Profiles of the Regional Educational Laboratories

The Regional Educational Laboratory at AEL Inc.

Mission

AEL is a catalyst for schools and communities to build lifelong learning systems that harness resources, research, and practical wisdom. To contribute knowledge that assists low-performing schools to move toward continuous improvement, AEL conducts research, development, evaluation, and dissemination activities that inform policy, affect educational practice, and contribute to the theoretical and procedural knowledge bases on effective teaching, learning, and schooling. Strategies build on research and reflect a commitment to empowering individuals and building local capacity.

Regional Problem Areas to be Addressed

AEL's work is integrated by focusing all work on four constituent-identified areas of need relative to low-performing schools and the contexts within which they operate: developing school capacity, improving teaching quality, promoting school-community connections, and providing policy-relevant information services.

Developing school capacity (staff contact: Sandra Orletsky). A central problem confronting low-performing schools is their lack of capacity to envision, plan, implement, and sustain changes that could transform them to high-performing learning communities. AEL views school capacity as incorporating the level of knowledge, skills, and dispositions possessed by school leadership and staff; the strength of the school's professional community; and the coherence of the total school program. AEL's strategy for building school capacity within the region is to develop, test, and refine an effective model for providing intensive assistance. This will be accomplished with the help of experts on low-performing schools, researchers on school change in rural and minority communities, and experts on collaborative action research. These experts will be convened and consulted in collaboration with Andy Hargreaves of The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Canada. AEL will assess and refine its assistance model as it works in intensive sites collaboratively selected with the region's chief state school officers.

Improving teaching quality (staff contact: Jim Craig). The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future reports that higher and more rigorous accountability standards do not appear to result in improved student outcomes absent attention to issues of teaching quality. In approaching this issue, AEL does not equate teaching quality with teacher quality, but defines its work in terms of individual and organizational factors that support or enable individual teachers to be highly effective, particularly in low-performing schools. Strategies for developing teaching quality are designed to provide information to enhance policy and practice at all levels of the system, including K­12 and higher education. These strategies include supporting a regional database of information relevant to teaching quality, investigating ways that identification of individual strengths can be used as tools for teacher development, examining the effectiveness of a high school-higher education collaborative model (supported by technology and research) in promoting teaching quality specific to work with disengaged students, engaging in collaborative research on teaching quality, and using resulting information in the reform of teacher educator development and practice. Fifteen institutions of higher education constituting the AEL/Institutions of Higher Education (IHE) Co-Venture are participating in the research.

Promoting school-community connections (staff contact: Ray Thornton). School-community partnerships are particularly necessary in the region served by AEL, which is predominantly rural and where schools often represent the single highest concentration of resources. AEL's strategies for promoting school-community connections are to work with schools and communities to enhance proactive community relations so that the community develops increasing ownership for its schools and becomes more accountable for student and school performance; document what is working in effective school-community partnerships; and work with participants to codify their procedures, giving special attention to how the resources of the community are used for engaging student learning. Intensive sites for developing proactive community relations--at least one in each state--will be identified by each chief state school officer. AEL will also work with members of the faith community in Charleston, West Virginia, to identify strategies they have found effective in fostering development of the whole child, including academic performance.

Providing policy-relevant information services (staff contact: Pamela Lutz). While improvements in school and student performance are achieved at the local and individual levels, the conditions that support or hinder those improvements are often found in the systems and structures of state policy. AEL delivers to state policymakers research and development-based information that honors their state context and enhances capacity to create and sustain high-performing institutions for teaching and learning. To increase policymaker access to and use of timely, focused information in policy decisionmaking, AEL employs face-to-face, print, and electronic formats to convene role-alike groups, report state-specific data whenever possible, and provide policy analysis and interpretation around specific issues such as rural sustainability and research on improving low-performing schools. Partners include the Commonwealth Educational Policy Institute at Virginia Commonwealth University, Dr. Stephen Ross of the Center for Research in Educational Policy at the University of Memphis, and the National Rural Education Association.

National Leadership Area

Educational technology (staff contact: Tammy McGraw). Since 1995, the United States has made a considerable investment in educational technology and its use in the classroom; estimates of combined federal and other funding total more than a billion dollars. Yet recent improvements in school technology will be wasted if teachers and school leaders are not prepared to use new tools effectively. AEL has identified five goals for promoting effective use of educational technology:

Goal 1: Explore innovative ways that current and emerging technologies can be used to address specific education problems, particularly as they relate to disadvantaged and underserved populations. AEL, Inc. recently established the Institute for the Advancement of Emerging Technologies in Education (IAETE) to integrate the organization's efforts.

Goal 2: Design and develop high-quality research-based products and services to address the documented needs of low-performing learning communities. Recent products include Principal Connections, an interactive CD-ROM and companion Web site that help school principals build technology leadership skills; and Distance Based and Distributed Learning: A Decision Tool for Education Leaders.

Goal 3: Maintain a collection of the most relevant research related to educational technology and its use. To guide this work, a panel of distinguished advisors with diverse expertise will be convened annually, to include Chris Dede of Harvard University and Mark Schlager of Stanford University, among others.

Goal 4: Collect and disseminate promising practices and exemplary strategies from throughout the United States and beyond. As demonstrated in Patterns of Promise, AEL products are designed to help schools understand the discrete elements necessary for replication in other settings.

Goal 5: Facilitate communication and resource sharing throughout the regional educational laboratory network. AEL is developing an electronic environment that will support the collection, organization, and dissemination of research, artifacts, media objects, and procedural knowledge.

Key Accomplishments

AEL is continuing two strands of work that have proven effective in improving low-performing schools: partnering with state departments of education and school districts to identify/develop effective processes and practices, and developing and testing tools for aligning curricula, instruction, and assessment with state standards.

Partnering with state departments of education to identify/develop effective processes and practices. AEL has developed and tested a process for working with state departments of education to improve the status, including student achievement, of low-performing schools and school districts. The processes include engaging school and community members in developing a vision and action plan for improvement and delivering professional development that targets challenges at the school and classroom levels. Test scores improved in the pilot district, which resulted in the district's removal from probationary status.

Developing and testing tools for aligning curricula and instruction with state standards. Through additional pilot sites, AEL will continue refinement and development of tools that can be used by educators to improve school and district performance. Early data indicate increases in student achievement and community involvement.

Upcoming Products and Events

Colloquium on inquiry and improvement in low-performing schools. AEL, in collaboration with Andy Hargreaves and Amanda Datnow from the International Center for Educational Change, will sponsor a colloquium involving researchers from the United States, Canada, and England, as well as the chief state school officers from each of AEL's states. Its purpose is to lay the groundwork for a continuing and collaborative research agenda around issues of sustainable school reform (Summer 2001, Arlington, Virginia).

TransFormation, a new research briefing, will communicate the latest policy-related implications from research on improvement in low-performing schools. The publication's editor is Dr. Stephen M. Ross, director of the Center for Research in Educational Policy at the University of Memphis. To request a subscription, or to access the briefings online, contact AEL at http://www.ael.org/transform/index.htm (two issues per year).

[Foreword] [Northeast and Islands Regional Educational Laboratory at Brown University]

This page last modified August 29, 2001 (jer)