Center for Research on the Context of Teaching Stanford University

Evaluation of the New Teacher Center-Ravenswood City School District

Partnership for System Improvement

Year One Report

Joan E. Talbert Jane L. David Pai-rou Chen Wendy Lin

September 2007

Table of Contents Executive Summary

Introduction 1

Theory of action for the RCSD-NTC Partnership 3

Evaluation approach and methods 5

Year One Implementation 6

Teacher mentoring and quality 6

Teacher learning teams and leadership development 13

Principal coaching and PLC development 19

Co-design of district support for teaching and learning 23

Year One Outcomes 28

School and district conditions of teaching 28

Teacher retention patterns 32

Student performance on California Standards Tests 33

Summary and Emergent Issues 36

Summary of findings 36

Emerging issues 37

Appendices

Appendix A. NTC Mentors’ Assignments to Teachers across RCSD Schools

Appendix B. RCSD Survey Instruments and Data

Appendix C. RCSD Teacher Retention Patterns by School, 2007-08

Appendix D. Student Demographics, Teacher Characteristics, and CST Scores

Tables

Table 1. RCSD Teacher Attrition, 2006-07 to 2007-08 32

Table 2. Performance Trends on the California English Test for Student Cohorts in Green Oaks, Cesar Chavez, and Willow Oaks: Percent scoring below or far below basic 35

Figures

Figure 1. NTC-RCSD Partnership Logic Model 3

Figure 2. NTC Mentoring Roles: Where Mentors Focus Their Efforts 7

Figure 3. How Teachers Rate their Mentors on Help with Instructional Skills 12

Figure 4. How Grade-Level Learning Teams Worked Together 14

Figure 5. Types of Activities Undertaken by Learning Teams 16

Figure 6. Teacher Reports of Principal Leadership Actions, 2006 – 2007 22

Figure 7. How Teachers Rate Their Professional Development Options 25

Figure 8. How Teachers Rate Their School Professional Culture, 2006 – 2007 29

Figure 9. How Teachers Rate RCSD Professionalism, 2006 – 2007 31

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Executive Summary

At the request of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Stanford University’s Center for Research on the Context of Teaching (CRC) undertook a three-year evaluation of the New Teacher Center’s (NTC)’s partnership with the Ravenswood City School District (RCSD) to strengthen teaching and learning across all seven district schools. The partners’ collaboration on system-wide instructional improvement began in 2006-07, building upon a three-year history of NTC mentors working with beginning teachers in three district schools.

This first year evaluation report describes NTC’s work with the district, outcomes for 2006-07, and successes and challenges for the Partnership using data from field-based research over the course of the year and teacher surveys conducted in Spring 2006 and Spring 2007. We interviewed central office leaders, principals in all seven district schools, and a sample of teachers who were mentored, and conducted focus groups with new and veteran teachers in each district school.1 In addition we interviewed NTC mentors, coaches, and staff working in the district and observed a range of professional activities from institutes designed or brokered by NTC to principal meetings and facilitator training.

The partnership between the Ravenswood City School District and the New Teacher Center aims to develop the system’s capacity to continuously improve teaching and learning for district students. The work rests on the indisputable premise that adult learning must be at the center of efforts to increase student learning, and it leads with a focus on new teachers who are most at risk of floundering. The Partnership’s strategies include mentoring and literacy professional development with the goals of improving instruction and retaining teachers. They also include opportunities for leadership development at all levels of the system to engender a strong collaborative culture of teaching in the district.

NTC brings its nationally recognized approach to mentoring which (1) builds up

from the identified needs of educators, (2) focuses on formative assessment at each level of the system, (3) provides intensive and sustained opportunities for adult learning, and (4) aims to create communities of adult learners within and across schools. Further, NTC applies the same principles for adult learning, formative assessment of professional practice, and learning communities to its own organization, thereby ensuring the continuing development of high-quality mentoring practice among individuals that NTC employs. After one year of system-wide mentoring by NTC coupled with myriad efforts to improve adult learning opportunities and the organizational conditions of teaching in the district, the partners have made significant headway.

1 Focus groups were conducted by NTC’s formative evaluator, Dr. Amy Gerstein.

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Summary of findings In 2006-07, the Partners substantially redesigned professional development for teachers and principals. NTC mentoring was expanded to include beginning teachers and some veteran teachers in all seven district schools – involving roughly half of the district’s teachers, district professional development time was re-allocated mainly to grade-level teams, and teachers could opt for several NTC-brokered trainings in literacy instruction. Principals were assigned an NTC coach and began meeting together for discussion and professional development focused on instruction. Teachers who worked with NTC mentors were overwhelmingly positive about the roles the mentors played to support their success in the classroom. Qualities of their work with mentors that teachers pointed to are the conditions that distinguish effective learning environment, according to research on learning. Specifically, mentors’ work with teachers centered on individual teacher learning needs, on content and pedagogical knowledge for instruction, on providing feedback and prompting reflection on teaching, and on creating professional collaborations that support teacher and student learning. Mentors working with RCSD teachers bring considerable knowledge and experience in teaching and coaching, and NTC provides them with ongoing high-quality professional development to continually enhance their effectiveness.

Grade-level teacher teams were launched in every school and grade. Although many did not manage to conduct the kind of inquiry into teaching and learning that was envisioned by the Partners, most were successful in planning instruction together and providing valued collegial support to new teachers—a significant accomplishment for the first year. Teachers who participated in voluntary trainings rated them very highly, especially CELL and ExLL. Notably, all but a few district teachers were engaged in at least one of these high-quality professional development opportunities. Principal leadership was strengthened through NTC coaching and the development of their own learning community, which included classroom observations in each others’ schools and subsequent discussion and feedback. Teachers perceived an increase in principal leadership and support. Also evident was a shift toward collaborative school cultures, with growth in shared leadership and teacher collaboration on instruction. These positive trends on leading indicators of system change bode well for the coming year. Finally, evidence concerning teacher retention and student learning gains is promising if not definitive. In both cases, we need another year of data to reliably track trends for schools in their first year of partnering with NTC. Nevertheless, across all district schools, the retention rate of teachers who met district standards for teaching quality and remained in teaching was at least 86 percent. This represents a substantial increase from previously low rates of new teacher retention in RCSD, documented by NTC as only 25% in the two schools they worked with beginning in 2003-04, and a level comparable to those observed in prior years for the schools working with NTC.

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We limited our analysis of California test data to the three schools that had received NTC mentoring support for at least a year prior to 2006-07. The student cohorts for whom at least three years of data were available, including 2006-07, showed gains in literacy performance Of nine cohorts who met these criteria, all but two evidenced declines in percent scoring below “Basic” in literacy, most of which were substantial (ranging from 9 to 32 percent). These outcomes are encouraging and hold promise for measurable gains for the other district schools over the next year. Emerging issues Inevitably challenges and issues emerge during an undertaking with the scale and ambition of the NTC-RCSD Partnership. We highlight several here that merit attention over the coming year to keep the momentum moving forward. Balancing different perspectives. This evaluation has documented great strides in the development of a collaborative culture of teaching in each school. The learning teams, with the support of principals and mentors, have taken the first steps in developing a culture of teacher collaboration and inquiry that is focused on improving instruction and student success. Similarly, with the support of their coaches, the principals are creating their own learning community. Yet we located sources of stress that could work against further development of a collaborative culture. Both within learning teams and between levels of the system, lack of a shared vision for professional learning communities and sense of how they develop contributes to misunderstandings. Different philosophies of instruction can clash without a shared vision of how seemingly competing approaches can enhance each other. Such differences are magnified by federal and state pressures to show improvements quickly. The challenge for the Partnership is to develop shared understandings of instructional improvement and collaborative learning that balance different perspectives. To do so, Partners will need to model and nurture leadership that bridges different perspectives and ensure that people at all levels of the system hear the same message. Ongoing renewal. Our findings highlight significant benefits accruing from the joint work of NTC and RCSD. With an eye toward the future and knowledge of many partnerships between districts and external organizations that fell short of their hopes and potential, we raise the question of what it takes for a partnership to successfully evolve over time. Communication up and down levels within the system is challenging to all districts; adding an external partner who works at all system levels cannot avoid complicating this challenge. Building and maintaining constructive professional relationships, both within RCSD and between RCSD and NTC, is key to the Partners’ work to improve teaching and learning in the district. As players change in both organizations, relationships must continually be created and renewed.

Moving to sustain improvement. Over time, NTC will move more into the background and RCSD will take on much of the work to sustain the trajectory of improvement. To support this transition, the Partnership would benefit from a more

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explicit vision for their future respective roles and responsibilities. Neither RCSD, nor most any district, could develop the scale and quality of new teacher mentoring that NTC provides directly and through its brokering of resources. This and other facets of the Partnership might be institutionalized in the future, while others may not be affordable or desirable. The Partners might work together to plan ways to strategically develop particular central office staff capacities and identify capacities of NTC and other external partners that the district might want to engage.

Monitoring progress. Finally, as evaluators, we urge the Partners to mutually

agree on a small set of leading indicators that capture progress on their key shared goals. It is important that the Partnership have a set of short-term measures to use for tracking their progress, making adjustments, and sustaining the effort. RCSD leading indicators would describe central office and school organizational conditions that research finds associated with improved teaching and learning, such as professional learning communities at all system levels and strong communication channels between levels. Our evaluation can contribute to the development of leading indicators; as a first step, our annual survey of teachers provides a year to year picture of school conditions of learning. The district’s strategic plan could provide a valuable framework for this development work.

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Introduction

At the request of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Stanford

University’s Center for Research on the Context of Teaching (CRC) undertook a 3-year evaluation of the New Teacher Center’s (NTC)’s partnership with the Ravenswood City School District (RCSD) to strengthen teaching and learning across all seven district schools. The partners’ collaboration on system-wide instructional improvement began in 2006-07, building upon three years of work in which NTC mentors worked with beginning teachers in three schools.2 This first year evaluation report describes NTC’s work with the district, outcomes for 2006-07, and challenges for the Partnership3 using data from field-based research over the course of the year and teacher surveys conducted in Spring 2006 and Spring 2007. Subsequent reports, scheduled for September 2008 and September 2009, will document and evaluate the partners’ work on an annual basis, with the final report assessing their accomplishments over the three year period.

NTC’s partnership with RCSD affords opportunities to study a promising strategy

for system reform and conditions under which such a strategy can be effective. The strategy rests on the indisputable premise that adult learning must be at the center of efforts to increase student learning, and it leads with a focus on new teachers who are heavily represented in this district and most at risk of floundering. NTC brings a long track-record and national reputation for excellence in mentoring new teachers. The quality of its work is grounded in the organization’s first-hand experience and a growing body of research on adult learning: (1) it builds up from the identified needs of teachers, (2) it focuses on formative assessment at each level of the system,4 (3) it provides intensive and sustained opportunities for adult learning, and (4) it aims to create communities of adult learners within and across schools. Further, NTC applies the same principles for adult learning, formative assessment of professional practice, and learning communities to its own organization, thereby ensuring the continuing development of high-quality mentoring practice among individuals that NTC employs.

The NTC-RCSD partnership is ambitious because it is fundamentally about

building the system’s capacity to continually improve. This goal is a qualitative move beyond the external organization’s established new teacher induction model. It takes NTC into a new frontier of supporting the development of leadership for improvement throughout a system and collaborating with district administrators and the community to strengthen the system’s infrastructure to support teaching and learning. It also goes beyond the district’s experience and asks the district to lead a complex agenda of changes

2 In 2003-2005 NTC worked with two schools and added a third in 2005-2006. 3 When referring to the RCSD-NTC partnership in this report we capitalize Partnership and Partners to distinguish it from other partnerships and to signal that the evaluation assumes this as its unit for evaluation. 4 We use “formative assessment” in its broadest sense: using feedback on desired outcomes to improve one’s practice. For example, we include teachers’ uses of diagnostic data to adjust instruction, mentors’ feedback to teachers, as well as district administers’ use of information from teachers to improve their support for teaching and learning.

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at multiple levels of the system. Even with the added opportunities offered by the partnership with NTC, this agenda is a major undertaking, especially during 2006-07 when several central office positions were vacant and the board acted slowly to appoint the current superintendent. Further, while small by urban school system standards, RCSD is beset by many of the same problems of poverty and population churn, contentious board politics, and violent crime that threatens professionals’ and students’ sense of security.

This work begins at a time of new found optimism in Ravenswood. Among

teachers, optimism about the future of a teaching career in the district has grown through NTC’s professional development and their experience of increased success with students. Among district leaders and the community, the Hewlett Foundation’s investment in the district may also have inspired optimism. Contributing to this are the formal appointment of the superintendent after a prolonged interim appointment, and the near end of operating under a decade-long court order to bring its special education system into compliance. It is nonetheless a challenging time as support for charter schools grows and the community struggles to maintain safety and continue its economic growth. Further, the latest round of state testing places RCSD in its third year as a Program Improvement (PI) district and subject to sanctions, increasing the pressure for rapid improvement. We hope that our documentation of how NTC and RCSD learn to address these challenges and forge a productive partnership will offer a useful contribution to the partners and to the field of urban school reform.

We consider the NTC-RCSD partnership to be within a family of system reform

efforts that focus on building system capacity for effective practice at all levels. What does it take to develop system capacity to create conditions that attract and retain new teachers as well as enable their continuous refinement of practice in a district like Ravenswood? Such districts are characterized by: high proportions of students from poor families whose native language is not English, high community transience and student turnover, high teacher turnover, high administrator turnover at school and district levels, and inconsistent board and community leadership. California data on district demographic and teaching force characteristics show that RCSD has substantially higher rates of English language learners, poverty, and new teachers than the Bay Area and state averages (see Appendix D). 5 In sum, RCSD’s leadership turnover, teacher attrition, and poor student performance represent a syndrome of conditions typical of the poorest communities in California and the nation. The Hewlett investment and this evaluation address the question of whether and how this syndrome can be reversed through an intensive and broadly defined professional development strategy.

The primary goals of the evaluation are to understand how the Partnership works

in practice: How do the NTC mentors and coaches work to promote professional learning in the district? How do professionals at all levels of the system perceive and respond to the external partner’s support? To what extent and how does this makes a difference for teaching and learning across district schools? What follows is our characterization of 5 Notably, in 2004-05 27 percent of RCSD teachers had less than two years of teaching experience, a rate that is 5 standard deviations higher than the state mean of 5 percent.

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NTC’s role in the Partners’ theory of action, the primary research questions, and the research design and methods. Theory of action for the RCSD-NTC Partnership RCSD and NTC share the dual goals of increasing teacher retention and student achievement. The theory of action or logic model underlying the Partnership’s effort, represented in Figure 1, centers on the premise that multiple forms of high-quality professional development and support throughout the school system can shift the culture to one that focuses on strengthening teaching and learning. It is grounded in a set of assumptions about the relationships between student learning, teacher learning, and system learning.

