Gearing Up for the 2019-20 School Year: Learning Supports for School Leaders
Summer vacation provides school leaders with a time to retool and reboot. The MiddleWeb offers Four Summer Strategies for School Leaders to make this a productive time. Though written specifically for middle school principals, the four strategies are useful for school leaders at any level.
Included among the strategies suggested by MiddleWeb are: (1) being intellectually curious; (2) activating a personal learning network; and (3) learning to do something new.
NYKids offers many resources that can assist with taking up these strategies this summer.
Feeding Your Curiosity with Continuous Learning
Identifying Opportunity Gaps at Your School
Start with the Know Your Schools database to assess the current performance of your school. Data, which is pulled from the NY State Department of Education, compares your school to others with comparable student demographics. Let the database select comparable schools or make your own selections. Results are available by the district and school level, as well as by different grades, subjects, and subgroups. Know Your Schools generates charts and graphs that display opportunity gaps (i.e. differences between the performance of students at your chosen school and the others selected for comparison).
Learning from Schools Around New York State
The NYKids’ repository of research results provides a one-stop resource for learning about other schools across New York State. The research reports provide detailed descriptions about what educators in other schools are doing to tackle challenges such as chronic absenteeism; address social and emotional well-being of children and adolescents; better engage parents and family members; and partner with community organizations. This resource allows you to filter reports by school level, student population or topic.
Take Advantage of Direct Support for School Improvement with NYKids COMPASS institutes
Looking for more support for you and others in your school to make improvements in the next school year? NYKids offers direct support for school improvement working with professional developers and your school-based teams. These opportunities not only model structured continuous improvement processes and offer tools, but can connect you and your school team to other educators in the NYKids network of odds-beaters.
On July 17-18, NYKids is hosting our Summer Learning Institute at Capital Region BOCES with districts across the Capital Region, but also provides direct continuous improvement support throughout the school year. Learn more about continuous improvement on NYKids website.
