A study published in the June issue of Educational Administration Quarterly looks at the causal impact of McREL’s Balanced Leadership® (BL) professional development program on principals’ learning, beliefs, and behaviors. Researcher Roger Goddard and his colleagues compared a treatment group of 100 principals in rural Michigan who participated in two years of BL training with a group who did not receive training. Results showed that participating principals reported substantively significant growth on the majority of outcomes targeted by BL, with the largest impacts on sense of efficacy for instructional improvement, reported ability to bring about change, and strength of norms for teachers’ instructional practice. Interestingly, principals were more likely to report growth on broad, school-level outcomes than in areas that involve them working directly with teachers.
Category Archives: McREL in the News
In the May/June issue of NAESP’s Principal magazine, McREL Senior Director Matt Seebaum and Superintendent Jay Harnack from Sublette County District #1 in Wyoming write about the importance of an integrated, shared approach to leadership, including the Balanced Leadership Framework and leadership training for all school leaders and teachers. “As we have proved in Sublette County,” the authors write. “If you invest in a research-based framework that aligns with classroom practices, take the time to train all of your staff, and work with them to ensure fidelity of implementation, you will see improvement—not just in one or two schools, but across the board.”
Read the article here.
The Guam Daily Post recently highlighted a STEM professional development program organized by McREL that gave teachers the opportunity to learn firsthand about marine robotics. During the three-day training, teacher teams constructed underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and used them in a competition to retrieve objects from the water, similar to a competition that their high school students participate in. The training was provided by Anne Tweed, a STEM consultant at McREL, and Jim McDonnel, a retired engineer who coaches school teams to compete in regional and international marine advanced technology education (MATE) ROV competitions.
Watch a video of the activity.
Chippewa Valley Schools in Clinton Township, Michigan, has been working to improve its curriculum and instruction practices with the goal of better preparing its students for post-secondary success. Part of its strategy has been to train every teacher in the district in Classroom Instruction That Works. In this article in a local newspaper, Director of Curriculum Pam Jones said, “Every teacher . . . has been trained in highly effective classroom instruction practices. It’s really about developing collaborative skills in student, and those 21st century skills of creativity, working together, and working cooperatively.”
Read the entire article.
In the May 2016 newsletter of the Alabama state chapter of ASCD, Executive Director Jane Cobia reflects on the balancing act required of educators, highlighting the insights she’s gained from McREL’s Balanced Leadership for Powerful Learning: Tools for Achieving Success in Your School. The book, Dr. Cobia says, provides “clear research-based data to help us navigate and hopefully increase teacher and student learning” by reminding us that “balance is the key to everything.”
Read the entire column.
A recent article from the Omaha World-Herald (on Omaha.com) highlighted the work of the Nebraska Department of Education in updating the state’s science standards, including partnering with McREL to compare existing standards with Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). McREL’s analysis showed content was similar but that the NGSS goes “deeper,” indicating the opportunity for NDE to raise the rigor and complexity of its standards statewide.
Read the entire article.
An interview with McREL President and CEO Bryan Goodwin is featured in the latest episode of TLTalkRadio, a weekly podcast focused on leading schools in the digital age. Hosts Lynn Fuini-Hetten and Randy Ziegenfuss talk to Bryan about the future of education, inside-out reform, and McREL’s two most recent whitepapers, The Road Less Traveled and Rebalancing Formative Assessment.
Learn more and listen to the podcast.
In a recent post on ASCD’s Inservice blog, McREL’s Jane Hill focuses on newly arrived ELL students at the middle and high school levels who have limited or interrupted formal education and suggests strategies that can help teachers meet these students’ unique needs. A focus on functional literacy, for example, and speaking basics is a good place to start, Hill writes, so that students can “do the authentic reading and writing they need to function” as soon as possible. She also suggests an approach developed by Stanford researcher Jeff Zwiers referred to as PIE, which reminds teachers that speaking and listening activities should be purposeful, include intentional language or fill in an information gap, and be used for explicit language development.
Read the blog post.
In the latest Research Says column in Educational Leadership, McREL’s Bryan Goodwin and Heather Hein look at why, after years of various approaches to reduce the achievement gap between English-language learners (ELLs) and non-ELLs, the gap refuses to budge.
Despite dramatically rising numbers of ELLs in our nation’s schools, language acquisition is still largely misunderstood, the authors write, due in large part to a lack of professional development. This misunderstanding can lead to unrealistic expectations and a “deficit-thinking” mindset that puts ELLs at fault for their low performance. Goodwin and Hein suggest an “asset-based” approach to teacher education could help—one that focuses on language and diversity not as problems to solve but as opportunities to prepare all students for a globally connected world.
Read the entire column.
In the February issue of Educational Leadership, McREL’s Jane Hill focuses on six key actions teachers should and shouldn’t take when trying to engage and challenge beginning-level English-language learners. For example, teachers need to understand each ELL’s stage of language acquisition and not group them into too-broad categories, like “high level” and “low level.” Also, it’s important that all students—even the lowest-level ELLs—are engage in the same level of thinking. In other words, don’t water down the curriculum, regardless of an ELL’s level of English language acquisition.