Figure 1. RCSD-NTC Partnership Logic Model

School leader- ship and support for teacher learning and instruction

Teacher mentoring, training, and support

Increased student achievement

Increased teacher knowledge of content and skills for instruction

District leadership and support for principals, teachers, and students

Higher teacher retention rates

Co-design of district PD and supports for teaching and learning

NTC & RCSD Partnership to increase teacher retention and

student achievement

Principal coaching, training and PLC development

Teacher leadership and PLC development

Establishment of grade level inquiry teams to improve instruction

Improved school and district conditions that support teaching and learning

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NTC’s core work is grounded in the premise that student learning is strongly

affected by what teachers know and know how to teach effectively, which is strongly influenced by their opportunities to continually refine their practice. The richest opportunities for teacher learning combine effective mentoring, professional development, and professional learning communities, all focused on using formative assessment to refine practice. In its partnering with RCSD, NTC uses the same logic to create learning opportunities for administrators that aim to improve their support of teaching and learning.

The model predicts that mentoring focused on new teachers, coupled with

enhanced opportunities for high-quality professional development and support, will increase teachers’ knowledge of content and their repertoire of teaching strategies and skills. Similarly, opportunities that engage teachers in teams that meet regularly to discuss teaching and learning provide a practice-based forum for teachers to learn from each other and develop into inquiry-based professional learning communities (PLCs).

As Figure 1 depicts, NTC’s partnership with RCSD also involves co-design and

support for professional learning at the administrator level. Coaching of principals as well as opportunities for professional development and support is expected to increase school leadership in support of teacher learning and improved instruction. In addition to individual coaching and support, developing a professional learning community of principals and assistant principals provides opportunities for learning and collaboration around issues of teaching, learning, and school leadership.

NTC also works to develop communication and alignment between levels of the

system. The model predicts that the work of the district and NTC to co-design professional development and supports for teaching and learning will lead to more powerful learning opportunities and stronger supports for principal, teachers, and students. As a result, both school and district conditions that support teaching and learning will be established.

In sum, Ravenswood teachers who work with students struggling with school and

with the language are more likely to experience success and to stay in teaching and in their current job. The crux of the logic model is that all the elements will result in higher teacher retention and increased achievement for students.

Implicit within and between each level is the notion that ongoing formative

assessment—both formal and informal feedback on practice—is essential to learning and change for district leaders, principals, teachers, and students as well as for NTC. Also implicit is that the partnership between Ravenswood and NTC is dynamic and, over the next three years, will be continually redefined to ensure that the trajectory of improvement is sustained beyond the next three years.

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Evaluation approach and methods Our evaluation design follows the logic of the model laid out in Figure 1. Our data collection and analysis focuses on the main classes of activities of the NTC-Ravenswood partnership and the expected outcomes.

To track progress, we looked for evidence that the partners’ designs were being implemented as intended at the school and/or the district level as well as evidence of unintended consequences. We interviewed central office leaders, principals in all seven district schools, and a sample of teachers who were mentored, and conducted focus groups with new and veteran teachers in each district school.6 In addition we interviewed NTC mentors, coaches, and staff working in the district.

We observed a range of professional activities from professional development

workshops and institutes designed or brokered by NTC or the district to principal Quick Visits and facilitator training based in the schools. We also conducted surveys in Spring 2006 and Spring 2007 of teachers in all district schools.7 The interviews, observations, and surveys were designed to elicit evidence about:

• nature and quality of NTC mentoring of beginning and veteran teachers • implementation of RCSD’s design for learning teams and PLC practices to

improve instruction • nature of principal professional development co-designed by the partners • nature of system reform co-designed by the partners

Sections of this report present evidence regarding each line of analysis from the first year of our three-year evaluation and raise issues for the partners to consider as they move forward.

6 Focus groups were conducted by NTC’s formative evaluator, Dr. Amy Gerstein. 7 Survey data include responses from 144 teachers in seven district schools in 2006 and responses from 143 teachers in seven schools in 2007. The overall response rate for the survey was 86 percent..

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Year One Implementation

Teacher mentoring design and quality NTC mentors work extensively with beginning teachers across the seven RCSD schools. They are matched with individual teachers to achieve a fit of their grade level or subject expertise to teacher assignment in a ratio of teachers to mentors of approximately 9:1. In 2006-07, most mentors worked with teachers in more than one school, and seven mentors worked in the school with most beginning teachers (see Appendix A). Also, each mentor worked with at least one “veteran” teacher, or a teacher who had already cleared the state credential requirements or had teaching experience in another country and was working on certification. These arrangements were made according to NTC criteria of teacher need for support or on request of the teacher or principal.

This design for mentoring results in a “critical mass” of district teachers in guided

instructional improvement. Indeed, in the 2007 teacher survey, half of the 143 respondents (49 percent) reported that they currently had a NTC mentor. Mentors also have provided some level of support to grade-level teams, further broadening the reach of their instructional assistance in district schools (see next section for discussion). In addition, the design ensures that mentors have at least one mentor colleague in each school who shares experience working in a particular school and can advise on work with individual teachers and collaborate to support instructional improvement school-wide. Our analysis of mentor learning opportunities, reported elsewhere, suggests that mentor collaboration in a school enhances the quality of their work.8 NTC mentors provide teachers with a wide range of valued professional supports

NTC mentors work with district teachers in myriad ways. They support beginning teachers’ by helping them to satisfy California’s BTSA requirements for certification, working with them to set up effective classroom routines, and being on call to respond to their crises. They also support beginning teachers with their content instruction, planning, lesson development, and assessment of student learning. They work with veteran teachers to provide ongoing critical support of their instruction, and to support their efforts to implement learning from NTC-brokered professional development. In their work with all teachers, NTC mentors focus on content standards for student learning and help teachers establish effective teaching practices and learning environments for their students. They use external professional development, such as CELL and ExLL, as vehicles for advancing and building upon teachers’ content knowledge and student assessment skills.

Figure 2 shows the kinds of supports NTC mentors provided to the teachers they mentored during 2006-07, ranked according to their frequency. Teachers reported that the 8 As a parallel line of research, the evaluation team is also studying ways in which NTC mentors learn to improve their practice of mentoring RCSD teachers and supporting school change. Preliminary findings were reported in a briefing to the Hewlett Foundation in February 2007; results of ongoing research will be reported annually.

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most frequent mentor activities – those that happened at least twice a month for more than 50 percent of the mentored teachers – were:

• Visits my classroom to observe instruction (67 percent) • Provides feedback on my teaching (66 percent) • Discusses professional and personal problems with me (59 percent)

At the other end of the spectrum, the mentoring roles that teachers said their mentor “never” did include: lesson modeling (46 percent said this never happened), work with their grade-level team (31 percent never), advocacy with administrators (24 percent never), conference attendance (25 percent never) and work on developing leadership skills (22 percent never). The last two mentoring activities, by design, involved selected individuals in developing high-level instructional expertise and teacher leadership, while advocacy was on an ad hoc basis and involved relatively low proportions of teachers.

Figure 2. NTC Mentoring Roles: Where Mentors Focus Their Efforts

0 20 40 60 80 100

Visited my classroom during instruction time

Provided feedback on my teaching

Discussed professional and personal problems with me

Conducted formal observations in my classroom

Helped me set goals for professional growth

Helped me assess student academic and emotional needs

Looked at student work with me

Gave me tools (e.g., for assessment)

Worked with my grade-level team

Partnered to design units or lessons for study

Acted as an advocate for me with the administrators

Worked with me to develop my leadership skills

Helped me with long-term planning of instruction

Attended conferences with me

Modeled lessons for me in the classroom

% Teachers who reported having worked with an NTC mentor "2-4 times a month" or "More than once a week"

Teachers gave their NTC mentor high ratings on all of their roles in the survey as

well as in focus groups and interviews. At least 60 percent of the teachers rated each mentor role as valuable or extremely valuable. Mentor roles that were rated as extremely valuable by at least half of the teachers are:

• Helped me assess student academic and emotional needs (63%) • Modeled lessons in the classroom (59%) • Gave me tools (e.g., for assessment) (58%)

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• Acted as an advocate with administrators (53%) • Provided feedback on my teaching (52%) • Looked at student work with me (52%) • Helped me set goals for professional growth (51%) • Partnered to design units or lessons for study (50%)

Notably, these highly rated mentor roles represent over half those listed in the survey. Also notable is that several of them were among the least frequent mentor activities, in particular, modeled lessons, acted as an advocate, and partnered to design units or lessons for study. Perhaps these point to areas for enhanced mentoring support. It is important to keep in mind that only about half of the district’s teachers had mentors, and that beginning teachers were NTC’s top priority. Consequently, deepening versus broadening mentoring support will be a decision for the Partners to address in the future. NTC mentors establish effective learning environments for teachers

The high quality of NTC mentoring was a prevalent focus of beginning and

veteran teachers’ comments in focus groups. Qualities of their work with mentors that teachers pointed to again and again are those that distinguish effective learning environments, according to a large body of research.9 NTC mentors establish learning environments for teachers that are learner-centered, knowledge-centered, assessment-centered, and community-centered, -- conditions that support learning.

Repeatedly teachers commented on the fact, and importance, of their mentor’s

knowledge of them as learners and of the students in their classroom. They talked about the trusting relationship they had with their mentor and the nurturing, personalized way in which s/he supported them as a person and as a professional. As one beginning teacher put it: “My mentor is one of the very few people that genuinely cares about the successes I have and …pushes me to think about those things and takes time to celebrate them which makes the job a whole lot better…” Another teacher compared her NTC mentor with mentors from her credentialing program and Teach for America in these terms:

… I get along with [all three of them] very well but my New Teacher Center mentor and I have a very good relationship, a very trusting relationship and she knows the names of my students and she knows particular problem areas and, you know, my strengths and my weaknesses very well – more so than my other mentors do…. I trust her very much and her opinion. ..and feel like I could call her at any point in time… and having that kind of positive personal relationship makes it easier for us to work on my professional needs, I think.

The mentoring is learner-centered both in its focus on building trusting personal relationships with teachers and in its attention to the particular learning needs of each teacher, predicated on his or her developmental stage and particular mix of strengths and challenges for learning to teach effectively.

9 These features of effective learning environments are described in a National Research Council panel report, How People Learn (Bransford, Brown & Cockings, 1999).

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The mentoring also is knowledge-centered, with a focus on particular knowledge

for teaching that are appropriate to the teacher’s developmental level and skill profile. Mentors honed their work to meet the learning needs of individuals, focusing especially on establishing classroom routines, discipline, and pro-active relationships with students with first-year teachers and more on best practices in literacy, math, or science instruction with less novice teachers.

Mentors use their own knowledge and expertise as a resource and also broker

teachers’ access to knowledge resources outside the school. Mentors often work alongside beginning teachers to model their knowledge of practice. For example, as one new kindergarten teacher told us:

She just really helped kind of set the classroom up and make it accessible for the kids. And just, the schedule for the day was a huge thing because I just didn’t know how to break my schedule up and…when do I introduce centers and… which they’re doing now, but that took a while but she just helped me… we went shopping for stuff, she’d bring me materials just for kindergarten, books, resources…

This teacher, along with about half the teachers in the district (55 percent according to the survey), also participated in Comprehensive Early Literacy Learning (CELL) training for literacy instruction that NTC brokered. She emphasized how important it was to have her mentor’s support in using this new knowledge in instruction: “I loved the CELL class but just reflecting [with my mentor] on how to implement it into the classroom [was important]… and we meet at least once a week and she’ll come in and do observations…

A veteran teacher in another school talked with us about her mentor’s role in prompting her to learn to teach differently:

At first I was kind of a skeptic… having taught for so many years and after so many mentors. [This] has been an excellent experience…we took a CELL class and…I had to change the way of teaching. [My mentor] came and observed me. We worked together to plan for classes, you know, presentations and class workshops [promoted by CELL]; we went and observed other teachers, other classrooms in other districts. It was maybe about three times…. [Mentor] was very easy but challenging…she always would bring me to the next step. She was “Okay, you know how to do this. Come on. Let’s try this”. And, you know, “Do I have to do it??” She goes, “Yes, try it”. And then…you know, at first I was kind of, no, I don’t think so but, you know, she would work with me and we were able to go to the next step.

This testimony illustrates both the mentor’s knowledge-centered probing and support for improving instruction and particular challenges mentors and veteran teachers face when they partner to change well-established instructional routines. A relentless focus on literacy instruction, the brokering of external high-quality professional development, and the prodding from a trusted mentor colleague were critical to this story of an experienced teacher’s learning and improved teaching.

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NTC mentors are foremost assessment-centered in their work with teachers. They

and the teachers they work with highlight practices of ongoing reflection together, supported formally with NTC’s Collaborative Assessment tool and informally in meetings and follow-ups to classroom observations. NTC’s formative assessment strategy, and the rich set of Formative Assessment Tools (FAS) that NTC developed to support this, assumes that instruction improves by helping teachers to assess their own practice and plan improvements. Research suggests that professionals need to learn to evaluate and improve their practice according to standards; absent this professional capacity in each classroom, teaching and learning cannot improve. Even if each principal in RCSD were a strong instructional leader, he or she would need to rely on teachers’ capacity to assess and improve their own instruction based on evidence of student learning.

In interviews, teachers stressed the importance of their mentor’s feedback on their

teaching; and in the 2007 survey two-thirds of the teachers with mentors indicated that their mentor provides feedback on their teaching at least twice a month, and 83 percent rated this as valuable (4 or 5 on a 5-point scale). One veteran teacher described how feedback made a difference for her instruction:

[Mentor] would come in every week and she got to know the students and she really picked out those students that I was potentially forgetting and reminded me about how to continue to hold them to high standards that I had originally set for them, and then brainstormed ways about how I could do that and then came in again and reminded me if I was or if I was not doing it.

Another veteran teacher in a different school described how her mentor provided her with useful data from her classroom observations:

…she did like scripting my walking patterns and showing a visual of how I walk in class. So like during my practice section when all students were kind of working together or working independently on practice, she drew a visual of how I would walk, and it was very interesting to see places that I continue to go to –it might have been a needy student or places where I avoided with might also have been a needy student that I didn’t realize or it could have been a student that was self sufficient but it was great to see that visual…. She was like a coach because she allowed…me to come to my own conclusions about it. She never put any type of judgment on it. She just showed me the data.

Through these and other formative assessment practices, the mentors help develop

teachers’ self-reflective habits of mind. A new teacher commented that her mentor regularly starts their meetings with the questions: “What’s going well in your classroom? What’s challenging this week?” Teachers commented that they sometimes ask their mentor to watch something in particular in their classroom and give feedback on it, signaling a readiness to assess their practice and learn from critical feedback. One described the way her mentor’s feedback called attention to both strengths and challenges for improvement: “…I notice you do this really well but try and do this a little bit more…” Another commented that her mentor “noticed that I was doing a lot less

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behavior correction [with students].” Mentors’ formative assessment practices help teachers to make moves that build upon and honor their accomplishments and to see improvement as a process of gradual learning and risk-taking.

Finally, NTC mentoring practice in RCSD is community-centered in two ways: it

establishes the mentor-teacher relationship as a community of practice focused on a particular class of students and it promotes teachers’ collaboration on instruction.

For brand new teachers a sense of community with a mentor offers emotional

support that often sustains their effort. One teacher commented:

...sometimes she’ll just listen to you…I definitely have cried many times when I met with her just because you’re like: ‘Oh, someone on my team!’ Like…it’s like a little kid when they get hurt and they cry in front of the mom because you know that she’s like ‘it’s okay. It’s okay. …this is what you’re really good at.’ And you’re like ‘I am good. Thank you!’

And, as described above, the mentors’ knowledge brokering and formative assessment practices build a community of practice around the classroom with each teacher.

