in low-performing schools, we decided to examine these interventions and, at the other end of the spectrum, initiatives that recognize school success. This report describes, analyzes and draws lessons and recommendations from the current interventions, which are primarily district-led. Our examination also provides an entry point into an inquiry into reciprocal accountability—strategies and systems where responsibility is shared among schools, communities, school districts, and the state. We believe that reciprocal accountability is critical to creating schools that are successful in teaching and learning. Thus, we are interested in whether, and how, current interventions can lead in the long run to practices where each stakeholder in the school system has a strong role to play and carries out his or her functions interdependently. The information and analyses in this report have been drawn from dozens of interviews; reviews of district documents and the literature on interventions in low-performing schools; and meetings and discussions among a wide range of participants from central offices, schools, and communities.

 

This collaborative approach has helped to shape the writing of this document.

 

PRINCIPLES OF ACCOUNTABILITY

 

Educational policymakers discuss accountability by asking: “Who is or should be accountable to whom? For what? How should the “what” be measured and assessed? What happens as a result?” Our response to these questions is that genuine systems of educational accountability promote high levels of achievement for all students. We believe that real accountability is schoolbased and includes strong roles for parents and community. Accountability pertains to all aspects of school life—school autonomy, standards, curriculum, instruction, professional development, assessment, schools organized as learning communities, school budgeting and school size.

 

Over the past five years, educators and community leaders have worked to develop principles that undergird a good, reciprocal system of accountability. They are organized under three goals: equity, reciprocity, and comprehensiveness and coherence.

 

Equity: All children—regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, economic circumstance, disability, and English language proficiency— receive the education they require in order to achieve to high academic standards.

 

Reciprocity: Principals, teachers, parents, students, community members, central office administrators, and the state share roles and responsibilities for student achievement. Each institutional level has full authority to carry out its roles and responsibilities. Parents, students, and community members are recognized as essential partners and accorded full respect.

 

Comprehensiveness and Coherence: Students learn in different ways and bring different strengths and cultural assets to the school. Thus, the school community organizes many resources and strategies to support the variety of ways in which students learn.

 

An ideal system of accountability would result in the achievement of these goals.

 

Our study focused on three major areas:

 

– What indicators are used to judge school success or failure? Are data disaggregated to reveal gaps in student achievement? Are the measures onetime snapshots or do they represent school trends over time?

 

– What processes do school districts employ to engage the schools, parents and community in supporting improvement? Are the processes leading to stronger school-based authority and responsibility? To reciprocal accountability?

 

– What are the key characteristics of the interventions’ implementation? Do successful schools share their experiences with less successful schools? Are the interventions isolated or part of a larger, systemwide reform initiative? What funds and assistance are provided?

 

Ultimately, we wanted to know whether the interventions are quick political fixes or serious commitments to education, whether the actions being taken are likely to result in sustained and sustainable school improvement and whether they advance the cause of reciprocal accountability so that continuous school improvement becomes the norm.

 

INTERVENTION ISSUES AND ANALYSIS

 

Our examination of district and state interventions surfaced issues that were common across cities. In light of these issues, we posed the question to ourselves: “What would an intervention in a low performing school look like if it were meeting a standard of excellence?” Thus, to undergird our assessment of the initiatives, we developed a set of intervention standards that address indicators, process, and implementation. We then assessed the interventions in light of these standards.

 

The standard: Multiple indicators from multiple sources, reviewed over time, measure the success of teaching and learning and allow schools to evaluate their own performance and compare their performance with peer schools, the district as a whole, and schools in similar districts.

 

Key issue: There is an over-reliance on standardized test scores for measuring school and student performance.

 

Standardized test scores are carrying inordinate weight.

 

Rather than using a broader set of indicators of school performance over time, central administrations use standardized testing almost exclusively to identify low-performing schools and to measure school improvement. Increasingly, “school success” is being equated with higher test scores.

 

The heavy emphasis by central administrations on increasing standardized test scores is working at cross-purposes with the systemwide goal of teaching all children to high standards.

 

High-stakes standardized testing is diverting attention away from the importance of good instructional practice. Schools that spend months concentrating on test preparation do not have time to implement high standards.

 

The focus on standardized testing is also taking precedence over monitoring and tracking individual student performance.

 

Although each of our cities has recently adopted and begun to implement content standards describing what students should know and be able to do, we found less emphasis on assessing the learning of individual students.

 

Disaggregated data are not being provided to schools to facilitate their responses to achievement gaps associated with race, ethnicity, gender, disability, English language proficiency, and socioeconomic level.

 

Data should drive decisions at the school level, but we found little evidence of data being used to tailor solutions aimed at improving instruction for particular students or groups of students.

 

The standard: The intervention process is fair, mutually respectful, and public. It engages all stakeholders—principals, teachers, parents, students, community members, unions, site councils, and central office and state administrators.

 

Key issue: A low priority is placed on shaping relationships among stakeholders and on building ownership to improve student achievement at the school level.

 

Central administrations are exercising energetic and determined leadership to intervene in low-performing schools but are alienating school-level personnel with their tactics.

 

Driven by a strong commitment to improve student achievement and by mounting public intolerance of failing schools, central office leaders are using high visibility tactics in high stakes interventions. Their bold, decisive actions, which heavily involve the media, successfully communicate a sense of urgency and, thus, gain a measure of public support. These same actions, however, also are breeding misunderstanding, fear, cynicism, and mistrust among the school constituencies who must be involved in the work to make significant student achievement improvements.

 

Central administrations are stifling school-initiated accountability.

 

On the one hand, school districts and state agencies must set clear policies, develop sufficient structure, provide appropriate resources and oversight, and implement real consequences for low-performing schools that do not improve within prescribed time frames. It is equally important, however, to recognize that to achieve genuine accountability, school districts and state agencies must increase or preserve autonomy and enhance flexibility at the school level (including both budgets and programs) so that schools can actively engage in their own achievement of districtwide standards.

 

The interventions have not only been “top down,” they have been “inside.”

 

Generally, parents, community members, and school site councils have been on the sidelines of school change. Unions have slowly begun to participate as calls for school-level accountability have increased. Clear intervention roles have not been defined, nor have the requisite resources been made available for meaningful engagement. New patterns of participation among all stakeholders, focused on school quality, must emerge if there is going to be positive and sustained school change.

 

The standard: The intervention is undertaken in a manner that builds capacity at the local school level to strengthen teaching and learning and results in significant improvement in achievement for all students.

 

Key issue: Major investment is needed to build local school capacity to improve teaching and learning.

 

Although additional sums are being allocated, the investment in professional development at the school level remains woefully inadequate.

 

In general, the interventions have brought three sources of support to schools: new central office structures, extra funds, and external help. The latter two elements, however, have varied tremendously. School districts and state agencies are reluctant to publicly address the scope and cost of the support that must be provided to help schools improve. Current actions follow years of fragmented activity or inattention to improving teachers’ and principals’ knowledge and skills.

 

We found little evidence that the interventions were organized around a research base of successful instructional practices or around connections to successful models of interventions in low-performing schools. Moreover, the interventions varied in terms of whether they were implemented as a strategy encompassed in a comprehensive systemwide effort or as an isolated, non-systemic initiative.

 

At the end of “round one” of school interventions, political considerations and timelines are taking precedence over educational requirements.

 

There is considerable distance between the stated goals of the interventions and the reality of the supports and measures in place to improve low performing schools.

 

IMPROVING DISTRICT-LED INTERVENTIONS

 

There are essential roles that school districts can and must play to ensure school-level success. Only top leadership in the school district can send a systemwide message on equity—that low performance will no longer be tolerated in any school or with any group of students. Only central office leaders can adopt districtwide standards and hold all schools accountable for meeting these standards. The district negotiates and agrees to contracts with all employees’ agreements that are critical for planning and implementing effective interventions and school improvement strategies. Only school districts can reconstitute a school, removing or replacing all staff—an action that is sometimes necessary to break a culture of failure at a school.

