FEATURED PROJECTS
SCHOOL QUALITY REVIEWS IN MASSACHUSETTS
Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership
NEW SCHOOL DESIGN IN TEXAS
New School Development Fellowship (NSDF)
SCHOOL CULTURE COACHING IN MASSACHUSETTS
Southbridge Public Schools
Situation
• The Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership (SEZP) is an attempt to create a zone within a Massachusetts public school system using conditions which have made many autonomous school models successful. Springfield’s is one of a dozen similar efforts countrywide to create serious autonomy and accountability conditions in district schools.
Approach
• SEN supports key strategic priorities of the SEZP by conducting an annual set of School Quality Reviews (beginning Spring 2018). This SQR process yields written reports for each school to inform school-level improvement planning, as well as data sets which help the district plan supervision and support across schools.
Results
• SEZP schools are moving in a positive direction. Compared to baseline SQR data from Spring 2018, nine of 10 participating schools made progress in all turnaround practices of SEZP’s Roadmap for Student Success framework.
• SQR recommendations have been formally rolled into the annual strategic planning process across the district and feed into each principal’s performance framework.
• SEN now provides the Massachusetts Department of Education with a comprehensive, statewide package of support and school monitoring visits which includes the generation of goals and benchmarks to guide school improvement work.
Situation
• Families’ demand for charter seats in NYC continues to exceed supply, with more than 48,000 children on wait lists. This need is concentrated in neighborhoods with a dearth of options. In partnership with the Walton Family Foundation, SEN both designed and launched the NYC Charter Leader Fellowship (est. 2016) to identify and mobilize NYC’s next cohort of visionary charter school leaders.
Approach
• SEN recruited entrepreneurial leaders and coached them through the three-year process of writing charters, planning for opening, and launching new schools. Through the fellowship, each aspiring leader was guided to generate a clear mission and vision for both instruction and school culture and to then build a detailed school design for bringing their vision to life. This program also focused on helping them develop the leadership skills needed to effectively build a new school and manage a staff to high standards of quality.
Results
• Brooklyn Emerging Leaders Academy (BELA), a STEAM-focused high school for girls, opened in Brooklyn in 2017. From within BELA’s inaugural class, 93% of students earned the required number of credits to graduate with a NYS Regents Diploma.
• A second CLF school, Elm Community Charter School, opened in Queens in 2018. A NYCDOE survey shows that 95% of teachers responded positively to questions about effective school leadership and that 95% of families feel the principal works to create a sense of community in and around the school.
• Three additional fellowship schools opened in 2019 and 2020: Hellenic Classical (2019), University Prep (2019) and Walkabout Bronx High School (2020). Results from these schools will be reported in 2021.
Situation
• Michigan Governor Rick Snyder created the Education Achievement Authority (EAA), in 2011, with the aim of revitalizing Michigan’s most persistently failing schools.
• One of the EAA’s main strategies was to identify and train the state’s greatest educational leaders in order to dramatically improve outcomes in related schools.
Approach
• During SYs 2015-2016 and 2016-2017, SEN launched a Leadership and Design Institute which prepared leaders and turnaround teams to launch Small Learning Communities (SLCs) in chronically failing schools.
• The establishment of a career ladder complemented these efforts by recognizing and training outstanding teachers across the district, using them to staff turnaround teams, and creating long-term stability by preparing developing leaders for the future.
• Identified leaders were trained to generate “reset” moments and replace entrenched cultures of low expectations with effective, sustainable structures and practices.
Results
• SQR data reported by Class Measures for SYs 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 showed steady improvement for all school quality scores across all 11 EAA schools.
• Between 2015 and 2017, the percent of EAA students meeting their growth targets on the NWEA assessment increased substantially, rising from 43% to 55% in math and 44% to 51% in reading. Furthermore, average growth in the percent of students meeting their NWEA targets was even stronger for SLCs–rising from 42% to 62% for math and 42% to 58% in reading.
Situation
As part of the Systems of Great Schools (SGS) initiative, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) is supporting participating districts as they expand the number of high-quality seats through the design and launch of new schools. TEA sought out SEN to design and launch the New School Design Fellowship to ensure aspiring leaders get superior support for school design. The first NSDF cohort was launched in Fall 2019. Since then SEN has supported the development and launch of 9 new schools in 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 in Lubbock, Aldine, and Victoria. In 2021-2022 we welcomed 13 new leaders from 7 different Texas districts into the Texas New School Design Fellowship.
Approach
- Districts apply a rigorous internal selection process to identify and name entrepreneurial passionate leaders to design and launch new schools.
