Research and Best Practices
The Handbook is designed to guide state, district, and school Title I personnel in providing high-quality, research-based family and community engagement programs and experiences. Thirty-six experts on a range of topics contributed to the Handbook. Each chapter provides grounding in research and practical action principles for the field. A concluding chapter lists specific recommended practices for the state, district, and school. The.....
Leadership Resources
The Handbook on Family and Community Engagement
This Handbook is intended to provide educators, community leaders, and parents with a succinct survey of the best research and practice accumulated over the years. More important, the Handbook gives us a guide—a lean and lucid roadmap with which we can travel to a new plain in our quest for each and every student’s academic, personal, social, and emotional development. The authors wanted to bring together the best minds on the various topics related to family and community engagement and produce a guidebook that is solid in its research.....
A Practical Guide to Designing Comprehensive Teacher Evaluation Systems
Across the nation, states and districts
are in the process of building better
teacher evaluation systems that not
only identify highly effective teachers
but also systematically provide data and
feedback that can be used to improve
teacher practice . A Practical Guide to
Designing Comprehensive Teacher
Evaluation Systems is a tool designed to
assist states and districts in constructing
high-quality teacher evaluation systems in
an effort to improve teaching and learning
Key Considerations When Measuring Teacher Effectiveness: A Framework for Validating Teachers’ Professional Practices
The report describes three levels of data collection to measure teacher effectiveness both with and without standardized test scores.
Building Teacher Evaluation Systems: Learning From Leading Efforts
This report from the Aspen Institute is part of three reports recently released by the Institute to provide policymakers and education leaders with information on how teacher evaluation and performance management systems work and to use the resulting evaluation results with other information, practices and policy levers to improve teaching and learning. This report is a synthesis of Aspen Institute’s profiles of the teacher evaluation and performance management system efforts conducted by the District of Columbia Public Schools (Teaching and.....
Find What Works
Looking for a better way to find curricula, products, and practices that meet your school or district's needs? Check out the new and improved What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) search feature, Find What Works. This powerful tool makes it easy to find out what rigorous research says about the effectiveness of more than 100 widely used education interventions. You can search for interventions by grade level, subject, delivery method, and other.....
New Updates to the National High School Center's Early Warning System (EWS) Tool v2.0 and Technical Manual
The National High School Center recently released an updated version of the tool and technical manual to better support users as they strive to identify and address issues that lead to students dropping out of school. The updated tool includes a new Export Data feature, and the updated Technical Manual includes several additional instructions, hints, and cautions to help you use the tool. More details on the new tool and Technical Manual are below, along with instructions on how you can easlily transfer your existing data into the new tool......
Principal Effectiveness: A New Principalship to Drive Student Achievement, Teacher Effectiveness, and School Turnarounds
Lessons learned from school leaders making breakthrough gains in student achievement and teacher effectiveness. Includes policy recommendations for school turnarounds and key insights from The Urban Excellence FrameworkTM.
A Comprehensive K-3 Reading Assessment Plan: Guidance for School Leaders (COI)
Because scientific studies have repeatedly demonstrated the value of regularly assessing reading progress, a comprehensive assessment plan is a critical element of an effective school-level plan for preventing reading difficulties. This guide from the Center on Instruction provides valuable information for school leaders. While the general principles, such as the early identification of students who are struggling in learning to read, are all based on scientific findings, the detailed recommendations for implementation derive from practical.....
FREE-DVD-Principal Walk-Throughs A Tool for Alaskan Instructional Leaders
THIS DVD IS AVAILABLE FOR FREE!
Produced by Education Northwest through the Alaska Comprehensive Center for the Alaska Department of Education & Early Development (EED), this 15-minute video looks at how four principals carry out “walk-throughs” in their schools. Walk-throughs—sometimes called learning walks or data walks—are quick classroom visits that can help principals systematically gather data on instructional practices. Alaska EED is particularly interested in using.....
Applying an On Track Indicator for High School Graduation: Adapting the Consortium on Chicago School Research Indicator for Five Texas Districts
This study uses a measure of the on-track or off-track status of students at the end of grade 9 as an indicator of whether students in five Texas districts would graduate from high school in four years. In all five districts, on-time graduation rates were higher for students who were on track at the end of grade 9 than for students who were off track, both for students overall and for all racial/ethnic groups.
Measuring Teacher and Leader Performance: Cross-Sector Lessons for Excellent Evaluation
With support from the Joyce Foundation, this report from Public Impact summarizes six steps derived from best practices and research of government agencies, non-profit organizations, and for-profit companies that are critical in designing high quality, effective performance measurement systems. Each step is illustrated by examples from other sectors. The report concludes by proposing sample elements of a performance measurement system for teachers that transparently show the relationship between the education system’s goals, teacher.....
A Coherent Approach to High School Improvement: A District and School Self-Assessment Tool
The National High School Center at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) developed this resource to assist districts and schools assess their current high school education policies and practices with a focus on identifying strengths and areas for improvement in order to implement coherent school reform initiatives. The self-assessment tool addresses eight domains: 1) curriculum and instruction, 2) assessment and accountability, 3) teacher effectiveness and professional growth, 4) student and family involvement, 5) stakeholder engagement,.....
What Are Rural Districts Doing? (Ideas for rural districts and others considering or committed to using SIG Funds)
In order to help districts considering or committed to using School Improvement Grant funds to rapidly improve persistently low-performing schools, CII researchers searched websites of major cities and districts to discover tools and processes already in use. The results, while not exhaustive, may provide models for implementing turnarounds, restarts, school closure, or transformations.
Evaluating School Principals (TQ Center)
As part of the TQ Center's Tips and Tools series, Evaluating School Principals outlines four practical strategies for evaluating principals and offers numerous real-world resources and examples. The tool describes the benefits of evaluating school principals and provides tips and cautions to assist district and state leaders in effectively creating robust systems for assessing the quality of school leadership.
Adolescent Literacy Walk-through for Principals: A Guide for Instructional Leaders - Grades 4-12 (COI)
This guide and accompanying scenarios of adolescent literacy instruction from the Center on Instruction, designed to help principals monitor and support adolescent literacy instruction in their schools more effectively, can be used at the late elementary school level, in content-area classes in middle and high school, and with intervention groups or classes. It provides a scaffold to build principals' understanding of scientifically based reading instruction, as a means for a principal to gather information about the quality of literacy and.....
Learning From Leadership: Investigating the Links to Improved Student Learning
The largest in-depth study of school leadership to date, this report gathers and analyzes quantitative data confirming that education leadership has a strong impact on student achievement, as measured by student test scores. The study shows that leadership makes its mark largely by strengthening a school’s “professional community” – an environment where teachers work together to improve classroom instruction. It also finds that rapid turnover of principals reduces student achievement. In addition, the study shows that although the.....
Principal and Teacher Evaluation: A Compilation of Information and Resources for Schools and Districts Developing Educator Evaluation Tools
This document lists information and resources relating to principal and teacher evaluation that districts may find helpful as they develop tools to review a teacher's or principal’s performance. ACC has identified a number of tools, some of which provide examples that include student data in the evaluation process, which are research-based and offer promise as an effective practice. However, any resource’s inclusion or omission from this list does not constitute ACC’s endorsement or lack of endorsement.
Reinventing the American High School (Association for Career and Tech Ed)
In this paper, the Association for Career and Technical Education review the challenges and current efforts in high school redesign, and offer a number of recommendations about what elements should be included in our mutual efforts to reinvent the American high school for the 21st century.
