The resources below provide practice-based learnings on how to implement evidence based HS redesign and improvement strategies & practices and why it is important and impactful to do so.
The “Organizing Adults” section on the “What the Evidence Says” page examines evidence and a research base that supports core principles to consider when redesigning high school staffing and how to most effectively deploy the adults in your building, like teaming and leadership structures, basically how to facilitate strong relationships between adults and students.
The people in the school building are the most important resource to consider both in terms of how they work together and the outcomes and impact of your redesign efforts. If the people – teachers, partners, administrators, AND students – are more satisfied, more productive, more supported, more connected and more engaged, then the evidence says that the conditions have been created where academic outcomes will flourish. The critical concept is thinking about how to make the support and advancement of students the fundamental responsibility of everyone in the building and how structures that organize adults can support this work’s acceleration.
Teacher Teams is a six-minute audiocast cohosted by Dr. Robert Balfanz, Director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University and Linda Muskauski, Knowledge Development Director at the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. The pair discuss how teacher teams serve as the building blocks for high school redesign initiatives.
Examples of Actions Taken by Principals Trying to Lead Turnaround this report describes examples of actions that school principals have taken in trying to lead turnaround. Most principals have either not worked in a turnaround situation or have fallen short in a turnaround attempt, despite their best efforts. Although not all of the principals highlighted in this report have successfully turned around their schools, these examples can be helpful to other principals, teacher-leader teams, and principal supervisors who are looking to approach turnaround work with strategic, but less common actions in an effort to get new, better results. The authors draw on prior research to frame the examples.
The report also draws on the observations of two organizations with deep experience in the turnaround field and partners on the CST: Public Impact and the University of Virginia Darden/Curry Partnership for Leaders in Education. The examples of actions described in this report are organized into familiar categories: vision, goals, data, change leadership, teachers and leaders, instruction, and strategic partnerships. These categories are also tied to domains and practices described in the Center on School Turnaround’s Four Domains for Rapid School Improvement: A Systems Framework.
Download the Report (PDF)
Peer Coaching that Works: The Power of Reflection and Feedback in Teacher Triad Teams this report from McRel International examines that teachers, like all professionals, should continuously grow and learn by developing new knowledge, skills, and abilities that benefit their students academically, we do not believe that a deficit-based approach to coaching is the way to get there.
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Design and Data in Balance: Using Data-Driven Decision Making to Enable Student Success to gain a better understanding of the dynamic between data and design, the New Visions data team took a closer look at schools that have used thoughtful approaches to achieve impressive results. This study describes how teachers and school leaders at the High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology (familiarly known as Telly) used data and design to strengthen programming for students in grades 9 and 10, thereby improving outcomes for all students.
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Classroom Q&A with Larry Ferlazzo is a teacher blog on Education Week’s website. In this post, Mr. Ferlazzo responds to the question: What are ‘Small Learning Communities’ (dividing large campuses into special interest small schools) and how do they work?
Read the Post
Opportunity by Design: New High School Models for Student Success produced by the Carnegie Corporation of New York examines while it is important to graduate from high school, high school is not an end in itself, but rather preparation for college as well as life-long learning. It is one part of the path that leads students towards their ultimate potential in any of endeavor as well as in personal satisfaction in their lives. To reach these goals, students deserve the best possible education that we can provide.
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Leading Indicators of School Turnarounds: How to Know When Dramatic Change is On Track this report summarizes the research and experience from other settings—including venture capital, franchising, and research and development in industries such as pharmaceuticals—in which leaders have long relied on leading indicators to enhance the likelihood of success.
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School Turnaround Leaders: Competencies for Success part of the School Turnaround Collection from Public Impact
Fall 2016 updated with links to:
Coaching & Developing Turnaround Leader Actions: Facilitator’s Guide contains the materials designed to implement a work session that builds the knowledge and capacity of leaders and staff members from regional comprehensive centers (RCCs), state education agencies (SEAs), and within-state regional centers.
Download the Guide (PDF)
Freshman Academy With almost 2,000 students, Bloomfield High School is a suburban Newark high school urban in demographics and small-town-like in culture. As the demographics and state accountability measures changed, it became apparent that the way to improve graduation rates was to start before students were enrolled. According to the principal, “The most important people at Bloomfield High School are now the ninth-grade students and teachers.” The teacher-designed freshman program with its summer orientation, team structure, and common planning time is credited with reducing student failures by 50 percent and significantly improving academic achievement.
Visit Bloomfield High School’s Website.
In the “Students at the Center” section on “What the Evidence Says” page examines the evidence-based research that highlights core principles to consider when redesigning high school experiences. As you design, think about how to keep students at the center of their educational experiences. Student apathy, lack of motivation, and behavior are factors underlying teacher stress and burnout. The longer students are in school, the less hopeful they become regarding their educational experiences. This has resulted in higher rates of student and teacher absenteeism, higher rates of student suspension and less learning ultimately.
