|
Methodology
The Building Blocks Initiative focuses on effective strategies of fundamental organizational change – i.e., school-wide strategies for change, not improved classroom practices or model lesson plans. Programs that can be scaled up in other schools, that do not depend on extraordinary local circumstances and are being institutionalized, are of particular importance. Schools of greatest interest are those that reflect the deepest levels of scalable, replicable organizational change – in short, those that promise to provide, by their example, roadmaps of conscious decision-making that could help lead other schools to similar results. Special attention is given to schools that made their gains as an integral part of a district wide plan that showed promising results in other schools within the district as well.
All of that said, the Building Blocks Initiative focuses most particularly on three criteria. We look for schools and districts that:
- Outperform (based on the past two years of averaged MCAS or other scoring data) other schools and districts serving student enrollments with similar demographics;
- Can show that this relative high student performance is the result of a specific, articulated, sustainable strategy or set of strategies; is led by a leadership team, not an individual; and (if the model is a school) is preferably supported if not spearheaded by the district of which it is a part; and that
- Provide a model for change that is readily adaptable by other schools and/or districts – i.e., it is not dependent on factors specific to that school or district alone.
Some consideration is also given to ensuring diversity of school type (elementary, middle, high), region, and community characteristics (urban, rural, suburban), in order to produce a set of tools and model practices of use to the entire Massachusetts K-12 education community. All public schools in the Commonwealth, including regional vocational schools, Horace Mann schools, and charter schools – excepting magnets with selective admissions processes – may apply. Districts may be invited to apply on behalf of a particular reform model (all elementaries, for example), or on behalf of their entire district model.
Building Blocks is not open to unsolicited application; schools and districts must be identified by our researchers and invited to apply.
The Judging Process
Applicants for Vanguard model status prepare an application form and supply a range of documents in support of their application. We are interested in seeing artifacts and evidence of articulated, successful school-improvement strategies that are not created especially for the application, but rather are a reflection of the ways the school or district routinely goes about its business. Applicants are encouraged to focus on their most effective and noteworthy strategies within one or two of the Building Blocks categories.
Vanguard applications are reviewed by a panel of judges. There is no set number of Vanguard models selected each year.
The Research Process
Teams of experienced educators, led by facilitator/writers from Mass Insight, visit each Vanguard model for a full day, preceded by a half-day planning and discussion session focused on application and other materials supplied by the Vanguard model. The site visit days are quite structured, with team members interviewing a rotating series of administrators, faculty members, students, and other local school leaders.
The site review teams (and the facilitator/writer, subsequently) use a research protocol developed especially for the Building Blocks Initiative and (like the judging process) continuously shaped by research findings. The protocol was originally produced in collaboration with SchoolWorks, Inc., a Beverly, MA firm with extensive experience in school evaluation programs.
The protocol and the research process are designed to examine the strategies, policies, and structures in place that have helped to produce higher student achievement – and exactly how the Vanguard schools and districts were able to put these effective strategies into place. Building Blocks site review teams probe for practical details that will provide useful guidance to educators working in other schools and districts. They look especially for information in the two Building Block categories that cut across the first four Building Blocks and that represent the principal resource choices faced by local school decision-makers:
|