 

It is school districts and school boards that must ensure that all schools have the support and the authority they need to transform practice. Only the school board can review, revise, or eliminate district policies that contribute to poor school performance—policies governing principal, teacher, and student assignments; teacher hiring; budget authority; and data collection and dissemination. The district must make certain that every school has adequate funding and that resources are distributed equitably. The school district can most effectively send a consistent message to the public about the importance of all students achieving to high standards. And the superintendent can lead the effort to build a broad base of public support for the investment necessary to improve low-performing schools.

 

If, however, one was designing an ideal system of intervening in low-performing schools—a system that had as its goal significant improvement in teaching and learning—central office interventions would not be the starting point. They would be an important last resort, after careful investment in other approaches. School districts can catalyze action, but they cannot improve educational practice. That work must happen at the school, with active parent and community participation.

 

The very nature of a large organization works against the carefully tailored, school-based work that serious educational change requires. By and large, central administrations as primary actors have tended to use generalized and one-size-fits all reform programs or approaches rather than a particular approach that is designed for a specific school and that draws on its strengths. While schools may have had years of low performance, most interventions expect schools to make major gains in very short periods of time. We agree that the work is urgent—students’ futures are at stake. But if serious educational change is desired, it will not occur in one school year. The initiatives have resulted in some test score gains, but that is not the same as improved schools.

 

When examined against standards for an effective intervention aimed at better teaching and learning, these initiatives fall far short. We offer the following recommendations for improving district-led interventions.

 

Develop multiple indicators of school performance and review them over time.

 

Any high stakes intervention should be based on a series of indicators of school and student performance, the trends of which are reviewed over time. These indicators should include—but not be limited to—scores on standardized tests that have been aligned to a district’s standards; other methods of assessing student performance (direct teacher observation, teacher-designed tests, student portfolios, exhibits, and so on); student attendance; student suspension/expulsion rates; dropout and mobility rates; course offerings; numbers of students taking college preparation courses; success at the next level; graduation rates; teacher attendance; level of teacher education and percentage of teachers who are teaching in their areas of certification; and measures of parental engagement.

 

Disaggregate data for every school by race, ethnicity, gender, primary language, socioeconomic status, and disabilities.

 

In order to thoughtfully judge school and student performance, data needs to be differentiated so that the parts, as well as the whole, are visible. Various groups of students at a school may be performing very differently. In fact, increasing a school’s average test scores may mask the failure rates among some students.

 

Use disaggregated data to close the performance gap among students.

 

Improving performance in low-performing schools must include all students, especially those scoring in the lowest quartiles on standardized tests and doing least well on other measures. Improving performance for all students will require close attention to disaggregated data. Tailor specific strategies for different students to ensure their progress.

 

Make the use of data the norm for school improvement planning and decision-making.

 

Parents, site councils, community leaders, teachers, and principals should be sophisticated data users. This will allow them to make wise judgments about school progress and share in planning and implementing strategies for improvement. Achieving this, however, will require that data be organized and user-friendly. Central administrators, principals and teachers, site council members, parents, and community leaders need to work together to identify which data are needed, how they will be prepared, and when they will be made available to schools. Data review and reflection should be built into the regular school schedule, and there also must be time allowed for public discussion of the data. Then, the information that is acquired through data can be incorporated into the school improvement plan.

 

Work with schools to develop multiple, alternative methods of assessing student progress; work to make those assessment methods educationally credible and publicly understood and accepted.

 

Standardized, norm-referenced test scores carry enormous political weight. Although they were designed for narrow purposes and do not measure student progress over time, they are, in fact, widely used for many purposes, including high stakes decision-making. At the same time, educators and community leaders are developing new educational methods of assessing student work that are not standardized. Student portfolios and public demonstrations of student mastery are only two of many examples. These approaches need to be fully developed and shared across sites. Once these measures have become sound and reliable, education and community leaders will need to create and implement careful strategies to enhance these assessments’ political and educational acceptance.

 

Help schools develop a process for regular self-diagnosis.

 

In order to help schools take responsibility for their own improvement—before a district intervenes— schools, districts, and states should work together to develop and implement a regular process for school self-study and planning. When this kind of rigorous self-diagnosis exposes problems and issues, schools and the district should design and agree on the type of assistance and support that will be available.

 

Notify and interview schools identified for intervention before there is a public announcement.

 

In some cities, a punitive climate was created because school staff, students, and parents first learned about the impending intervention when they saw their school named in the newspaper. This is not a good way to begin the partnership that will be required if schools are to improve. Before schools are identified for intervention, they should be notified and given a chance to discuss the data on their performance. Before the public is notified, schools should have time to inform teachers and parents and begin to enlist them in an improvement process.

 

Engage principals and teachers.

 

In the relatively small number of reconstituted schools, teachers and principals are removed from their jobs and have to reapply if they wish to return to that school. In most low-performing schools involved in interventions, however, the same principal and teachers will remain at the school and will be the primary leaders of the improvement. School district administrators, therefore, must walk a line between directives and encouragement, between tough love and support, between no excuses and respect, and between central office dictates and local diagnosis and action.

 

Enlist school site councils, parents, and community members as major allies in the intervention and improvement process.

 

Most of the interventions to date have been “insider” operations, with little attention to, or support for, the critical role that parents, site councils, and other members of the school community can and should play. Parent and community participation occurs most effectively at the school level, but the central administration has an important role to fulfill in encouraging and promoting this participation. Make data publicly available, create improvement plans that involve strong roles for these leaders, and enlist the community resources to which they have access.

 

Adopt a timeline for improvement that communicates both urgency and the time needed to make substantial educational improvements.

 

Some of the interventions have signaled their superficiality by demanding major changes in a few months. But serious school change takes time. If interventions are comprehensive and use a coherent instructional improvement framework, they will, by necessity, require more than one year to implement. Improvements should be measurable every year, but a serious and sustainable turnaround of a low-performing school is a multiyear effort.

 

Make a major investment in supporting the professional growth of teachers and principals.

 

Teaching all children to high standards and expecting high levels of achievement for all students requires excellent teaching by all teachers. Although teaching transformation should be viewed as the single most important intervention in improving low-performing schools, it has not been a focus. The work required to transform teaching should be school-based and employ multiple strategies within and across schools. To be done well, transforming teaching practices requires both a significant infusion of new funds and a redeployment of current funds.

 

Provide high-quality external help that has a “track record” of improving low-performing schools.

 

Low-performing schools need help to change what is often a culture of failure. That help should be substantive, sustained, and of proven quality. It can be provided by an educational organization, colleges and universities, a successful school, or a community group—whoever the entities are, they should be able to demonstrate their successful results in other, similar circumstances. School communities should play a leading role in designing the help needed and in choosing among potential support providers.

 

Engage successful schools as mentors for their low-performing peers.

 

Schools that have succeeded in educating students well in urban communities are essential sources of help to their less successful peers. In most urban school districts, however, there is no culture of cross-school exchange and support. Such a culture is needed in order to tap the peer-to-peer mentoring that could provide one of the most productive sources of support.

 

Revise or eliminate school district policies that contribute to low performance.

 

Just as they demand improvements at the school level, school districts have important work to do to put their own houses in order. Working with principals, site councils, teachers, and parents, they must make a commitment to identify and then revise (or eliminate) their own policies and practices that stymie school improvement. Policies that might need change include, but are not limited to, teacher hiring and assignment, principal tenure, student assignment, resource allocation, and data preparation and reporting.

 

TOWARD RECIPROCAL ACCOUNTABILITY

 

We propose moving beyond the current interventions to a system of reciprocal accountability—a school-centered approach focused on success for all students. An equitable, comprehensive, and reciprocal system of accountability requires all participants to take active roles, in contrast to having a system imposed by the central office or the state. It strives for intrinsic accountability in which members of the school community— teachers, principals, site council members, parents, and students—are the primary designers, with strong support from the central office and the state. Reciprocal accountability means that everyone accepts responsibility for results.

