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McREL: Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning, delivering research and practical guidance to educators

Quick Links

This page provides quick & easy access to some of McREL’s most popular online resources.

Asking the Right Questions
This online toolkit is designed to help school leaders, particularly principals, think systemically as they examine school improvement issues and make decisions about change. It can be used individually, with colleagues, or with an entire school staff.

Balanced Leadership Profile
The Balanced Leadership Profile™ is an online feedback tool intended to gather information about school leadership from various perspectives: an individual principal, the teachers working with the principal and the principal’s supervisor. The profile provides building principals with multiple perspectives on their fulfillment of the 21 leadership responsibilities identified in McREL’s leadership research, and furnishes feedback on principals’ change leadership.

Compendium of Standards & Benchmarks
McREL’s Compendium of K–12 content standards and related tools offers educators a rich resource for designing standards-based units. Our compendium provides a compilation of content standards for K-12 curriculum in both searchable and browsable formats. In addition, it includes a rich collection of standards-based lesson and unit plans.

Dawn
McREL provides products and services to support NASA’s Dawn mission’s outreach efforts. The Dawn mission will characterize the conditions and processes of the solar system's earliest epoch by investigating in detail two protoplanets, Ceres and Vesta.

Genesis
McREL provides education and public outreach services for NASA’s Genesis mission, which was launched in 2001 to study samples of solar wind. Despite the spacecraft’s hard landing in 2004, NASA scientists were able to recover solar wind information, which they are now beginning to study.

Future of Schooling
Using techniques codified by the Global Business Network, McREL has developed a series of workshops, keynote addresses, and consulting services to assist education leaders to not only anticipate the future but take action today to respond effectively to whatever lies ahead.

Keys to Learning
For more than a decade, McREL has been a leader in the field of standards-based education. Our Keys to Learning Web site provides free guidance on how to make standards-based schools and classrooms a reality. Arranged by six key challenges to creating standards-based education, Keys to Learning provides solutions to these challenges based on McREL’s research and guides you through a process that will help you ensure that teachers are teaching what students need to learn.

Learning Street
Learning Street is designed to provide support for our training and technical assistance to clients in the region and across the nation. The goal of Learning Street is to improve communication with our clients and to provide easy access to schedules, materials, and resources for ongoing work. The Web site provides specific resources for schools and districts involved in Consortia and Customized Training/Consulting offered by McREL.

Lesson Plans
A variety of lesson plans and activities, organized by topic and linked to McREL’s standards compendium.

Success in Sight
Success in Sight provides schools with hands-on consulting and professional development based on McREL’s comprehensive approach to school improvement. We incorporate McREL’s “science” of effective schools from such publications as What Works in Schools and Classroom Instruction that Works with the “art” of continuous improvement and school change. McREL can train state, district, or intermediate agency staff members to serve as local school improvement coaches and thus, build local capacity for continuous improvement.

Whelmers. These hands-on science activities are based on Steve Jacobs’ Whelmers. They have been adapted to the McREL Web site and have been aligned with the National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, 1995) by the staff of McREL.