A shift can occur that places students at the center when redesigning schools, which aligns students’ interest with teachers and administrators desired outcomes. This section gives evidence-based suggestions on how to produce this change of ideas and practices within schools. Also, it explores the importance of listening, valuing and implementing student voice in the decision-making process to achieve successful outcomes for all students. This section also underscores the importance of developing agency with students and the balancing act that is needed to help foster agency within students.
Freshman On-Track Toolkit prepared by the Network for College Success at the University of Chicago, the NCS Freshman On-Track Toolkit is a collection of protocols, reports, resources, and artifacts used by our experienced Coaches in their daily work to help schools better support students through the critical first year of high school.
Download the Report (PDF)
Beyond the Indicators: An Integrated School-Level Approach to Dropout Prevention from the Mid-Atlantic Equity Center summarizes the research on why students drop out of school, explains the research implications for how to create an integrated dropout prevention strategy, and highlights an innovative pilot project that yielded results in a matter of months—a how-to example that works.
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Overcoming the Poverty challenge to Enable College and Career Readiness for All examines the important and under-conceptualized thread in the weave of efforts needed to ensure that all students graduate from high school prepared for college and/or career
training: enhanced student supports.
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Springpoint published Designing New School Models, A Practical Guide in fall 2016, which outlines a three-phase process for new school model development, together with a set of planning tools for designers and leaders who want to engage in the work of doing school differently. The materials in the guide represent key insights gleaned from our work supporting school designers in the design, implementation, and iteration of new school models. For us, this work is anchored by three core priorities: young people, great practice, and iteration.
Download the Report (PDF)
Report Card Conferences are conferences held between students and typically a non-school affiliated adult. Report Card Conferences offer students the opportunity to have a caring adult review their Attendance, Behavior, and Course Performance as part of their report card. The adults, which are typically not teachers but other caring adults from the community, praise and support students to continue the good work and discuss any ways they can improve.
Report Card Conferences also give students the opportunity to speak with adults who reinforce the value of success in school and encourage them to get help when experiencing difficulty in their courses and/or environment.
Redesigning Student Support Systems is a six-minute video which examines how high schools can redesign their student support systems using the A-B-Cs of Attendance, Behavior and Course Performance.
PBS’s program Frontline featured a story on Omarina. The video follows Omarina over a six year period and how an innovative program to stem the high school dropout rate affected her life’s journey.
The “What the Evidence Says” page of the Teaching and Learning Section provides a learning sciences, research-based guide to teaching and learning practices.
The “How to Section” introduces models and approaches to support implementation of selected practices at your school or your district.
Implementing evidence-based practices is a human endeavor and an ongoing process. It requires continuous self-reflection on the ways we teach and on the use of students’ work as indicators to determine the success of meeting the needs of diverse learners.
The resources in the section include concise articles, successful teaching and learning experiences as well as applications that may be used by practitioners as reference to build up teaching, bring together evidence of effective teaching approaches while leveraging resourcefulness and proven classroom strategies and techniques to improve students and teachers’ learning. In addition, this section highlights proof points of learning as demonstrated by schools implementing specific practices or strategies.
Educator Competencies for Personalized, Learner-Centered Teaching the development of Educator Competencies for Personalized, Learner-Centered Teaching serves as a first step in identifying the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that educators need in order to create and thrive in effective personalized, learner-centered environments.
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Teacher Views and Voices the Center on Education Policy (CEP), in an effort to gather and amplify teachers’ voices about current education issues and their own profession, conducted a national survey of public school K-12 teachers in the winter of 2015-16. The survey focused on a strategic set of issues for policy-makers, educators, business leaders, and the public, including teachers’ views on their profession, standards, testing, and evaluations.
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Supporting the Whole Teacher from The Aspen Institute highlights the need for teacher preparation and professional learning to both build teachers’ own social and emotional competence and prepare teachers to foster these skills in their students. The case study cites key examples of programs supporting teachers in this work including RULER, an evidence-based program that trains teachers on how to model the social and emotional behaviors they want to see in their students, and the Center for Reaching and Teaching the Whole Child, which works with teacher preparation programs to help integrate teacher and student social and emotional competencies into their classes.
Download the Report (PDF)
Improving Academic Outcomes for Disadvantaged Students: Scaling Up Individualized Tutorials prepared by The Hamilton Project examines the need for a more robust safety net for students who fall behind grade level is a key systemic challenge for many urban school districts.
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Global Best Practices: An Internationally Benchmarked Self-Assessment Tool for Secondary Learning was created by the New England Secondary School Consortium to equip high schools with a clearly articulated, step-by-step process they can follow to identify existing issues or needs, and to shape school-improvement plans and priorities.
Download the Research Summary (PDF)
Download the Web-based Version
A PBS’s NEWSHOUR feature that examines a South Texas high school that integrates early college learning into the high school curriculum in an a multi-cultural environment of poverty, English as second language, differing education levels, etc.
