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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.

Mar 26
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Middle school math teachers learn formative assessment skills to overcome students’ anxiety

By Assessment, Blog, Math, STEM, GreenSTEM & STEAM No Comments

Even in the most supportive of middle schools, students’ performance in math and science can decline sharply. With a larger peer group to judge themselves against, many students who exuded confidence in elementary school no longer feel they can measure up, and stop trying—harming not only the students but society at large. Fortunately, new research from McREL and IMPAQ International shows that math teachers can help by significantly boosting their use of formative assessment, without sacrificing other responsibilities.

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Mar 15
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School culture: Secret sauce or missing ingredient?

By Blog, Leadership Insights, Research Insights, School Improvement No Comments

Frustratingly for practitioners, research often tell us what a phenomenon is, but not why it came to be that way. And that can strand us without an answer to the most important question: How should we manipulate inputs to achieve the outputs we desire?

So it is with school culture. In his column for the March edition of ASCD’s Educational Leadership magazine, McREL CEO Bryan Goodwin recounts how a conversation with a principal caused him to reexamine his long-held stance that school culture is the “secret sauce” of high-performing schools. The problem for that principal, Bryan writes, was the difficulty of teasing apart correlation from causation. Does a strong, healthy school culture cause high performance? Or might it be the other way around?

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Jan 30
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The measurement gap: Advocating for a new generation of assessments

By Assessment, Blog, Curiosity, Engaging Classrooms, Research Insights, School Improvement No Comments

By now it’s a commonplace observation that academic success alone isn’t generally adequate to ensure success in college and career. Without minimizing the importance of academic skills, it’s also important to recognize that personality traits like intrinsic motivation, persistence, resilience, and curiosity play a huge role in how far students ultimately advance. Yet, because academic skills are relatively easy to test for, that’s what schools keep measuring—and thus what society seems to keep valuing, potentially depriving students of meaningful growth and learning opportunities.

McREL CEO Bryan Goodwin uses his Research Matters column in ASCD’s February 2018 Educational Leadership magazine to advocate for expanding student assessments to develop a fuller understanding of the causes of success.

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Dec 15
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Curiosity Works: Moving your school from improvement to innovation

By Blog, Curiosity, Engaging Classrooms, Everyday Innovation, Instructional Coaching, Leadership Coaching, School Improvement No Comments

Curiosity Works™ is what McREL is calling our new approach to school improvement and innovation. It incorporates our existing What Matters Most® framework that for years has been helping educators worldwide to spend their time and effort most effectively, and it adds an exciting new focus: harnessing the power of curiosity to drive ever-greater performance from students, teachers, and school leaders.

No two schools are alike—heck, no two school days are alike. So, in keeping with McREL tradition, the aim of Curiosity Works is decidedly not to impose a rigid program that must be followed unimaginatively. Rather, it aims to inspire teachers and leaders within a school to grow the courage and capacity to make things better without waiting for orders from the outside.

Nevertheless, our decades of consulting and research work have shown that many school leadership teams (we call them research and innovation teams) undergo similar phases of development when they get serious about improvement and innovation

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Dec 11
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“Specials” may help traumatized students succeed in academics

By Arts and Humanities, Blog, Engaging Classrooms, Learning Supports, Research Insights No Comments

Some of the best-known therapeutic techniques for people suffering the after-effects of trauma include art therapy, music therapy, and exercise. Sound familiar? These also happen to be the “specials” that we sometimes think of as distinct from academics. However, for traumatized students who have trouble concentrating, they could hold the key to accessing learning throughout the school day, McREL CEO Bryan Goodwin proposes in the December 2017 issue of Educational Leadership magazine.

Goodwin recalls that it’s been 20 years since the director of a popular weight-loss program revolutionized our understanding of the long-lasting impact of emotional trauma by observing that nearly half his patients had experienced such difficulties in childhood as being abused, witnessing domestic violence, or having an incarcerated parent. Perhaps these “adverse childhood experiences” contributed to their overeating—and other risky behaviors—as adults.

Brain research has supported this proposition, uncovering brain abnormalities that would make it hard to regulate emotion and concentration—and thus make it hard to learn—in people suffering from chronic stress or post-traumatic stress disorder.

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Nov 09
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Can compassion cure indifference?

By Blog, Current Affairs, Research Insights No Comments

Research suggests that the level of incivility in the U.S. is rising. As we publicly battle out our issues in every arena—on our roads, in schools, on social media, in the check-out lane—we’re exhausting our collective ability to empathize with each other. In his latest column in ASCD’s Educational Leadership, McREL’s CEO and president Bryan Goodwin looks at the research and wonders why the shift away from empathy began, and how, as educators, we might help reverse this trend.

Empathy is feeling with another; compassion is feeling for another. Either would lead us to behave ethically toward the people around us. But, to social scientists and brain researchers, they differ in a crucial way: Compassion can be taught and better sustained than empathy.

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Oct 12
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The Reading Now Network: Redefining value to chart a course to improvement

By Blog, Engaging Classrooms, Everyday Innovation, Literacy No Comments

In Major League Baseball, game data have been a constant, with RBIs, batting averages, and ERAs long-serving as measurements of player and team performance. The end goal for all teams, year after year, has also been a constant: win a World Series championship. What has changed more recently are the metrics: measurements that are used to track and assess the status of progress. Thanks to Moneyball, most of us know the story of the 2002 Oakland Athletics baseball team and their relentless commitment to dissecting player data in new ways, which helped them assemble a low-budget ball club that won more games and eventually entered the playoffs. Since then, many teams across the entire landscape of baseball have changed the way they do business. They’ve found a better way to use data to identify good players who were previously undervalued.

What if an entire region of schools and districts took a similar approach to addressing challenges with early literacy? What would that look like?

The Reading Now Network of West Michigan and its ongoing work on addressing challenges with early literacy could provide a glimpse of what is possible.

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