State Mentors Map a Course for School Improvement

Partnership for Success Program Works With High Priority School Leaders to Raise Student Achievement

by Betty Underwood, Assistant Director, Office of School Improvement, Curriculum and Instruction Unit

Sometimes, when you face a tough challenge, you could use the help of a wise, supportive, and friendly mentor. That’s what Michigan’s high priority schools—schools that have not made adequate yearly progress—found in the Partnership for Success. The Partnership for Success, a Michigan Department of Education (MDE) initiative from 2001-2004, was designed to assist high priority schools with leadership, school improvement, and capacity building.

Partner Educators served as “critical friends” who collaborated with school principals to find possible ways to create environments that embrace change and promote excellence. Partner Educators, who were “on loan” from other organizations or districts, worked as part of a team with intermediate school district (ISD) and regional education service agency (RESA) facilitators and Office of School Improvement (OSI) field service consultants in eight regions: Genesee, Kent, Kalamazoo, Muskegon, Oakland, Saginaw, Washtenaw, and Wayne. These teams provided intense, on-site assistance to help raise student achievement in high priority schools. They helped school staff develop powerful school improvement plans, collect and analyze data, diagnose barriers to learning, design and deliver instruction, participate in on-going professional development provided by the MDE and others, and keep required records. For example, Kent County’s High Priority Team recently worked with Grand Rapids Public Schools to integrate writing into the social studies curriculum (see page 1). In Genesee County, Partner Educators provided professional development to principals on grading and reporting. In Wayne County, teams focused on building capacity and assisting schools with meeting the demands of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Education Yes!

Leadership Academies

In addition to serving as hands-on advisors to school leaders, Partner Educators worked with the field service consultants and ISDs to provide local and state-wide seminars to help leaders raise student achievement in high priority schools (see Leading Change in High Priority Schools). For example, Washtenaw ISD consultants provided a workshop on analyzing Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) data and instructional strategies. Saginaw County hosted national researcher Ruby Payne, who discussed “A Framework for Understanding Poverty.” In Kalamazoo, national speaker and author Alice Terry provided training on “Improving Behavior Through Classroom Management.”

ABCS Coaches Institute

The MDE provided a grant to develop an institute to recruit and equip academic coaches to help high priority schools. The Institute for High Priority Coaches is the work of The Alliance for Building Capacity in Schools (ABCS)—a partnership of higher education institutions, education stakeholder associations, and an urban school district. Eighteen accomplished educators form the institute’s core faculty. The core faculty listened to the ideas of university scholars, Parent Educators, and principals in high-priority schools and created a curriculum for the institute.

Next, the ABCS put out a call via Internet, newspaper advertisements, and word of mouth for potential coaches. Close to two hundred diverse and highly qualified applicants responded, resulting in nearly 120 interviews to select final candidates for training. In the end, the alliance selected 80 coaches who bring a wealth of experience in school improvement and represent almost every area of the state.

Selected candidates completed training sessions on a variety of school reform topics: Process Consultation, curriculum initiatives, parent involvement, NCLB and Education Yes! data collection, school climate, and leadership. Those who successfully completed the training have become “certified” ABCS coaches with their names listed on the coaches registry. They offer a new source of expertise for school leadership teams.

Michigan schools are able to contact the ABCS Web site and select a coach from their area. Coaches will work with the leadership teams at schools at least 100 days during a year to develop each school’s unique plan for meeting student needs. Coaches will not come with a program to impose; instead, they will come with a helping attitude and demonstrated skills in coaching others to improve school performance and meet the accountability requirements of NCLB. Districts provide funding for the coaches.

For more information about the ABCS Coaches Institute, visit www.abcscoaches.org or contact Christopher B. Reimann, Outreach Specialist, Michigan State University, College of Education, 134 Erickson Hall, East Lansing, 48824, (517) 353-8950, reimannc@msu.edu.

MI Plan

MI Plan is Michigan’s new Web-based school improvement planning tool that is currently being created as part of a comprehensive approach to using data to improve the achievement of Michigan’s students. MI Plan was designed to provide every school in Michigan with a common, easy-to-use school improvement framework and to streamline the school improvement planning and reporting process.

MI Plan is a project of the Center for Educational Performance and Information (CEPI), whose staff developed MI Plan with other state agencies and representatives from the education community. However, former CEPI director Andrew Henry is quick to share credit for the project with intermediate and local school districts, whose staffs diligently compile and submit data to the state.

“Just as a seed needs soil and water to take root and grow, MI Plan needs complete and accurate data to [provide each principal] with a tool that can effectively assist her/him develop a planning process that will lead to improved student learning,” Henry wrote in the Spring 2004 Journal for the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning (MACUL).

Henry says that by using the data and resources already built into MI Plan, principals and school improvement teams can develop a single plan to streamline the school-improvement planning process and to meet various state and federal reporting requirements. The MI Plan process for school improvement planning includes eight basic steps:

• Assess a school’s readiness to benefit from MI Plan.
• Collect, sort, and select data.
• Build and analyze a school profile.
• Set and prioritize school improvement goals.
• Study and select research-based practices.
• Draft an action plan.
• Implement and monitor the plan.
• Evaluate the plan’s impact on student achievement.

“MI Plan makes it possible for a school to enter the process at any time, without losing important data, and to archive data and plans that can be used year-to-year,” says Henry. “MI Plan is a continuous school improvement planning tool—what planning teams accomplish in one school year is carried forward to another, and another.”

For more information about MI Plan, visit www.michigan.gov/miplan or contact the Department of Information Technology (DIT) Education help desk, (517) 335-0505, Help-Desk@michigan.gov.

MI-MAP

Working closely with High Priority Schools around the state, Michigan Partner Educators have identified 38 “ruthlessly practical” processes fundamental to accelerating improvement in student achievement. This collection of processes (housed in a sturdy, portable box) will be made available free to high priority schools this fall. Educators from non-high priority schools, who field-tested the packets, indicated that the processes will also be helpful to anyone wanting to show growth in student achievement, so the Office of School Improvement is making the tool kit available to other Michigan schools as well on the MDE Web site and through Central Michigan University’s Educational Materials Center at www.emc.cmich.edu.

“What I like most about these materials is the tone—they’re so down-to-earth and accessible,” offered one participant at a recent MI-Map preview. “You can tell in advance what you’ll have if you finish that work on the inside—so you can decide which ones fit with your school’s direction.” The processes range from how to improve staff communication systems to how to focus and organize a school-wide calendar to how to develop a school-wide behavior management plan. There is a six-packet series on deepening and sharpening instructional design and delivery, and others on setting up school-wide databases and learning from perception and from process data. The Office of School Improvement hopes to release MI-Map kits by fall 2004.

Taken together, the modules form a map for the journey toward school improvement—“driving directions” for how to get from here to a particular objective schools have chosen for their school-improvement plans. The packets are clustered into sections, including

• Organizing Administrative Systems (Packing for the Trip)
• Holding a Shared Vision Steady (The Compass)
• Tending to Spirit/Culture (Tunes on the Radio)
• Moving Decisively Toward Data (Eye on the Dashboard)
• Designing and Delivering Instruction (Steering Instruction)
• Aligning Curriculum (The Destination)
• Learning as a Professional Community (Drivers’ Ed)
• Sharing Decision-making (Let’s Caravan!)
• Using Technology (Tuning the Engine till it Hums)

For more information, contact: Betty Underwood, Assistant Director of Curriculum and Instruction, Office of School Improvement, Michigan Department of Education, P.O. Box 30008, Lansing, MI 48909, (517) 335-3401, underwoodb@michigan.gov.

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