- In the first year of the New School Design Fellowship, participants spend the fall semester exploring the assets and needs of their community, examining effective school models, and crafting the vision for their school’s model. During this time they plan how they will provide high-quality academics, a vibrant and inclusive school culture, and a talented team of teachers committed to continuous improvement. In the spring semester, participants focus on bringing their vision to life by building out the enabling systems and their own leadership skills to implement the model with fidelity.
- Participating districts support each new school by ensuring key autonomies, providing facilities, and facilitating startup funding. In addition, they provide supervision and support aligned with the design and expectations for the new school model.
- After the school design process, Districts have the opportunity to apply for Continuation Coaching from the SEN team which includes two years of 1:1 leadership coaching, twice yearly school reviews that assess the school’s development toward the stated mission, andregularFellow convenings focused on developing leadership skills and reflecting and improving on school outcomes.
Highlights
- Nine out of ten participants in the first two NSDF cohorts completed a high-quality School Design Guide and opened a new school on time (August 2020 or August 2021).
- 100% of participants in the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 NSDF cohorts rated the following aspects of their experience effective or highly effective: a) professional development sessions, b) 1:1 coaching on school design and 1:1 coaching on leadership skills, c) centering each design topic on issues of equity
- 100% of the schools who completed the Planning year successfully applied for and earned Continuation grants from the Texas Education Agency of $1,000,000 over two years
Guiding Principles for SEN School Design
Foundations: Vision driven, equitable schools in which the principal is the instructional leader
SEN schools are designed around a compelling vision for equity and include a coherent set of systems and practices that align with a clear vision for how students learn best. SEN founding principals lead the school community to a common understanding of the link between the parts and the whole, or the Vision and the supporting practices. SEN principals are instructional leaders and spend ~70% of their time focused on the instructional core. SEN schools ideally start fresh and grow a grade at a time to make space and time for all community members to learn to implement the aligned plan.
NON-NEGOTIABLES
DO (SEN schools…)
- Are built around a vision for equity (see SEN Equity Statement)
- Are driven by the principal’s vision - SEN schools are developed out of the principal’s beliefs, their research and engagement with the community, and assessment of community assets and needs - they are not out of the box school models
- Give principals ownership over the instructional core: clarity on how students learn best
- Are fresh start and slow growth schools (Ideal)
DO NOT
- Business as usual schools built using the same practices that historically produced inequitable results
- Principal as manager: makes sure the trains run on time, but doesn’t know where the train is going
- School turnaround without new staff, new vision and time to organize the community around a new set of expectations
Instructional Core: Heavy Lifting/Deeper Learning
SEN schools are intellectually challenging, rigorous places of learning. Students are doing the thinking in classrooms and are engaging with challenging questions and content. Students frequently collaborate by working on group projects or by discussing and debating ideas through a common critical lens. Students may engage in long term projects, or short-term analysis of information, hands-on activities, reading and writing, and work-based internships. Students are not memorizing and regurgitating information.
NON-NEGOTIABLES
DO
- Select or create rigorous curricula as defined by (EdReports, Texas Resource Review, PBLWorks)
- Have a clear vision for pedagogy that is informed by views of how children learn best and supported by a research based teaching framework
- Provide opportunity for deeper learning experiences and/or give students the opportunity to “play the whole game” in academic pursuits
DO NOT
- Support “sit-and-git” style instruction.
- Leave teachers to their own devices to design and implement instructional approaches
- Demand rote practice of students as the central component of their learning experience
School Culture: Relationships Matter
Positive, caring relationships are at the core of SEN school culture. In every interaction SEN school staff work to “discover and cultivate the unique gifts, talents and interests that every human possesses.” School responses to off-culture behavior take a teaching and nurturing approach and do not focus on discipline and punishment as the strategies for reinforcing cultural expectations. SEN schools take student voice into account in every interaction and in every moment of the day, not in isolated moments such as student government, or leadership teams.
Staff in SEN schools must be organized to enable adults to know a small number of students and their families very well. This can be accomplished through innovative staffing, programs such as advisory or crew, or other distributed counseling models. When students are struggling adults make an effort to identify root cause problems and to teach students how to navigate these challenges effectively.
SEN schools make every effort to provide an additional layer of support that activates when students and their families are facing significant challenges outside of school and would benefit from a staff member helping them navigate programs and services available to them.
NON-NEGOTIABLES
DO
- Incorporate one or more structures designed to repair harm.
- Incorporate a crew/advisory/homeroom structure that ensures every child has one adult with visibility into all aspects of their school experience.