 

Reciprocal accountability assumes high expectations, assessment, continuous improvement, and mutually supportive relationships among all those who play a role in education, both inside and outside the system. In a reciprocal system, all participants actively work to ensure that all students experience success in school. Authority and responsibility are clearly located at the school, with strong support provided by the school district and the state.

 

Implicit in both our critique and the approach we advocate are many unanswered questions— questions that represent discussions to be had and work to be done. A few of them follow.

 

1. What is needed at all levels to close the systemwide achievement gap?

 

2. In a system of reciprocal accountability, what steps are necessary to ensure that issues of equity do not get separated from issues of excellence?

 

3. To what extent should teachers and principals be held accountable for student performance? What supports and consequences are appropriate for teachers whose classes are consistently low-performing? What role can unions play in ensuring that teachers who should no longer be teaching find other jobs?

 

4. In what ways can we hold central office and state administrators accountable for student performance? Is it possible to raise the standards of achievement for students without financial investment in opportunities to learn to high standards? Should schools be held accountable if the state and district have failed to invest in implementing standards well?

 

5. Who initiates standards in a system of reciprocal accountability? The school? The district? The state? How do we ensure that parents and community members are active participants in discussions of standards and the resources needed to implement them?

 

6. Can we avoid the “blame syndrome” for parents and communities and move to solutions that include support, respectful partnerships, and fair accountability?

 

7. Are we willing to provide the needed time, resources, and rigor to make substantive improvement in schools and school districts? How long is long enough?

 

8. What constitutes meaningful progress? For parents? Schools? Districts? How can progress over time be demonstrated? What methods should be devised to compare progress across schools when alternative forms of assessment are used?

 

9. How should political pressures for prompt action be honored? How can a school district or a school honestly report low performance and limited progress in a politically charged environment?

 

10. If schools need autonomy and authority to be accountable, what steps should precede district-led interventions? Can interventions be designed to increase autonomy?

 

11. In a system of reciprocal accountability, how do we ensure rigor and high expectations at all levels of the educational system? What happens when schools and districts disagree? When parents and educators disagree?

 

12. Will reciprocal accountability improve public confidence in public schools? Will it increase the public will to provide adequate resources and support?

 

NEXT STEPS

 

The work on educational interventions is new in every city. Administrators charged with the responsibility of designing and implementing those interventions have already begun to seek ways to improve their current initiatives. Closing the gap in student performance across schools must be part of this improvement. The work required to close the gap among all students (with no exceptions) makes it essential to develop a broader policy of reciprocal accountability among schools, parents and community members, school districts, and state education departments.

 

There are, as yet, only a limited number of good models of strong support across system levels— ample state support for standards-based reform; district support for curriculum redesign; school based professional development and support for multiple, shared instructional strategies that give teachers many ways to teach; school time for reflection and data-based school improvement planning that places student work at its center; leadership development for parents and community members; and a strong investment in capacity building across the system levels.

 

Still, practices are in place that reflect some elements of the system we advocate. Building these practices into an equitable, comprehensive, and reciprocal system of accountability requires thoughtful leaders who can integrate the elements into a strong whole. When we hold urban schools accountable for teaching all students to high standards, it is not just an academic exercise; it is an educational and civic imperative. We believe that shared accountability at all levels holds the greatest promise for school and student success.

 

Jeff C. Palmer is a teacher, success coach, trainer, Certified Master of Web Copywriting and founder of https://Ebookschoice.com. Jeff is a prolific writer, Senior Research Associate and Infopreneur having written many eBooks, articles and special reports.

 

Source: https://ebookschoice.com/creating-schools-that-are-successful-in-teaching-and-learning/

The Urgent Need For School-based Primary Prevention Programs – ebookschoice.com

The prevalence of American youth who engage in antisocial and health-damaging behaviors is unacceptably high.  24% of American 10 to 17 year olds engage in multiple, interrelated social and health risk behaviors, such as delinquency and substance use.  An additional 26% experiment with some risk behaviors.  Such widespread involvement jeopardizes the development of young people who participate in such activities, and often negatively affects their peers, family members, and community.

 

Societal changes-such as dramatic alterations in family structures and stability, reduced amounts of support and guidance for young people by responsible adults, and changing demographics resulting in larger numbers of economically disadvantaged children entering school-increase the likelihood that children will behave in antisocial ways, both in and out of school.  These problems are especially pronounced for young urban adolescents.  Urban young people encounter a diverse array of health-damaging environmental stressors while growing up in economically disadvantaged communities.  In addition, rapid bodily changes, cognitive maturation, and increased social pressures can profoundly influence, and in some instances, disrupt the psychological functioning of young adolescents.  Furthermore, the transition from self-contained elementary-school classrooms to the less structured middle-school culture often introduces new problems and concerns to compound those connected with growing up.

 

Difficult societal conditions and the high prevalence of problem behavior among our young people have prompted numerous calls for school-based, primary prevention efforts to address young adolescents’ social and health needs.  Clearly, the educational system offers the most efficient and systematic means available to enhance the positive development of large numbers of young people.  In spite of a growing consensus regarding the urgent need for school-based primary prevention programs, there is less agreement about what constitutes the most appropriate prevention strategies or the extent to which such prevention programs have been effective.

 

To improve the quality of future school-based preventive interventions, researchers must evaluate well-conceptualized programs that are implemented with fidelity.  Program conceptualization involves explicitly articulating the intermediate and distal outcomes a program intends to achieve, the intervention methods that will accomplish these objectives, and the models of behavioral change that guide the development of intervention strategies and practices.  However, regardless of how well-conceptualized a program is, its potential for positive impact is lessened when program implementers have inadequate resources or time for effective program delivery; are poorly trained or supervised; or lack the skills or motivation to provide competent instruction.  Well-conceptualized prevention programs that are implemented with low integrity may appear ineffective when, in fact, they could be beneficial.  Unfortunately, few investigators who conduct program-outcome research also assess the quality of program implementation or examine relationships between such process variables and the behavioral outcomes of program participants.

 

The present study assesses the effects of a school-based social competence promotion (SCP) program designed to prevent antisocial behavior in a sample of young urban adolescents. The goal of SCP training is to enhance young people’s capacities to coordinate interrelated cognitive, affective, and behavioral skills so they effectively handle developmentally relevant social tasks.  Based on research and theory identifying factors related to aggressive, antisocial behavior, our SCP intervention attempts to: (a) teach students impulse-control, social-information-processing, and behavioral social skills, (b) foster pro-social attitudes, and (c) create environmental supports to encourage and reinforce the adaptive, real-life application of skills and values.  Because aggression and peer rejection are two central high-risk predictors of future conduct problems and delinquency, the intervention emphasized social-cognitive skills and attitudes that reduce impulsive or aggressive behavior and promote social acceptance, such as:  identifying, labeling, and controlling emotions; encoding relevant environmental cues; accurately interpreting the intentions of social partners; establishing pro-social, adaptive goals; generating effective, cooperative, non-aggressive solutions; realistically anticipating consequences; enacting social behaviors effectively; monitoring the effects of behaviors on others; and overcoming obstacles.

 

A growing literature suggests that family-based and small-group SCP treatment programs, which emphasize social-cognitive and behavioral skills training, can improve the skills, attitudes, and behaviors of antisocial children and youth.  Similarly, classroom-based, primary prevention SCP programs for preschool and elementary-school children have enhanced students’ problem-solving skills, social relationships, and behavioral adjustment.  Although some studies document the potential efficacy of SCP training approaches, few studies have tested whether classroom-based, teacher-taught, preventive SCP programs can promote adaptive functioning and reduce aggressive, antisocial behavior in urban adolescents.  The complex, multiple challenges of successfully implementing and evaluating innovative programs in urban middle schools may limit the number of investigators who conduct such research.

