To better support its CSI and TSI schools’ improvement efforts in a systemic manner, the ND Department of Public Education reached out to the Region 11 Comprehensive Center to create an overarching plan and uniform framework to set statewide expectations and monitor if the work was resulting in real change.
McREL
Our expert researchers, evaluators, and veteran educators synthesize information gleaned from our research and blend it with best practices gathered from schools and districts around the world to bring you insightful and practical ideas that support changing the odds of success for you and your students. By aligning practice with research, we mix professional wisdom with real world experience to bring you unexpectedly insightful and uncommonly practical ideas that offer ways to build student resiliency, close achievement gaps, implement retention strategies, prioritize improvement initiatives, build staff motivation, and interpret data and understand its impact.
In our work with schools across the U.S. and around the world, we often hear teachers say that more of their students than ever appear to be chronically disengaged from learning. Their bodies come to class, but their hearts and minds seem to be somewhere else. Perhaps it’s lingering effects of online learning during the pandemic, or the distractions of smartphones. Whatever it is, what can we do to win them back? Through our analysis of hundreds of research studies, we’ve come up with five things teachers can do to increase student engagement with their learning.
Recently, at a professional learning event in Texas, I may have ruffled some feathers when I shared that scant evidence exists in scientific research for teachers posting learning objectives to improve student learning. What?! How can that be when so many teachers are required to post learning objectives in their classrooms?
In Building a Curious School, author Bryan Goodwin notes that students have greater well-being, goal orientation, and motivation when they have a passion worthy of pursuit that makes their lives meaningful. However, for many students, telling them to find their life’s passion can feel overwhelming. They may not feel like they know what they’re really passionate about yet.
Few things within a school’s control have as much impact on student success as the curriculum. Studies show, in fact, that the extent to which a school has a well-aligned curriculum and ensures it’s taught in every classroom is one of the most important within-school variable driving school performance (second only to teaching quality). This is the perfect time for school and district leaders to think about the extent to which your curriculum is clearly articulated, well aligned, focused on essential knowledge and skills, and enacted in every classroom
One of the best ways to help all students succeed is by focusing on delivering effective Tier 1 foundational instruction in every classroom, every day, for every student. Like many others, we call this best first instruction, which we define in our Unleashing the Power of Best First Instruction white paper as “the skillful use of proven teaching techniques that are intentionally sequenced to help all students convert new learning into long-term memory.”
One of our primary roles at the Region 11 Comprehensive Center (managed by McREL) is to support statewide education improvement efforts involving partnerships among state departments of education, regional service agencies, local districts, and even individual schools.