Success Stories

Because of Power Walkthrough, Millville Public Schools in Millville, New Jersey, not only increased instruction of higher-order thinking skills in classrooms, but also generated much-needed discussions about effective instruction.

By implementing McREL’s five-step Success in Sight^® process, Northeast Guilford High School in McLeansville, North Carolina has undergone a positive cultural shift and increased shared leadership, instructional strategies, and capacity to implement change.

Independent programs in Des Moines, Iowa, North Dakota, and Montana have seen an increase in their students’ language skills using McREL’s Scaffolding Early Learning program, which focuses on highly imaginative, structured play and targets the development of critical early literacy and self-regulation skills.

Learning how to better manage change, administrators from Sioux City Community School District established a district-wide monitoring and evaluation protocol based on McREL’s research to ensure changes are made consistently across all schools.

Using McREL’s Purposeful Community Reflection Tool to collect data, the staff and administration at Barry Goldwater High School in Phoenix, Arizona, have successfully navigated two major change initiatives: (1) standards-based grading and (2) developing a capstone project requirement for all graduating seniors.

By using a common process, Power of Data allowed Deer Valley School District to generate school goals from their student data and then determine which practices to put in place and which principal responsibilities they needed to achieve those goals.

McREL partnered with Sedalia Elementary in Sedalia, Colorado, to implement Success in Sight change initiatives specifically focused on state assessment writing scores but also included new behaviors and strategies for teachers.

McREL partnered with the Gesell Institute to collect data about the validity and reliability of the Gesell Developmental Observation (GDO) tool that determines a child’s stage of development.

Principal Consultant Elena Bodrova and Gwendolyn Coe, early childhood professor at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, trained teachers in 31 rural Wisconsin districts in strategies that teach children self-regulation, such as structured, dramatic play.

McREL’s Adapted Curriculum Enhancements (ACE) project gave mainstream science teachers visualization techniques—models, tactile graphics, and observation tools—in order to better meet the needs of their visually impaired students.