“Determination and perseverance move the world.”
–Marva Collins, founder of Chicago’s Westside Preparatory School and mentor to CSL founder & CEO Tom Maridada
What’s ahead for CSL?
The Center has accomplished an enormous amount in its first years. But it has the potential to help even more teachers and school leaders accelerate student achievement through advocacy for change and helping to shape long-term, systemic policy reform at the national, state, and district levels, as well as deeper and higher levels of engagement with schools and districts.
To move to this next level of impact, the Center will convene even broader, more sustainable national networks, conduct and share evidence-informed research, and actively engage in national, regional, and local policy advocacy conversations.
Leveraging lessons learned
NETWORKS • RESEARCH • POLICY ADVOCACY
Expand networks across districts, states, and regions.
A key component of the Center’s work since its inception has been to elevate professional practice in part by connecting teachers and leaders with a network of aligned educators, coaches, and mentors.
In Arkansas, for example, the Center’s ACHIEVE project uses educator performance results to inform key school- and district-level human capital management decisions, focusing on low-performing schools. The strategies range from preparation, recruitment, and hiring to placement, retention of teachers and leaders, performance-based compensation, professional development, and promotion. Key components of this work include teacher and leader peer review, job-embedded blended coaching, and Virtual Networks for Improvement, both within and across districts.
The Center intends to build on this work by connecting within-district, cross-district, and consortium-based educator networks to groups of teachers and leaders in other states and regions. These virtual and in-person convenings will enable educators who are tackling similar components of the transformation challenge to share their lessons learned and gain insights from peers across the country—reinforcing their shared commitment to accelerating student achievement.
Conduct and disseminate rigorous research on promising practices.
The Center was founded on a commitment to practices grounded in science and engagement and has demonstrated its ability to replicate, innovate, and scale proven school improvement strategies.
To do this work, the Center is using evidence-based strategies ranging from the improvement science principles of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to the proficiency standards developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards—both CSL partners. In collaboration with Harvard University’s Strategic Data Project, the Center is bringing together “data talent, training, and tools to transform outcomes for students,” in the Project’s formulation. In addition, the Center is working with and learning from top university schools of business, education, and departments of science, mathematics, and other disciplines.
To achieve maximum impact, however, the Center intends to leverage scientifically rigorous lessons that are emerging from its work into the body of knowledge available to educators across the country. In this way, CSL will accelerate “learning by doing” by deploying “rapid tests of change to guide the development, revision and continued fine-tuning of new tools, processes, work roles and relationships,” in the words of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Specifically, CSL’s team will execute a multi-faceted action research, dissemination, and scaling strategy:
Intentionally engage in policy advocacy.
Both at CSL and in previous roles, the Center’s leaders have directly engaged in public policy discussions promoting innovative pathways to teaching and leading in support of the nation’s most vulnerable children and families.
For example, Dr. Thomas Maridada, the Center’s founding president, has served for years as a policy ambassador, collaborating with policy makers, academics and educational leaders addressing challenges in education and the need for greater access to critical resources across the U.S. and globally, ranging from Europe and Africa to Australia and New Zealand.
In the years ahead, the Center’s cadre of in-house professionals will engage more directly with states, communities, and urban and rural districts considering policy changes and financial investments in evidence-informed strategies to address the urgent learning needs of students in high-poverty and low-performing schools.