Mentors sometimes played a role in brokering informal mentoring and

collaboration between teachers within and across schools. A veteran 6th grade teacher described how her mentor arranged for her to coach colleagues in another school who were struggling with how to structure their schedule to teach the curriculum:

She told them that she had ‘this great teacher over at [other school] who would be willing to help you… And so I was able to meet with them. We sat down and like went over what a day would look like. We looked at their whole weekly schedule. How we would teacher the stories or, you know, things like that. What we did with our time [was productive].

NTC mentors’ success in establishing effective learning environments for RCSD

new and veteran teachers is evidenced in teachers’ judgments of the mentors’ helpfulness in a wide range of instructional practices and in our longitudinal assessment of teachers’ self-ratings RCSD teachers report instructional benefits from mentoring

In light of the extensive kinds and high quality of support district teachers received from their NTC mentors it is not surprising that they gave high ratings to their mentoring experience. Asked on the survey to rate the helpfulness of mentoring to developing their professional skills, the majority of teachers gave ratings of 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale on 14 of the 17 skills that pertained to instruction (see Figure 3).

More than two-thirds of the teachers gave mentors the highest ratings on their

help in developing skills to: use a variety of instructional methods (78 percent gave ratings of 4 or 5), engage all students in learning (74 percent), design units or lessons of

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study (72 percent), teach my subject matter (70 percent), assess student learning (68 percent), and handle a range of classroom management or discipline situations (67 percent).

Interestingly, some of the skills on which RCSD teachers rated their mentor as least helpful in 2007 showed significant gains from 2006. These include: use of formative assessment to inform writing instruction (52 percent giving 4 and 5 ratings in 2007 versus 35 percent in 2006), use of formative assessments to inform mathematics instruction (50 versus 20 percent), assess student emotional and social needs (63 versus 44 percent), and create specific goals for individual students and modify instruction accordingly (61 versus 39 percent). All of these areas of mentoring growth pertained to helping teachers use data to individualize instruction for students in their classroom.

Figure 3. How Teachers Rate their Mentors on Help with Instructional Skills

0 20 40 60 80 100

Use a variety of instructional methods

Engage all students in learning

Design units or lessons of study

Teach your subject matter

Assess student learning

Handle a range of classroom management or discipline situations

Assess student emotional and social needs

Plan lessons effectively

Select and adapt curriculum and instructional materials

Create specific goals for individual students and modify instruction accordingly

Use formative assessment to inform writing instruction

Work effectively with others in my learning team

Teach English Language Learners

Use formative assessment to inform reading instruction

Use formative assessment to inform mathematics instruction

Teach Special Education students

Take a leadership role in my school

Use formative assessment to inform science instruction

Work with parents to improve student performance

Use computers in classroom instruction

% Helpful or Extremely HelpfulHelpful Extremely helpful

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NTC Mentors Benefit from Ongoing Professional Development NTC builds its own capacity by investing in ongoing learning opportunities for the mentors to ensure that their own skills and knowledge continue to develop. The high quality of mentoring that Ravenswood teachers receive is not just a matter of recruiting skilled educators or coaches but significantly comes from their learning through practice in this particular context. One such learning venue is bi-weekly mentor meetings designed to focus on the content of mentoring, to learn from mentors’ individual expertise, to build reflection into their practice and discourse with each other, and to build community. Mentors also build their skills through attending formal professional development, including NTC’s Induction Institute. The mentors’ success in supporting district teachers depends upon their engagement in such continuing learning opportunities. Teacher learning teams and leadership development Beginning in the fall of 2006, Ravenswood successfully launched a significantly different strategy for conducting the bulk of district-led professional development for teachers: creating grade-level learning teams at each school. The strategy emerged from the work of the district’s Professional Development Committee during the previous year. District professional development is transformed into teacher learning communities

During 2005-06 NTC helped organize and lead a committee of teachers and central office administrators to review and redesign district-led professional development. Responding to teachers’ desires to be more involved in the design and content of their professional development, the committee explored the idea of professional learning communities. The recommendations of the group, embraced by the district leadership, proposed a new design, locating professional development in the schools in the form of grade-level learning teams. Each team, led by a teacher facilitator, would conduct a series of inquiry cycles throughout the year.

The design called for weekly meetings during the two hours on Wednesday

afternoons when students are released early—the time already dedicated to teacher professional development. The original plan proposed a series of four-week inquiry cycles in which teachers would meet in their grade-level teams for the first three and then “share out” their accomplishments in district-wide grade level groups at the fourth meeting. Thus both school-based and district-wide learning were balanced. (The upper grades always met district-wide by paired subject areas: English language arts teachers with social studies and math with science.) Another key element was the training provided by NTC to the facilitators. Once a month from 4:00-6:00pm facilitators gathered together for training in their new leadership roles (with dinner provided). Grade-level learning teams were launched and highly valued by teachers

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Representing a major shift in teacher professional development in Ravenswood, the new strategy was implemented in all the schools in the fall of 2006. Grade-level learning teams were formed early in the school year and met regularly; facilitators were selected and trained and led team meetings. Teachers collaborated in teams that averaged three teachers with some as small as one and a few with five or more. In a few cases with small teams, two schools paired up.

In spite of the expected—and unexpected—bumps in implementing a new

strategy, teachers were quite positive about the learning teams. On 7 of 11 dimensions that describe different aspects of working collaboratively in grade-level learning teams, 75 percent or more of the teachers agreed or strongly agreed (on a five-point scale) with the statements. The two highest were “mutually respectful interactions” and “trying out new ideas for instruction.” The two lowest were not about the tone or content of the meetings but rather about attendance and effective routines for doing the work (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. How Grade-Level Learning Teams Worked Together

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Our interactions are mutually respectful

We have tried out new ideas for instruction

We have learned from one anotherabout effective teaching strategies

We have developed good ideas toimprove instruction

We have identified areas for improvingour instruction

We have discussed what happened whenwe tried out new ideas for instruction

Our facilitator does a good job ofguiding our work and discussions

We share a commitment to working together

We understand the goals for grade-levellearning teams

Team members attend scheduledmeetings regularly

We have developed effective routinesfor doing this work

% Agree or Strongly AgreeAgreeStrongly Agree

In interviews and focus groups teachers elaborated on their perceptions of the

benefits of having grade-level learning teams. For example, one teacher commented, “I feel every single Wednesday is productive and …I get frustrated when we don’t get to meet because I feel like I’m not getting things to do in my class.” Another said:

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I thought it was great that we had the choice, you know, to pick what we wanted to focus on in our inquiry cycle rather than going to these State district meetings that were supposed to be on like IEP’s or learning about something else. But we chose to focus on writing whereas other groups maybe chose to focus on math but (pause) that was their group’s decision and I thought, having that choice is so powerful like for our teaching and our kids.

Commenting on exposure to different viewpoints in her learning team, one teacher said:

There is a greater understanding that there are different ways to teach. Whether or not you agree on those are separate issues but the fact that they both work well and that as a new teacher, I’m able to pull from both, I think I’m learning the most.

We also heard from teachers that the team experiences were a form of validation and confidence building as well as arenas for problem solving. One teacher explained:

You know, those kinds of things [grade level team meetings] were very, very helpful and it was really, really good to hear your own I guess problems, fears, challenges being validated by other people who are having similar difficulties and begin to really brainstorm and really figure out better ways of tackling them and similar problems. In addition to the planned grade-level teams, the Reading Recovery teachers who

were to split up among grade level teams were inspired to form their own learning community and began meeting as a district-wide Reading Recovery team.

Not everyone reported positive experiences as evidenced by the 17 percent who disagreed in the survey that their grade level team interactions were respectful. In some cases dissatisfaction represented tensions between new and veteran teachers. As one veteran put it: “That’s a complaint for me because when I see a second year or a third year teacher facilitating over teachers who have been in the district 10, 15…I have an issue with that because it’s like you’re still learning how to be a teacher.”

The district-wide share-outs were not viewed as favorably as the grade-level

teams. Teachers were asked to rate each on a five-point scale, with “extremely valuable” (5) the highest. More than twice as many teachers rated grade-level learning teams as “extremely valuable” (38 percent) than gave that rating to district-wide share outs (16 percent). Combining the top two ratings, 65 percent gave ratings of 4 and 5 to grade level teams and 44 percent to district-wide share outs. Our evaluation did not address teachers’ reasons for dissatisfaction with the current design, but the Partners might pursue an alternative design for the share-outs or hold off on this design until school teams are more advanced in their inquiry. Learning teams focus on planning during their first year

The learning teams could choose to focus on several different types of activities, for example, a planning cycle or lesson study. “Planning cycle” was the most frequently

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reported activity of learning teams, cited by 87 percent of the teachers who responded to our survey. (See Figure 5). “Looking at student work” and “analysis of student assessment” were the two other activities cited by more than half the teachers. Between 60 and 74 percent of teachers rated each of these activities as 4 or 5 where 5 is “extremely valuable,” with “planning cycle” the highest and “case study of a student” the lowest.

Figure 5. Types of Activities Undertaken by Learning Teams

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Planning cycle

Looking at student work

Analysis of student assessmentdata

Lesson study

Case study of a student

Book study

% Yes

Focus groups and interviews added more detail to the kinds of activities the

grade-level teams tackled. One teacher said her team members “brought student work samples to the meetings, set their instructional goals, got ideas from other teachers, and rotated meeting in each teacher’s classroom so they could look around each other’s classrooms to get ideas.” Another teacher spoke of teaching interactive writing to her colleagues and described how they shared what they did and discussed what was working and what was not. Another said. “We made unit plans and we made specific lesson plans and we prepared lessons together.” Most spoke of planning and sharing lessons and strategies.

Some teachers suggested that more could have been accomplished with more structure. One teacher said, “When I didn’t go with a specific objective that I needed, there wasn’t a whole lot that was accomplished.” Another said, “It didn’t seem like . . . it tied together from week to week even or something like that. It was not cohesive . . . If we had like looked at Lucy Calkins as a grade level or something like that and just done

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the…lesson study or something like that.” A facilitator describing one school said, “Teachers were introduced to the inquiry cycle idea in their staff retreat last year. They knew they were supposed to plan something, carry it out, and assess it, but things got looser through the year. They mostly did planning.” How well learning teams functioned varied more within schools than across schools

Although the learning teams functioned quite well overall, according to teachers, they varied substantially across grade levels. We combined the items above into one scale that captures teachers’ judgments of the functioning of their grade-level teams in order to look at variation across schools and across grade levels. We found that the range of responses varied more across grade levels within a school than between schools.10 Translating “strongly disagree” and “strongly agree” into a five-point scale with “strongly agree” a 5, teachers’ judgments overall averaged 4. Yet within a single school responses ranged widely, for example, from 2.7 to 5.

Interviews with mentors, who sat in on team meetings, and with teachers suggest

several reasons for variation across grades not associated with school characteristics. Each grade level team had a particular mix of teachers; some all new teachers, some primarily veterans, others a mixture; some as large as eight, some as small as two. Some teams embodied conflicting teaching philosophies, others did not. Some team members were committed to the idea of collaboration, others were not. Similarly, the skills and background knowledge of facilitators and team members varied. How well each team functioned reflected a combination of these and possibly other factors. Grade-level teams provide new opportunities for teacher leadership

The grade level teams provided a new opportunity for teachers to take on positions of leadership. Each team had a facilitator whose role was to keep the meeting running smoothly. Facilitators attended monthly two-hour training sessions which ran in parallel with the start-up of the learning teams.

Teachers valued the facilitator training, although it was challenging to take on the role at the same time as learning what it meant to be a facilitator. Several noted that the whole concept of grade-level teams was new to them. As one put it, “I’ve never been really part of a collaborative effort. It’s always been lone rangers.” Others faced challenging group dynamics at their grade level. For example, one veteran teacher expressed a viewpoint shared among several: “When I see a second year or a third year teacher facilitating over teachers who have been in the district ten, 15…I have an issue with that because it’s like you’re still learning how to be a teacher.”

Still, the overall response was positive and marked the development of a new leadership role for teachers. One said, “Even though there are facilitators not coming, I

10 In fact, differences across grade levels were statistically significant while differences across schools were not.

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know across every grade level, everybody has said, ‘This has been a great tool for us.’” Another facilitator said:

I think that there’s like a community that was formed among facilitators that like if we saw each other, even if we didn’t know each other’s name, we knew a lot about each other and the stories and I think it sort of bonded the district.

Learning Teams Encounter Start-Up Challenges The introduction of grade-level learning teams brought with it changes in conceptions of professional development, changes in the roles of teachers both as team members and as facilitators, and implications for changes in those who lead and support teachers. A shift of this magnitude does not occur without ripples, some anticipated and some not. Three challenges emerged, each of which is recognized and is being worked on by NTC and the district. One is the inevitable scheduling challenge. Although Wednesday afternoons were set aside for professional development and the grade-level teams were scheduled for that time, other needs competed with that agenda. Principals had school-wide agendas that placed demands on some of the time. The district had certain professional development responsibilities mandated by state and federal law that also required the time of teachers. Time needed for report card preparation and parent conferences, as well as vacation breaks and testing, also cut into time available for the teams to meet. One result was fewer opportunities to meet than expected. Now that the challenge of fitting in multiple demands is on the table at the beginning of the school year, the negative side effect of repeated changes in schedule is less likely to repeat itself. A second challenge that emerged was the need to define the role of the principal vis a vis the grade-level teams. Principals understood that they were to take a “hands-off” stance to ensure teacher autonomy in setting and carrying out their agendas in the team meetings. But this role was defined by what they should not do, not what they should do. Before the end of the school year, the principals met with NTC and district leaders to formulate an appropriate role. Their ideas included making themselves visible to teachers during the team meetings, providing time for teams to share their work at faculty meetings, and have systematic communication with facilitators. Mentors struggled with a similar issue: how to remain in the background and let teachers take the lead yet be available for help and support. A third challenge that arose was the need for more opportunities to learn about inquiry. Both mentors and learning team participants pointed to limited understanding of inquiry cycles among teachers, including many facilitators. As one mentor said: “one thing that we’ve all raised is that it’s not data driven.” A few teams made substantial progress because of their knowledge of inquiry cycles. Yet even these teams often struggled to figure out what actions to take based on the data they reviewed, having reached the bounds of their own knowledge of content and pedagogy. Some had team members or mentors who brought experiences from their own backgrounds, such as CELL training, to share with the team. Overall, however, our findings suggest that most

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learning teams were struggling to go beyond basic planning, sharing ideas, and informally looking at work their students produced. No one expected learning teams to leave the starting block as highly functioning professional learning communities. Research on the development of professional learning communities underscores the time it takes for such teams to develop.11 Creating and adapting structures to conduct cycles of inquiry and access to a range of sources of new knowledge are part of this developmental process, along with the practice of collaboration. The first year’s experience with grade-level learning teams was a strong beginning and teams are now poised to move ahead. Their progress depends upon sustained support from mentors and principals. Principal coaching and professional learning community development A key goal of the RCSD-NTC Partnership is to expand learning opportunities for principals, including professional development, coaching, and a new structure for meeting together, grounded in the idea of a principals’ professional learning community. Three NTC coaches work with every principal and assistant principal, facilitate district-wide meetings of principals and school visits, and broker or provide professional development. Principals value the support they receive from coaching and professional development opportunities Site administrators benefited from individual coaching as well as a range of professional development opportunities designed by the district and NTC. NTC coaches visited each school twice a month on average to provide one-on-one support to each administrator. Coaches worked individually with site administrators in two primary ways. For those in their first or second year, the coaching emphasizes the requirements for the second tier administrative credential with goals based on the California Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (CPSELs). For all the administrators, the coaches focus on the design and implementation of systems that support the school organization, teachers, and student learning, adapted to the individual needs of each. Linked to specific state standards for administrators, coaches work with site administrators on setting goals for themselves and for their teachers. The specific areas and content of coaching sessions were adapted to each administrator and circumstance. For example, in one instance the focus was on the school’s ELD program. In another case, the focus was on helping the principal work with individual faculty members. Principals spoke quite highly of their coaches and found them very helpful. They referred to their coaches as “awesome” and “great”. One said “She challenges my thinking.” Another said “She keeps me focused on what is really essential.”

