On December 7, McREL and Sedalia Elementary in Sedalia, Colorado, will formalize a partnership to create McREL's first-ever demonstration school. Sedalia, a low-performing, semi-rural school that is part of the high-performing, suburban Douglas County School District, hopes to reduce the achievement gap among its students through its work with McREL. The school will complete the Success in Sight approach to school improvement, which it began in 2010, as well as a number of other McREL programs aimed at improving achievement. In just over a year of work, Sedalia has increased its writing scores school-wide by 6 percent and, most notably, by 19 percent among 6th graders.
Oklahoma's Teacher and Leader Effectiveness Commission has recommended McREL's Principal Evaluation System as the model for school leader evaluations in the state. For the teacher evaluation system, it has recommended Tulsa Public School's (TPS) system. The Commission, acting on a mandate for a new, state-wide evaluation system as part of the Oklahoma Teacher and Leader Effectiveness Act of 2010, will now send its recommendations to the state board of education for final approval.
In this article, McREL Principal Consultant Sammye Wheeler-Clouse and Senior Director Michael Siebersma, along with former Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) Chief Academic Officer Deborah Backus, share the success story of Eiber Elementary, an under-performing school that the JCPS partnered with to ensure effective implementation of its improvement plan. Realizing it needed to get serious about monitoring how well school initiatives were carried out, the school worked with McREL to break down a large improvement goal into manageable parts, involve the entire staff, monitor and provide support along the way, and apply lessons learned to future initiatives.
Bryan Goodwin’s latest Educational Leadership article discusses the possibility of grade inflation and why it may be occurring. Using data from several studies, Goodwin shows that even though grades have risen over the years, student performance on national tests has not improved. He gives several possible reasons for grade inflation, including that teachers base grades on factors indirectly related to their learning, including effort, ability, behavior, and attitude. Goodwin concludes that if grade inflation is occurring, giving unrealistic grades only harms students when they fail in college because they do not have the necessary skills.
A profile of McREL’s Teacher Evaluation System, written by Tony Davis and Bryan Goodwin, appears in the November issue of NJEA Review, a publication of the New Jersey Education Association. The profile describes the system, defines “good teaching,” and addresses questions about the system’s efficacy, how it uses data and promotes collaboration among educators, and how it differs from other models available to New Jersey schools. McREL’s system has been approved by the New Jersey Department of Education as a provider of a standards-based evaluation system as part of the Excellent Educators for New Jersey Pilot Program.
McREL’s Greg Cameron and Mel Sussman traveled to Saipan recently to deliver a two-day professional development session on Balanced Leadership® to 50 educators in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas (CNMI) Public School System (PSS). According to Education Commissioner Rita A. Sablan, the training, involving school administrators, key PSS staff members, and Board of Education members, continues work started a year ago that aims to improve the capability and leadership skills of not only school administrators but all stakeholders in the community who want to support student success.
Gary Sharp, technology director for the Monroe County (Tenn.) School System, recently attended a McREL Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works workshop, and came away inspired to break the barriers of “old-school learning” and embrace technology. The district, which recently hired a data and instructional technology coach through a school technology grant, is able to provide one-on-one training to teachers on how to take advantage of its 300 iPads and the iPad lab at its high school. "It's time to change," said Sharp. "We're in the 21st century and still trying to teach 20th century stuff."
In September, representatives from McREL, Apple Inc., Missouri Southern State University, and Pittsburg State University met with school officials and community members for the second time in Joplin, Missouri, to discuss how these organizations can contribute to a new vision for the city’s high school, which was destroyed by last May’s tornado. “It’s very seldom that a school district gets to start from scratch and create a vision and build a building around that vision,” said Superintendent C.J. Huff. Ideas discussed included the use of technology, flexible scheduling, the creation of a freshman wing, and implementation of “career cluster academies” in areas such as information technology, finance, and health sciences.
Millville Public Schools has stepped up its technology use in monitoring instruction, based on McREL’s Classroom Instruction that Works strategies and Power Walkthrough classroom observation software. "The collection of data over time allows both the leadership team and the instructional staff to see instructional trends," said Superintendent David N. Gentile. "Utilizing the data, the teaching staff and leaders can engage in coaching conversations to foster professional development."
In this article, McREL Senior Director of Research Andrea Beesley writes about the challenges facing rural schools, such as less access to advanced courses and difficulty recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers, and how best to address them. An obvious solution, Beesley writes, is online courses and professional development. However, while rural schools often have excellent access to technology, the way technology is provided and serviced as well as the level of connectivity varies greatly among schools and districts. Beesley makes the case that overcoming these challenges in order to provide high-quality instruction for both students and teachers is well worth the effort.
An Educational Leadership column by McREL's Bryan Goodwin, vice president for marketing, communications, and business development, is referenced in this article that examines the value of technology in increasing student achievement. While more and more schools spend significant amounts of money on technology, there continues to be a lack of evidence that it is helping students learn. Wrote Goodwin, "Rather than being a cure-all or silver bullet, one-to-one laptop programs may simply amplify what’s already occurring—for better or worse."
Ankeny Community Schools in central Iowa is one of the high-performing districts invited to McREL's Summit for Innovative Education, to be held September 21-23 in Orlando, Fla. The Summit, hosted by McREL in partnership with Lockheed Martin, will bring together education leaders from across the country to focus on elevating the performance of America's schools to that of high-reliability organizations.
McREL Senior Director John Ristvey will bring the journey of NASA’s Dawn spacecraft to life for visitors to the Estes Park Memorial Observatory in Estes Park, Colorado, on July 28. The talk, which is free, open to the public, and held in conjunction with the monthly meeting of the Estes Valley Astronomical Society, will focus on the super-fast ion engine propelling Dawn and how the mission will contribute to our understanding of the solar system. After four years of traveling through the solar system, Dawn has recently reached its destination of the asteroid Vesta, which it will explore until 2012.
