Profiles of the Regional Educational Laboratories

Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory

Mission

The Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory's (NWREL) mission is to improve educational results for children, youth, and adults by providing research and development assistance in delivering equitable, high-quality educational programs.

Regional Problem Areas to be Addressed

NWREL is using an integrated approach to address five priority problems northwest schools face as they strive to become high-performing institutions (staff coordinator: Steve Nelson).

Re-engineering (staff contact: Alf Langland). Schools face the problem of re-engineering themselves to plan, implement, and sustain the capacity to become high-performing learning communities. Re-engineering is the fundamental building block for school reform. Through re-engineering, schools, districts, and their communities use quality management principles to implement the structures, processes, programs, and training necessary to renew themselves based on a shared vision, changing context, student population, proven successful practices, and community expectations and requirements. Re-engineering focuses on the most challenging changes--changes in the culture of the school, changes in what people do and how they do it, and changes in how people relate to one another and work in teams. Since schools are embedded within districts, communities, and states, how schools, parents, and districts interact is part of the complex web of relationships that must become productive.

Quality teaching and learning (staff contact: Jerian Abel). Schools face the problem of how to more effectively plan, implement, and sustain quality teaching and learning that contributes to high-performing learning communities. The quality of classroom instruction is key to student achievement and is dependent on the quality of the school staff. Changes solely to curriculum, organizational structure, or piecemeal training in new strategies will not bring about the changes needed to create high-performing learning communities. Professional development, as the analysis of teaching and learning, should focus on the role of the learner, the role of the teacher, and how learning takes place. There must be a forward-looking focus on several aspects of system, culture, customer needs, and quality improvement. Transforming a school into a high-performing learning community that requires the school and individuals in the school have a shared vision, driven by student needs, to change their ideas and beliefs of teaching and learning.

Student assessment (staff contact: Dean Arrasmith). Schools face the problem of more adequately assessing students' progress in achieving high performance standards. Well-aligned, authentic, and continuous feedback is needed to inform teachers, students, and parents of their progress in meeting state standards. Teachers need to know how to develop quality assessments for day-to-day work. Schools need to know how to develop and use assessment information to guide decisionmaking. Among educators and policymakers, there is a strong belief in the power of standards-based assessments to motivate changes in teaching and students' learning that is based in part on the power of assessments to define what is important to learn. Assessment ultimately, and specifically, defines what educators and the community want students to know and be able to do. Assessment tasks translate academic standards into specific meaning for students and teachers.

Literacy and language development (staff contact: Rebecca Novick). Schools face the problem of how to achieve high levels of literacy and language development among all of their students. Educators need access to research-based practices in language development and the ability to make wise choices from the wealth of resource materials and programs that exist to address the learning needs of their students and to meet challenging literacy standards. During the early elementary years, learning to read is the top priority; school success depends, in large part, on how successful children are in learning to read. Literacy remains the key to school success throughout a student's school years and is critical for full social and economic participation in our increasingly knowledge-dependent, technological society. Although in middle and high school, teachers may view their primary responsibility as conveying the content of their subject area, it is increasingly understood by educators that reading in middle and high school is a critical issue to be addressed.

School, family, and community partnerships (staff contact: Steffen Saifer). Schools face the problem of how to develop and sustain school, family, and community partnerships that clearly contribute to high levels of student performance. School staff tend to see family and community partnership activities as peripheral to meeting standards, rather than as central to achieving them. Assessments of children at all levels and of all types tend to ignore cultural and family considerations, attributes, goals, and strengths. The ultimate result is that the current relationship between schools and families, in too many cases, can be characterized as lacking in trust, mutual support, and a commitment to a partnership for the benefit of the children. Schools must work with families and communities in new and different ways if every student is to achieve challenging standards. In addition, communities must work with schools to create and extend learning opportunities for children and adults in safe and engaging environments.

NWREL is using three interrelated strategies to help schools in each of the five northwest states to overcome these problems in becoming high-performing institutions:

• Regional awareness and outreach activities are conducted to engage educators in an ongoing way in delineating problems, discussing their resolution, and disseminating resource information.

• Research and development services are made broadly available to educators across the region to apply existing procedural knowledge, tools, and processes.

• In-depth, long-term research and development services are delivered to 15 high poverty, low-performing schools across the 5-state region to achieve high levels of student performance. These 15 schools are the primary partner sites in developing and evaluating effective research and development products and processes for schools to become high-performing organizations.

National Leadership Area

Re-Engineering schools for improvement (staff contract: Bob Blum). NWREL's national leadership area in Re-engineering Schools for Improvement extends and enhances its past successful work in its national specialty on school change.

