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I was able to see Deb Delisle, the United States Department of Education Assistant Secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education, speak at the Strive Network Convening, which I attended in September. Delisle participated in a panel discussion called “Investing for Impact: Lessons Learned in the Shift to Funding What Works.

Months later, I’m still thinking about what she said.

Delisle posited that when we discuss education reform and focus on closing the achievement gap, that we’re not asking the right question. She went on to say that the term closing the achievement gap really puts the onus or responsibility on what a child has done or hasn’t done. From her perspective the conversation should be reframed to focus on the opportunity gap or expectations gap. This refocuses the conversation to thinking about the extent to which we provide all children opportunities  or access to highly rigorous and personalized learning environments that will prepare them to be college and career ready.

That’s powerful stuff and gets to the heart of what I see us doing at EDWorks.

A few weeks after the Convening I led Delisle on her site visit to Reynoldsburg City Schools District schools, one of our partner districts.  She made this same statement at that visit and said she is on a one-woman mission to change the conversation in this direction.

As a result of what she said, I have already begun thinking about how our work and messaging can support her mission. Does changing the focus from achievement gap to the opportunity gap affect how you think about education reform? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments area.

It’s always a great thing to see hard work and collaboration pay off. For the past many months, people from, Reynoldsburg City Schools District, Battelle Memorial Institute, EDWorks, Ohio Education Matters, Education Elements and Strive have been partnering to submit a proposal for a Race to the Top grant. While we still have to wait for the final award decisions, we can be happy knowing that Reynoldsburg City Schools District was recently named finalists for the grant.

“These finalists are setting the curve for the rest of the country with innovative plans to drive education reform in the classroom,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in the announcement today.

The R3: Reynoldsburg Race to Results proposal is designed to personalize instruction by increasing choice for parents and students, deploying blended learning, creating an adaptive data analysis system and expanding college and real-world experiences for all students via a community-wide education partnership. Reynoldsburg aims for all students to graduate from high school with recognized credentials showing they are ready for a career, with significant college credits aligned with their postsecondary goals, or both. District Race to the Top Funds would support the design, development, implementation and expansion of:

1. Choice: Families and students choose where / how / what they learn by selecting among high quality, interest-based schools and have some control over content and instructional delivery methods
2. Blended Learning: Students progress at their own pace with personalized digital content, maximizing opportunities for highly individualized support and instruction from educators
3. Adaptive Analytical Framework: Educators and families make better informed decisions using the power of sophisticated data analytical models commonly deployed by industries (e.g. national defense, health care)
4. Partnership: Reduces costs and increases services inside and outside the school, expanding students’ opportunities for learn from and be supported by experts, organizations and businesses throughout the community

For those of us here at EDWorks, we’re excited for the opportunity to help Reynoldsburg expand upon the success they are already seeing in their first schools of choice. It’s also a wonderful opportunity for us to continue to partner with two of KnowledgeWorks’ other subsidiaries: Ohio Education Matters and Strive.

The other Ohio school districts among the finalists were the Cleveland Municipal School District and the Maysville Local School District near Zanesville in Eastern Ohio. The finalists were selected from 372 applications.

USDOE will select 15 to 25 to receive grants ranging from $5 million to $40 million. Grant awards are expected by December 31, 2012.

For Thompson Middle School in Saginaw, Michigan, a primary area of emphasis this year is expanding the use of data to inform instruction. To that end, the school has implemented a comprehensive Data Room that houses pertinent student, group and school-level data. This critical data is neatly posted on the walls, while related resource material is housed in binders and file cabinets. Among the posted data is:

• AIMSweb results for all grade levels in Reading and Math. This includes both individual and group results in unique graph formats.
• MEAP results for grades 6,7 and 8 in Reading and Math (individual, grade level and school).
• Report Card Grade Analysis (Es and Ds).
• Current state-level percentile ranking.
• Current AYP status.
• Walkthrough trend data.
• A Dashboard poster with detailed information, including:
  1. MEAP results
  2. Explore results
  3. Attendance
  4. Suspension rates
  5. Positive parental contacts
  6. Retention rates
  7. AIMSweb data
  8. Extra-curricular participation

To maintain a high level of awareness relative to the need to use data to inform instruction, many of the grade level and content area Professional Learning Community (PLC) meetings take place in this data facility. Also, to ensure confidentiality, the Data Room is kept locked and only accessible to staff members.