On July 25, preschool teachers in an Early Reading First classroom in Des Moines, Iowa, got to try out a couple strategies from McREL’s Scaffolding Early Learning (SEL) program for Iowa Senator Tom Harkin and United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The distinguished guests visited Carver Community School, which participated in the SEL program as part of a three-year Early Reading First grant, and led a round table discussion that focused on the importance of high-quality early learning programs. Duncan, who also gave the keynote address at the Iowa Education Summit on the following day, highlighted the Obama administration’s recent announcement that it will invest $500 million in a state-level Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge.
According to achievement data taken from a five-year period, it's the language proficiency gap—not poverty or ethnicity—that most effects the disparity in performance between Hispanic and non-Hispanic students in Summit County. McREL's Jim Eck presented this data to school board members following three years of school improvement work through a state Closing the Achievement Gap (CTAG) grant. After examining scores according to how well students knew English, he said, "As students are being moved into (fluency), you're seeing improvements in their performance." The gap in reading performance overall went from 47 percent to 39 percent, with 9th and 10th graders closing the gap most significantly—from 60 to 37 percent.
Observation data from more than 60,000 classrooms across 34 states shows that, while more and more schools have technology devices available, the percentage of teachers and students using them is startlingly low, writes McREL's Howard Pitler. McREL collected the data from classrooms that use the Power Walkthrough observation tool, which measures, among other indicators, how technology is being used in classrooms. In 63 percent of all observations, teachers utilized no technology at all. The percentage of students using no technology in any form was even lower at 73 percent. Pitler concludes that, "If we really want to see technology supporting quality instruction...we need to get serious about providing ongoing and targeted professional development and set clear expectations for the use of technology..."
McREL's research on superintendent effectiveness--specifically, that tenure positively effects student achievement--was referenced in this article in District Administration. The article profiles superintendents in the 10 largest school districts in the country and notes a recently released study by the Council of the Great City Schools which found the average tenure of urban superintendents has gone up in the past decade, from 2.3 to 3.6 years.
We all look to teachers to tell us things we don't know, right? Yes, but just giving students information does little to engage them. A better route, write Bryan Goodwin, McREL's vice president of communications & marketing, and John Ristvey, principal consultant, is to "build suspense [around a topic], piquing students' natural curiosity." They cite example science and mathematics lessons McREL has created for NASA on comets and meteorites, one of which has students reach into a box and feel a variety of materials—dirt, dust, ice, a potato—that represent the materials in a comet. Students then record their observations and speculations about the composition of a comet. Exploration and solving mysteries is not just a "gimmicky way to increase the entertainment value of a lesson," Goodwin and Ristvey write, but a way to tap into a human's natural "desire to explore and learn about their environments."
McREL Senior Consultant Whitney Cobb contributed to this article on teaching about comets through hands-on activities that emulate real science. The authors describe modeling an object in space while introducing key vocabulary and science concepts with visuals in order to support learning and retention. Then, students collaborate by developing their own models. Finally, students engage in scientific argumentation as they discuss the strengths and limitations of their models and brainstorm ways to improve them.
This editorial, written by McREL's early childhood team in response to a January 27 article, "Preschool Funding: $150 Million to What Result?", highlights the achievement gains of children participating in the Preparing Early Readers for Kindergarten (PERK) program. At the core of this program are strategies for self-regulation, which research shows to be a predictor of academic success. In fact, an independent evaluation of the PERK program found that, of the four year olds in the program, 73 percent gained age-appropriate language skills in the first year, and 82 percent in the second year.
Millions of dollars have been spent in recent years on one-to-one laptop initiatives in schools across the country—but the effects on student achievement have been mixed and depend largely on the amount of planning by the participating school or district. This article by McREL Principal Consultant Elizabeth Hubbell explains one of the best ways to get the most from a laptop initiative: Conduct a technology audit first. A good audit will gather data through various means—surveys, focus groups, classroom walkthroughs, and interviews—to see how comfortable staff is with current technologies and how easily a new tool could be integrated into the current culture. It will save a school or district time, money and, potentially, a lot of headaches.
Though extremely popular in recent years, one-to-one laptop initiatives do not guarantee better student achievement. As Bryan Goodwin, McREL vice president of communciations and marketing, writes, studies show that students with laptops are more engaged and have better technology skills, but most large-scale evaluations have found little to no effect on achievement. However, successful initiatives have some common elements: uniform integration in every class; teacher training and collaboration; and daily use by students for cooperative learning.
"Comet and Asteroid Mysteries Revealed" was the topic of a lecture given by McREL Senior Director John Ristvey in January at the Aurora Central Library in Aurora, Colo., as part of its Discover Space exhibit. Ristvey described recent satellite images, for example, one of a snowstorm created by carbon dioxide jets on the surface of a comet, which had never been seen by scientists before.
McREL Principal Researcher Elena Bodrova was quoted in this article on the importance of imaginative play for children. Bodrova asserts that such play increases children's vocabulary--if parents and children are role-playing being in a doctor's office, for example, parents can use words like "vaccination," or, in a restaurant, ask the chef to "saute" the vegetables. "Children will use these words when they play the game again," says Bodrova. While kids feel more confident when parents participate, she cautions to let the children control the theme and direction of the game.
Despite being linked with multiple negative outcomes for students, student mobility hasn't been addressed in any significant way, according to McREL Senior Director Andrea Beesley, who was interviewed for this Education Week article. A new report released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office shows that 13 percent of schoolchildren in the United States change schools four or more times before high school, and this number may be on the rise due to job loss, home foreclosures, and homelessness.
