State-Supported Evidence-Based Strategies

Grade Range

All

Parameters:

Coaching programs are broadly defined as in-service PD programs where coaches or peers observe teachers’ instruction and provide feedback to help them improve. Coaching should be individualized, time-intensive, sustained over the course of a semester or year, context-specific, and focused on discrete skills. Common roles for coaches include:

• Instructional: Helps teachers implement effective instructional strategies, new ideas, often by observing a teacher and providing feedback, demonstrating a lesson, or even co-teaching. 
• Curriculum: Excels at understanding content standards, how components of a curriculum link together, in addition to how to use the content in planning instruction and assessment.  These individuals can ensure a consistent curriculum implementation throughout a school.
• Data: Leads conversations that assists teachers in analyzing data and then applying the data to strengthen instruction

For More Information:

Matthew A. Kraft, David Blazar, Dylan Hogan. The Effect of Teacher Coaching on Instruction and Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence. Review of Educational Research, November 2016

Grade Range

All

Parameters

Leadership is second only to teaching among school related factors as an influence on learning. Effective pre-service and in-service principal training programs should be aligned with the 2015 Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSELs), and must include at least one of the following activities:

• high-quality mentoring and coaching,
• peer observations,
• visits to other schools, principals networks and conferences,
• participation in professional development with teachers
• guided “walk-throughs” of schools to look at particular practices in classrooms and consider how to evaluate/improve learning and teaching

For More Information

Karen Seashore Louis, Kenneth Leithwood, Kyla L. Wahlstrom, Stephen E. Anderson et al., Learning from Leadership: Investigating the Links to Improved Student Learning, Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement/University of Minnesota and Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto, 2010, 9. Available at www.wallacefoundation.org

Linda Darling-Hammond, Michelle LaPointe, Debra Meyerson, Margaret Orr. Preparing School Leaders for a Changing World: Lessons from Exemplary Leadership Development Programs – Final Report, Stanford, 2007. Available at http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/pages/preparing-school-leaders.aspx

Grade Range

6-12

Parameters

• Implement a year-long system that reduces the use of suspensions, calls to the police, and permanent removal of a student from a school system in response to student misbehavior to eliminate racial inequalities in discipline practices.

• Design graduated discipline systems that increase consequences based on the seriousness of student offenses and eliminate “zero tolerance” policies.
• Develop district-wide staff professional development on culture change and restorative justice approaches.
• Adopt graduated social and emotional support systems by including interventions that range from individual and group counseling to mediation.

For more information

Anyon, Y., Jenson, J. M., Altschul, I., Farrar, J., McQueen, J., Greer, E., & ... Simmons, J. (2014). The persistent effect of race and the promise of alternatives to suspension in school discipline outcomes. Children & Youth Services Review.

Grade Range

6-12

Parameters

Modified from Getting Students on Track for Graduation: Impacts of the Early Warning Intervention and Monitoring System (Faria et al.) 

• Step 1—Establish roles and responsibilities. Schools establish a team to lead and carry out the EWIMS process, determine the frequency and duration of meetings, and develop a shared vision for the team’s work. The team should include a broad representation of staff within the school.  The team should meet monthly and examine students’ risk status and progress in interventions at the end of each grading period and at the end of the school year.
• Step 2—Use the early warning data tool. The EWIMS team, with support from data or technology specialists, imports student demographic data and initial data on absences, course failure, grade point average, and behavior indicators into the early warning data tool
• Step 3—Review the early warning data. The EWIMS team focuses its attention on student- and school-level data, based on the indicators available in the tool. Data are reviewed to identify students who are at risk for not graduating on time and to examine patterns in student engagement and academic performance within the school. This step is critical when using any type of early warning data, although the focus here is on using the “research-based” indicators and thresholds preloaded into the tool. Step 3 is revisited any time new data become available.
• Step 4—Interpret the early warning data. The EWIMS team seeks out and brings in additional data (besides the indicators) to better understand the specific needs of individual students or groups of flagged students. Unlike step 3, which is focused on the risk indicators in the tool, this step focuses on the underlying causes that might lead students to be identified as at risk on one or more indicators, using additional formal data (for example, administrative records) and informal input (for example, from teachers, family, and students).
• Step 5—Assign and provide interventions. EWIMS team members make decisions about matching individual students to specific interventions in the school, district, and community, which are locally determined.
• Step 6—Monitor students and interventions. The EWIMS team examines the student risk indicators on an ongoing basis to monitor the progress of students who have already been assigned to interventions. If these students continue to be flagged as at risk, the EWIMS team may consider assigning them to different interventions
• Step 7—Evaluate and refine the early warning process. Through active and structured reflection, EWIMS team members revise specific strategies or their general approach as needed and determine how best to allocate resources to support at-risk students. This step encourages EWIMS teams to make course corrections to any aspect of EWIMS implementation.

For more information

Getting Students on Track for Graduation: Impacts of the Early Warning Intervention and Monitoring System (Faria et al.) https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED573814.pdf