Housing the data in a centralized location helps PLC groups more readily access student data and resources. This likewise enables them to more efficiently collaborate on appropriate interventions.

Earlier this month, Strive Network’s Jennifer Blatz discussed how President Obama was able to use big data to drill down deep into voter habits and tendencies. That strategy helped Obama win a second term in the White House.

In the president’s hometown of Chicago, New York Times reporter Erica Goode writes a compelling piece about a nearly 20-year study by psychiatrists at Northwestern’s medical school that looks at the impact and causes of violent youth crime. The entire article can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/us/chicago-project-follows-what-happens-to-juveniles.html?pagewanted=all

Based on the study’s data, more than 80 percent of juveniles who enter the criminal justice system early in life have at some point belonged to a gang. Seventy percent of men and 40 percent of women have used a firearm. The average age of first gun use is 14. At any given time, 20 percent are incarcerated.

Dr. Thomas Lasley, director of Dayton’s Learn to Earn cradle to career initiative, has long been a champion of early college high schools because he has seen the difference they have made in the lives of kids in Ohio.

These schools report an average graduation rate of more than 91%. In addition, more than one in three students graduate from high school with both a high school diploma and two years of college credit or an associate’s degree.  Perhaps most important is that they demystify the college experience for kids and help them learn key skills needed to go to work.

Having people with job skills for the new economy is critically important in Dayton, as in many communities. Dayton, once flush with good manufacturing jobs which required only high school degrees, is now seeking to prepare kids and adults for the new economy. Increasingly, they are finding answers in sub-baccalaureate degrees.

In the Fall edition of Lumina Foundation’s Focus, the editors  prominently feature Lasley and  the work of the Learn to Earn initiative as Focus addressed the importance of sub-baccalaureate degrees and their role in preparing tomorrow’s work force. Included in the piece is Alexis Ponder, who earned a high school diploma and an associate degree at the rigorous Dayton Early College Academy, said that experience helped her later earn a bachelor’s in nursing at Xavier University and later become successful in the work force.

Through Focus, the Lumina Foundation  offers a needed perspective on how one community’s cross-sector of stakeholders are working together — including government, nonprofits, business and education – to become better prepared for the future.

As adults, we spend a great deal of time telling the children in our charge that they need to “listen.” As parents, questions like “Did you clean your room?” are common. For teachers, “Did you write down the information on that assignment?” Both questions are often followed by “Did you hear what I just said?” As children, we don’t understand how much what we hear will influence our choices later in life. As adults, we sometimes fail to consider how important it is for us to listen to each other, our children and to the world around us.

Friday is the National Day of Listening, a national holiday started by StoryCorps in 2008. The goal is that on the day after Thanksgiving we will all take a few minutes to talk with a loved one. Even better, to record a conversation with a loved one! By taking the time on one day a year to focus on listening, people may be inspired to do so year-round.

Being a good listener isn’t a skill we all have. I was fortunate to have someone model the behavior for me. In high school, Mrs. Cairns taught me World and European History. She didn’t just see herself as the person instructing others, but she felt she had a lot to learn in interacting with her students. It made her a better teacher, but more importantly, it imparted to others a love of knowledge and demonstrated in a practical way the importance of communicating well with others.

Mrs. Cairns possessed a unique ability to draw in her students. Long before the internet could bring worldwide events to life with a few keystrokes, Mrs. Cairns helped us understand the world by telling us about her travels. She weaved her personal stories from around the globe into our classroom discussions and we were compelled to not only learn the material, but also craved more information about the world beyond the classroom.

