Is It Working in Your Middle School?: A Personalized System to Monitor Progress of Initiatives

By Nikki C. Woodson and James W. Frakes

How effective are the programs and initiatives at your school?

Authors Nikki Woodson and James Frakes offer a personalized system to provide school administrators, teachers, departments, school improvement committees, and central office administrators with a process and tools for continuous improvement of student learning. With perspectives from both educational and business project management experts, this book guides you through a system to plan, implement, and evaluate any initiative, strategy, or program. Although designed to be used by middle level educators, this framework works for any grade level or school.

You will be coached, with the use of specific tools, through processes similar to those educators use to evaluate student progress, including

- Determining root causes of problems rather than treating symptoms
- Setting clear and measurable goals
- Gathering data
- Interpreting data and drawing conclusions
- Creating plans with specific, measurable actions
- Monitoring progress and providing support where needed
- Holding individuals accountable for implementation

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781560902843

Book preview

References

Getting Started

How Do You Know It’s Working?

The purpose of this personalized system is to provide school administrators, department chairs, coaches, and teachers the process and tools needed to ensure continuous improvement of student learning. This system will not give specific instructional strategies or programs for schools to implement. Each school must determine the instructional practices that will have the greatest impact on teaching and learning based on research and experience. The focus of this workbook is on continuous improvement and accountability. The objective is to provide schools with a system to identify improvements and support areas of growth that can be applied to any initiative, strategy, or program that has been implemented.

This book will guide you through a system of planning, implementation, and evaluation of programs step-by-step. Although designed to be used by middle level educators, the same system or framework works for any grade level or school. Each chapter has the same format. First, an idea or background information is shared so it can be discussed for educator learning and professional growth. This is followed by a Case Study example from a middle school. Finally, and most important, the Personalized Reflection section is your opportunity to personalize the learning and conduct your own program evaluation as you progress through the book.

Teachers, departments, school improvement committees, administrators, and central office administrators can benefit from suggestions in this book. Certainly there is power in teamwork as group thinking yields deeper reflections, but individual teachers can use the framework described in this book to determine the effectiveness of programs or strategies they have implemented in their classrooms, too.

This book is unique because it offers perspectives from both educational and business project management experts, yielding a value-added process of evaluating school programs. Dr. Woodson’s educational expertise and Mr. Frakes’ quality assurance expertise have combined to develop a framework that educators in any school setting can use to raise student achievement levels. They have shown that the very actions non-educational organizations have used to ensure quality and become successful, when applied with fidelity, can work in schools, too.

The book is not laden with technical language or hard-to-grasp concepts. In reality, you will notice processes and actions that are familiar to you; there is data gathering, problem solving, and formative and summative assessment to name a few. Achieving success using quality assurance principles is about discipline—putting in time and effort to

•Determine root causes of problems rather than treating symptoms

•Set clear and measurable goals

•Gather data

•Interpret data/draw conclusions

•Create plans with specific, measurable actions

•Monitor progress and provide support where needed

•Hold individuals accountable for implementation

As you can see, these reflect actions you routinely perform as educators accountable for student achievement. The aim of this book is to provide you with tools for each step of the process including goal setting, strategizing, data collecting, and ultimately communicating to staff about how to focus on what will make a difference in their students’ performance, to help them narrow to what matters.

Please remember this book is only useful if the reader completes the Personalized Reflection area of each chapter. Without this personalization and making meaning of the content and case study,