 

In the present study we assessed the effects of a classroom-based, preventive SCP program on the skills, attitudes, and behaviors of urban, young adolescent, middle-school students.  Second, different sets of teachers rated the school-based behavioral changes of program students both in and out of the classrooms in which SCP instruction took place.  This evaluation strategy enabled us to determine if the behavioral improvements of program students generalized beyond the training setting.  Third, we examined the quality of program implementation and the relationship of program implementation to student behavioral outcomes.  We hypothesized that program students would improve more than controls in social-cognitive problem-solving skills, pro-social attitudes, social acceptance, and behavioral conduct.  We also predicted that most teachers would carry out the program effectively, and that students from classes with higher quality implementation would benefit more from training.

 

Participants included 421 fifth through eighth-grade students from 11 program (n = 238) and 9 control (n = 183) classes in four urban, multiethnic schools.  Teachers sent consent forms home with 447 students before pre-assessment, and parents withheld permission for 26 students (5.8% of the sample).  Approximately equal numbers of males (210) and females (211) participated.  The final sample of students from low- and middle-income families consisted of 178 Whites, 167 Blacks, 72 Hispanics, and 4 students of other ethnic origins. Analyses revealed that the program and control groups did not differ with respect to grade level, gender, or race.

 

Following approval from the Superintendent of Schools, Board of Education, Director of Research and Special Programs, and building principals, we described the program and evaluation to teachers at four middle schools.  Once teachers volunteered to participate, we assigned classes to program and control conditions based on scheduling and comparability of academic-ability grouping levels across conditions.  Analysis of group differences indicated that program and control students were comparable with respect to academic achievement levels as measured by the Tests of Basic Skills.  Participating teachers were compensated with stipends drawn from the school system’s in-service training budget.

 

The SCP training program.  The traffic light links an image that children are already familiar with to the skills and concepts involved in solving problems.  The red light (step 1) emphasizes impulse-control and stress-management skills.  Children identify common stresses in their lives and learn ways to inhibit impulsive, aggressive responses to stressful situations by stopping to calm down and think about the best ways to cope with them.  The yellow light (steps 2 to 5) symbolizes thinking about the problem, and teaches multiple skills involved in effective problem solving and responsible decision making.  Students learn an expanded feeling-word vocabulary; to identify problem situations and associated feelings; to establish positive, prosocial goals; to generate alternative solutions; to seek input or support from peers and adults when they have difficulty thinking of solutions; to anticipate realistically the effects their actions may have improve problem situations.  The green light (step 6) focuses on successfully enacting solutions.  Since even the best of solutions may fail if poorly executed, students learn planning, communication, and behavioral social skills, such as using appropriate timing, speaking with a friendly or respectful tone of voice, and monitoring the effects of their actions on others.  Throughout the program, teachers emphasize the benefits of behaving cooperatively in most situations rather than passively or aggressively.

 

During the first half of the program, students learn the six steps and master problem-solving skills and concepts through discussing and role playing common interpersonal problems for young adolescents, such as coping with physical and verbal provocation by peers, meeting new peers, handling social pressures to take risks, and resolving conflicts with parents, siblings, or teachers.  During the program’s second half, students apply the framework to the real-life, daily situations they experience.  The six-step process provides a helpful structure to guide students and teachers in addressing problems more thoughtfully.  The lessons help students and teachers develop a common language and framework that fosters clearer communication about problems that arise.  Teachers learn to model the application of the six-step framework for students, and to “dialogue” with students as problems arise.  Dialoguing involves asking students leading questions that guide them through the six-step framework to produce effective solutions to their problems.  Dialoguing enhances the internalization, generalization, and maintenance of the SCP skills by helping students practice to calm down and reflect about problems rather than responding in antisocial ways, and to remain persistent in adaptive problem-solving when a first solution attempt fails.

 

Program implementation and teacher training.  Classroom teachers and undergraduate aides co-taught sixteen 45-minute classroom sessions.  They taught lessons once or twice per week, depending on school scheduling, over the course of a 12-week period.  Direct instruction, role plays, class and small group discussions of problems, and cooperative learning activities were the primary methods used to convey program concepts.  Parents were also involved in the program through cooperative homework assignments.  These assignments encouraged parent-child discussions of common adolescent problems and the steps leading to their successful resolution.  After the 16 sessions, teachers conducted brief weekly classroom activities and dialogued regularly with students to support the continued application of adaptive problem solving.

 

The two co-authors and an experienced teacher, who taught the program during the previous school year, trained the teachers and undergraduate aides.  The training included ten 90-minute workshops that started before program implementation and continued throughout the 16-session intervention.  At the start of each training meeting, teachers shared vignettes about program successes and discussed strategies for handling program difficulties.  Then upcoming lessons were discussed, modeled by the trainers, and role played by the teachers and aides.  Program staff provided on-site consultation and coaching during classroom lessons.  After the 16-session program ended, three monthly, 2-hour teacher-training meetings focused on ways that teachers could support their students’ continued application of SCP skills.

 

A multi-method, multi-rater assessment approach assessed change on 28 dependent variables.  Three instruments yielded 16 measures of students’ (a) problem-solving skills, (b) attitudes about conflict resolution, and (c) self-reported assertiveness in response to hypothetical situations.  Teacher, peer, and self-report measures produced 12 convergent assessments of students’ behavioral adjustment for two separate constructs:  social acceptance, or the extent to which peers like a student; and behavioral conduct, or the degree to which individuals engage in impulsive, aggressive, or delinquent acts.  Finally, two observers independently rated the quality of program implementation in each classroom.

 

Social problem-solving skills.  The Middle-school Alternative Solutions Test (AST) is an individually administered problem-solving measure that assesses the ability to generate alternative solutions to age-relevant, hypothetical peer conflict situations.   Given the curriculum focus on the deterrence of aggressive, antisocial behavior, we selected three problems based on their capacity to provoke aggression, and the staging of circumstances with minimal adult supervision.  The three scenarios include: (a) being picked on by a peer, (b) being bothered by a peer when involved in an important activity, and (c) having a textbook taken by a peer in the library.  Following the presentation of each problem, an interviewer asked students to name only those solutions they would actually do, rather than saying what a hypothetical peer might do or brainstorming all the ideas that one could possibly try.

 

Raters scored alternative solutions for a total of nine quantity and quality variables.  The quantity of solutions represents the number of non-redundant responses generated across the three stories.  The quality of solutions, found to be an important correlate of adjustment, is assessed in three different ways:  (a) effectiveness – the average-rated effectiveness of solutions on a 4-point scale (1 = “very ineffective” to 4 = “very effective”); (b) planfulness – the number of planful solutions (e.g., responses that indicate consideration of timing, interpersonal skill, or step-by-step preparation); and (c) content – the percent of solutions that are aggressive, passive, help-seeking, non-confrontational, assertive, and cooperative.

 

Three raters each scored one-third of the pre and post-interviews.  An additional person independently scored 25% of the interviews, from which inter-rater agreements were established.  Kappa coefficients were .96 for quantity, .94 for effectiveness, .81 for planfulness, and .92 for the content of alternative solutions.  One-week test-retest AST reliabilities for an independent sample of 38 sixth graders yielded Spearman-Brown coefficients of .84 for the quantity of alternative solutions generated, .85 for average effectiveness of solutions, and .86 for the number of planful solutions.

 

Attitudes about conflict-resolution strategies.  The Problem-Solving Attitude Questionnaire was individually administered after the AST.  It assesses beliefs about six different conflict-resolution strategies – i.e., physically aggressive, verbally aggressive, passive, help-seeking, assertive, and cooperative reactions.  Students used a 4-point scale (1 = “not at all” to  4 = “a lot”) to indicate how much they would like to spend time with a peer who used each strategy.  The same three AST problems were used, based on their potential to evoke a range of conflict-resolution strategies including aggressive reactions.  One week test-retest reliabilities for the endorsement of conflict-resolution strategies averaged .84, ranging from .82 for cooperative to .87 for physically aggressive responses.