- Provide students consistent opportunity to share their views and beliefs, in classrooms during instruction, in informal interactions around the school, and when navigating challenges encountered as a community or individual level.
DO NOT
- Support consequence-driven discipline systems or those that are derived from the “broken windows theory”.
- Assume students know how to enact behavioral expectations without teaching and support
- Adopt a colonial mentality in imposing a set of cultural expectations on students and their families
Structures and Systems for Improvement: Coherence
Talent: All of us are learners
Staff in SEN schools are organized in teams to facilitate adults being responsible for students’ wellbeing and academic outcomes in a meaningful way. Distributed leadership supports this organization with team leaders being intentionally cultivated by school principals. Interactions between principals, team leaders, teachers, and ultimately students follow the same method and mode as that identified as desired pedagogy for instructional core.
DO
- Create explicit structures for teacher development that focus on efficacy in academic gains and student belonging.
- Create staffing models that ensure the capacity of instructional leaders to provide every teacher with meaningful coaching every week
- Designate an instructional leadership team who engages in a progress-monitoring/improvement cycle regarding student learning
- Create a staffing model that affords the principal time to focus on the quality of instruction and student outcomes
DO NOT
- Engage in the magical thinking that the principal can be the instructional leader unless other responsibilities are distributed across the staff
- Assume teachers will be meaningfully coached without allocating sufficient time to instructional coaches
- Recruit and hire teachers in the middle or end of hiring periods
- Create reactive staffing plans. SEN schools are proactive in creating staffing plans that fit the vision and mission of the school
Goals and Gains: Set clear targets and frequently monitor progress
SEN schools set 2-3 priority goals to work on each year. Those goals are discussed and digested by the entire staff. All staff members understand how their work relates to and supports the select goals. Staff receive feedback and are supported in their efforts to advance towards goals, and there are frequent opportunities for community members to reflect on and have input into what is working, what is not working and how that should influence action plans moving forward.
DO
- Establish no more than 2 or 3 implementation priorities for Year 1 of the school and orient design decisions around achieving those priorities.
- Identify scaffolded expectations for different times of the year and for different levels of quality for each of the priorities
DO NOT
- Set goals that are isolated from one another. Such as stand alone goals for improving attendance, raising proficiency rates in ELA and reducing suspensions. These goals need to be linked to the school’s vision and mission
- Set goals without clear underlying action plans and benchmark expectations that can be used to monitor progress
Equity:
DO
- Recognize that, historically, the american education system was built for white people and in response are intentionally anti-racist
DO NOT
- Perpetuate systems and structures that reinforce racist and inequitable elements of American society
- Allow inequitable outcomes to go unexplored and unchallenged
- Track students towards unequal opportunity
- Lower expectations for students based on past performance
Situation
• In January 2016, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted to designate the Southbridge Public Schools (SPS) as chronically underperforming, placing the district in state Receivership.
• To support the implementation of its turnaround plan, in 2019 SPS chose to partner with SEN to support the development of tools, systems, and professional development to help Southbridge Middle School realize its vision for strengthening school culture.
Approach
• The SEN culture coach supported the development of school leaders’ and teachers’ capacity in relation to culture building. This included an assessment of teacher needs, design of a professional development plan to address identified needs, as well as facilitation of teacher training sessions to meet those needs.
• In addition, the SEN culture coach worked closely with the administrators of the Southbridge culture team to support, troubleshoot and develop plans to further culture goals.
• Currently, SEN coaches continue to provide monthly school culture coaching including strategic planning with appropriate staff, co-observation of and feedback on classroom management, SEL activities for advisory, as well as support with design, monitoring, and refinement of systems and structures to support improvements to school culture.
Results
• Leaders articulated a vision for high levels of student engagement, participation, and demonstrations of respect for learning time across all physical and virtual classrooms.
• At faculty PD, leaders introduced a schoolwide vision for culture with priorities around increasing student attendance and implementing teacher use of “direct praise” as a strategy to increase student engagement during lessons
• Mid-year results:
– Average daily student attendance increased from roughly 70% to 83% by early spring.
– SSC referrals (classroom removals) fell from 2.44 per day in November 2020 to 1.88 per day in March 2021
– December 2020 staff survey show the vast majority of teachers report positive feelings about gains in:
– overall perception of school climate
– staff connectedness and safety
– culture systems and structures in place
– Select Student Survey Results (Dec ‘20):
– Teachers treat me with respect (93%)
– Adults in this school treat all students with respect (89%)
– All students are treated fairly by the adults in my school (87%)
– Students are frequently recognized for good behavior (85%)
– The behaviors in my classroom allow teachers to teach so I can learn (82%)