By Bryan Goodwin
At the end of September, McREL’s work operating the Region 11 and Region 12 Comprehensive Centers (R11CC and R12CC) through federally funded 5-year grants supporting state education agencies concluded. We’re proud of our teams and the capacity they’ve built across 7 states, and we’re honored for the opportunities to learn, work, and collaborate with so many talented educators and leaders. With that in mind, I’d like to share a small sampling of the work we’ve done and what we’ve learned with our partners over the past five years.
► Focus and PDSAs are the key to school renewal.
Research paints an unflattering picture of school improvement—finding that most efforts fail often because they take an “everything but the kitchen sink” approach, trying to do too much at once and accomplishing too little. In North Dakota, our R11CC team partnered with the state’s Department of Public Instruction and Regional Education Association to develop an approach for supporting continuous improvement that’s based on the simple idea of helping schools in need of improvement identify one or two high-leverage solutions and then employing plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycles to implement them well. Using this approach, which is outlined in the new School Renewal Guide for North Dakota Public Schools, the partners helped pilot schools improve student outcomes and, in some cases, exit improvement status.
► Tomorrow’s teachers are today’s students. In Colorado, the R12CC and its partners created a geographic information system (GIS) map to identify “bright spots” in educator workforce pipelines, which revealed an important and often overlooked source of future teachers: today’s students. As an outgrowth of this effort, the R12CC partnered with the Southwest Colorado Education Collaborative to support rural high school students as they consider pathways to pursue careers in education.
The partnership created a series of inspirational videos that share the joy and rewards of teaching as well as a collection of resources to support high school counselors as they promote education as a career choice. This effort not only offers a template for other district collaboratives to follow but serves as an important reminder that we all have a role to play in improving teacher pipelines by talking up teaching as a meaningful and rewarding profession that makes all others possible.
► Leadership matters—now more than ever. In Missouri and Kansas, the R12CC engaged networks of dozens of superintendents in each state in multi-year communities of practice for executive leaders. Initially, this effort began to help superintendents address the challenges of guiding their school systems through the pandemic but evolved to focus on what leaders (and only leaders) can do to improve student outcomes. What emerged during these sessions were profound insights and professional wisdom about the power of district leaders to improve systems. Indeed, no system ever improves without strong leadership. And strong leaders engage stakeholders in developing a shared vision, which means they often need to go slow to go fast.
► Elevate classroom practice to improve outcomes for all learners. Our efforts in Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming reveal that improving outcomes for students who have been historically under-served and under-represented requires improving their learning experiences. In Nebraska, the R11CC team partnered with the state Department of Education and local Education Service Units to use data to target school improvement efforts for multilingual learners where they matter most—the use of targeted evidence-based teaching practices. In South Dakota, the R11CC partners identified what’s already working with efforts to support Native American students by integrating the Oceti Sakowin Essential Understandings and Standards (OSEUS) into classrooms, which resulted in an Integration Guide and collaborative efforts to share lessons and best practices for integrating cultural understandings into lessons and units. While in Wyoming, the R11CC supported a partnership of school systems serving students on Tribal lands with the implementation of the jointly updated K–3 Literacy Guidance Framework and use of evidence-based practices for reading instruction in elementary school classrooms.
This is just a snapshot of the projects conducted across Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming and insights to emerge from them. I invite you to spend some time on each website to learn more. And if you’re interested in learning about work done by other centers in other states, a great place to start is by reviewing impact stories housed on the National Comprehensive Center website.
This post originally appeared in our September 2024 monthly newsletter. Click here to sign up to receive McREL’s free monthly newsletter.
Bryan Goodwin, president and CEO of McREL, thrives on translating insights from education research into practical strategies and professional learning for effective teaching and school leadership. He is the author or co-author of several McREL books, including The New Classroom Instruction That Works, Learning That Sticks, Building a Curious School, and Instructional Models. Before joining McREL in 1998, Bryan was a college instructor, a high school teacher, and a business journalist.