 

Self-reported assertiveness.  The Children’s Assertive Behavior Scale measures children’s self-reported tendency to respond assertively, passively, or aggressively in a variety of hypothetical situations.  The present study included 13 of 27 items that focused on interpersonal interactions.  Items scores ranged from -2 (most passive response) to 0 (assertive response) to 2 (most aggressive response).  Absolute values of the 13 scores were summed and subtracted from the total possible score of 26, yielding a total assertiveness score ranging from 0 to 26 (high assertiveness).  The Cronbach’s alpha for the 13 items used in the present study was .60.

 

Teacher ratings of social acceptance and behavioral conduct.  On this 6-item Teacher Rating Measure, teachers use a 5-point scale (1=”not at all” to 5=”very well”) to rate how well each item describes a student. Preprogram scores were factor analyzed (principal components analysis) to yield two factors accounting for 72% of the variance.  The first factor, termed behavioral conduct (teacher), consisted of four items (alpha = .85):  impulse control, problem solving, teasing of peers, and academic motivation.  The second factor, termed social acceptance (teacher), consisted of two items (alpha = .66):  popularity among peers and being left out of groups.  For both scales, individual items are reverse-scored as necessary so higher total scores represent better adjustment.

 

Two sets of teachers completed rating scales for each student.  “Primary” teachers taught students in the program or control classrooms.  “Secondary” teachers taught other departmentalized classes that program and control students might attend together (e.g., music or art).  These teachers were unaware of students’ experimental condition.  These two sets of ratings allowed the assessment of behavioral adjustment from more than one perspective and in more than one setting.  In addition, ratings from teachers who were unaware of students’ treatment condition provided a non-biased view of change in students’ school behaviors.  The correlations between the two sets of teachers were .59 (pre) and .66 (post) for the behavioral conduct scale and .22 (pre) and .39 (post) for the social acceptance scale.  These moderate-sized correlations were expected since the teachers based their ratings on observations of students’ behavior in different contexts.  Because of these differences, we report analyses of primary and secondary teacher ratings separately.

 

Peer ratings of social acceptance and behavioral conduct.  The 5-item Peer Rating Scale was adapted from the Class Play Sociometric Scale.  Students rated each same-gender classmate on a 5-point scale (1 = “not at all that way” to 5 = “really that way”) according to how well each item described the classmate.  Factor analysis (principal components analysis, varimax rotation) of preprogram scores yielded two factors, accounting for 76% of the variance, that corresponded to those of the teacher rating scale.  The first factor, behavioral conduct (peer), consisted of two items (alpha = .54):  impulse control and teasing of peers.  The second factor, social acceptance (peer), consisted of three items (alpha = .75):  being liked, leadership among peers, and being left out of groups.  Sociometric scores represent the average ratings given by same-gender classmates.  For both scales, individual items are reverse-scored as necessary so that higher scores represent better adjustment.

 

Self-report ratings of social acceptance and behavioral conduct.  The present study used six scales from two self-report measures.  We included two 6-item scales from the 36-item Self-Perception Profile for Children, which assesses children’s perceptions of personal competence in six separate domains.  The social acceptance scale assesses the ease with which a child makes friends and interacts with others.  The behavioral conduct scale measures the degree to which a child likes the way she/he behaves and avoids getting into trouble.  In the present study, the alpha coefficients were .72 for social acceptance and .61 for behavioral conduct.

 

Two scales from the Student Survey assess students’ involvement with and attachment to their peers.  The 4-item involvement with peers scale (alpha = .68) examines the degree of perceived cooperation and positive feelings among classmates.  The mean of the four items was used as the dependent variable.  The 4-item attachment to peers scale (alpha = .59) measures the extent to which students feel close to pro-social, non-delinquent friends and share their thoughts and feelings with them.  Students used a 5-point scale to show the extent to which they agree or disagree with statements on these scales. In addition, an 8-item scale from the Student Survey assesses students’ involvement in minor delinquent behavior.  Students reported the number of times they engaged in each antisocial act during the past year.  Scores were transformed into a 0 to 4 scale, with 0 = never, 1 = once, 2 = 2 times, 3 = 3 or 4 times, and 4 = 5 or more times.  The items were:  stealing from a locker/desk, stealing from a store, getting sent out of the classroom, starting fights, vandalism, going out at night without permission, skipping school without permission, and getting suspended (alpha = .80).  Finally, three items from the Student Survey asked students to report how often they drank beer or wine, drank hard liquor, or smoked marijuana during the past month (alpha = .81).

 

Assessment of quality of program implementation.  Two evaluators conducted observations of implementation fidelity in each classroom.  They independently rated each teacher’s quality of program implementation on two dimensions:  (a) understanding program concepts and conveying them clearly to students, and (b) modeling program skills and encouraging students to apply them in real-life situations.  The observers used a 5-point scale (1 = “has considerable difficulty” to 5 = “does very well”).  Inter-rater agreement between the two observers was high for both dimensions:  r = .91 for understanding and teaching program concepts, and r = .95 for modeling and encouraging students to use skills.  In the results section, we report analyses that distinguish high implementation quality (a score of 4 or 5 on each dimension) from lower implementation quality.

 

The project’s evaluation component was kept separate from the intervention component to reduce testing bias and potential feelings of disenfranchisement of the control group.  The staff responsible for data collection was distinct from the staff implementing the program.  Supervised undergraduate and graduate students, enrolled in a full-year practicum course, conducted pre and post-program assessments.  Evaluators were blind to treatment conditions and tested children randomly across the two conditions.

 

Before the administration of group and individual interviews, evaluators reminded students that participation was voluntary and that their survey responses were confidential.  Code numbers, rather than students’ names, were used on evaluation packets.  Evaluators administered class surveys during two 45-minute periods on two separate days.  The first day included the Children’s Assertive Behavior Scale and Self-Perception Profile, and the second day included the Peer Rating Scale and the Student Survey.  Teachers remained in classrooms for management purposes but did not participate in administering the survey.  To assure maximum comprehension, a primary evaluator read aloud all questions on group-administered tests while two aides circulated through the room to answer questions.  Individual problem-solving interviews, lasting between 20-30 minutes, were conducted in an empty classroom about one week after group surveys at both pre and post-testing.  Six girls and 6 boys from each class participated in individual testing, resulting in a sample of 198 students.  The order of AST story presentation was counterbalanced across condition, class, and gender, but was consistent across pre and post-testing.

 

Overview of data analyses.  Several 2 (Condition) x 2 (Gender) x 20 (Classroom nested within Condition) x 2 (Time) repeated-measures Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) assessed program impact.  Each MANOVA cluster included all related scales within a particular instrument.  One MANOVA assessed students’ acquisition of social problem-solving skills.  A second MANOVA measured pre to post changes in attitudes toward conflict-resolution strategies on the Problem-Solving Attitude Questionnaire.  A separate ANOVA examined changes in self-reported assertiveness on the Children’s Assertive Behavior Scale.  Separate MANOVAs on different teacher, peer, and self-report measures examined changes in social acceptance and behavioral conduct.

 

Pretest comparisons.  Before conducting outcome analyses, a series of MANOVAs examined the pretest comparability of program and control students.  Group differences were not found for the 9 problem-solving indices, attitudes about 3 of 6 conflict-resolution strategies, both peer ratings, both self-perception ratings, primary teacher ratings of social acceptance, and self-reported attachment to peers, minor delinquency, and substance use.  However, the groups did differ on 8 of 28 variables; 5 favored the experimental group and 3 favored the control group. Program students, relative to controls, were rated lower by primary teachers on behavioral conduct [F(1,399) = 3.89, p < .05], but higher by secondary teachers on behavioral conduct [F(1,349) = 18.58, p <.001] and social acceptance [F(1,349) = 6.83, p < .01].  Pre-assessment differences also emerged on attitudes toward conflict-resolution strategies where program students had more favorable attitudes toward passive conflict-resolution strategies [F(1,176) = 5.70, p < .05] and less favorable attitudes toward physically aggressive [F(1,176) = 5.65, p < .05] and verbally aggressive strategies [F(1,176) = 7.84, p < .01].  Program students also endorsed more assertive responses on the Children’s Assertive Behavior Scale [F(1,311) = 7.06, p < .01].  Finally, self-reported involvement with peers was higher for control students than program participants [F (1,267) = 3.99, p < .05].