Blended Learning—An innovative blended learning program at Huntley High School is breaking down the barriers of the traditional school day and leveraging technology to help students learn better. Blended Learning classes at Huntley High School Inspire, Challenge and Empower students to become self-motivated learners through both face to face and online instruction. HHS utilizes a Flex Learning Model of Blended Learning.
As a national pioneer of this increasingly popular approach, the District has been recognized in a national peer-reviewed journal, CNN, Parenting Magazine, the Pearson Education Blog, and other media.
Visit HHS’s Website
Sandborn Regional High School produced a nine-minute video focusing on Competency-Based Learning.
PSI High is an immersive, full-time program located within Seminole High School where students work in an environment that looks like a high-tech office instead of a classroom. Rather than learn through traditional instruction, our students join teams with their peers and teachers to solve real community, business, and social problems.
The guide, Design Your Personal Learning Plan, from Problem Solving Incubator High School in Seminole County Public Schools provides an example for creating an individualized learning plan that combines face to face classroom experiences, individual advisors and project based learning experiences across the school campus and community.
Download the Guide (PDF)
In the “What the Evidence Says” section on post-secondary pathways is evidence and a research-base that supports core principles to consider when redesigning high school experiences. As you design pathways that see high school as a beginning and not an end, keep students’ options open, keep the choice of which pathway with students and their families, and collaborate beyond the school walls with families, employers, community partners and post-secondary education providers there are many implementation decisions to address.
In order to support the “know how” of school leaders, teachers, staff, and community we have compiled a variety of reports and guides. Each of these reports offer models and often share district and school sites where the approach has had a successful impact.
“More than an Application” below, for example, examines how New York City Schools offer a comprehensive college and career planning program to students and families beginning in the freshman year. It also provides an example of how to provide all students support to complete a comprehensive plan for success after high school.
Connecting Secondary Career and Technical Education and Registered Apprenticeship A Profile of Six State Systems Connecticut, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Washington states were profiled in this report are using a range of approaches to align secondary Career Technical Education with Registered Apprenticeships. Produced by the US Department of Education.
Download the Report (PDF)
More than an Application from the Research Alliance for New York City Schools looks at how two NYC high schools work with students and families on the road to college.
Download the Report (PDF)
What it Takes to Create Linked Learning a 2016 report issued by Linked Learning on lessons learned from evaluation the approach of in practice. Click to download (PDF).
Not as Hard as You Think a report which details engaging high school students in work-based learning. Prepared by Jobs for the Future in conjunction with The Pathways to Prosperity Network. Click to download (PDF).
Toward a Better Future evidence on improving employment outcomes for disadvantaged youth in the United States. Prepared in February, 2015 by MDRC. Click to download (PDF).
Nudging for Success examines the behavioral barriers that prevent students from accessing college, completing a degree, and repaying their loans and cost-effective solutions that can be used to address these barriers.
Download the Report (PDF)
Earn While You Learn: Switzerland’s Vocational Education and Training System In countries such as Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, apprenticeships are an integral part of the educational system. Recently, the United States has shown increasing interest in learning more about the Swiss model and other European models. This brochure explains the key characteristics of the Swiss model, highlights Swiss-U.S. cooperation, and discusses current initiatives in the field.
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Degrees of Opportunity from AEI provides lessons learned from state-level data on post-secondary earnings outcomes and shows if we
move beyond our current on the bachelor’s degree and widen the aperture to include all the post-secondary pathways at our disposal, far more educational options emerge that can lead students to economic success.
Download the Reports (PDF)
ISA Outcome Evaluation This report summarizes key findings from Academy for Educational Development’s external evaluation of the Institute for Student Achievement (ISA). The six-year evaluation investigated the following key questions: 1) What are the outcomes for ISA students in terms of high school and college achievement?, and 2), How do outcomes for ISA students compare with those of similar students in non-ISA schools?
Download the Report (PDF)
Iowa BIG is a public school with no admissions requirements. Each partnering district has slots proportional to their financial commitment to the program. We currently serve an accurate cross section of our partner districts’ demographics.
Visit Iowa BIG’s Website
PSI High is an immersive, full-time program located within Seminole High School where students work in an environment that looks like a high-tech office instead of a classroom. Rather than learn through traditional instruction, our students join teams with their peers and teachers to solve real community, business, and social problems.
The guide, Design Your Personal Learning Plan, from Problem Solving Incubator High School in Seminole County Public Schools provides an example for creating an individualized learning plan that combines face to face classroom experiences, individual advisors and project based learning experiences across the school campus and community.
Download the Guide (PDF)
We also offer a section which looks at what as been learned from efforts to implement evidence-based high school redesign and improvement efforts in a comprehensive manner.
Addressing Early Warning Indicators: Interim Impact Findings from the Investing in Innovation (i3) Evaluation of Diplomas Now from MDRC and ICF International which conducted an independent, experimental evaluation of 62 secondary schools in 11 school districts on the impact and implementation of Diplomas Now.
Download the Report (PDF)
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