Arkansas

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School Services

The JFTK School Service provides a comprehensive three-part professional development program to teach educators how to benchmark their schools against higher performing schools.

The goal of this service is to help educators structure a system and build a culture that leads ALL students to master college/career readiness benchmarks. The key concept behind our approach is benchmarking-comparison with the best. This means comparing your performance with that of schools that have successfully overcome challenges similar to your school's (INFORM) and comparing your practices with those that distinguish higher performing schools (INSPIRE). Knowledge gained from these comparisons will then guide you to deliberate, laser-focused action (IMPROVE).

The improvement cycle--data, evidence-based practices, focused plans with measurable goals, and ongoing support from higher performing peers--helps forge a reflective learning culture designed to prepare all students to enter their chosen colleges or careers.

Step 1: INFORM with Data

We believe that all improvement begins with honest and diligent effort to achieve a deep understanding of your current student performance levels. Student achievement data from the state provide information about your student performance levels relative to an established performance standard. School Reports provide additional, and extremely important, ways to study this same data. Both views are necessary for setting appropriately high goals for students in your school.

• September - Introduction and overview
• October - Data analysis training: School reports
• November - Guided implementation

Step 2: INSPIRE with Evidence-based Practices

Why are some schools helping more students reach higher standards than other schools? To answer that question, we have conducted six years of studies in approximately 500 school systems. The Best Practice Framework organizes our findings. The Framework outlines 15 practices found in higher performing school systems more often, or in different quality, than average-performing ones. The Best Practice Framework focuses a school system on the practices that have had the greatest impact in raising student achievement in Higher Performing School Systems.

• January - Evidence-Based training: Best Practice Framework
• February - Guided implementation

Step 3: IMPROVE through Focused Actions

Having objectively evaluated its current reality--both student performance data and the practices that produced those data--a school will set student academic goals and articulate the practices that to be used in reaching those goals. With mentoring from leaders of Higher Performing Schools, planning will lead to action-changes in the behavior of adults in your organization and subsequently in the performance levels of students. Moving an organization from knowing what sustained Higher Performing School Systems to doing what sustained Higher Performing School Systems do requires focused planning. Our tools are designed to assist schools in developing this type of focus in their improvement planning.

• March - Mentoring webinars
• April - Action plan development training
• May - Presentation of action plan
• June - After-Action review

To find out more about our School Services, contact us.