 

Because there were some pre-assessment differences between treatment groups, we performed supplementary analyses of covariance (ANCOVA) on post-scores, using pre-scores as covariates.  In general, the findings were comparable to those yielded by the repeated-measures MANOVA procedure.  For one variable, however, an ANOVA yielded a significant Condition x Time effect favoring the program group while the ANCOVA procedure did not reveal a significant Condition effect; in two other instances, ANCOVAs yielded significant Condition effects, favoring program students, not revealed by the repeated-measures analyses.  These divergent findings are noted where applicable in the results.

 

The AST MANOVA yielded a significant Condition x Time interaction [F(9,168) = .92, p < .001], and no significant Gender x Condition x Time interaction effect.  Univariate ANOVAs indicated that program participants improved more than controls in generating a greater number of alternative solutions, more effective solutions, and more planful solutions.  Regarding solution content, program students generated significantly lower percentages of aggressive and passive solutions, and significantly more non-confrontational and cooperative solutions from pre to post-assessment.

 

Attitudes concerning preferred conflict-resolution strategies were affected by program participation, as indicated by a significant multivariate Condition x Time interaction [F(6,171) = 2.97, p < .01].  Follow-up ANOVAS showed that the extent of liking peers who resolved conflicts in assertive ways increased more for program than control students [F(1,176) = 4.07, p < .05], and the degree to which students liked peers who used passive conflict-resolution strategies decreased [F(1,176) = 4.68, p < .05].  However, this latter effect was largely due to differences at pretesting; the ANCOVA on postscores, controlling for pre differences, did not yield a significant condition effect.  There was also a directional improvement in the tendency for program students to endorse cooperative resolution strategies [F(1,176) = 3.38. p < .07].  When group pre-differences were controlled using ANCOVA, program students endorsed cooperative strategies more often at posttesting than control students [F(1,175) = 4.24, p < .05].

 

The ANOVA examining changes on the Children’s Assertive Behavior Scale did not reach statistical significance.  However, controlling for pretest group differences, program students at post responded more assertively rather than passively or aggressively to hypothetical situations [F(1,311) = 7.06, p < .01].

 

Teacher ratings.  The MANOVA assessing changes in primary teacher ratings yielded significant Condition x Time [F(2,398) = 9.31, p < .001] and Condition x Gender x Time interactions [F(2,398) = 4.73, p < .01].  Follow-up ANOVAs showed that, relative to controls, program students improved significantly in behavioral conduct, but not in social acceptance by peers.  The 3-way ANOVA for the behavioral conduct factor was also significant [F(1,399) = 8.57, p < .01], and a post-hoc Newman-Keuls test indicated that male and female program students increased significantly more than male controls from pre to post-assessment. The MANOVA assessing changes in the ratings of secondary teachers, who were unaware of students’ assignment to treatment conditions, also yielded a significant Condition x Time interaction, F(2,348) = 3.90, p < .05.  Follow-up univariate analyses showed that program students improved more than controls in both behavioral conduct and social acceptance.  Significant nested classroom effects for both primary raters [F(36,796) = 4.64, p < .001] and secondary raters [F(32,696) =  6.51, p < .001] and inspection of classroom means suggested that the results were more positive in some program classes than others.

 

Peer ratings.  The MANOVA interactions examining changes in peer ratings of behavioral conduct and social acceptance were not significant.

 

Self-report ratings.  The MANOVA interactions assessing changes on the Self-Perception Profile were not significant.  The MANOVA examining changes on the Student Survey scales, however, yielded a significant Condition x Time interaction [F(4,264) = 2.86, p < .05].  Follow-up ANOVAs, showed that program participants increased more than controls in their self-reported involvement with peers.  Attachment to peers was not significantly affected by program participation.  There was also a significant univariate Condition x Time interaction for self-reported minor delinquent behavior. Although program students remained stable from pre to post-assessment, control students engaged in significantly more antisocial acts (e.g., getting sent out of the classroom, starting fights, staying out at night without permission, and stealing from a desk).  From pre to post-assessment, engagement in self-reported minor delinquent behavior increased by 36.8% for control students, and only 2.8% for program students.  Finally, although gateway substance use increased significantly for all students from pre to post-assessment, the Condition x Time and Condition x Gender x Time interactions for this ANOVA were not significant.

 

Implementation ratings of teachers’ mastery and presentation of SCP program concepts ranged from 2 to 5 with a mean of 4.0.  Implementation ratings of teachers’ modeling and encouraging students in the use of program concepts ranged from 1 to 5 with a mean of 3.75.  Based on observer assessments, five teachers were classified as higher and six teachers as lower in implementation quality.  Analyses yielded several significant Condition (Higher Quality Implementation vs. Lower Quality Implementation vs. Control Group) x Time (Pre, Post) interaction effects, which were clarified by post-hoc Newman-Keuls comparisons.  Regardless of implementation quality, program students showed significant gains, relative to controls, in solution effectiveness [F(2,192) = 5.52, p < .01], the number of planful solutions, [F(2,192) = 8.08, p < .001], and the percentage of cooperative solutions [F(2,192) = 6.14, p < .01], and decreased more in their percentage of passive solutions [F(2,192) = 5.05, p < .01].  However, students in well-implemented program classes improved significantly more than those in lower-quality implementation classes and control classes on the number of alternative solutions generated to problem situations [F(2,192) = 13.01, p < .001], the extent of endorsing assertive [F(2,193) = 3.58, p < .05] and cooperative [F(2,193) = 4.09, p < .05] conflict-resolution strategies, as well as on secondary teacher ratings of behavioral conduct [F(2,366) = 8.95, p < .001] and social acceptance [F (2,366) = 15.88, p < .001].

 

Diverse social, environmental, and developmental factors place young urban adolescents at risk for antisocial, aggressive behavior.  Communities and schools need theory-based, empirically validated interventions that effectively address predisposing and precipitating developmental and sociocultural risk factors leading to antisocial behavior.  Most prevention programs focus on preschool and elementary school children rather than on young adolescents.  The current study focused on young, urban adolescents and tested the effects of a middle-school SCP program on students’ social-cognitive and behavioral abilities to cope effectively with daily social problems and stressors that foster antisocial behavior.  The findings show that well-implemented classroom-based SCP training can enhance the skills, prosocial attitudes, and behavioral adjustment of young urban adolescents.  The constellation of positive results suggests that SCP training represents a promising strategy for preventing or reducing antisocial, aggressive behavior in this high-risk group.

 

The current study focused on young, urban adolescents and tested the effects of a middle-school SCP program on students’ social-cognitive and behavioral abilities to cope effectively with daily social problems and stressors that foster antisocial behavior.  The findings show that well-implemented classroom-based SCP training can enhance the skills, prosocial attitudes, and behavioral adjustment of young urban adolescents.  The constellation of positive results suggests that SCP training represents a promising strategy for preventing or reducing antisocial, aggressive behavior in this high-risk group.

 

A major goal of the SCP intervention was to enhance students’ social information-processing skills and attitudes about aggressive behavior.  Such skills and values may serve as important mediators in deterring antisocial behavior.  SCP training produced robust positive effects on both the quantity and quality of students’ alternative solution thinking in response to hypothetical problem situations with potential to provoke antisocial responses. Program students learned to generate an increased number of options as well as more effective and planful solutions.  These findings support those of other SCP interventions that successfully promoted children’s alternative solution thinking.