Those World and European History classes relied heavily on strong communication, requiring students to interactively participate in classroom discussions. Mrs. Cairns was a superb listener who was responsive to the questions and interests that were shared with her. It was a winning combination, and years after those courses, I still remember her as one of my favorite teachers.

National Day of Listening is an opportunity to make a collective effort to be better listeners. Perhaps we will develop a new passion, a new interest or develop a new relationship. We are never too young, or too old, to strengthen our ability to learn more about each other and the world around us – by listening a little more.

Jeff Edmondson, Managing Director of Strive, is guest blogging for Forbes about how we can make smarter social investments.  In the first post of this series, he shares the idea behind Strive and building the cradle to career civic infrastructure needed to make disciplined decisions about the investment of precious educational resources.

To read the full blog post click here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashoka/2012/11/14/making-smarter-social-investments-getting-better-results-for-kids-and-communities/

 Know | Trust | Empower | Care | Honor

Teachers are always looking for ways to improve classroom management. The K-TECH framework offers teachers quick and effective strategies which will help build the foundation for a safe and purposeful classroom for everyone – students and staff. K-TECH is the acronym EDWorks’ uses for integrating characteristics of a safe and purposeful school environment into overall school improvement. K-TECH is aligned with major youth development initiatives including Josepshon Institute’s Six Pillars of Character and Search Institute’s 40 Developmental Assets. K-TECH was originally created by Ohio’s Center for Essential School Reform as part of its Framework for Building Safe and Serious Schools.

In this five part series, EDWork’s school climate and learning supports specialist Michele Timmons shares ideas for implementing K-TECH in any classroom.

Last month we highlighted E – Empowering Students in Authentic Ways.

Connecting Students in Meaningful Ways

Students are more successful in school when the content makes sense in their world. Creating highly rigorous lessons are important for student success, but it is just as important that the lesson is relevant to the students and they can see how the learning applies to the real world.

• Connect text to students’ lives, other text and the world. Some students automatically make connections between literature and their lives. Others need help. Here is how one teacher creates connections for her students.

• Engage community partners to collaborate with students on projects. A third grade class partnered with their local historical society to update a website about the community’s historical events. Community leaders shared information about the history. Students conducted further research and created PowerPoint presentations which could be used by the historical society in the future.

• Spark student interests. Connecting teaching and learning through students’ personal interests is a great way to spark kids’ engagement in school. One high school re-vamped home room and sorted kids based on hobbies and interests they had in common with teachers rather than random by grade level. This is a no cost way to build connections. Search Institute’s Sparks research offers even more ways to connect with students at home, at school and in the community.

• Build units and lessons using the Rigor / Relevance Framework. The more often student learning is in Dr. Daggett’s Quadrant D (high rigor and high relevance), the better able students are to connect their learning to the real world. Not sure what this looks like in practice? Check out Laura Cross’s recent Expect Success post, Teaching with Technology in a Language Arts Classroom.

What strategies do you use to ensure everyday student learning has meaningful connections to the world in which students live?

Check back next month for Part Four of EDWorks’ five-part series on implementing K-TECH in the classroom. Read other posts in this series:

• Kick Start Your Classroom with K-TECH
• Kick Start Your Classroom with K-TECH (Part 2): Three Tips for Building Trust
• Kick Start Your Classroom with K-TECH (Part 3): Four Tips for Authentic Student Empowerment

Every day, I collaborate with my colleagues. We set and track our progress toward shared goals, engage in heated debates about purpose and process, co-produce and iterate ideas and products, and drag silly jokes out for a little too long.

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I'm feeling post-election relief and something else -- a surprising sense of hope. After months of advertising, campaigning, rhetoric and speeches, the 2012 presidential election is now history. President Obama is re-elected, the nation is returning to some sort of "normalcy," and everyone is trying to figure out what the vote results really mean.

Read more at Huffington Post

Social sciences are in the spotlight at Arthur Hill High School in Saginaw, Michigan. Much in the fashion of a science fair, students at this EDWorks New Start school are participating in their school’s first Social Studies Fair on November 15, 2012. They will be sharing projects from classes in world history, United States history, government, psychology and sociology.

