Our Philosophy

The Current Need

Great teachers help students progress along their paths of learning. They take each student from his or her starting point each school year to where they need to be by the end of the year. This task is particularly difficult to accomplish in urban public schools because students often enter classrooms significantly below grade level and with various strengths and weaknesses. Four key strategic questions asked by teachers include the following:

• Where are my students supposed to be at the end of the year?
• Where are my students when they begin the year?
• After I teach new concepts, how do I know if my students have fully grasped the material?
• What do I do if my students do no fully grasp the material?

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the end of the year state assessments cannot provide school administrators and teachers with the information they need to diagnose student performance throughout the year and thereby answer these questions. Research conducted prior to the launch of MPSP revealed that schools were attempting to meet this need for real-time assessment data in a variety of ways.

First, some schools tried to use their own homegrown internal assessments. This is not ideal because they take a great deal of sophisticated knowledge and staff time to design, administer, score, and update. Next, other schools used off-the-shelf products, despite the fact that these products were linked to more general national standards and not to the more specific Massachusetts state standards. This meant that the content of the assessments was often aligned neither with what was actually being taught in classrooms in Massachusetts nor to the degree of difficulty that the state expected students to understand. Whether schools were using their own homegrown assessments or off the shelf products, they had few resources available to provide the ongoing support to determine what to do with the information if it revealed that students were not learning the material. Many companies provided one-off training sessions on how to look at data, but did not provide continuous, personalized support to schools. As a result many schools had large amounts of data on students, but they were not able to systematically use this data to directly impact teaching and student learning. This meant that many schools never imbedded the work into the culture of their school or realized the full potential of this work.

The solution to this challenge is two-part – schools need both the right data and coaching to lead them to systematically implement and maintain informed instruction. When creating the MPSP Program, we based our approach on three primary components:

1. Create a strong partnership with each school. Our approach focuses on building a strong partnership with each school by first learning as much about the school and its needs as possible. We then focus on saving time for school leaders and teachers, rather than creating more work, and ensuring that our work can fit into the already established school plans, professional development, and culture. In addition, we build in a significant amount of time to get feedback on every aspect of our work from the schools we are serving. Ultimately, our approach ensures that we fully understand each school’s goals in order to provide them with the best continuous support.
2. Focus on building school leader capacity to lead the work. A key component of our approach is centered on building the capacity of school leaders, who can then support their teachers on the value of using of this data in the classroom every day. Therefore, we coach the school leaders on data analysis and on ways to create a school community that supports the optimal use of this data. Our approach ensures that school leaders obtain the skills to effectively lead this work in their schools.
3. Establish a powerful peer network. Another important aspect of our approach is the creation of a network of schools that harnesses the innovation in urban education by allowing schools to learn from each other. Schools are generally very isolated. Therefore, providing them with common assessments that allow for them to compare student performance between schools and regular forums to exchange problem-solving strategies and best practices, we help participating schools learn from peer school leaders and teachers serving similar student populations.