Current Projects

What is IRRE doing today?

First Things First

Nineteen high schools in five states serving more than 30,000 students currently implement all five core strategies of the First Things First framework. In some sites, multiple generations of students have experienced First Things First for their entire middle or high school careers. In these longstanding sites, some teachers have only known personalized learning communities, shared instructional goals, and advocate relationships with their students and families. The level and nature of our services to these “all in” sites depend on local needs and stage of implementation. You can find additional information about the framework at About First Things First.

A sample of districts currently implementing all of the First Things First strategies includes Austin, Texas; Pharr San-Juan Alamo ISD, Weslaco ISD, and Zapata ISD in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas1 , and Kansas City, Kansas.

1 The reform in the Rio Grande Valley is referred to as the High School Redesign Project (HSRP) and is a joint project of IRRE, Region One Service Center, and the Institute of School Excellence to implement the First Things First core strategies.
 

Measuring What Matters – Effective Instructional Practices

Over 2000 twenty-minute classroom visits were conducted in Agua Fria, Arizona last year to explore levels of engagement, alignment and rigor of teaching and learning. Faculty and administrators made this happen to fuel instructional improvement in their four high schools. Using hand-held technology, peer teachers and instructional leaders observed teaching in action and recorded data on IRRE’s Engagement, Alignment and Rigor (EAR) classroom visit protocol. Training around EAR instructional strategies and test scores rose in all four schools.

The recorded data became the basis for reports summarizing:

  • Levels of student engagement.
  • Alignment of content with state standards.
  • The relevance of learning assessments to state testing.
  • The rigor of content and teaching methods experienced by all students, regardless of their level of mastery.

The reports describe classroom instruction at the department, course, learning community (if appropriate), and other levels. All involved learned how to identify and use evidence of exemplary and underdeveloped practice to drive improved instruction among all teachers. In addition to Agua Fria, Arizona, all sites implementing First Things First are now working with Measuring What Matters – Effective Instructional Practices.

Click here to read more about MWM.

Every Classroom Every Day

IRRE and a distinguished team of researchers and scholars are implementing and studying Every Classroom Every Day – a federally funded project designed to increase literacy and math performance among high school students. Independent researchers are using the most rigorous research design ever applied to such comprehensive instructional improvement in high schools to evaluate the results. Ninth- and tenth-grade English and math teachers, along with their instructional supervisors, receive:

Training and ongoing supports around teaching strategies that promote mastery of rigorous academic content.

  • Engaging and rigorous literacy curricula and benchmarking techniques to support students’ math skills.
  • New forms of assessing student learning and teaching quality.
  • New ways for instructional staff to use these assessments to improve teaching and learning.

We are currently implementing Every Classroom Every Day in Pasadena, California and Stockton, California school districts. The second cohort of up to four sites will begin in summer 2010.

Bringing Rigor and Relevance to High School Reform

IRRE and Bloom Associates are currently developing and piloting two thematic curricula called Art Matters and Health Matters through a research and implementation grant provided by the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) (http://ies.ed.gov/). Within the field of secondary school reform, a strong consensus has emerged that infusing student learning activities with “themes” linked directly to post-secondary work and educational experiences holds tremendous promise for engaging and re-engaging diverse students in their school experience. These two curricula fill this need by providing the field two rigorous and engaging curricula for use in high schools seeking to give their students opportunities to delve into two broad, high-interest thematic areas – health sciences and the arts. In addition, both curricula adopt an explicit focus on building fundamental literacy skills by integrating research-based literacy strategies and fostering students’ ability to transfer the use of these strategies in all of their courses.
 
This three year multi-site project will also develop a set of research tools to capture data and examine each component of the project’s theory of change: 1) the quality of professional development supports provided (training and coaching); 2) the experience of teachers receiving supports and implementing these curricula; 3) the intensity and fidelity of implementation of the curricula; and 4) the quality of classroom instruction and other key student outcomes related to the implementation of the curricula.
 
Please contact Julie Broom, Ed.D at julieabroom@gmail.com for additional information about the curricula and instructional supports provided by IRRE.