The Social Studies Fair is the result of collaboration among teachers within the Social Studies Department at Arthur Hill High School. According to department lead, Terry Metiva, “We as department wanted to do this to promote social studies as an interesting and important discipline around which students can demonstrate their passion and knowledge.”

The goal is to make topics current and relevant through hands-on applications. For example:

• World history students learning about ancient leaders by creating “fakebook” pages for the leaders, which lets students use what they know about current technology and apply to it what they’re learning in class.
• A government teacher and an English teacher are collaborating to help students create campaign posters. Similarly, history students are learning how to create political cartoons. These projects will help them better understand the political campaigns that just wrapped up.
• Sociology and accounting classes intersect when students learn about surveys and then apply that knowledge by looking at ACT scores for Arthur Hill compare High School as compared with state and national data. This will help students understand the consequences of their own scores on the ACT.

Arthur Hill High School is partnering with Castle Museum / Saginaw Historical Society to help promote the Social Studies Fair, display projects and honor the students’ work. According to Sheila Hempsted, education coordinator at the Museum, “Arthur Hill is breaking new ground by showing social studies work of students.”

We recently hit the benchmarks of having over 150 communities reach out to us and 80 communities having completed the Site Readiness Assessment to join the Strive Network.  As we start our discussions with each community on the work of collective impact through building civic infrastructure, I would estimate at least half have declared “we are already doing that!”

Based on these conversations, we have been able to identify the most critical differences between the historical definition of “collaboration” and the emerging understanding of “collective impact”.  The diagram below outlines the differences as simply as possible.

The first is that in collaboration, we have historically come together to implement a new program or initiative.  This is most often the case when we wanted to apply for or have been awarded a grant.  When it comes to collective impact, community leaders and practitioners come together around their desire to improve outcomes consistently over time.  The outcome serves as the true north and the partners can uncover the right practices to move the outcome over time.

This brings us to the second difference: using data to improve, not just prove.  In collaboration, data is often used to pick a winner or prove something works.  In collective impact, data is used for the purpose of continuous improvement.  We certainly want to find what works, but the partners are focused instead on using the data to spread the practices across programs and systems not simply scale an individual program.

Third, collaboration is often one more thing you do on top of everything else.  People meet in coffee shops or church basements to figure out how to do a specific task together and in addition to their day job.  Collective impact becomes part of what you do every day.  It is not one more thing because it is truly about using data on a daily basis – in an organization and across community partners – to integrate practices that get results into your everyday contribution to the field.

And last, collaboration is often about falling in love with an idea.  Somebody may have visited a program somewhere and seen something they liked so they advocated to bring it to town.  The core assumption in their efforts is that success elsewhere will be consistent with success right here.  Collective impact is about advocating what those practices you know get results in your own backyard.  The voice of community partners is leveraged to protect and spread the best of what exists right here and now instead of what one hopes would get results down the line.

It will be those communities that exemplify the rigor and realities of collective impact that can help us fully grasp the shift that needs to be made to achieve population level impact.  We are on our way with the interest of so many and we are hopeful that we can collectively embrace this fundamentally new way of doing business.

When I was first encouraged to use more technology at school, I was a little nervous. It wasn’t because I am technology illiterate or anything; I am always looking to learn about the latest and greatest means of teaching and the tools to use while doing it. I was mostly nervous that I wouldn’t be able to effectively teach content and incorporate technology into my daily routine. I quickly learned that building technology into the daily routine was not difficult at all; actually it was much easier. I also noticed that by using technology more often in my classroom, the behavior of my students improved drastically. I was able to talk and students listened intently to what I had to say because they knew they would soon get to use the computer and do a task that was engaging, meaningful, content oriented and “Fun.” I was thrilled.

