Growing Into Equity: Professional Learning and Personalization in High-Achieving Schools

High-Achieving Students and Teachers—Winning Strategies from Title I Schools!

This illuminating book shows how four outstanding Title I schools make the goal of personalized learning a reality for every student and every teacher. The common thread is commitment to equity—the belief that every child can achieve. Readers will find:

• Guidance on identifying obstacles to equity within your school and building a case for personalized learning
• Case studies showing the lived values, practices, and leadership that have helped schools transform learning
• How-to’s and templates for creating a team-based professional development program that helps teachers individualize instruction

Sonia Caus Gleason has over twenty-five years of professional experience in consulting and designing professional learning on leadership, school organization, developing data-driven instruction, and use of data to improve achievement in high poverty communities. Sonia has crafted and delivered professional learning for schools, districts, cadres of coaches, and SEA leaders. Collaborations with WestEd, Education Development Center, the Regional Educational Laboratory for the Northeast and Islands (REL-NEI) and Comprehensive Centers have been central over time, as has work with a range of community-based agencies.

Sonia is founding developer of the award-winning Success at the Core (www.successathtehcore.com), a free, online suite of professional learning materials that build school leadership and instructional capacity. Success at the Core is driven by documentary-style videos of high achieving, high poverty schools. Videos are complemented by resources that support reflection, analysis, and taking action This toolkit offers a range of materials that educators can take up, without external support and resources, and start to deepen their focus and practice.

Sonia has written in publications including Educational Leadership, the Journal of Staff Development, Perspectives (the Massachusetts Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development); she was a contributing writer for Learning in Deed: A Report of the National Commission on Service Learning. She coauthored How Eight State Education Agencies in the Northeast and Islands Region Identify and Support Low-Performing Schools and Districts (IES).

Soniäs community service over time has focused on equity and justice both locally and globally, ranging from issues including sustainable, living wages; the crisis in Darfur; and socially responsible investing. She is founding board member of the k-8 Boston Teachers Union Pilot School and Grace Academy in Hartford, CT. Sonia has served a range of leadership posts at Learning Forward over a decade, and is a founding member of its New England Affiliate.

Nancy Gerzon has been supporting school districts to better manage school reform processes for two decades. As Senior Research Associate at Learning Innovations at WestEd, Nancy provides technical assistance, professional development, and administrative coaching to support school improvement and reform efforts in New England and New York. Through this work she collaborates with leading educational agencies and groups, including CCSSO, CRESST, Regional Laboratories and the Comprehensive Center networks.

Currently she provides sustained support for underperforming schools and districts, with focus on developing district assessment systems, data analysis processes, and effective professional learning structures for principal and teacher leadership. In this role, Nancy helps districts build internal capacity to improve achievement for each student through personalized adult learning focused on the individual academic needs of each student. Through this work she has developed tools, templates and protocols for educators to develop and implement their own learning plans, and to align their intended learnings with school and district learning goals.

For the past five years, Nancy has provided professional development for teachers and administrators across New England and New York on the design and use of classroom formative assessment practices. In this role she has worked at all levels of public education from the classroom to district- and state-level administration, and has helped support coherent assessment policy at the state, district and school level. As team leader for the New York Comprehensive Assessment Team, Nancy led a formative assessment "research-to-practice" pilot in an urban New York school district. In collaboration with the Assessment and Accountability Comprehensive Center, Nancy and her team developed district and school-level training modules for mathematics classroom formative assessment. She led the development of the dissemination website for this project (http://www.nycomprehensivecenter.org/pubs/form_assess/).