 

SCP training also positively affected students’ attitudes toward conflict resolution.  For example, the solutions generated in response to AST problems became less aggressive and passive as well as more non-confrontational and cooperative as a function of program participation.  In addition, on the Problem-Solving Attitudes Questionnaire, students evidenced more favorable attitudes towards peers who resolved conflicts in assertive and cooperative ways.  The endorsement of pro-social, non-aggressive strategies for resolving disputes has been found to mediate social adjustment.  Fostering prosocial beliefs about responding to provocations appears as important in deterring antisocial behavior as teaching general information processing skills.

 

Teacher ratings showed that the intervention enhanced students’ behavioral conduct and, to a lesser extent, social acceptance.  The positive findings held true for ratings by “primary” teachers who were aware of treatment assignment, and also to ratings by “secondary” teachers who were blind to treatment conditions.  The findings for secondary teacher ratings are important for two reasons.  First, research using teacher ratings to measure adjustment is often qualified because teachers who supply the ratings have knowledge of the treatment group assignments of students.  The present design overcomes this potential bias.  Second, the results from secondary raters also indicated that students’ behavioral gains generalized beyond the setting in which training occurred.  Few prevention studies have documented that positive training effects transfer to other settings and situations.  It will be important for future SCP studies to examine generalization of acquired skills to non-school settings such as neighborhoods and homes.

 

Both primary and secondary teacher ratings indicated that program students improved in behavioral conduct.  Clearly, the early SCP lessons that emphasized self-control and stress-management training positively affected students’ behavior.  In a series of group discussions after the program, teacher, students, and parents independently agreed that teaching students to “stop, calm down, and think before you act” was the most important problem-solving step to teach students.  Secondary – but not primary – teacher ratings suggested program benefits in peer acceptance.  The discrepancy in social acceptance ratings may be due to the settings in which students were observed.  The secondary teacher raters included primarily music and art teachers.  The music and art rooms, compared to the structured academic classroom setting, may provide an arena in which peer relations are more open, making it easier to observe changes in social interactions and relationships.

 

In contrast to the positive teacher-rated results, program participation did not appear to affect peer assessments of behavioral and social adjustment.  Other research has indicated that sociometric status is typically resistant to rapid changes during childhood and early adolescence.  Although social reputation is difficult to alter in a short period, such changes may be revealed over time, as supported by follow-up studies of social-skills training programs.  Clearly, longitudinal studies will help to clarify the impact of SCP programs on peer assessments of behavior and popularity.

 

Self-reported involvement with peers increased as a function of program participation, however, similar gains were not found on the Self-Perception Profile.  The discrepancy may be due to differences in the particular items that comprise the scales and the spheres to which they apply.  The involvement with peers scale reflects the extent to which one views classmates as approachable, cooperative, and caring.  SCP training, which emphasized supportive small-group discussions of problems faced by students, may be particularly instrumental in promoting a positive classroom climate.  By contrast, the Self-Perception Profile assesses the extent to which students feel that others like them.  Such self-perceptions, similar to peer assessments, are difficult to alter in brief interventions.  Follow-up studies are needed to determine the impact on students’ self-perceptions over time.

 

Finally, the outcome findings suggest that the program helped to prevent the development antisocial behavior in the young urban adolescent sample.  In line with improvements in teacher ratings of behavioral conduct in the classroom, training positively affected students’ self-reported engagement in minor delinquent acts.  Program students remained stable in the frequency of such acts from pre to post-assessment, while control students significantly increased their engagement in delinquent behaviors.  Future research must clarify how SCP training reduces students’ participation in delinquency.  Such positive effects may result from improved skills, attitudes, and behaviors or from better student communication with teachers, parents, and peers about problem situations.  In contrast to the program’s positive impact on delinquent behavior, SCP training failed to affect students’ involvement with alcohol and marijuana.  Domain-specific SCP training that emphasizes the negative consequences of substance use and particular skills to resist drugs may be needed to prevent drug use.

 

The present findings also highlight the importance of considering the quality of program implementation when determining the effectiveness of SCP programs. Although program students from all classes improved in problem-solving skill performance, there were several areas in which implementation quality affected outcomes.  For example, attitudes toward conflict-resolution styles and secondary teacher ratings of behavior changed positively for students in the high-quality implementation classes, while the students from lower-quality implementation classes fared no better than controls.  Perhaps changing students’ values and behavior requires greater levels of SCP mastery, modeling, and reinforcement on the part of trainers.  This study adds to a growing literature demonstrating that the quality of program implementation mediates student behavioral outcomes.  Notably, as school-based SCP programs become more widely disseminated, monitoring implementation quality becomes essential.

 

In sum, school-based SCP programs hold great promise for enhancing the adaptive functioning of high-risk urban adolescents.  In particular, this study demonstrates the beneficial effects of well-implemented SCP programs targeting social information-processing skills, attitude change, and the prevention of behavioral conduct problems in early adolescence.  An important next step is to determine the long-term impact of this SCP program.  We are conducting a follow-up study to assess the extent to which the initial gains reported here will be sustained over time.  Ultimately, it may prove necessary to provide additional, developmentally appropriate SCP training during later grade levels to maintain or strengthen the short-term benefits achieved by the current intervention.  A growing literature suggests that multi-year SCP programs are the most realistic way to enhance positive youth development and prevent antisocial behavior among young people growing up in high-risk urban environments.

 

Jeff C. Palmer is a teacher, success coach, trainer, Certified Master of Web Copywriting and founder of https://Ebookschoice.com. Jeff is a prolific writer, Senior Research Associate and Infopreneur having written many eBooks, articles and special reports.

 

Source: https://ebookschoice.com/the-urgent-need-for-school-based-primary-prevention-programs/

Commitment to Retaining Talented Teachers – ebookschoice.com

Training is a component of many teacher induction programs. All too often, inductees have received insufficient professional preparation. With increasing numbers of inductees entering the classroom via alternative routes, many induction programs today are compensating for little or no previous training whatsoever, in effect blurring the line between teacher preparation and induction.

 

Even if your new hires have had traditional teacher education, they often come unprepared for the first year of teaching, especially in urban classrooms. Sometimes, even an aspiring urban teacher who shines when placed for her eight-week practicum in an “exemplary” school, with excellent teachers and a rich learning environment, may well be hopelessly unprepared to cope with conditions in the mediocre or failing school that is likely to be her first assignment.

 

The most effective type of training program is that which is part of a teacher’s ongoing professional development. Viewed as part of continuing education, content and complexity grow as the inductee matures into a seasoned teacher. Completing your first year as a fully responsible teacher in an urban school has nothing to do with having been “successful” in a college preparation program. Even if you student-taught in an urban school, you were never accountable to the parents and principal for students’ learning and behavior.

 

Training programs for beginning teachers often are determined by courses that the state or district requires (and sometimes finances). Training typically is conducted by a staff developer and a cadre of teacher trainers; central office personnel, site administrators, or consultants also may facilitate workshops. The best training programs are those that include ongoing assessments of the particular needs of individual beginning teachers, and design workshops, seminars, and course work based on these needs.

 

Training can take many forms, including:

 

– Observation in other classrooms in same school

– Workshops/seminars

– Conferences

– Observations in other schools

– Reflection on practice/journal writing

– Team teaching (novice + experienced teacher)

– Individual induction plan

– Psychological support

– Teacher-led inquiry/action research

– Case-based discussion

– Electronic networking

 

You can hold induction activities in the same school building the inductee works in, at a different school site or professional development center, or you can rotate activities among different school sites. Induction activities can be held during the school day, after school, on weekends, or even before school.

 

Curriculum

 

Program content often deals with perceived barriers to inductee success. Common curricular topics for induction include addressing inadequate classroom management skills and inability to handle disruptive students.

 

Curriculum topics you might include:

 

– District/system policies, paperwork

– Classroom management

– School policies, paperwork

– Organizing time/work schedules

– Classroom discipline

– Instruction/pedagogy

– Planning

– Student assessment

– Available resources

– K-12 curriculum

– Special education

– Cultural sensitivity/diversity

– Parent involvement

– School improvement/reform

– Stress management

– Educational research

– School/community violence

– Second language acquisition

 

Assessment

 

With growing attention to teacher accountability for student learning, inductee performance assessments should be designed to help the inductee meet standards and to determine if the inductee should remain in teaching.