What I had decided as a teacher was to do units in my class that taught basic skills and use the computers as much as possible, but to end each unit with a project which would showcase all of the skills learned in that unit. Our latest unit was an Autobiography Unit. Students did a formal Autobiography and typed it out like we had typically done in the past. The project part was them presenting their lives to me in a digital way using one of several choices:

• A PowerPoint doing an AlphaBiography
• A slideshow that had them use each letter of the alphabet to describe who they are)
• A GoAnimate in which they would create a cartoon character who talked about their life to another character
• An XtraNormal which would also let them create a cartoon character who talked about their life to another character, but was a different cite
• A Glogster which would be an online digital collage to which they could upload pictures, videos and text

I was unsure of what to expect back from the students since I had never done anything like this before. The results I got were amazing! I had engaged, active learners in my classroom from the minute they walked in until the minute they walked out (which was 5 minutes late and I had to write passes because they wanted to finish).

With this type of project, my students were automatically using critical thinking skills because they had to figure out how to present their lives because I left it open-ended. By the second week of a three week project, students were doing cartoons, Glogsters and PowerPoints that were far more superior than the examples that I had given them. Actually, they began teaching me how to do some of the cool things that they had learned! It was a truly rewarding experience as a teacher.

To end the unit, we did a Gallery Walk in which we put all of the desks in a circle and students opened their projects up on one of the computers in the room. Students went desk to desk viewing others projects and leaving positive comments on sticky notes on the desk with the project.

Here is a sample of one of the projects my students created:

Here are a few student responses to the project:

“I loved the Autobiography Project. We were able to do different tasks instead of just pencil paper work or a poster. I really liked that we were able to be creative with it and had multiple choices to do our projects instead of one choice like I said before: just paper and pencil. It was fun. I would love to do more projects like that.” ~Lanice

“I loved working on GoAnimate and figuring out how to do a video and make it about my life. I loved creating the stories of my life through the stick figure people. I kept wanting to learn more and more about how to do the videos so I played with it all night long at home. I spent two hours one night trying to get pony tails on all my girl characters. It was the funnest project I have ever done in school.” ~Deztani

This post was written by Laura Cross, an English Language Arts teacher at Akron Buchtel Innovation-STEM 7-8 Middle School.

This week we pre-empted Tuesday's 9pm EST #PBLChat, instead tweeted about the Election with students using the #MyParty12 hashtag.  However, many great resources were shared all week long. Here are a few of our favs:

• Schoolwide, cross curricular & wild project ideas brewing at @InnovationHigh via @NateLangel (This tweet goes with the photo in this post! Love how these facilitators collaborate)

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Regardless of your political persuasion it is hard for anyone to deny the critical role that big data played in helping Barack Obama get elected for a second term.  Several post-election news stories have talked about how a group of “number crunchers” in a windowless room known as “the cave” at Obama Campaign Headquarters in Chicago mined data to drive nearly every decision made throughout the two-year long campaign.  From determining which media buys to make to predicting voter turnout, they measured every aspect of the campaign or as Campaign Director Jim Messina told Time  “assumptions were rarely left in place without the numbers to back it up.”
Here in the battleground state of Ohio, we know firsthand about the data machine that was the Obama re-election campaign.  A day after the election, a friend shared a story about a visit from an Obama campaign volunteer in the final days of the campaign.  The volunteer stopped by my friend’s home to confirm whether the campaign could count on his vote.  The volunteer checked his list and asked to speak to my friend’s wife and asked her whether he could count on her vote.
And then the volunteer inquired about my friend’s 22 year-old daughter, Chelsea, who still lived at home but wasn’t there at the time. Because she wasn’t home, the volunteer said someone would stop by the next day to check in with her.  It turns out it was Chelsea whom the volunteer in the field was looking for. The Obama campaign data machine had determined that Chelsea, a single 22-year-old woman, was part of a key target demographic and that she was more likely to vote if she received a personal request like this from a volunteer.
So that volunteer, with Chelsea’s name on his list, was determined to have a conversation with her to make sure she went to the polls and cast her vote for Obama.  The data analysts in Chicago had used determining factors such as age, sex, race, voting record to determine who were the priority targets and had deployed the volunteers in the field to find these targets and personally encourage their vote.  This strategy proved highly effective when the results came in late Tuesday night.  The data-driven decision making that took place in the campaign war rooms helped Obama win key battleground states and remain in the presidency.
So what can we learn from this strategy that can be applied toward using big data to drive education improvement?

