[ North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL) ]
[ Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) ]
Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) |
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| Address: | 211 East Seventh Street, Suite 200 Austin, TX 78701-3281 Phone: (512) 476-6861, (800) 476-6861 Fax: (512) 476-2286 E-mail: info@sedl.org Internet: http://www.sedl.org/ |
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| Director: | Wesley A. Hoover | |
| States Served: | Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas | |
| OERI Program Officer: | Gil Garcia (202) 219-2144; gil.garcia@ed.gov | |
To find, share, and sustain effective solutions for the most urgent problems facing educational systems, practitioners, and decisionmakers in the southwestern United States. SEDL's particular emphasis is on ensuring educational equality for children and youth who live in poverty; who are Hispanic, African-American, or other minorities; or who have mental or physical exceptionalities.
SEDL's field-based research, development, and dissemination work is organized around six related goals:
Among the range of SEDL's initiatives that address each of the above goal areas, selected projects are described below, with the exception of the goal related to diversity, language, and culture, which is described as part of SEDL's "Specialty Area."
Development of Collaborative Action Team (CAT) Process. The CAT process steers parents, educators, and community members as they learn to collaborate; identify the most pressing issues in their communities; and develop, implement, and evaluate action plans to address those issues. SEDL is working with 14 sites to develop self-sustaining teams across the southwestern region. Individual teams have developed strategies to support the continued improvement of their school districts; created systems for delivering school-based health, social, and parenting services to school campuses; and improved the quality of schooling and life for students.
Community Deliberative Dialogue and Education Policymaking. The core idea behind this project is that ongoing public support for successful local school reform and improvement is likely to occur only if there is a "fit" or coherence between education policy and the public's priorities for education. SEDL is investigating how a series of community-wide deliberative dialogues in Arkansas and Oklahoma affected the interaction among legislators and their constituents. For example, participating policymakers reported that the dialogues helped them understand what matters to the public and helped them anticipate the public's willingness to accept policy consequences and build common ground.
Promoting Instructional Coherence. SEDL is working with teachers and administrators to explore how teachers make linkages among external mandates, curriculum, instruction, and assessment to provide quality instruction. SEDL is creating a portfolio of tools, strategies, and resources other educators can use to explore such linkages on their own, improve their instruction, and increase student learning. A related project, the Reading Coherence Initiative, focuses on prevention of early reading failure in grades K-2. SEDL has developed a conceptual framework and tools that map the cognitive requirements of learning to read to student skill levels and instructional strategies that address skill development. The Early Reading Assessment Inventory, available as a searchable database on SEDL's Web site, gives teachers information about more than 130 assessments in Spanish and English.
Applying Technology to Restructuring and Learning. Both this effort and SEDL's "Promoting Instructional Coherence" project are based on the concept that sustained reform and improvement require changes in the core of education practice — teaching and learning. Working with 150 teachers at six schools, SEDL is developing and delivering professional development, creating portfolios of tools, and providing intensive assistance to help them create and assess student-centered learning activities. In less than 1 year, all six schools have significantly raised teacher and student enthusiasm, engagement, and learning.
Creating Communities of Continuous Inquiry and Improvement. This project focuses on the professional staff of a school and how its efforts at school improvement affect the core student-teacher relationship in the classroom. SEDL is studying the efforts of about 20 co-developers to create professional learning communities in schools throughout the region. Based on this work, SEDL is developing tools and strategies other educators can use to build professional learning communities as they address their school improvement goals.
Best Start Early Childhood Program (BECP), second edition, emphasizes the development of children's skills in several areas: visual, auditory, motor, language development, vocabulary building, and early literacy. For children who speak Spanish at home, the material offers an approach to language learning that helps prepare them for the transition to English-speaking classrooms. The first edition of BECP was developed almost 30 years ago and was available commercially until 1983. This second edition of BECP is being developed through a partnership between the Harris County Department of Education, which serves school districts and education programs in and around Houston, Texas, and SEDL.
Leadership for Change Program (LFC) is grounded in years of research about the management of planned change in schools. The two-part LFC program, designed for administrators and teacher leaders, contains books, videotapes, and instruments that school leaders can use to assess staff members' concerns about a change (be it a new curriculum or scheduling plan), develop a shared vision, and guide the creation of an action plan to put that change into practice. SEDL uses LFC tools to support much of its work with schools.
Policy Information Services and Regional Policy Analysts Network has delivered SEDL's information services to state education decisionmakers since 1989. Engaging a network of key staff members from executive offices, legislatures, and state departments of education, SEDL responds to their requests for comparative and strategic information by providing policy information packets. Annually, network members meet in " networkshops" during which they explore emerging or existing education topics of their choice.
SEDL's Language and Cultural Diversity specialty area builds on the Laboratory's decades-long experience in carrying out research and developing materials for educators — and parents—who teach children of non-English language background.
Organizing for Diversity. This project seeks to reduce the influence that cultural differences between teachers and students might have on student achievement. Based on its review of research on intercultural communications, SEDL is developing and field testing training modules in Austin, Texas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, classrooms to help teachers understand and work with such differences.
Adapting Comprehensive School Reform Models. Across the Southwest, schools have adopted models of comprehensive school reform that have proven track records of educating minority students. Little is known, however, about the effectiveness of these models in teaching Latino English language learners. SEDL is investigating how these models are adapted in schools that serve large numbers of these students. Rich descriptions resulting from SEDL's study of these schools will be developed into products for educators, model developers, researchers, and policymakers.
SEDL also has developed other products aimed at teachers, administrators, and community members who deal with issues of diversity. Many are available from its Web site, including:
Connecting Student Learning and Technology introduces teachers to the principles of constructivist learning theory or student-centered learning. This guide includes lesson plans that apply the principles in the classroom. It also includes suggestions on how to supplement lessons with technology using software usually found in schools.
SEDL's Occasional Paper Series on Charter Schools: Redefining Educational Governance: The Charter School Concept; Variations on Autonomy: Charter School Laws in the Southwestern Region; and Designs for School-Site Reform: Charter Schools in New Mexico and Texas. These publications are useful references for educators, policymakers, parents, or charter school program planners who either are new to charter schools or are refining existing charter school programs. Executive summaries are available from SEDL's Web site.
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This page last modified 19 October 1999. (lvb)