Re-engineering is the process of making things work. It means using what has been learned about standards, school organization, comprehensive reform, and other initiatives to help schools become high-performing learning communities. However, it is conceptually distinct from past and present reform movements, and addresses the needs and challenges schools will face in the coming decades. This involves helping schools:

• implement structures, processes, and programs that have the greatest potential for improving student performance;

• build the personal and organizational capacity necessary to support intensive reform;

• create an organizational culture that promotes the values of collaboration, shared responsibility, continuous learning by adults and students, and continuous improvement in student performance;

• bring focus and coherence to efforts that sometimes address competing demands (such as the demand for higher scores on multiple choice tests, and the demand for learner-centered instructional strategies that foster deeper understanding);

• negotiate the multiple challenges stemming from changing demands, higher expectations, and greater ethnic and socioeconomic diversity; and

• figure out ways to reallocate resources--including time for staffs to work, reflect, and plan together--in support of higher student performance.

Work is being carried out in three components--research synthesis, direct support to schools, and dissemination.

• Research synthesis products developed annually are: a topical synthesis related to re-engineering, descriptions of research in practice in schools or districts that have re-engineered successfully and achieved results, and updated descriptions and new model descriptions in the Catalog of School Reform Models.

• Direct support to schools is delivered through: an annual National Re-engineering Forum, Topical Institutes that are regional training sessions providing focused interaction for school leaders, and training and assistance for skill development of teams and individuals in districts and schools.

• Dissemination includes print, media, and electronic activities.

This work is being carried out in collaboration with the American Association of School Administrators, National Association of Secondary School Principals, National Association of Elementary School Principals, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown, Consortium for Policy Research in Education, Council of Chief State School Officers, and National Clearinghouse on Comprehensive School Reform.

Key Accomplishments

NWREL "signature programs" of work conducted over two decades in Trait-Based Assessment and Effective Schooling Practices provide a research and development base for current work in the Student Assessment and Re-engineering problem areas.

Trait-Based Assessment. NWREL's trait-based assessment models in writing, reading, oral communication, mathematics problem solving, and bilingual language development provide teachers with powerful tools to assess students' learning and to organize instruction. Assessment literacy is a critical part of professional development activities for teachers and school administrators to be able to make maximum use of high-quality assessment results to guide student learning and to plan effective school improvement activities.

NWREL's 6+1 Traits Writing Assessment Model has revolutionized writing assessment and instruction in many thousands of classrooms across the nation. The training associated with the 6+1 Traits Writing Assessment Model is provided through workshops, training institutes, and training of trainers institutes. The training of trainers institutes have led to a large cadre of local and regional trainers who share the model beyond NWREL's training activities. Writing has provided a model for other language skills development work of NWREL. In the past 3 years approximately 3,600 teachers have participated in nearly 40 Traits of an Effective Reader training events. Most recently, assessment models have been completed in Oral Communications and Spanish Writing. The Mathematics Problem Solving Model toolkit includes all of the materials and resources necessary to implement the model in schools and districts, including a K-12 analytical trait scoring guide, student work samples at all levels, anchor papers to guide teachers in assessing students' problem solving, grade-level appropriate and standards-based tasks, sample workshop agencies, handouts and overhead masters, classroom observation tools, and problem solving video.

Effective schooling practices. NWREL's syntheses of more than 30 years of educational research have identified and verified school- and classroom-level practices that foster superior student performance within a high-performing organization. This body of knowledge is used to guide assistance to schools in such areas as safe and supportive school environments characterized by agreed-upon vision and standards; sound building and classroom management principles; improved student performance; communication of high learning expectations; equity in educational opportunities and outcomes; and community and parental support of students' learning. Two NWREL landmark publications--Research You Can Use to Improve Results and Schooling Practices That Matter Most--are published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD).

These research synthesis resources provide the foundation for NWREL's comprehensive school reform model, Onward to Excellence (OTE). OTE engages the full school community in reform, including principal, teachers, other staff, students, parents, community members, and central office staff. Thirty-three schools across the country are using the new generation model called OTE II to guide their comprehensive school reform efforts and improve student learning. After only 1 year of implementation, some of the schools are reporting improvements in test scores.

Upcoming Products and Events

Education Now and in the Future Conference is the northwest region's major professional development event, drawing more than a thousand participants each year (Fall 2001, Portland, Oregon).

By request booklets. Three booklets are developed each year on a topic of frequently requested information. Each booklet contains an explanation of the topic's relevance, a sampling of how northwest schools are dealing with the issue, suggestions for adapting these ideas to schools, and selected references and contact information. The first 2001 booklet was completed in May on the topic of Supporting Beginning Teachers.

Northwest Education magazine. Topics of quarterly issues in 2001 are charter schools, school building design (both now available), education standards (October 2001), and teacher preparation and induction (December 2001).

Problem-focused resources. Process guides, research syntheses, effective practices description, and training manuals being developed in 2001 in NWREL's five problem areas of work include:

• Re-engineering Schools: Getting Started process guide (Fall 2001) and Smaller Learning Communities research synthesis (Winter 2001).

• Quality Teaching and Learning: Sustaining Teachers' Motivation to Improve Classroom Practice research synthesis (Winter 2001).

• Assessment: Assessment Consumer Skills and Knowledge (Winter 2001).

• Reading and Language Development: Resource guide for teacher study teams (Winter 2001).

• Family and Community Partnerships: Evaluation that Empowers training manual (Fall 2001).

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This page last modified August 298, 2001 (jer)