1. First and foremost we must organize the data.  The campaign initially found that there were too many disconnected databases so they took the time and spent the necessary resources to connect the various databases to create a “megafile” from which to create comprehensive profiles of voters.  This is a common problem in education – too many databases that must be connected in order to paint a complete and holistic picture of a student’s journey.  In Cincinnati, the Learning Partner Dashboard was created to serve as a data aggregator and connect provider databases with the district data warehouse.  Strive is working to scale this type of “megafile” database as it develops the Student Success Dashboard tool.
2. Next, the data must be used to conduct small tests of change and use data for real-time continuous improvement.  As an example, the campaign ran tests to determine which types of voters were persuaded by which types of appeals and made real time decisions based on what it was learning in real time.  Using data in this way to drive continuous improvement is core to the collaborative action process espoused by Strive.  The process requires data analysts to work together with educators and use the data to make decisions, often through small tests of change, about what individual students need to help them be successful.  If a campaign can use data in this way to create a comprehensive voter profile and predict voter behavior, why shouldn’t a teacher be able to use data in the same way to create a comprehensive student profile and use that data to predict what that student will need to excel?
3. Finally, ensure that data determines how resources are allocated.  It’s clear that data was used throughout the campaign to target resources for the most efficient and effective uses.  Examples include the strategies the campaign employed around buying advertising and where they needed to deploy field resources.  In education we must use the data to determine which strategies and interventions have the greatest impact and allocate resources accordingly.  This is the only way we will achieve a greater social return on investment.

The way in which the Obama campaign used big data to drive strategy is something that will be studied, published about and emulated in future campaigns.  Let’s hope that the next big story is about how big data is being used to transform education.  In a recently published report from Brookings, Darrell M. West ponders the learning environment of the future in which technology enables instant feedback and the teacher becomes a “data scientist.”  Why must we wait for the future to achieve this?  Big data is all around us.  It was used to elect a President.  Now, let’s put the systems and infrastructure in place so that we can use big data to ensure every student achieves, cradle to career.

As the college application season has rolled around I have begun to realize that it’s getting tougher and tougher to distinguish myself among my peers. Everything that I have done has already been done, and sometimes with better grades. After searching my resume for bits and pieces of my past to put on a pedestal, I realized that I needed to look at my high school career from a broader lens. My high school alone has been what has defined my career as a student, and for multiple reasons.

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Wherever we go, the challenge is the same: How to develop the collective will, know-how, capacity, support and flexibility to implement what is known to work, in all the schools that so desperately need it.

The formula is not overly-complicated. Much of the work we need to do for low-income and minority children is the same work we need to do for all children. We must provide clear goals with high expectations and ongoing assessments. We must make sure there is a strong teacher who knows the subject and knows how to teach it. We must insist on a rigorous curriculum and on giving extra help and time to students who are behind. And kids who struggle the most need the best instructors. The bottom line is that we need schools with dedicated, energetic, skilled professionals who focus on the needs of children and who care deeply about whether all their students have access to the kinds of knowledge and opportunities that most affluent and middle-class white children take for granted.

All of these things are needed in large, sustained and coordinated measures. Yet, this rarely occurs because schools and districts have lacked the energy, synergy, know-how, leadership and resources to do all that is needed. Instead, they focus on 1 or 2 areas of needed reform, and then become disappointed and frustrated when the results are not sufficient.

Let us all be reminded, however, that there is not a single magic bullet, there is no panacea. Multiple strategies work better than simple fixes. Only simultaneous interventions by families, schools, and the larger society will lead to sustained academic improvement for low-income and minority children.

