Northwest Regional Comprehensive Center
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Statewide Systems of Support (SSOS)
The Montana Story: Providing Support to Frontier Communities Through State Oversight, Embedded Coaching, and Community Engagement
Center on Innovation and Improvement released a new Promising Practices paper. As state education agency budgets decrease, state education leaders must develop strategies to do more with fewer resources. Leaders must determine which strategies and supports are the most effective for schools in improvement, how to build capacity with fewer staff at the district and state levels, and how to best communicate with individual schools and districts.
Evaluating the Effectiveness of the Statewide System of Support
Conversations with Practitioners: Supporting State-level Collaboration among General and Special Educators
The Center on Instruction has released the third resource of a series of Conversations with Practitioners based on a working group of state-level and regional comprehensive center (RCC) staff which collaborated on a project designed to learn how state departments of education, along with their RCCs, are supporting an RTI framework. This document focuses on the collaboration of general and special educators. It discusses the definition of collaboration, provides recommendations for supporting state-level collaboration, and offers tools and suggestions for building capacity for collaboration.
Achieving More, Spending Less in Schools, Districts, and States
The Center on Innovation and Improvement has released a document summarizing research on how learning productivity can best be increased by three means:
- Increase learning effectiveness without increasing costs;
- Reduce costs without diminishing effectiveness;
- Both, that is, increase effectiveness and simultaneously reduce costs.
Eight Elements of High School Improvement: A Mapping Framework
The National High School Center's Eight Elements of High School Improvement framework provides a lens for mapping school, district, and state high school improvement efforts. This framework, updated from the original July 2008 version, incorporates new language and ideas from the U.S. Department of Education's current education reform priorities.
Meeting the Challenge: The Role of School Leaders in Turning Around the Lowest-Performing High Schools
The Alliance for Excellent Education has released a policy brief examining the limitations of previous high school reforms and describes new approaches showing promise in producing substantive changes in secondary level teaching and learning. The brief highlights the central role of school leaders and districts in creating high school learning environments that can engage and support students with widely divergent learning needs.
Coaching for School Improvement: A Guide for Coaches and Their Supervisors
The Center on Innovation and Improvement (CII) has released a guide offering tools, tips, and strategies for coaches working with school improvement teams. Ideas in the guide can be used to inform the training and supervision provided by state agencies, districts, or other organizations responsible for recruiting, hiring, and assigning coaches to work with school teams. In addition to general guidance for school improvement coaches, the guide offers examples and recommendations for coaches working with teams who are using the online Indistar® tool created by CII to structure their work.
What are the Characteristics, Qualifications, Roles, and Functions of School Support Teams? An Examination of Survey Results for Four Northwest Region States
Support teams work as external facilitators of improvement in schools and districts designated as in need of improvement under the No Child Left Behind Act. REL Northwest has released a study finding that team members in four Northwest region states share many characteristics and qualifications and work primarily in schools, meeting with administrators on school improvement planning and implementation. Team members differ in time spent on the activities that support these functions.
Transforming a Statewide System of Support: The Idaho Story
The Center on Innovation and Improvement (CII) released a case study of the Idaho State Department of Education (IDE). The report provides a case example of how a state can quickly and dramatically alter its approach to providing support for school improvement, building upon internal capacity and external resources. Idaho's story also illustrates the complex nature of state-level change and highlights certain triggers and conditions that can help other states to engage in rapid state-level improvement.
Indicators in Action
The Center on Innovation and Improvement has a new topical area on their website. Based primarily on the Center's research syntheses, Indicators in Action provides an explanation of indicators of effective practice. Video clips of principals, teachers, and teacher teams show the indicators "in action". Indicators in Action can be used for professional development, faculty meetings and workshops, and as a tutorial for individual educators.