11 See, for example, McLaughlin, M.W. & Talbert, J.E. (2006). Building school-based teacher learning communities: Professional strategies to improve student achievement. New York: Teachers College Press.

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In collaboration with NTC, the district brokered and provided a variety of professional development sessions for site administrators. Before the opening of school, all the principals attended a three-day leadership retreat on shared leadership, communities of practice, and instructional leadership. As one principal described it: “Having everyone get together who is in leadership for three days, although we were all very nervous about the amount of work that we had to do at our sites, created, established a pattern of increased collaboration throughout the year that is still going [on].” A sense of collaboration and belonging to the district was further enhanced by a November dinner gathering at the Hewlett Foundation for district and school administrators and NTC mentors and coaches that centered on a facilitated discussion about school climate. The event signaled a new willingness on the part of all parties to delve into joint problem solving and a visible sign of the Foundation’s investment in the future of the district. Principals also had professional development in their monthly meetings with the district. Topics included norm setting for effective meetings, goal setting, communities of practice, Quick Visit protocols (see below) and literacy assessment. The last evolved into training on CELL/ExLL12 literacy that paralleled training received by over half the teachers. The topics were based on needs the principals identified the previous year. In addition, first and second year site administrators attended the monthly New Administrator’s Institute offered by the NTC at the San Mateo County Office of Education. Principals have developed a collaborative community Ravenswood principals began the year with a stronger sense of collegiality than in the past, which many had characterized as competitive and individualistic. Building on the Leadership Institute and the explicit goals of the district and NTC, the coaches trained principals in a process called Quick Visits to begin to build a professional learning community. Ideally once a month, the principals and their coaches gather in one school, divide into small teams, and visit 10-12 classrooms over the period of an hour. The classroom visits are focused on a topic tied to teaching standards and selected by the host principal and his/her teachers, such as student engagement or lesson objectives and checking for understanding. Following the observations, each team composes a note to each teacher as practice in writing formative feedback that the principal will deliver to the teacher. After completing the notes, the whole group debriefs with host principal on what they observed. Principals valued these conversations that were so tightly focused on instruction. One principal said: “[The Quick Visit] has gotten us away from my site versus your site . . . that was so prevalent in this district. It was so competitive.” Another emphasized the honesty describing earlier “a sense of competition . . . and not really being honest about the things that were happening in the schools.” This principal went on to describe the process at his/her school: 12 Comprehensive Early Literacy Learning (CELL) and Extended Literacy Learning (ExLL). See footnote 1

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We talk about what were the things that we observed. What were some of the trends. What were some of the areas of improvement . . . It’s helpful to have our colleagues sharing in a non-threatening way what their observations are and getting feedback.

Another principal described the importance of the Quick Visit process for developing a common language and understanding about good teaching. As the year went on, the principals saw additional value in meeting together and chose to add time to their school visit meetings to discuss a broader array of issues they all face. This shift signaled a major change from past practice where each principal had one district contact and each approached the district individually rather than convening first around issues of common interest. Principals describe a new level of professionalism in the district Principals, especially those with long tenure in the district, pointed to a noticeable change in school and district culture. One example is the decrease in competition between the schools as described above. Principals also pointed to the quality of the August Leadership Retreat and the monthly professional development sessions. Valuing the NTC mentors and coaches also contributed to their more positive perception of the district. Every principal had positive words about the NTC mentors who work with their teachers. “I think that it [the NTC presence in the school] has an impact on improving the culture, the professional culture. I think that it has had a material impact . . . these guys have gotten into the book room with me and cleaned up stuff.” Another principal said: “The working conditions are the best now than I have ever seen them.” Linking these positive changes to stability, a principal said: “And those are the kinds of things that are going to keep principals, you know, build some longevity. I mean we’ve got a revolving door.” Teachers report stronger principal leadership The preceding description documents that principals have positive perceptions about their coaching, professional development, and professional community building. We now look at whether teachers perceive any differences in how their school leaders behave. Both the 2006 and 2007 teacher surveys asked teachers to indicate how often the principal demonstrated a set of activities exemplifying strong leadership focused on improving teaching and learning. For example, how often the principal uses data to inform decision making, encourages teachers to be learners, and supports the development of adult learning communities. As Figure 6 displays, on all eleven actions, the percent of teachers reporting “always” or “often” increased from 2006 to 2007. In fact, such increases also hold across all the items for the top category alone. The four items with increases of at least 15 percent are:

• Promotes improvement of student outcomes (19 percent increase)

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• Supports the development of adult learning communities (18 percent increase)

• Cultivates a shared vision and common purpose among staff (18 percent increase)

• Creates opportunities for teacher learning (15 percent increase) By spring 2007, over 60 percent of the teachers reported that their principal did all but three of the 11 actions listed in the survey often or always. The only item not cited by at least half the teachers as a frequent principal practice was “works with individual teachers effectively to improve instruction.” 13

Figure 6. Teacher Reports of Principal Leadership Actions, 2006-2007

0 20 40 60 80 100

Demonstrates high expectations forall students

Uses data to inform decision making

Promotes improvement of student outcomes

Encourages teachers to be learners

Cultivates a shared vision andcommon purpose among staff

Encourages teachers to be leaders

Creates opportunities for teachers’ learning

Works effectively to developcommunity involvement in the school

Supports the development ofadult learning communities

Works effectively to developparent involvement in the school

Works with individual teacherseffectively to improve instruction

% Often or Always20062007

These increases are consistent with principals’ positive reports of their

professional development experiences and with the establishment of grade-level learning teams in district schools. The survey findings also are consistent with the broader sense among NTC mentors and district leaders at all levels of the system that school conditions that support teaching and learning are on an upward swing.

13 Despite improvements on this front, principal instructional leadership will depend upon sustained professional development in this area.

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Co-design of district support for teaching and learning Beyond mentoring teachers, training grade-level facilitators, and coaching principals, NTC leaders have brokered external professional development options for district teachers and have co-designed and co-led district professional development for teachers and site administrators. As we discussed earlier, the design for grade-level inquiry teams and district share-outs was the outcome of a collaborative planning process that involved NTC leaders and district leaders at all levels of the system. Here we focus on the external professional development that NTC brokered, as well as on the partners’ efforts to improve after school programs for district students and to develop an infrastructure to support teaching and learning, including a substitute network. Brokered external professional development was highly successful

The New Teacher Center brought to its partnership with RCSD knowledge of, and relationships with, a broad network of professions who provide high-quality professional development. These resources were put to good use in the district. With funding provided by the Hewlett Foundation, the partners contracted with several individuals and organizations to provide professional development for large numbers of district teachers and administrators.

During 2006-07, teachers had options to participate in: training in Comprehensive

Early Literacy Learning (CELL) and Extended Literacy Learning (ExLL),14 a writing committee lead by Adria Klein15, the annual West Coast Literacy Conference,16 and small group instruction. Over three-fourths of district teachers took advantage of at least one of the NTC-brokered professional development options, and this included equal numbers of teacher who did and did not have a mentor. Specifically: of the 143 teachers who responded to our 2007 survey, 116 (81%) participated in at least one, and 17 teachers were involved in all of the options.17

Teachers who participated in any of these professional development options were

enthusiastic over both the quality and the fact that they were voluntary. In interviews teachers commented that this was a radical departure from district professional 14 These trainings are run by the Foundation for Comprehensive Early Literacy Learning, established in 1997 with the mission to support whole school reform by providing trainings that improve instruction through scientifically-based teaching methods and formative assessments. CELL is directed at grades 1-3, and ExLL is designed for grades 3-6. Both feature six literacy instruction strategies: read aloud, shared reading, guided reading, independent reading, interactive writing, and independent writing; ExLL includes, in addition: directed writing and oral presentation. Training components address each of the strategies, and teachers are expected to work on each between sessions. 15 Adria Klein is a national expert in language arts education. Her book Research in Reading Recovery (with Stanley Swartz, 1997) summarizes research on students’ learning to read and on teachers’ learning to improve reading instruction. She has been working with district teachers to develop a writing curriculum since 2005-06, and provided training for principals as well. 16 This annual conference, run by the Foundation for Comprehensive Early Literacy Learning, provides high-quality professional development in language arts for teachers and literacy specialists. 17 The survey question listed all of the options except for the small group instruction training, so this is a conservative estimate of teacher involvement.

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development in the past. One put it this way: “… unfortunately, the district had such a long history of having sort of classes that were so redundant… I mean, it was like Open Court yet one more year again, and it was all mandatory… [having options] opened up a whole new way of approaching it.”

One unanticipated consequence of the enthusiastic response of teachers to these

new learning opportunities is that district leaders may feel that are now associated only with compliance training in response to state and federal mandates—training that does not engender enthusiasm. The Partners have yet to address quality standards for, or to co-design, professional development required by the state.

The survey ratings that teachers gave to the externally-provided professional

development options convey their enthusiasm over the quality of each (see Figure 7). Over half of the teachers who participated in CELL, ExLL, West Coast Literacy conference, and/or the writing committee with Adria Klein rated the professional development as “extremely valuable,” and 75-80 percent gave ratings of 4 or 5 on the 5-point scale. In focus groups, some teachers explained that the trainings helped them to be effective in teaching the Open Court curriculum. One 3rd grade teacher described the benefits of CELL training in these terms:

…it was really nice to see other things that I can do in the classroom… A lot of my students are at a first grade reading level right now and the stories in the book are very, very difficult for them to comprehend… so there’s a lot of scaffolding [needed], a lot of differentiation going on with that, and I feel that doing guided reading and any type of shared reading –read alouds – and the interactive writing is really helping them with Open Court.

CELL and ExLL, in particular, appear to have contributed to teachers’ ability to

support their students’ literacy development. We found that a teacher’s participation in either of these trainings predicted increases in their survey ratings of how prepared they felt to use formative assessments and to engage all students in learning.18 These outcomes are aligned with the content of this literacy training and attest to its effectiveness and value to district teachers.

In general, the district professional development offerings were a major success,

as judged by their engagement of nearly all teachers, their quality, and their impact on teachers’ instructional skills. Whether or not they contributed to the focus and quality of grade-level teams’ collaborative work perhaps depended on whether or not team members shared a common professional development experience. This was the case for several teams that were identified as outstanding by NTC mentors. If so, the district faces a trade-off between maintaining the individual voluntarism of the professional

18 Using regression analysis techniques, we estimated the effect of CELL or ExLL participation (1 versus 0) on teachers’ 2007 preparedness ratings after controlling for their 2006 ratings on the same skill. The model also included controls for new teacher status and whether or not the teacher had a mentor. For both assessment use and engaging students the effect was statistically significant; effects were positive but not significant for other instructional skills tapped by the survey (general instruction skills, teaching special education students, and teaching English Learners.

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development system that was in place last year and moving forward with grade-level teams as a key context for teacher learning and instructional improvement. A companion challenge will be the need to further differentiate professional development options given that half the teachers have already participated in a number of trainings.

Figure 7. How Teachers Rate their Professional Development Options

0 20 40 60 80 100

Grade-level learning team (97%)

District-wide grade-level teamshare outs (95%)

Facilitator training (59%)

CELL training (55%)

ExLL training (40%)

Writing with Adria Klein (39%)

West Coast Literacy Conference(33%)

% Valuable or Extremely ValuableValuableExtremely Valuable

Note: The number in parentheses is the percentage of teachers who reported having attended the professional development activity. The partnership made progress on projects to support teaching and learning

NTC’s Hewlett Foundation grant included funds to support work to improve after-school program offerings to district students and to develop a stable and high-quality network of substitute teachers. A full-time ‘Outreach Coordinator’ devoted her time largely to working with district staff and the community toward these ends. This individual also communicated regularly with a Hewlett Foundation expert on community-based organizations, thus expanding the knowledge resources for the RCSD-NTC work.

After-school programs operate at each school under the auspices of a lead organization. Most of the programs lacked an academic component; and some were characterized as ineffective and even as chaotic and negative environments for kids. NTC and RCSD worked together to establish some degree of academic support in the programs and to hold the programs more accountable.

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Building on an earlier effort, the re-design introduced an on-site small group instruction program for an hour or more after school in four schools, beginning in the fall.19 Teachers at each school staffed the program and worked with students who they and their colleagues had referred because they needed extra academic help, in a ratio of roughly 1:6. Approximately 20 teachers were involved in the after-school programs, paid by the Hewlett grant to NTC. NTC mentors provided training in small group instruction to the participating teachers. In two other schools, NTC leaders worked with the schools’ established support organization, the Boys and Girls Club, to choose a literacy curriculum to implement this year; and they provided training to the staffs on how to provide homework help.

By all accounts, the designs were implemented as planned and students were

engaged in the academic work provided after school and persisted in the programs. Challenges mentioned centered on the initial recruitment of students, since parents needed to be involved and many parents of the neediest students were not responsive and/or relied on these students to care for siblings after school.

To develop a substitute network, the partners embarked this year on a discovery

phase to assess ways of improving the quality and quantity of substitute teachers available to the district, a persistent problem that has been highlighted by principals. This effort was largely staffed by the Outreach Coordinator, who led a research effort to determine existing conditions and to use the information to catalyze change. They interviewed a dozen substitute teachers, surveyed administrators and teachers, and tapped other districts’ human resources departments. This research uncovered practices that create or respond to the poor quality of substitute teaching, including: principals’ inability to control who is sent to the school, substitutes’ refusal to follow a lesson plan, and teachers not taking sick leave because they are afraid of consequences of having a substitute in their classroom.

Extensive analysis of data from other districts that have successfully established

strong substitute networks yielded a set of recommendations that district leaders will consider. As presented in an April 2007 briefing to district leaders, they include:

• Coordinate trainings for substitutes, especially on classroom management • Coordinate opportunities for subs to observe full-time teachers • Coordinate monthly discussion groups for subs • Further standardize substitute support procedures, sub plans/ absence

manuals, and emergency sub-plans • Manufacture grade-specific/content specific sub-plans that can be used

district wide when no sub plans are available • Appoint a “substitute resource/aid” at each school to support subs during

the day • Attend and advertise at collegiate recruiting fairs

19 The design built on a pilot program that NTC began in 2005-06 at the two schools they had been partnering with during the previous school year. It had been a big success in one of the two schools and thus served as an evidence-based model to scale up across the district

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• Communicate with Bay Area retired teacher organizations to post substitute job opportunities

• Provide subs with copies of feedback/evaluation forms • Integrate methods used in the “Sub Handbook from The Substitute

Institute at the Utah State University – hhttp://subbed.usu.edu. The Partners are moving forward with the Substitute Initiative with a recruitment and training phase this fall. In collaboration with the district’s HR leaders, NTC will support the district’s recruitment, training, and tool development to support the development of a high-quality substitute network. Partners face challenges to co-designing system reform

RCSD’s partnership with NTC has focused thus far on enhanced mentoring support for beginning and veteran teachers, principals professional development for instructional leadership, and the redesign of professional development to support a continuous improvement process in the district. Progress on the initiatives has been substantial. At the same time, these successes have given rise to questions about how the partnership can operate as a vehicle for sustainable district system change.

