The School Technical Assistance Process

 

Using

The School Improvement Rubric (SIR)

The Process

The Rubric

Support

Center

Resource

Center

FAQ's

The links above will bring you to the information you need to understand the technical assistance process, to learn about the Rubric itself and its supporting Question Bank, to find the support you need (including public program offerings), to find and/or download the resources required and to answer your questions.

About The School Improvement Rubric (SIR)

Under contracts with the East Regional School Improvement Team (ERSIT), and subsidized by WINOC, WINOC has developed a School Improvement Rubric, with tools and training materials to support its application. The Rubric is a four-tier rubric based on the Baldrige improvement model... systematic approaches, fully deployed, beget results. The Rubric has 19 sub-dimensions within 7 dimensions of school building performance: Leadership, Planning, Student Learning, Learning Partners, Human resources, Curriculum & Instruction and Support Processes.

A short cycle Technical Assistance Team (TAT) support infrastructure process has been designed for optimal application of the Rubric... the time from TAT training to goal setting by the School Leadership Team is as little as five-days.

Uniquely, a Question Bank tool accompanies the Rubric so that its application is not fully reliant on use and availability of 'experts.'

The Baldrige Basis of this Approach: The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) has been a strong advocate of applying the Malcolm Baldrige National Award for Quality Education Criteria for Performance Excellence since 1999. ODE itself, many school districts and some schools have applied for the Ohio Award for Excellence (which is also based on the Baldrige Education Criteria). WINOC has considerable expertise with the Baldrige Criteria and has provided Advisory Services to numerous school districts and schools related to the Criteria. [You can find a listing of WINOC’s education clients at http://www.winoc.org/WINOCServiceToEducation.htm.]

In the 2002-2003 period, ODE was encouraging development of various school technical assistance models and it was at that time that WINOC was first engaged to develop such a model predicated on the Baldrige Examination Process. While the Baldrige approach is well-proven its application to schools, i.e. school buildings, has five key problems that needed to be fixed:

  1. The Criteria is too comprehensive for schools. So we developed a Baldrige-like Rubric instead.

  2. The Criteria fits a school district better than it fits a school. So we replaced the Baldrige Categories and Scoring Items with Dimensions and Sub-Dimensions, as needed, that were specific to schools.

  3. Preparing an Application diverts too much resource for a school. So we adopted an interviewing approach that WINOC had originally developed for assessment of Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) Districts.

  4. The examination process is not short-cycle. So we developed a process that could be executed in as little as five days.

  5. The process ends when the Feedback Report is delivered. So we incorporated a Feedback WORKshop and Short-cycle Check-Ups over two years into our process.

Further, to enable the process to work with a mix of experienced and inexperienced people (interviewers), WINOC developed a Question Bank tool as an interviewing aid.

The School Technical Assistance Process using the School Improvement Rubric (SIR): The process begins by assembling a Technical Assistance Team (TAT) of 4-6 people, depending on the size of the school. These people are preferably drawn from within the school’s school district and at least the team leader should have previous experience with the Baldrige-based examination process (such as used by the Ohio Award for Excellence program).

This SIR-based process can be executed in as little as ten half-days which can be consecutive.

•         The first day-and-a-half is training for the TAT on the concepts and process, the Rubric itself and the Question Bank.

•         There is a half-day of preparation for an onsite evaluation.

•         The TAT spends a day onsite interviewing school administrators and staff to assess the school against the Rubric; then a half-day of diagnosis followed by another half-day onsite if needed.

•         The Team spends a half-day developing a Feedback Report, which is a scored Rubric and a list of school improvement opportunities.

•         In a half-day Feedback WORKshop the school’s leadership/planning team is facilitated to analyze the Feedback report such that improvement strategies and annualized improvement goals emerge, which can then drive changes to the school’s Continuous/Site Improvement Plan (CIP or SIP).

Uniquely, the SIR-based process prescribes short cycle check ups to help the school be accountable for following through on its improvement goals.

Experience To Date: An early version of the Rubric and supporting materials was tested during a Pilot Program conducted at Katherine Thomas Elementary School, Windham School District, Windham, Ohio and at Goodrich Middle School, Akron Public Schools, Akron, Ohio. Key learnings from the Pilot included;

  1. The need for Technical Assistance Team Captain Training, even when using Baldrige-experienced resources. TAT (Technical Assistance Team) Team leader training has subsequently been developed and delivered.

  2. Inexperienced interviewers overly relied on the Question Bank as script. WINOC has subsequently greatly expanded the Question Bank such that it could, if necessary, be used as script.

Because of the short-cycle nature of the process, Akron Public Schools (APS) has adopted this approach as an intervention strategy for all of its schools in SI or At Risk status and has engaged WINOC to assist with planning to deploy the process district-wide.

It should be noted that the key to the process is the Feedback WORKshop where the school takes ownership for acting on the findings. That part of the process has been developed and refined by WINOC over the last five years and has been successfully applied with WINOC clients dozens of times, including at least twenty times in education.

© 2006 Work in Northeast Ohio (WINOC) and the East Regional Schools Improvement Team (ERSIT) - All Rights Reserved

WINOC: Work in Northeast Ohio Council

445 West Liberty Street, Suite 225, Medina, Ohio 44256

(330) 725-4885

SIR@winoc.org

East Regional School Improvement

2100 38th Street NW

Canton, Ohio 44709

1-800-733-7732

Burrier@sparcc.org