CALL for Leadership Training
Starting at the Plenary session on 11/16, Carolyn Kelley will lead a presentation explaining what CALL is and we’ll share featured parts of the survey for attendees. In this first session, we’ll present CALL as an asset for leadership training and development via university graduate programming. CALL in this case not only measures leadership tasks, but shows concepts and tasks that compose effective practice, making a teaching tool that can be continually used as a practitioner.

CALL for Leadership Practice and Reseach
Thursday the 17th, CALL will be part of the Wallace group sessions at 4:30. This session will be cover the research that went into, is part of constructing, and that we hope to be able to see as a result of the CALL survey. Because the entire process is task based, massive data sets resulting from the survey will allow exciting portals to understanding the connection between leadership and learning. Ultimately this data set will be an asset to the field.

CALL trial run
Finally, on Friday the 18th, CALL is being shared as an innovative session workshop. Participants will be able to take a portion of the survey and be able to see basic results of their work. This is the session where you can take the survey, ask questions about it, and see how the feedback design is going to work.

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The ETS research report can be found here.

Summary of the HSTW findings:

” HSTW is an effort-based school-improvement initiative…”, with a goal “to work with schools to create a culture of continuous improvement in which schools implement a series of strategies to provide students with a high-quality, engaging learning environment”.  HSTW is rooted in the statistic that those that complete a common core curriculum score 151 points higher on the combined sections of the SAT, therefore HSTW provides a framework of practices that build:

• A challenging program study built around student interests (both academic and career/technical)
• Literacy across the curriculum which allows for unique and engaging course offerings.
• Student choice in work that asks them to represent their understanding, defend it, and explore alternative strategies.
• Project-based learning that allows for refinement until student is successful, “Failure is not an option.”
• Designed systems that provide for extra help and extra time for students that need it, including digital options.
• One-to-one adult mentorship around life goals, skill building, and habits of success.
• Transition programming for entering and exiting the high school.
• Continuous school improvement conditions.

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The full report can be found here.

ETS outlines the importance of college readiness, but also emphasizes the importance of Career and Technical Education (CTE) for the graduates that enter the workforce without advanced degrees. Interestingly, despite ETS role in building assessments, this report pushes school leaders to as what are the purposes of education in addition to increased math and reading scores.  Overall the report highlights core issues for high schools today:

• Increasing the percentage of college ready students.
• Increasing the preparedness of CTE graduates.
• Recognizing the impact of a narrow focus on math and reading.
• Utilization of counseling services to maximize one-on-one attention.
• Addressing the non-completion/drop-out problem.

Ongoing: CALL is shifting to a full support staff. Over the last couple weeks Dr. Halverson and Dr. Kelley have been meeting with the universities’ Survey Center that does survey development across the institution. For initial pilots over the last couple years we have used a platform developed by Shree Durga so that all adjustments and management happened ‘in house’. As we move to scale in the coming months, the Survey Center provides the support and staff needed to administer CALL nationwide and on demand. Durga will be overseeing the system porting process and guiding the training of the Survey Center staff to be CALL experts too. With Dr. Blitz completing the revisions to the survey, we are at the perfect point to make the transition and prepare for a slate of pilot schools.

2011: The University of Wisconsin Survey Center provides more than just back end support. Being experts in survey design, they are ready to help with marketing, support, and layout of the product to best serve the school and make CALL as easy to use as possible. They will also be helping with semantics and clarity in the questions themselves, the best way to order the questions, and consult on the most accurate ways to give users item options. All of this work is beginning in September and we expect to be ready to roll out pilot school participation again in 2012.

2011: Data management and construct building is still enjoying the addition of Dr. Camburn and Jason Salisbury. They just finished with the “In/Out” analysis testing that the database produces data accurate to what was entered into the system. Currently they are building an item-by-item export which will give us the ability to report percentages for each response item (% of respondents that answered “b”), as requested by last year’s pilot principals. Coming up will be a full Rausch analysis of CALL’s constructs.

2012: In the new year we will be opening up a collection of pilot school live beta tests. Drs. Halverson, Kelley, Mason, Blitz, Marsha Modeste, and Seann Dikkers will be setting up and visiting cooperating schools as they test run the system and feedback process in the new year. Live tests will begin in January.

2012: Feedback is being build in concert, starting with a reflective build that allows pilot principals to see the raw data provided from their school. As the analysis and construct work is done this year, formative feedback will weigh leadership tasks against student learning for each school and build clear interpretations of the data for principals to have at their disposal too.

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However, our question isn’t if task-based questions predict that other leadership tasks are being done too, but whether or not those tasks are predictive of student learning. Coming rounds of validity data will measure CALL by item to ask if a given leadership task is predictive of student learning outcomes. With large-scale data sets at hand, we are very excited to see and explore this data as it’s clearly contributing to the field in interesting ways.

More to come…

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1) Welcome to Rick Mason and Marsha Modeste new members of the CALL staff. Rick will be working with Southern Wisconsin schools and Marsha brings expertise, all the way from NY, in administration and organization of large scale data collection.
2) Validation studies are ongoing with Mississippi and Wisconsin data.
3) The survey is getting a front end. We’ll be building a simplified entry for teachers using randomly generated IDs and self-selection of schools.
4) You are now looking at the new site build! WordPress allows more robust options for the future and a polished look.