The Partnership was challenged during 2006-07 by the RCSD board’s delay in

confirming Maria De La Vega’s appointment as Superintendent (after more than a year’s tenure as acting administrator) and the time it took to fill the position of Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction. These conditions made it difficult for RCSD leaders to fully engage in the partnership with NTC around instructional improvement and prompted NTC leaders to take a stronger leadership role than “partner” implies.20 In interviews, administrators at all levels of the system both praise NTC’s impact and worry about the organization’s interest and ability to partner with the district in ways that will leave the district stronger when NTC departs.

We view these tensions in leadership for district system change – between

external and internal roles and accountability – as endemic to foundation-funded reform efforts. We take up this issue, as well as challenges for district change and the Partnership, in the concluding section of this report.

20 At the same time. NTC’s presence in the district during this period seemed to help the district weather turbulence and created stability for teachers.

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Year One Outcomes

The RCSD-NTC Partnership aimed to improve conditions of teaching in the district in order to retain effective teachers beyond their first years of teaching and to steadily improve student outcomes. Our evaluation measures change on all of these outcomes – the intermediate outcomes of school and district culture change and teacher retention and the ultimate outcome of improved student achievement.

• Conditions of teaching. Annual teacher surveys include indicators of RCSD’s professional culture allowing us to track change over time. These indicators measure key goals of the partnership, including increasing teacher collaboration and principal leadership to improve instruction and strengthening district professionalism and standards for teaching and learning.

• Teacher retention. The partners consider teacher retention to be an important leading indicator of district improvement, since high attrition of new teachers in the past has constrained the system’s ability to build teachers’ professional skills and leadership. The evaluation attempts to measure this outcome subtracting out teacher attrition due to non-renewal based on poor performance, moves into non-teaching positions in RSDC, as well as retirement and other reasons for leaving the labor force.

• Student achievement. The ultimate outcome of improved student achievement is most commonly conceived in terms of increasing rates of students performing at grade-level standards in literacy and mathematics. To track change, we assess trends in the performance of student cohorts across grades over three or more years. Ultimately, our data base will include student-level data to be used in tracking change for students in each cohort who remain in district schools for at least three years. We will collaborate with the NTC research unit on developing this longitudinal data base. For this report, we use “synthetic cohort analysis” for all students in successive grade-level cohorts (i.e., scores for grade 2 in 2004, grade 3 in 2005, grade 4 in 2006) and focus on trends for student cohorts in the three district schools that have been working with NTC mentors for at least one year prior to 2006-07. Based on prior research showing a three-year lag in student achievement outcomes of school reform, we would not expect to see patterns of gains across district schools until 2008-09 at the earliest.

School and district conditions of teaching The Partners’ theory of action assumes that all of their efforts to increase support for professional learning and improved instruction will create a more favorable culture of teaching across the district system. At the school level, they expect to see stronger principal instructional leadership and shifts in teacher cultures toward shared leadership, collaboration on instruction, colleague support, and knowledge sharing and development. At the district level, they aim for increased professionalism and a system culture that places top priority on the continual improvement of teaching and learning and is

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perceived as a desirable environment for teaching. As a consequence, both schools and the central office will be perceived as attractive and rewarding environments in which to work. Survey measures show marked improvement on indicators of the desired shifts in school and district culture. Teachers’ survey reports on their school’s professional culture show positive trends over the past year. Figure 8 presents average teacher ratings of their school conditions on five survey scales in 2006 and again in 2007. (See Appendix B for items composing each scale.) Trends on principal leadership are positive and reflect principals’ more pro-active support of teacher learning and instructional improvement, as described earlier. Teachers’ collegial relationships also appear to have strengthened over the year. The overall trend on the shared leadership indicator dovetails with findings that principals increased their support of teacher leadership and achieved a shared vision and common purpose among the staff. All but one of the district’s seven schools had significant gains in teacher ratings of shared leaderships.

Figure 8. How Teachers Rate Their School Professional Culture, 2006 and 2007

1.0

2.0

3.0

4.0

5.0

PrincipalLeadership

SharedLeadership

Collaboration onInstruction

ColleagueSupport

TeacherKnowledge

Development2006 2007

Positive

Negative

On two other leading indicators of improved school culture – teacher

collaboration on instruction and colleague support (help with efforts to improve instruction) – we observe significant gains only for the three district schools that had NTC mentoring support prior to this year. This may reflect a lag time in teachers’

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readiness to open their instructional practice to colleagues or the importance of a mentor in catalyzing teachers’ improvement efforts.

Perhaps surprisingly, in light of teachers’ positive reports on their work with

grade-level inquiry groups discussed earlier, we found no change in scores on the indicator of teacher knowledge development. This survey scale includes such practices as knowledge sharing from conferences and research, using data to make decisions about instruction, and developing new teaching approaches for under-performing students –the kinds of professional sharing and work envisioned for the learning teams. None of the district schools showed a significant gain over the past year on this scale. This finding suggests that the kinds of collaborative practices that are measured by the scale are relatively advanced and currently involve few teachers. The developmental trajectory for building high-functioning teacher learning teams is not well understood, but these data suggest that the transition begins with a shift toward norms of collaborative and collegial trust. A shift toward teachers’ frequent, systematic sharing and development of knowledge for improved instruction is likely to come later, and to depend upon strong facilitation in data use and teacher teams’ access to a range of instructional resources. Also, since many teams were composed of mostly beginning teachers, we would not expect to see advanced team practices develop until they had become skilled in classroom management and using their grade-level curriculum.

Changes in teachers’ perceptions of the Ravenswood district as a context of teaching suggest that significant progress toward a system culture of professionalism is being made. Evidence comes from teacher comments in interviews and from their survey ratings of district conditions. Figure 9 shows increasing positive teacher ratings on seven indicators of district professionalism.21

For each of the indicators, RCSD teachers rated the district considerably higher

this year than last. Not shown in the graph are equally large declines in strong negative ratings. Indicators that showed increases in positive ratings of 10-20 percent and decreases in strong negative ratings of 11-13 percent were:

• Promotes the professional development of teachers • Is committed to high standards for every student • Helps my school focus on teaching and learning • Holds high expectations for our school

Declines in negative ratings are especially important in light of several teachers’

comments that troublesome district conditions in the past had prompted teachers to seek jobs elsewhere. They pointed to what teachers have perceived to be disrespectful treatment by central office staff, weak communication between the district and schools, district assessments out of sync with the curriculum, weak district support in curriculum areas, and counterproductive dynamics around issues of culture and race. According to 21 The survey items that form our District Professionalism scale have been used in numerous studies to measure the district context of teaching. Research has found that teachers’ ratings of their district vary widely across districts and predict their satisfaction with their school and teaching job. The 2006 baseline rating for RCSD was well below that typical of urban school systems.

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available evidence, the RCSD-NTC Partnership has made strides in addressing these system problems.

Figure 9. How Teachers Rate RCSD Professionalism, 2006 – 2007

0 20 40 60 80 100

Promotes the professionaldevelopment of teachers

Is improving its support forteaching and learning

Holds high expectations for ourschool

Is committed to high standardsfor every student

Ensures that student learning isthe “bottom line” in this school

Helps my school focus onteaching and learning

Inspires the very best in the jobperformance of its teachers

% Agree or Strongly Agree2006

2007 Although there is much work ahead for the district and its partners, substantial

shifts in teacher perceptions of the district’s culture are a strong and promising outcome of work over the past year. As one teacher leader commented:

The district has come a long way in the past five years [since he began teaching in the district] in terms of just finally cleaning up schools, in terms of like everything from behavior to getting more assessments, [becoming] more standardized --and these learning teams are a huge step in the right direction, getting the right administrators in the right places, cleaning up some of the dead weight in the district office and teachers, likewise.

Teachers’ perceptions that their district administrators and external partners are working effectively to improve conditions of teaching and learning in their school and classroom can make all the difference for their motivation and effort to improve their teaching and commit their teaching careers to RCSD children.

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Teacher retention patterns A primary goal of the Partnership is to retain teachers. Investments in building the capacity of new teachers does not hold long-term benefit for the district if they leave for teaching positions elsewhere. A certain amount of teacher turnover is inevitable—some leave for personal reasons, others leave because their contract is not renewed. In the Bay Area, many leave because they cannot afford the cost of living. To estimate teacher retention in RCSD, we tracked all teachers who left the classroom to determine their reasons for leaving. We defined the retention rate in the context of the district’s goal to retain teachers who meet their quality standards. Therefore we excluded those whose contract was not renewed when computing retention. Similarly we did not include those who left teaching for reasons of retirement, pregnancy, or career change. We included those who left for other teaching jobs, either in the region or elsewhere, and we included nine teachers for whom we had no information. These criteria yielded a total of 23 teachers who left but might have been retained, representing an attrition rate of 14 percent – or a retention rate of 86 percent. This rate is comparable to that documented by NTC for the schools in which it worked in earlier years. We do not have a district-wide frame of reference, but apparently retention has been substantially lower in years prior to the Partnership; indeed, NTC documented a prior attrition rate of 75% for the two schools they began working with in 2003-04. Table 1 summarizes these data. Appendix C provides a more detailed summary of reasons by school. Table 1. RCSD Teacher Attrition, 2006-07 to 2007-08

Reasons for leaving teaching in RCSD Total in District

Left teaching, stayed in the district 4 Personal reasons, including retirement 11 Contract not renewed 11 Left to teach in another Bay Area district 6 Left the region 8 Don’t know 9 Total number of teachers 167 Percent who left the classroom for any reason 29% Retention rate based on shaded rows 86%

Retention rates can be defined in a number of different ways, but typically they

are calculated over a period of several years. We will continue to track reasons for teachers’ leaving over the next three years to build a more accurate estimate of the district trend. The criteria we chose are also open to debate, hence we include all the data to allow different estimates depending on which categories are included and excluded.

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Student performance on California Standards Tests Our assessment of student achievement outcomes of the Partnership focuses on English CST scores for the three schools that have been involved in NTC mentoring and supports for 2-4 years. Green Oaks and Cesar Chavez have had 4 years of NTC teacher mentoring from 2003-04 through 2006-07, and Willow Oaks has had two years of mentoring support from 2005-06 through 2006-07. Other district schools were engaged in work of the Partnership for the first time in 2006-07. The work focused heavily on the improvement of literacy instruction.

Student performance data on the California Standards Test (CST) for all RCSD

schools are reported in Appendix D. The table shows percentages of student who scored “Far Below Basic,” “Below Basic,” and “Basic” –performance levels that include the vast majority of students in most of the district schools (in many instances none scored at the “Proficient” level).

In the three schools that pioneered NTC mentoring in the district, trends in student

performance on the English assessment were generally positive. We examined trends for student cohorts as they move through grades in each school, since this provides a better measure of instructional effects than comparing scores for the same grade over time.22 Most student cohorts who moved through the three schools during the past 3-4 years had declining rates of “Below Basic” and “Far Below Basic” scores. These data are summarized in Table 2. Of the nine student cohorts with at least 3 years of data, only two showed gains in percent scoring below the “Basic” level (Cesar Chavez Grade 4 in 2005; and Willow Oaks Grade 4 in 2004) The other student cohorts improved over the years – with the largest declines for Green Oaks Grade 2 in 2005 (74% to 48%), Cesar Chavez Grade 4 in 2004 (64% to 42%), and Willow Oaks Grade 2 in 2004 (81% to 49%). Note that some of the declines in below-basic performance rates shown for Willow Oaks student cohorts occurred between 2004 and 2005; these were before the school received mentoring support and so are not attributable to the Partnership. Indeed, using 3-year trends for this school, we find declines for only 3 of the 5 Willow Oaks student cohorts and slight increases in percent below basic for the others. Although there were improved CST English scores for some student cohorts in the schools new to mentoring in 2006-07, nearly half of them stayed the same or increased in below-basic rates. In any case, it is too soon to assess trends in student outcomes that can be associated with the NTC Partnership in these schools.

We do not focus here on Math score trends, since the Partnership’s work has

centered on Literacy instruction, and it is here where they would expect to see the most improved student outcomes. The data reported in Appendix D, in fact, show less positive outcomes for students’ math performance than for English in the three pioneer schools,

22 Given student turnover in the schools, cohort analysis only approximates growth in a student group’s performance in meeting grade-level standards. Ideally one would include only students who were in the school for all grade levels. The cohort analysis approach takes into account differences in grade-level performances within each year and the likelihood that change in performance at any grade level between years reflects cohort effects as much or more than instructional effects.

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and 2-year trends for the other four schools generally show increased levels of below-basic performance.

Based on prior research, we expect to see significantly improved student

outcomes only after three years of an improvement effort. Thus we expect Willow Oaks to show more substantially improved English scores next year, while the four other district schools might not show much improvement until 2009. Future evaluation reports will track CST performance trends for student cohorts in all district schools, and the final report also will include trends for students who have stayed in district schools for three or more years.

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Table 2. Performance Trends on the California English Test for Student Cohorts in Green Oaks, Cesar Chavez, and Willow Oaks: Percent Scoring Below or Far Below Basic

% Scoring Below or Far Below Basic

School Grade 2004 2005 2006 2007

Green Oaks

NTC in Green Oaks

2 87 (50)

74 (43)

3

57 (21)

4

48 (19)

Chavez

NTC in Cesar Chavez

4 64 (28)

45 (8)

5 59 (33)

57 (29)

48 (27)

6

49 (19)

56 (25)

59 (18)

7

43 (20)

42 (12)

8

48 (21)

Willow Oaks

NTC in Willow Oaks 2 81

(22) 53

(17) 3 73

(36) 66

(22) 61

(23) 4 51

(17) 56

(34) 35

(15) 44

(23) 5 67

(30) 52

(27) 55

(23) 49 (9)

6

53 (23)

59 (17)

59 (26)

7

50 (19)

54 (14)

8

50 (21)

Note: Trends are shown for student cohorts with at least three years of data. The numbers in parentheses are % students scoring far below Basic, a subset of the number in the cell.

