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Best Practices/Dissemination

New Leaders for New Schools (New Leaders) and their partners identified and provided incentives to educators who drive significant student achievement gains in their urban schools. They designed the Effective Practice Incentive Community (EPIC). The EPIC partners are: District of Columbia Public Schools, Memphis City Schools, National Consortium of Charter Schools and Denver Public Schools.

EPIC, funded primarily through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, is a five-year initiative, with academic years 2006-07 and 2007-08 serving as the pilot years. The 2007-08 school year saw the successful pilot of a complete cycle of the EPIC program, in which more than 1,000 educators from 62 schools nationwide were awarded over $3 million. Smith Leadership Academy Charter Public School received recognition as a Silver Gain school in 2007-08 for its outstanding performance and growth on our state's academic assessments in 2007 to 2008.

EPIC uses student achievement gains to evaluate schools' and educators' performances and requires educators from award-winning schools to work with New Leaders to identify and document the practices that contributed to the student achievement gains in their schools. New Leaders and school leadership teams then collaborate to create professional development case studies around the effective practices (found on the EPIC website).

EPIC identifies "high gain" schools through a Value Added Model (VAM), created by New Leaders and Mathematica Policy Research (MPR). These schools partner with teams led by SchoolWorks (including New Leaders and partner district or charter school staff) to engage in a reflection-oriented process that includes a self-study as well as school visits to identify practices that the entire team determines contributed to the student achievement gains.

When New Leaders identify a central set of effective practices, a team of case writers and producers work closely with the school's leadership team and teachers to document these practices for use by the broader educational community. New Leaders then directs the development and production of the case studies and practice profiles, and it works with staff developers and subject-matter experts to create tools and resources for facilitators to use with the EPIC cases in professional development programs for principals, aspiring principals, leadership teams and teachers.

Smith Leadership Academy Charter Public School closely analyzes student needs to determine curriculum, programs and professional development. The Academy has implemented best practices by adapting models from other schools and, as a result, the school has seen a jump in math and English performance.

Curriculum Map Template for Classroom Instruction: At Smith Leadership Academy, teachers create curriculum maps based on the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks. Each semester, they organize these maps by content area and grade levels. Content-area coordinators provide feedback and review the curriculum maps.

The curriculum maps cover essential questions from the Frameworks, content strands and specific skills for instruction as well as assessments and resources for each week of each trimester. Teachers examine curriculum maps three times a year to address content gaps they have highlighted as weaknesses in their assessments.

Open-Response Question for Do Now Exercise: Across the school, teachers at Smith Leadership Academy conduct a Do Now exercise similar to this sample every day during the first five-to-10 minutes of each class. Teachers develop the Do Now assignments from open-response questions in previous state assessments and execute them over a four-day period. During this time, teachers and students follow a specific rubric for this practice:

First day: Teachers present the open-response question to students who brainstorm on what the answer should be.
Second day: Students outline what they want to include in the response.
Third day: Students complete any necessary computation.
Fourth day: Students finalize their response.

Teachers follow this procedure in English language arts and math classes. To create consistent expectations throughout the school, Smith Leadership Academy uses a uniform rubric as a reminder of the scoring on open-response questions.

This rubric, posted throughout the school, familiarizes students with the standard for benchmark assessments. Note that grading is on a 0-4 scale and that there are at least two criteria for each score. The Academy copied this rubric from the Massachusetts Department of Education website and adapted it for school-wide use.

Ten-Minute Classroom Snapshot: As part of Smith Leadership Academy's teacher improvement and accountability process, members of the Academy's leadership team visit each classroom several times on a weekly basis to provide feedback to teachers on their lesson, instruction and interaction with students.

The observers complete a form covering 13 indicators including instructional rigor, teacher organization and preparation, classroom management and content understanding. They rate each indicator on a three-point scale, and they also can include a brief comment.
In addition to the annual formal evaluation, these snapshots allow for ongoing feedback to teachers and supervision support from administrators. It also shows where the Academy should target its professional development.