 

Whether evaluations are conducted by school site administrators, peer teachers, or a team including university faculty members, all inductees (not just those lucky enough to have a mentor) are entitled to comparable amounts and types of support prior to assessment. Local and state standards (both for student achievement and teacher performance) should be clearly stated and available to inductees when hired.

 

Professional Portfolios

 

Some states and districts have introduced the use of professional portfolios as a method for aiding teacher assessment. Inductees prepare and submit a teaching portfolio, which documents planning, teaching, and student learning. The portfolio includes multiple sources of information (such as videos of teacher-directed instruction and student-centered lessons, teacher commentaries, and samples of student work). If teaching portfolios are required, inductees should receive clear guidance as to their development.

 

Peer Review

 

Peer review represents a shift away from the traditional model of assessment (administrators supervising and evaluating new teachers) to one where experienced teachers support, assist, and appraise inductees. Peer assistance and review programs offer leadership roles for exemplary teachers, who are responsible for assuring quality in their profession. Schools that use peer review have found that it can successfully assist and support teachers and also be effective in weeding out incompetent teachers.

 

Inductees are screened rigorously at entry level by their peers. Teachers must present evidence of continual growth and renewal in order to advance their careers. Supervisors, who formerly monitored teacher performance, have been eliminated. Teacher evaluation has become a responsibility shared by principals and a select corps of experienced teachers.

 

The evaluation process is one of continuous mutual goal setting based on detailed observations and follow-up conferences, in which intern and consultant analyze and set practical goals for improvement based on specific evaluation criteria. Consulting teachers submit periodic reports to an intern board of review regarding the status of each of the interns with whom they are working. During the first year, the observations and subsequent evaluations are completed solely by the consulting teacher. Consultants submit a final evaluation of interns’ progress and recommend to the board the future status of interns’ employment.

 

Areas in which the interns are evaluated include teaching procedures, classroom management, knowledge of subject, and academic preparation.

 

The Peer Assistance program, designed by teachers, broadened the original program to incorporate a career ladder, with new teacher roles and compensation, teacher empowerment, and school-based planning.

 

At the heart of the program is the concept of peer review and assistance, in which lead teachers take responsibility for assuring teacher quality. The Peer Assistance program determines whether a teacher moves up the career ladder, which has four stages: intern, resident, professional, and lead teacher.

 

Components of peer review and assistance include:

 

– Assistance by a lead teacher during the first year of teaching, after which the new teacher is recommended, terminated, or put on probation.

 

– After the first year, under the Performance Appraisal Review for Teachers, teachers are evaluated annually by a team. Every three years, teachers receive an intensive summative evaluation, based in part on student performance.

 

– A teacher having problems can seek the help of a lead teacher, who connects her to district resources.

 

No longer are graduates of teacher preparation programs in those states fully or permanently licensed when they start teaching. Instead, those states have made qualifying for full licensure part of the induction process: states grant graduates of teacher preparation programs initial or provisional licensure and evaluate their competence. And, more often than not, states ask districts to provide a support component to guide and mentor inductees (or “interns,” as they are often called) as they prepare for assessment.

 

Commitment to Retaining Talented Teachers/Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment

 

While there is no one induction model that would serve all districts, it is helpful to look around for ideas.

 

The new program increases new teachers’ confidence and satisfaction while improving their teaching practices. Ninety-one percent of beginning teachers who complete the new program remain in teaching, as compared to a national average well below that.

 

What is the mission of the program?

 

The goal of the program is for new teachers to experience enhanced professional growth and development and become increasingly attached to teaching through a rich and thoughtful induction process. Each will gain a professional voice by working in close concert with experienced colleagues and trained assessors to chart their own progress through the continuum of skills, knowledge, and abilities associated with each domain of the profession.

 

What are the key elements?

– Support by a mentor

– Clinical supervision regarding reflection and portfolio work

– Formative assessments of teaching practice

– Professional development to promote effectiveness with students

– Retention in teaching

– Satisfaction with the occupation

 

What about standards and assessment?

 

More than any other program of this type, the new program uses standards as the basis for individual learning activities as well as annual program accountability reviews. Standards have been developed by outstanding teachers and other educators to ensure program excellence. These serve as the “bench-marks” that guide the consultations and activities of beginning teachers, their support providers, and their formative assessors. In each new teacher’s Individual Induction Plan, teachers aim toward eventual accomplishment of the new teaching standards.

 

In this model, which is being used voluntarily in new projects, experienced professionals learn how to manage an integrated process of assessment, assistance, implementation, reflection on practice, and further assessment on the part of each beginning teacher.

 

How are the projects coordinated?

 

A project may be coordinated by an individual district, districts in collaboration with colleges and universities, or large consortia in which districts, colleges and universities, and county offices of education work together. To assist local managers of new projects, a regional structure has been established in which highly experienced consultants support the recruitment of effective support providers, coordinate training plans, assist in implementing the Support System for teachers, and answer questions.

 

What else does the Teacher Support and Assessment offer?

 

Sponsors training programs for the veteran teachers who assist and support first- and second-year teachers. Additionally, offers specialized training for site administrators in participating schools, for seasoned educators who assess the performance of new teachers, and for local managers who initiate new projects.

 

The program was designed to provide group and individual support for beginning teachers working in central-city schools and to establish a program of formative assessment to guide professional growth.

 

Benefits to participants:

– A collegial and nurturing program that provides an informal network for new teachers

– Individualized in-classroom support from mentor teachers, University coaches, and district resource teacher coaches

– Nonevaluative and nonjudgmental assistance

– Monthly cluster group meetings which address inductees’ individual professional development goals

– Two units of district salary advancement credit (tuition fee included)

– Opportunity for professional growth for renewal of clear credential

– Mini-grants for classroom materials

– Four release days to attend all-day seminars and mentor observations

– Opportunities for observing in classrooms and conferring with university-based and district coaches, other beginning teachers, mentors, and project resource teachers

– Opportunities to document professional growth through development of a personal portfolio

– All benefits of the district’s New Teacher Induction program

 

Inductee support

 

District mentors and school site coaches customize support to each teacher’s needs. We never play to the negatives, we avoid getting hung up on the discouraging realities of the urban classroom. Instead, we emphasize what we can do to help inductees have a successful year.

 

For every cluster of teachers, a district mentor is either on-site or comes on a regular basis to observe classes (at least once per month) and provide in-class technical assistance; a faculty member serves as coach, helping teachers with development of their professional portfolios and written reflection on practice, and visiting their classrooms two to three times per month; and a school site resource teacher supports new participants. Mentors and coaches are trained together during two days of diversity training, one day of support provider training, two days of portfolio development training, plus at least four additional staff meetings each year.

 

Checklist for Developing an Induction Program

 

Use the following summary as a checklist for developing your program:

 

– Understand the value of developing an induction program in your district.

– Put together a planning team to design, coordinate, and integrate program components.

– Gather as much information as possible to determine teacher needs and district needs.

– Collaborate with partner organizations.

– Determine who will manage your program and how it will be funded.

– Design a program in which orientation, assistance, training, and assessment are not separate, unrelated elements, but parts of a whole.

– Plan an induction program that is a multiyear, developmental process.

– Ensure that school site administrators understand how to orient inductees, create supportive working conditions for them, and effectively meet their professional needs.

– Provide a first-class mentoring program, backed by funding adequate to serve all eligible inductees.

– Link inductee evaluation to district- and state-level standards.

– Invest in technology.

– Evaluate program effectiveness.

 

Jeff C. Palmer is a teacher, success coach, trainer, Certified Master of Web Copywriting and founder of https://Ebookschoice.com. Jeff is a prolific writer, Senior Research Associate and Infopreneur having written many eBooks, articles and special reports.

 

Source: https://ebookschoice.com/commitment-to-retaining-talented-teachers/