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Summary and Emerging Issues

The partnership between the Ravenswood City School District and the New Teacher Center aims to develop the system’s capacity to continuously improve teaching and learning for district students. The Partnership’s strategies include mentoring and literacy professional development with the goals of improving instruction and retaining teachers. They also includes opportunities for leadership development at all levels of the system to engender a strong collaborative culture of teaching in the district. After one year of system-wide mentoring by NTC coupled with myriad efforts to improve adult learning opportunities and the organizational conditions of teaching in the district, the partners have made significant headway. Summary of findings In 2006-07, the Partners substantially redesigned professional development for teachers and principals. NTC mentoring was expanded to include beginning teachers and some veteran teachers in all seven district schools involving roughly half of the district’s teachers; district professional development time was re-allocated, mainly to grade-level teams; and teachers could opt for several NTC-brokered trainings in literacy instruction. Principals were assigned an NTC coach and during the year began to meet together for discussion and professional development focused on instruction. Teachers who worked with NTC mentors were overwhelmingly positive about the roles the mentors played to support their success in the classroom. Qualities of their work with mentors that teachers pointed to are the conditions that distinguish effective learning environment, according to research on learning. Specifically, mentors’ work with teachers centered on teacher learning needs, on content and pedagogical knowledge for instruction, on providing feedback and prompting nurturing reflective teaching practice, and on creating professional collaborations that support teacher and student learning. Mentors working with RCSD teachers bring vast knowledge and experience in teaching and coaching, and NTC provides them with ongoing high-quality professional development to continually enhance their effectiveness. Grade-level teacher teams were launched in every school and grade. Although many did not manage to conduct the kind of inquiry into teaching and learning that was envisioned by the Partners, most were successful in planning instruction together and providing valued collegial support to new teachers—a significant accomplishment for the first year. Teachers who participated in voluntary trainings rated them very highly, especially CELL and ExLL. Notably, all but a few district teachers were engaged in at least one of these high-quality professional development opportunities. Principal leadership was strengthened through NTC coaching and the development of their own learning community, which included classroom observations in each others’ schools and subsequent discussion and feedback. Teachers perceived an increase in principal leadership and support. Also evident was a shift toward

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collaborative school cultures, with growth in shared leadership and teacher collaboration on instruction. These positive trends on leading indicators of system change bode well for the coming year. Finally, evidence concerning teacher retention and student learning gains is promising if not definitive. In both cases, we need another year of data to reliably track trends for schools in their first year of partnering with NTC. Nevertheless, across all district schools, the retention rate of teachers who met district standards for teaching quality and remained in teaching was at least 86 percent. This represents a substantial increase from previously low rates of new teacher retention in RCSD, documented by NTC as only 25% in the two schools they worked with beginning in 2003-04, and a level comparable to those observed last year for the schools that had been working with NTC. We limited our analysis of California test data to the three schools that had received NTC mentoring support for at least a year prior to 2006-07. The student cohorts for whom at least three years of data were available, including 2006-07, showed gains in literacy performance Of nine cohorts who met these criteria, all but two evidenced declines in percent scoring below “Basic” in literacy, most of which were substantial (ranging from 9 to 32 percent). These outcomes are encouraging and hold promise for measurable gains for the other district schools over the next year. Emerging issues In earlier sections we pointed to issues that necessarily emerge from an undertaking with the scale and ambition of the NTC-RCSD Partnership. We highlight several here that merit attention over the coming year to keep the momentum moving forward. Balancing different perspectives. This evaluation has documented great strides in the development of a collaborative culture of teaching in each school. The learning teams, with the support of principals and mentors, have taken the first steps in developing a culture of teacher collaboration and inquiry that is focused on improving instruction and student success. Yet we located sources of stress that could work against further development of such a culture. One is the tension that exists within some teams between new and veteran teachers, who can differ not only by their teaching experience but also , by race and teaching philosophy as well. We heard enough examples of these tensions being overcome to know that it is possible, but only if the differences are on the table for discussion. Deeper understanding of the purpose of the learning teams, what inquiry entails, the value of diverse perspectives and expertise, and the role of the facilitator would contribute to resolving these tensions. The fact that principals are creating their own learning community further enhances a culture of collaboration. Here the source of stress concerns the role of the principal in the work of grade-level learning teams. Principals rightly have their own school-wide agendas around which they want teachers to rally. At the same time teacher teams cannot evolve into full-fledged learning communities without the discretion to choose their focus based on evidence of their students’ grade-specific learning needs. An

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analogous tension arises around the principals’ own learning community, which cannot survive unless principals set the agenda and focus for their work together. Here, clear communication between the principals and district administrators about the nature and purposes of the work is called for. Both within learning teams and between levels of the system, lack of a shared vision for professional learning communities and sense of how they develop contributes to misunderstandings. Different philosophies of instruction can clash without a shared vision of how seemingly competing approaches can enhance each other. Such differences are magnified by federal and state pressures to show improvements quickly. The challenges for the Partnership is to develop shared understandings of instructional improvement and collaborative learning that balance different perspectives. To do so, Partners will need to model and nurture leadership that bridges different perspectives and ensure that people at all levels of the system hear the same message.

Ongoing renewal. Our findings highlight significant benefits accruing from the joint work of NTC and RCSD. With an eye toward the future and knowledge of many partnerships between districts and external organizations that fell short of their hopes and potential, we raise the question of what it takes to for a partnership to successfully evolve over time. Communication up and down levels within the system is challenging to all districts; adding an external partner who works at all system levels cannot avoid complicating this challenge. Building and maintaining constructive professional relationships, both within RCSD and between RCSD and NTC, is key to the Partners’ work to improve teaching and learning in the district. As players change in both organizations, relationships must continually be created and renewed. New staff need opportunities to hear first-hand about the Partnership, its purposes, and its activities. Emphasizing common ground rather than differences and avoiding a culture of blame are key to effective partnerships and can develop through shared goals and work, if the leadership and mechanisms for communication are in place. As the district’s strategic plan is translated into actions, additional opportunities for constructive collaboration can be identified.

Moving to sustain improvement. Over time, as RCSD continues to build its

leadership team and system strengths and as the end of NTC’s three-year grant comes into view, the Partners’ roles will continue to shift. NTC will move more into the background and RCSD will take on much of the work to sustain the trajectory of improvement. To support this transition, the Partnership would benefit from a more explicit vision for their future respective roles and responsibilities. It seems clear that neither RCSD, nor most any district, could develop the scale and quality of new teacher mentoring that NTC provides directly and through its brokering of resources. This and other facets of the Partnership might be institutionalized in the future, while others may not be affordable or desirable. Taking into account RCSD’s size and challenges, the Partners might work together to plan ways to strategically develop particular central office staff capacities and identify capacities of NTC and other external partners that the district might want to engage.

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Monitoring progress. Finally, as evaluators, we urge the Partners to mutually agree on a small set of leading indicators that capture progress on their key shared goals. Because a more stable teaching force through higher retention and higher student achievement are long-range goals, it is important that the Partnership have a set of more short-term measures to use for tracking their progress, making adjustments, and sustaining the effort. RCSD leading indicators would describe central office and school conditions that research finds associated with improved teaching and learning, such as professional learning communities at all system levels and strong communication channels between levels. Our evaluation can contribute to the development of leading indicators and have taken some steps in this direction with our annual survey of teachers that provides a year to year picture of school conditions of learning. The district’s strategic plan provides a valuable framework for this development work.

APPENDICES

Appendix A. NTC Mentor Assignments across RCSD Schools

Mentor Belle

Haven Cesar

Chavez Costano Green Oaks

James Flood

Willow Oaks 49ers Total*

A 3 3 B 6 1 7 C 6 2 8 D 1 2 2 5 E 3 3 6 F 3 3 G 2 7 1 10 H 1 8 9 I 1 3 2 6 J 2 2 1 5 K 1 5 1** 7 L 2 2 1 1** 1 7 M 5 1 6

Total 23 15 4 13 6 15 5 81 * Some mentors worked less than full time, so numbers of teachers varies. ** These mentors worked with the same teacher on different grade level content.

Appendix B

RCSD Survey Instruments and Data

• Teacher Survey Response Summary

• Teacher Survey Scale Definitions

Center for Research on the Context of Teaching Stanford University

Ravenswood City School District

TEACHER SURVEY

Spring 2007

Response Summary Overall

(based on data from 143 teachers in 7 schools)

CRC: School of Education, CERAS Building, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-3084 (650) 723-4972

ABOUT THE SURVEY

This survey is being conducted by the Center for Research on the Context of Teaching (CRC) at Stanford University as part of an evaluation of the New Teacher Center’s (NTC) work on systemic change in the Ravenswood City School District. The evaluation is being conducted under the auspices of the Flora and William Hewlett Foundation. All the teachers in the district’s 7 public schools are being invited to participate in this survey. A similar survey was conducted last spring and follow-up surveys will be conducted in Spring 2008 and Spring 2009. This survey includes four parts:

• School Conditions • District Context and Professional Development • NTC Mentoring • Background and Career

Time needed to complete the structured questions is approximately 30 minutes. Of course, additional written comments of any length are welcome. Survey responses are entirely confidential. Stringent Stanford University regulations designed to safeguard study participants ensure the privacy of individuals’ data. ID numbers are used by the CRC for follow-up and record-keeping purposes and for creating school reports. All survey results will be reported only in statistical summaries that ensure that no individuals can be identified. Thank you for contributing your time and thoughtful responses to this survey.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION

If you have any questions about this survey, please feel free to call us: Dr. Joan Talbert¸ CRC Co-Director (650)725-1241 or Dr. Wendy Lin, Statistical Analyst (650)725-7231.

NTC Teacher Survey 1 Response Summary Spring 2007 Overall

SCHOOL CONDITIONS

1. To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements about your school?

Strongly Agree

Strongly Disagree

a. The school administration’s behavior toward the staff is supportive and encouraging 46.2 29.4 21.0 3.5

b. The level of student misbehavior in this school (such as noise, horseplay or fighting in the halls, cafeteria or student lounge) interferes with my teaching 29.1 27.0 31.9 12.1

c. I receive a great deal of support from parents for the work I do 10.7 30.0 34.3 25.0 d. Necessary materials such as textbooks, supplies, and copy machines are

available as needed by the staff 26.8 44.9 18.1 10.1 e. This school has a resource room or library to support instruction 41.1 27.7 19.9 11.3 f. Routine duties and paperwork interfere with my job of teaching 27.3 40.6 20.3 11.9 g. Rules for student behavior are consistently enforced by teachers in this

school, even for students who are not in their classes 11.9 40.6 30.8 16.8 h. It is stressful to be a teacher at this school 31.5 23.1 25.9 19.6 i. Most of my colleagues share my beliefs and values about what the

central mission of the school should be 28.2 50.7 13.4 7.7 j. There is a great deal of cooperative effort among the staff members 25.0 42.9 25.0 7.1 k. In this school, staff members are recognized for a job well done 25.2 39.6 21.6 13.7 l. Most students in this school will not be able to meet grade level

standards 28.9 32.4 30.3 8.5 m. I am given the support I need to teach students with special needs 14.1 32.4 27.5 26.1 n. I make a conscious effort to coordinate the content of my courses with

that of other teachers 24.6 54.2 16.2 4.9 o. The amount of student tardiness and class cutting in this school

interferes with my teaching 11.9 31.5 28.0 28.7 p. I am generally satisfied with being a teacher at this school 35.2 35.9 22.5 6.3 q. I think about transferring to another school 17.5 18.2 16.8 47.6 r. I worry about the security of my job because of the performance of my

students on state and/or local tests 5.6 16.9 31.7 45.8 s. I am proud of the physical appearance of my school 22.5 47.2 21.8 8.5 t. This school has well-defined plans for instructional improvement 14.0 46.9 30.8 8.4 u. Teachers share a vision of good teaching 23.9 47.2 24.6 4.2 v. This school has a high-quality after-school program 16.2 39.4 28.9 15.5 w. This school has developed a strong relationship with our parent

community 13.4 38.0 39.4 9.2 x. Teachers have the skills to help all students succeed 21.1 49.3 23.9 5.6 y. Quality substitute teachers are available when needed 3.5 11.9 23.1 61.5

NTC Teacher Survey 2 Response Summary Spring 2007 Overall

2. How well does each of the following statements describe professional relationships in your school?

In this school… Strongly Agree

Strongly Disagree

a. Teachers trust one another 18.9 39.2 23.1 9.1 9.8 b. Teachers feel responsible to help one another do their best 17.5 44.8 21.0 12.6 4.2 c. Teachers use time together to discuss teaching and learning 26.6 42.0 19.6 9.1 2.8 d. Teachers discuss particular lessons that were not very successful 15.0 35.0 27.1 15.7 7.1 e. Teachers believe they can meet the learning needs of their

students 24.5 37.1 26.6 10.5 1.4 f. Teachers advocate for improved conditions in school and district 29.8 46.8 17.0 4.3 2.1 g. Teachers take an active role in school-wide decision making 19.7 36.6 21.8 14.8 7.0 h. The faculty has an effective process for making group decisions

and solving problems 15.4 31.5 25.9 16.1 11.2 i. Teachers trust the school administration 31.0 23.2 16.9 17.6 11.3 j. I see myself as a learner 69.2 21.7 7.0 1.4 .7 k. The faculty works together to achieve excellence 28.0 37.8 18.9 11.9 3.5 l. I feel supported by colleagues to try out new ideas 32.6 39.7 22.0 2.8 2.8 m. When addressing particular instructional challenges, I feel

comfortable asking for advice or help from fellow teachers 39.9 42.0 13.3 3.5 1.4 n. I feel comfortable giving feedback to fellow teachers on ways

they might improve their instruction 25.9 35.7 21.7 10.5 6.3 o. I see myself as a leader 31.7 35.2 23.2 6.3 3.5 3. How frequently do you do each of the following with other teachers in your school?

With other teachers in this school, I …

Never

Once or twice a

year

A few times a

year

Once or twice a month

Almost daily

a. Share ideas on teaching 1.4 3.5 16.9 37.3 40.8 b. Discuss what you/they learned at a workshop or conference 6.4 9.3 34.3 44.3 5.7 c. Share and discuss research on effective teaching methods 11.6 15.2 26.8 35.5 10.9 d. Share and discuss research on effective instructional practices

for English language learners 9.9 19.1 28.4 34.8 7.8 e. Explore new teaching approaches for under-performing students 5.0 12.9 32.4 33.1 16.5 f. Analyze samples of work done by our students 4.9 12.7 31.7 33.1 17.6 g. Develop teaching materials or activities for particular classes 7.7 9.9 20.4 33.1 28.9 h. Seek each other’s advice about instructional issues and problems 1.4 9.4 18.8 37.0 33.3 i. Observe each other’s classrooms to offer feedback and/or learn

ideas (excluding observation for purposes of formal evaluation) 25.4 27.5 22.5 16.2 8.5 j. Discuss student assessment data to make decisions about

instruction 9.2 11.3 35.2 35.2 9.2

NTC Teacher Survey 3 Response Summary Spring 2007 Overall

4. Please indicate the extent to which your school principal does each of the following. My principal … Always Often

Occasion-ally Rarely Never

a. Demonstrates high expectations for all students 49.7 28.7 13.3 8.4 .0 b. Uses data to inform decision making 37.6 36.9 19.1 5.0 1.4 c. Works with individual teachers effectively to improve

instruction 18.6 25.0 25.7 22.1 8.6 d. Cultivates a shared vision and common purpose among

staff 43.0 24.6 15.5 12.7 4.2 e. Encourages teachers to be learners 43.0 26.8 18.3 6.3 5.6 f. Creates opportunities for teachers’ learning 37.3 27.5 20.4 6.3 8.5 g. Promotes improvement of student outcomes 33.1 39.4 18.3 7.7 1.4 h. Supports the development of adult learning

communities 29.3 28.6 25.0 7.1 10.0 i. Works effectively to develop parent involvement in the

school 23.2 33.8 22.5 14.1 6.3 j. Encourages teachers to be leaders 30.1 35.0 16.8 11.9 6.3 k. Works effectively to develop community involvement

in the school 28.9 32.4 19.7 14.1 4.9 5. Now think about your work this year with colleagues in grade-level learning teams. To what extent

does each of the following describe how your team works together?