Seniors at Toledo Early College High School (TECHS), an EDWorks Fast Track school, are giving back to the community during their last year in high school. Fifty-five seniors at TECHS have pledged to donate 2,1013 hours of community service time. This equates to more than 36 hours per student, which is more than TECHS requires from its students.

Monika Perry, who is a senior at TECHS, is excited about the opportunity. “Everyone at TECHS knows what it is to accomplish academic goals,” she said. “This project is about harnessing that drive and applying it to taking an active role in the community, into making Toledo a better place to live.”

The types of volunteer projects are taking part in include working at a community garden, donating time to fundraising events and volunteering at locations like libraries, schools, food banks and nursing homes.

We’re excited to see the community involvement occurring at TECHS. Interacting with community members and volunteering will give students exposure to career opportunities, a chance to network and a way to give back.

October is National Principals Month, sponsored by the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the National Association of Elementary School Principals. KnowledgeWorks is profiling some principals from some of their subsidiary schools and one of those profiled is Leslie Kelly.

Leslie is the founding principal of eSTEM Academy at Reynoldsburg High School, an EDWorks STEMLab school. She currently serves as the principal at Walnut Springs Middle School in Westerville, Ohio.

In her interview for World of Learning, Kelly talked about her relationship with EDWorks while designing, developing and implementing eSTEM Academy. “For the two years prior to opening eSTEM, we worked hand in hand with EDWorks as we created our program from scratch,” She said. “As a professional it was the most meaningful experience I have had to date. It was amazing to see the staff come together to create curriculum, portrait of a graduate, grading practices, student challenges, etc. that they all equally owned.”

Kelly worked closely with EDWorks’ National Director of Coaching Strategy Robin Kanaan. About their working together Kelly said. “Robin Kanaan said to me often, trust the process.’ She was right. EDWorks helped our students by guiding us through the … implementation of a program that resulted in our students achieving the highest performance index in Reynoldsburg City School’s history and a parent survey that also had extraordinarily high marks.”

Read the full post about Leslie Kelly on World of Learning.

Read an earlier post about Roslyn Valentine on World of Learning.

Every school we partner with is unique, with its own strengths and challenges. Despite this, some things hold true no matter the type of work.

1. Being Willing to Change: There are many research-based interventions, models and programs that can be effective. Whatever the chosen approach, however, it must be implemented with fidelity. Schools and those within them must be willing to change, and all parties must align themselves and buy into the improvement model and the Non-Negotiables that come with it. It can be adjusted to reflect local context and concerns, but it requires full buy-in from the superintendent, principals and teachers. We have found a high correlation between fidelity to the model and results. It is sometimes said that, “Staying the course can be as important as the course taken.” We have found this to be true. Most low-performing schools are not going to turn around completely and totally in years 1, 2 or 3. Deep, sustained improvement is a multiple-year process. Though we must hold them accountable, we must allow those going through transformation to stay the course as they pursue real, meaningful reform.
2. Smaller is Better: Smaller and autonomous is even more effective. “Small” dramatically improves the “possibility” for improvement, but it is what you do with those smaller learning environments that increases the “probability” of improvement.
3. Structure and Instruction: You can’t just change the structure and expect to see results. Radical changes in structure and instruction are necessary.
4. Data, Data, Data: From the beginning of our work, we made a strong commitment to collect and analyze both short-cycle and longitudinal data, not only for the purpose of tracking the progress of our sites, but also for the purpose of using the data to improve our technical assistance and support to the schools, which should ultimately lead to improvements in instruction. We have a relentless focus on data and our schools have become addicted to it as well.
5. Parental and Community Involvement: Parental and community involvement is essential to school reform success and sustainability. Broad stakeholder ownership is the best way to ensure that the reforms will survive the inevitable and frequent turnover in our districts and schools.
6. Concerns About Cost: Concerns about cost are often perceived, but without basis. Despite popular opinion, it does not necessarily cost more money to operate a small school design in high schools than it does to operate traditional large high schools. We’ve shown this to be true in our work.