Strongly Agree

Strongly Disagree

a. We understand the goals for grade-level learning teams 42.7 28.0 14.0 11.2 4.2 b. We share a commitment to working together 39.9 33.6 11.2 9.8 5.6 c. Team members attend scheduled meetings regularly 39.9 28.7 13.3 13.3 4.9 d. We have developed effective routines for doing this work 34.0 30.5 19.1 10.6 5.7 e. Our interactions are mutually respectful 46.9 36.4 8.4 2.8 5.6 f. Our facilitator does a good job of guiding our work and

discussions 44.4 30.3 14.1 7.0 4.2 g. We have identified areas for improving our instruction 37.8 39.2 18.9 1.4 2.8 h. We have learned from one another about effective teaching

strategies 46.5 31.7 14.8 3.5 3.5 i. We have developed good ideas to improve instruction 46.5 31.0 16.9 2.1 3.5 j. We have tried out new ideas for instruction 47.2 33.8 12.7 3.5 2.8 k. We have discussed what happened when we tried out new ideas

for instruction 41.3 35.0 14.7 6.3 2.8

NTC Teacher Survey 4 Response Summary Spring 2007 Overall

6. Has an NTC mentor worked with your grade level team?

Yes No 72.7 27.3

If yes, please rate how valuable this was?

Not at all valuable

Extremely valuable

1.9 9.7 26.2 18.4 43.7 7. Which kind(s) of “inquiry cycle” did your learning team do this year? (Check all that apply.)

For each type that you tried, please indicate how valuable it was for improving your classroom instruction.

My

team did this

Not at all

valuable Extremely valuable

a. Planning cycle 87.0 2.6 7.7 15.4 23.1 51.3 b. Case study of a student 27.6 2.5 7.5 30.0 32.5 27.5 c. Book study 23.6 2.7 13.5 13.5 24.3 45.9 d. Lesson study 40.7 1.8 10.7 17.9 30.4 39.3 e. Looking at student work 74.0 3.0 7.1 19.2 28.3 42.4 f. Analysis of student assessment data 63.6 4.7 7.1 18.8 35.3 34.1 g. Other (write in:

_________________________________) Please add any additional comments you would like to make about the instructional relationships and support in your school.

NTC Teacher Survey 5 Response Summary Spring 2007 Overall

DISTRICT CONTEXT AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

8. This question concerns the professional climate of your district. Please indicate how strongly you

agree or disagree with each of the below statements.

The district … Strongly Agree

Strongly Disagree

a. Inspires the very best in the job performance of its teachers 7.1 15.0 33.6 28.6 15.7 b. Supports local innovation 3.6 21.6 35.3 27.3 12.2 c. Holds high expectations for our school 15.8 23.7 32.4 18.7 9.4 d. Supports my school’s whole school change effort 10.1 19.4 38.8 18.0 13.7 e. Promotes the professional development of teachers 19.6 32.6 30.4 12.3 5.1 f. Ensures that student learning is the “bottom line” in this

school 10.1 25.4 35.5 14.5 14.5 g. Helps my school focus on teaching and learning 7.9 23.0 39.6 18.0 11.5 h. Is committed to high standards for every student 11.6 26.8 34.1 18.1 9.4 i. Is improving its support for teaching and learning 10.7 36.4 32.1 12.9 7.9

9. Please indicate the extent to which your district does each of the following.

The district … Strongly

Agree

Strongly Disagree

a. Provides useful student assessment data 4.3 22.1 36.4 20.0 17.1 b. Supports schools in using student assessment data 7.1 24.3 30.7 23.6 14.3 c. Provides professional development tied to our improvement

efforts 15.0 30.7 31.4 14.3 8.6 d. Provides teachers with support for curriculum and instruction

in literacy 12.9 25.9 36.7 18.0 6.5 e. Provides teachers with support for curriculum and instruction

in mathematics 7.4 18.4 36.8 23.5 14.0 f. Provides teachers with up-to-date teaching materials 11.5 15.8 38.1 23.0 11.5 g. Maintains school facilities 8.6 20.9 33.8 18.7 18.0 h. Provides timely and accurate information 4.3 14.5 30.4 21.7 29.0 i. Provides teachers with easy access to district support staff

(e.g., phone number directory) 10.2 26.3 28.5 19.0 16.1

NTC Teacher Survey 6 Response Summary Spring 2007 Overall

10. Please rate how valuable each of the following kinds of professional development has been. (Check

N/A if you did not participate in a particular kind.)

Focus of professional development Not valuable

Extremely valuable

N/A (did not do this)

a. Grade-level learning team 3.6 10.1 20.1 26.6 36.7 2.9

b. District-wide grade-level team share outs 12.9 14.3 26.4 26.4 15.0 5.0

c. Facilitator training 4.4 6.6 21.9 13.9 12.4 40.9

d. Other professional development provided by the district 6.5 14.5 29.0 20.3 17.4 12.3

e. Targeted professional development in my school (specify: _____________________) 4.0 5.6 22.2 15.1 15.1 38.1

f. CELL training 1.5 .7 9.0 11.9 32.1 44.8

g. ExLL training 1.5 .8 6.1 12.9 18.9 59.8

h. Writing with Adria Klein 1.5 .8 8.3 11.4 17.4 60.6

i. West Coast Literacy Conference 1.6 .8 6.2 6.2 18.6 66.7

j. Other (specify): ______________________ Please add any additional comments you wish to make about your district or professional development opportunities.

NTC Teacher Survey 7 Response Summary Spring 2007 Overall

NTC MENTORING

11. Please check below if you have a mentor from any of the following organizations. (Check all that apply.)

New Teacher Center (NTC) 49.3 Teach for America (TFA) 7.0 A credential program 9.2

12. Please indicate how often your mentor has worked with you in each activity listed below and how

valuable it was to your development as a teacher? (Please select a frequency and value for each item.)

My NTC mentor … Never

A few times a

year Once a month

2-4 times a month

More than

once a week

Not valuable

Extremely valuable

a. Visited my classroom during instruction time 5.8 17.4 10.1 49.3 17.4 6.2 4.6 18.5 21.5 49.2

b. Conducted formal observations in my classroom 10.1 26.1 15.9 40.6 7.2 6.5 3.2 17.7 27.4 45.2

c. Provided feedback on my teaching 7.4 13.2 13.2 50.0 16.2 4.7 3.1 9.4 31.3 51.6

d. Modeled lessons for me in the classroom 46.4 24.6 10.1 17.4 1.4 15.7 .0 9.8 15.7 58.8

e. Partnered to design units or lessons for study 17.4 30.4 17.4 26.1 8.7 10.0 .0 11.7 28.3 50.0

f. Gave me tools (e.g., for assessment) 11.6 24.6 23.2 30.4 10.1 6.5 4.8 11.3 19.4 58.1

g. Helped me assess student academic and emotional needs 15.9 27.5 13.0 29.0 14.5 10.2 5.1 11.9 10.2 62.7

h. Looked at student work with me 7.2 34.8 14.5 30.4 13.0 4.8 1.6 19.4 22.6 51.6

i. Attended conferences / trainings with me 24.6 36.2 13.0 21.7 4.3 11.1 3.7 24.1 20.4 40.7

j. Helped me set goals for professional growth 8.7 27.5 15.9 37.7 10.1 4.9 3.3 19.7 21.3 50.8

If you have an NTC mentor, please answer the following questions. If not, skip to Question 14 (p.10)

NTC Teacher Survey 8 Response Summary Spring 2007 Overall

Q12 - Continued from Page 7

My NTC mentor … Never

A few times a

year Once a month

2-4 times a month

More than

once a week

Not valuable

Extremely valuable

k. Helped me with long-term planning of instruction 17.6 36.8 17.6 23.5 4.4 5.5 7.3 9.1 32.7 45.5

l. Discussed professional and personal problems with me 5.9 22.1 13.2 45.6 13.2 5.0 3.3 15.0 30.0 46.7

m. Worked with my grade-level team 30.9 11.8 17.6 32.4 7.4 17.6 2.0 17.6 21.6 41.2

n. Worked with me to develop my leadership skills 22.1 27.9 20.6 22.1 7.4 7.5 7.5 24.5 20.8 39.6

o. Acted as an advocate for me with the administrators 24.2 31.8 13.6 16.7 13.6 9.4 .0 20.8 17.0 52.8

p. Other (specify):

13. To what extent has your mentoring experience helped you to develop each of the following skills?

Not at all helpful

Extremely helpful

a. Handle a range of classroom management or discipline situations 7.1 5.7 20.0 34.3 32.9

b. Use a variety of instructional methods 2.9 7.1 11.4 38.6 40.0

c. Teach your subject matter 4.3 10.1 15.9 33.3 36.2

d. Use computers in classroom instruction 33.3 15.2 25.8 15.2 10.6

e. Plan lessons effectively 7.2 10.1 20.3 23.2 39.1

f. Design units or lessons of study 10.3 5.9 11.8 30.9 41.2

g. Assess student learning 7.2 2.9 21.7 30.4 37.7

h. Use formative assessment to inform reading instruction 13.6 9.1 25.8 27.3 24.2

i. Use formative assessment to inform writing instruction 12.1 10.6 22.7 24.2 30.3

j. Use formative assessment to inform mathematics instruction 16.1 14.5 19.4 22.6 27.4

k. Use formative assessment to inform science instruction 19.7 9.8 32.8 16.4 21.3

l. Create specific goals for individual students and modify instruction accordingly 10.4 9.0 19.4 26.9 34.3

NTC Teacher Survey 9 Response Summary Spring 2007 Overall

Q13 - Continued from Page 8 Not at all

helpful Extremely

helpful

m. Select and adapt curriculum and instructional materials 9.1 10.6 18.2 33.3 28.8

n. Teach English Language Learners 9.2 15.4 21.5 32.3 21.5

o. Teach Special Education students 11.9 17.9 22.4 23.9 23.9

p. Engage all students in learning 8.8 4.4 13.2 36.8 36.8

q. Assess student emotional and social needs 7.5 10.4 19.4 26.9 35.8

r. Work with parents to improve student performance 21.5 16.9 29.2 18.5 13.8

s. Work effectively with others in my learning team 9.1 13.6 22.7 24.2 30.3

t. Take a leadership role in my school 18.5 13.8 23.1 18.5 26.2

Please write any additional comments you wish to make about NTC mentoring.

NTC Teacher Survey 10 Response Summary Spring 2007 Overall

BACKGROUND AND CAREER These questions pertain to your current position and professional background and will be used strictly for statistical summaries of the survey data. 14. What grade levels do you currently teach? (Check all that apply.)

K 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

10.1 23.1 16.2 20.8 14.6 15.4 18.5 21.5 19.2 15. Please indicate which of the following roles you have had this year. (Check all that apply.)

Classroom Teacher 79.4 Grade-level Facilitator 22.8 Member of Writing Committee 3.7 Literacy Coach 2.2 Other (write in)____________________________________________ 21.3

16. a) How many years have you worked full-time as a teacher in an elementary or secondary school?

(Include this school year.) _Mean = 9.0 (std. dev. = 8.8)_____ years

b) How many years have you taught in this school?

_Mean = 3.7 (std. dev. = 4.5)_____ years c) How many years have you taught in the Ravenswood City School District?

_Mean = 6.2 (std. dev. = 7.2)_____ years

NTC Teacher Survey 11 Response Summary Spring 2007 Overall

17. Please indicate your plans for next year.

Will teach in the same school 65.7 Will teach in a different school in this district 3.6 Will teach in a different district 10.7 Will have a non-teaching job in this district 4.3 Will have a non-teaching job in another district .7 Will have a job outside education 3.6 Will be a full-time student 2.1 Other (please write in): __________________________________ 9.3

If you are leaving the district, please indicate your primary reason for leaving.

________________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________________

18. a) Which of the following describes the teaching credential you currently hold in California?

None, I do not have a teaching credential 2.9 Clear 47.5 Emergency 3.6 Intern 9.4 Life 4.3 Pre-intern .0 Preliminary 30.2 Other (please write in): _____________________________________________ 2.2

b) If you have a teaching credential, please indicate whether it is for single or multiple subjects?

Multiple subjects 93.1 Single subject (content area: _________________________________________) 6.9

19. If you could go back to your college days and start over again, would you become a teacher or not?

Certainly would become a teacher 57.7 Probably would become a teacher 15.3 Chances about even for and against 10.9 Probably would not become a teacher 11.7 Certainly would not become a teacher 4.4

NTC Teacher Survey 12 Response Summary Spring 2007 Overall

20. How long do you plan to remain in teaching? (Check one.)

As long as I am able 54.2 Until I am eligible for retirement 12.0 Will probably continue unless something better comes along 12.0 Definitely plan to leave teaching as soon as I can 5.6 Undecided at this time 16.2

21. Over the past year, how well prepared have you felt to…?

Not at all prepared

Somewhat prepared

Well prepared

Very well prepared

a. Handle a range of classroom management or discipline situations 4.3 25.5 39.0 31.2

b. Use a variety of instructional methods .0 26.2 41.8 31.9 c. Teach your subject matter .0 20.1 37.4 42.4 d. Use computers in classroom instruction 20.7 30.0 29.3 20.0 e. Plan lessons effectively 2.1 17.9 40.7 39.3 f. Design units or lessons of study .7 27.7 37.6 34.0 g. Assess student learning .7 21.3 41.1 36.9 h. Use formative assessment to inform reading instruction 4.4 26.7 30.4 38.5 i. Use formative assessment to inform writing instruction 6.7 28.1 29.6 35.6 j. Use formative assessment to inform mathematics instruction 2.3 32.3 30.0 35.4 k. Use formative assessment to inform science instruction 12.5 37.5 28.1 21.9 l. Create specific goals for individual students and modify

instruction accordingly 2.1 27.1 37.9 32.9 m. Select and adapt curriculum and instructional materials 2.2 24.6 38.4 34.8 n. Teach English Language Learners 4.3 28.6 37.9 29.3 o. Teach Special Education students 16.5 33.8 25.9 23.7 p. Engage all students in learning 3.5 14.9 46.1 35.5 q. Assess student emotional and social needs 4.3 24.1 44.0 27.7 r. Work with parents to improve student performance 7.9 35.7 32.1 24.3 s. Take a leadership role in my school 13.5 31.2 30.5 24.8

NTC Teacher Survey 13 Response Summary Spring 2007 Overall

22. a) What is your gender?

Male 24.5 Female 75.5

b) What is your ethnicity/race?

American Indian or Alaska Native .0 Asian 15.0 Hispanic 17.3 Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander .0 Non-Hispanic Black or African American 13.5 Non-Hispanic White or Caucasian 48.9 Multiracial (write in)__________________________________ 5.3

Please add any comments you would like to make about your career in education. THANK YOU FOR THE TIME AND THOUGHT YOU CONTRIBUTED TO THIS SURVEY!

Ravenswood Teacher Survey Scale Definitions 1

Ravenswood Teacher Survey Scale Definitions These survey scales were developed with data from Ravenswood Teacher Survey administered in 7 schools in Ravenswood City School District in 2006 and 2007 (Ns = 144 in 2006 and 143 in 2007). Principal components analysis was used to identify survey items that loaded on a common factor; alpha coefficients indicate the internal consistence of the scale. I. SCHOOL CONDITIONS

Principal Leadership (11 items. Alpha = .91 & .91) 5-point frequency scale, ranging from 1 (“Never”) to 5 (“Always”) 23

Please indicate the extent to which your school principal does each of the following.

My principal … Demonstrates high expectations for all students Uses data to inform decision making Works with individual teachers effectively to improve instruction Cultivates a shared vision and common purpose among staff Encourages teachers to be learners Creates opportunities for teachers’ learning Promotes improvement of student outcomes Supports the development of adult learning communities Works effectively to develop parent involvement in the school Encourages teachers to be leaders Works effectively to develop community involvement in the school

Shared Leadership (3 items. Alpha = .82 & .84) 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 5 (“Strongly agree”)

How well does each of the following statements describe professional relationships in your school?

In this school… Teachers take an active role in school-wide decision making The faculty has an effective process for making group decisions and solving problems Teachers trust the school administration

23 The original response categories on surveys ranged from 1 (“Strongly agree”) to 5 (“Strongly disagree). The scale scores were reversed so that the higher the number, the more positive the measure. The same reverse scoring was done on the following scales: Principal Leadership, Shared Leadership, Collaboration on Instruction, Colleague Support, and District Professionalism.

Ravenswood Teacher Survey Scale Definitions 2

Collaboration on Instruction (3 items. Alpha = .85 & .83)

5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 5 (“Strongly agree”)

How well does each of the following statements describe professional relationships in your school?

In this school… Teachers feel responsible to help one another do their best Teachers use time together to discuss teaching and learning Teachers discuss particular lessons that were not very successful

Colleague Support (2 items. Alpha = .83 & .76) 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 5 (“Strongly agree”)

How well does each of the following statements describe professional relationships in your school?

In this school… I feel supported by colleagues to try out new ideas When addressing particular instructional challenges, I feel comfortable asking for advice or help from fellow teachers

Teacher Knowledge Development (8 items. Alpha = .97 & .87) 5-point frequency scale, ranging from 1 (“Never”) to 5 (“Almost daily”)

How well does each of these statements describe teachers’ practices in your school?

With other teachers in this school, I … Share ideas on teaching Discuss what you/they learned at a workshop or conference Share and discuss research on effective teaching methods Share and discuss research on effective instructional practices for English language learners Explore new teaching approaches for under-performing students Analyze samples of work done by our students Develop teaching materials or activities for particular classes Discuss student assessment data to make decisions about instruction

Ravenswood Teacher Survey Scale Definitions 3

II. DISTRICT CONTEXT

District Professionalism (9 items. Alpha = .94 & .94) 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 5 (“Strongly agree”)

This question concerns the professional climate of your district. Please indicate how strongly you agree or disagree with each of the below statements.

This district … Inspires the very best in the job performance of its teachers Supports local innovation Holds high expectations for our school Supports my school’s whole school change effort Promotes the professional development of teachers Ensures that student learning is the “bottom line” in this school Helps my school focus on teaching and learning Is committed to high standards for every student Is improving its support for teaching and learning

Appendix C. RCSD Teacher Retention Patterns by School, 2007-08

Reasons for leaving teaching in the district

Belle Haven

Cesar Chavez Costano

Green Oaks

James Flood

Willow Oaks 49ers

District-wide

Left teaching, stayed in the district 2 1 1 4

Left teaching Back to school 1 1 2 Pregnancy 2 2 Church mission 1 1 Non-teaching jobs 2 2 Retired 3 1 4

Contract was not renewed* 4 2 2 2 1 11

Teach in another district 1 2 3 6

Left the region 2 1 4 1 8 Don’t know 3 3 2 1 9 Total number of teachers who left the classroom

15 5 8 5 2 11 3 49

Total number of teachers** 39 20 21 28 17 33 9 167

Percent who left classroom for any reason

38% 25% 38% 18% 12% 33% 33% 29%

Retention rate based on shaded rows only***

85% 95% 86% 93% 88% 76% 89% 86%

* Includes teachers who were asked to leave during 2006-07. ** Includes all teachers who taught in the school during in 2006-07; those who worked in two schools were counted only once. *** The shaded rows represent the pool of teachers that NTC and RCSD would have liked to retain in the classroom.

Appendix D

Student Demographics, Teacher Characteristics, and Student Performance

Table D.1. Student Demographics in RCSD, 2006-07

Table D.2. Teacher Characteristics in RCSD, 2005-06

Table D.3. Student Performance on CST

D - 1

Table D.1. Student Demographics in RCSD, 2006-07

School

School Grade Level Charter

Grade Span

Total Enrollment

% Asian

% Filipino

% Hispanic

or Latino

% African

American%

White

% Multiple

or No Response % EL

% Free or Reduced-

price Meals

Belle Haven ES K-8 587 1.53 0.68 78.02 11.58 0.00 0.17 72.91 86.21 Cesar Chavez ES 4-8 412 0.73 0.73 79.13 8.01 0.73 0.24 63.83 97.57 Costano ES K-8 371 1.35 0.81 59.57 16.44 0.81 1.08 59.03 94.37 Green Oaks ES K-3 471 0.64 0.21 85.14 6.16 0.00 0.21 90.23 93.74 James Flood ES K-8 283 1.06 0.00 32.86 56.89 1.41 1.77 26.15 76.06 Willow Oaks ES K-8 565 0.88 0.88 84.07 7.43 0.35 0.35 73.10 88.05 Forty-Niners MS 6-8 104 0.96 0.00 61.54 28.85 0.00 0.00 50.96 76.47 East Palo Alto Charter ES Y K-8 415 0.48 0.00 82.65 13.98 0.00 1.69 51.57 74.82 Edison-Brentwood ES Y K-4 523 0.96 0.38 78.20 10.13 0.76 0.57 78.20 76.19 Edison-Ronald McNair ES Y 5-8 414 2.42 0.24 72.22 13.04 0.72 1.69 53.14 69.95 Stanford New School ES Y K-12 438 1.37 0.00 71.46 19.63 0.68 0.23 55.48 -- District Overall Mean 2793 1.02 0.47 68.62 19.34 0.47 0.55 62.32 87.50 (7 regular schools) sd (total) 0.32 0.39 18.80 18.32 0.54 0.64 20.24 8.58 Bay Area Schools Mean 628.94 17.04 5.17 32.22 11.14 30.00 5.53 26.19 41.20 (1280 schools) sd 485.43 18.36 7.27 25.28 15.97 25.35 5.26 20.95 29.80 All CA Schools Mean 735.61 8.42 2.85 45.54 7.93 33.09 3.77 27.28 53.11 (8246 schools) sd 611.56 12.77 4.59 29.71 11.90 27.25 4.80 21.30 29.71

* All data are for the school year 2006-07, except that the % Meals data are for 2005-06.

D - 2

Table D.2. Teacher Characteristics in RCSD, 2005-06

School # teachers at

school

Average years of teaching

Average years of

teaching in the district

# 1st-year teachers

# New teachers (1-2

years of teaching)

% teachers with full

credentials

% teachers with

emergency credentials

Belle Haven 28 14.71 11.93 17.86 17.86 71.43 14.29 Cesar Chavez 27 7.37 3.78 18.52 25.93 66.67 7.41 Costano 22 13.32 10.77 22.73 31.82 81.82 4.55 Green Oaks 26 7.50 6.15 15.38 34.62 76.92 3.85 James Flood 13 10.92 6.85 0.00 0.00 92.31 0.00 Willow Oaks 33 8.52 6.45 12.12 36.36 75.76 0.00 Forty-Niners 6 7.17 4.33 16.67 50.00 66.67 0.00 East Palo Alto Charter 20 3.40 2.85 15.00 30.00 85.00 5.00 Edison-Brentwood 22 3.36 2.36 31.82 50.00 72.73 4.55 Edison-Ronald McNair 16 4.06 3.50 31.25 43.75 56.25 6.25 Stanford New School District Overall 22.14 9.93 7.18 14.75 28.08 75.94 4.30 (7 regular schools) 9.44 3.09 3.08 7.26 15.83 9.09 5.25 Bay Area Schools 32.03 12.03 9.40 8.20 14.89 94.32 3.91 (1280 schools) 21.47 3.68 3.39 9.44 12.83 9.91 9.01 All CA Schools 35.65 12.60 10.30 6.80 12.52 95.04 2.78 (8246 schools) 25.64 3.86 3.63 8.84 12.24 8.80 6.65

D - 3

Table D.3. Student Performance on CST English CST Math CST School Grade 2004 2005 2006 2007 2004 2005 2006 2007

2 % Basic 9 21 19 18 23 29 23 23 Green Oaks % Below Basic 37 31 40 32 42 33 34 36 % Far Below Basic 50 43 29 41 19 17 14 15 3 % Basic 15 13 33 16 23 23 23 23 % Below Basic 35 26 36 44 56 46 47 45 % Far Below Basic 46 58 21 32 8 18 3 16 4 % Basic 34 25 % Below Basic 29 48 % Far Below Basic 19 8 Chavez 4 % Basic 22 35 39 27 28 38 % Below Basic 36 37 34 44 28 33 % Far Below Basic 28 8 14 7 5 6 5 % Basic 33 29 41 29 20 32 23 15 % Below Basic 26 28 21 33 50 32 46 52 % Far Below Basic 33 29 27 30 28 12 13 29 6 % Basic 40 43 28 33 42 34 37 29 % Below Basic 25 30 31 41 34 33 30 48 % Far Below Basic 26 19 25 18 10 12 8 16 7 % Basic 28 35 36 34 26 32 36 27 % Below Basic 35 26 23 30 43 33 28 17 % Far Below Basic 30 19 20 12 20 15 7 9 8 % Basic 24 39 38 35 % Below Basic 30 39 24 27 % Far Below Basic 42 13 22 21

2 % Basic 14 35 31 31 36 35 40 31 Willow Oaks % Below Basic 59 36 27 22 40 42 16 17 % Far Below Basic 22 17 2 17 12 7 2 11 3 % Basic 20 24 30 36 33 32 37 29 % Below Basic 37 44 38 41 33 42 27 24 % Far Below Basic 36 22 23 19 5 8 4 2 4 % Basic 24 30 44 44 20 24 40 35 % Below Basic 34 22 20 21 46 46 24 42 % Far Below Basic 17 34 15 23 8 16 4 12 5 % Basic 24 35 34 31 32 20 19 19 % Below Basic 37 25 32 40 43 39 57 45 % Far Below Basic 30 27 23 9 17 30 15 10 6 % Basic 40 35 28 22 24 20 31 26 % Below Basic 31 30 42 33 53 48 48 33 % Far Below Basic 22 23 17 26 16 18 8 19 7 % Basic 41 37 35 31 31 39 40 29 % Below Basic 32 26 31 40 32 21 33 33 % Far Below Basic 20 9 19 14 12 11 11 17 8 % Basic 42 47 51 31 % Below Basic 30 24 29 29 % Far Below Basic 18 9 6 21

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English CST Math CST School Grade 2004 2005 2006 2007 2004 2005 2006 2007

2 % Basic 37 30 30 36 38 34 22 36 Belle Haven % Below Basic 34 41 29 28 33 31 30 36 % Far Below Basic 16 13 25 14 9 4 16 9 3 % Basic 37 21 35 31 33 26 23 32 % Below Basic 26 45 35 35 40 41 47 35 % Far Below Basic 25 23 23 24 4 4 8 13 4 % Basic 28 26 41 36 19 26 37 29 % Below Basic 35 39 25 27 57 41 37 46 % Far Below Basic 21 17 16 21 9 17 11 13 5 % Basic 33 34 33 31 16 17 29 15 % Below Basic 30 29 31 26 43 33 27 47 % Far Below Basic 25 20 18 32 33 34 25 30 6 % Basic 37 27 35 36 36 25 19 29 % Below Basic 35 39 28 38 41 51 54 38 % Far Below Basic 11 26 21 9 7 14 13 16 7 % Basic 46 29 47 42 35 26 40 45 % Below Basic 18 27 18 24 43 32 31 11 % Far Below Basic 25 8 18 5 16 12 4 1 8 % Basic 37 42 31 34 % Below Basic 25 30 31 29 % Far Below Basic 20 19 13 21 Flood 2 % Basic 56 31 31 24 19 26 28 18 % Below Basic 14 13 26 18 19 8 31 9 % Far Below Basic 8 8 8 3 0 0 5 3 3 % Basic 43 36 35 39 30 24 32 29 % Below Basic 23 27 14 18 25 15 19 34 % Far Below Basic 8 6 19 26 3 3 3 5 4 % Basic 38 43 38 41 21 25 27 28 % Below Basic 10 14 23 14 38 36 46 38 % Far Below Basic 3 4 12 10 0 0 15 7 5 % Basic 54 34 35 46 35 31 23 19 % Below Basic 8 17 42 46 19 24 50 58 % Far Below Basic 4 0 4 4 4 7 19 23 6 % Basic 52 52 32 33 41 32 37 31 % Below Basic 24 20 21 33 24 28 47 54 % Far Below Basic 0 4 11 7 10 4 16 4 7 % Basic 38 50 25 22 41 46 24 41 % Below Basic 14 4 29 26 31 21 40 23 % Far Below Basic 7 4 17 4 10 0 4 5 8 % Basic 44 46 58 44 % Below Basic 16 18 4 22 % Far Below Basic 8 7 0 7

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English CST Math CST School Grade 2004 2005 2006 2007 2004 2005 2006 2007 Costano 2 % Basic 25 21 23 34 11 13 19 19 % Below Basic 28 10 13 28 25 3 13 26 % Far Below Basic 6 0 10 2 2 0 2 8 3 % Basic 33 35 49 21 32 24 46 16 % Below Basic 33 24 36 42 28 45 31 49 % Far Below Basic 22 24 5 21 10 4 0 11 4 % Basic 36 40 32 38 37 28 36 22 % Below Basic 22 26 25 27 34 42 41 53 % Far Below Basic 24 15 16 24 4 11 5 7 5 % Basic 17 32 38 44 19 13 24 26 % Below Basic 32 23 25 20 19 23 33 43 % Far Below Basic 15 17 9 9 37 38 16 15 6 % Basic 52 40 28 29 29 37 % Below Basic 31 25 20 58 44 30 % Far Below Basic 13 17 26 10 19 9 7 % Basic 42 33 38 24 34 25 45 31 % Below Basic 31 17 32 33 49 37 21 33 % Far Below Basic 25 27 9 14 15 35 21 8 8 % Basic 38 34 46 40 % Below Basic 21 31 27 23 % Far Below Basic 27 25 16 13 SF 49er 6 % Basic 33 27 38 29 21 24 31 23 % Below Basic 38 27 28 42 42 58 41 61 % Far Below Basic 25 42 31 16 38 12 21 10 7 % Basic 30 40 50 24 28 20 26 24 % Below Basic 36 29 29 43 38 37 34 35 % Far Below Basic 23 20 11 24 30 29 16 32 8 % Basic 34 36 41 47 % Below Basic 47 31 35 24 % Far Below Basic 11 15 8 11