Tired of grading systems that are not working?  Based on his newest book, The Elements of Grading (Solution Tree, October 2010), Dr. Douglas B. Reeves presents the four fundamental requirements of grading systems: accuracy, fairness, timeliness, and specificity.  He offers practical ways to improve your grading systems now and suggest ways to conduct constructive inquiries into the grading systems of your schools.

One of the greatest challenges of educational leadership is motivation, particularly when schools are facing financial crises. In the words of one superintendent, “It’s pretty hard to motivate people who might lose their jobs.” While there is no denying the economic realities of today, there are clear, positive, and free strategies that leaders can use that can have a positive impact on staff at every level. In this interactive webinar, we will consider the preponderance of the evidence on staff motivation, including:

• The power of non-financial incentives
• Key mistakes to avoid in financial incentives
• How leaders reward the wrong behavior
• Purpose and passion – the best motivators of all
• Maintaining the leader’s personal motivation
• Motivating community stakeholders in challenging times

The 90/90/90 School™ studies by Dr. Douglas B. Reeves are some of the most quoted pieces of educational research since published ten years ago and have been used in thousands of schools in the United States and around the world.  The original studies by Dr. Reeves have been widely replicated by other scholars, the majority of whom have found nearly identical results.  This webinar will explore new research in high poverty, high success schools with new 2009 evidence from Dr. Reeves and other scholars in the field.  The webinar will be interactive, featuring opportunities for live questions from participants.

During this Webinar participants will learn:

• What Resources are Available to Identify the Common Core State Standards
• What Resources are Available to Support Implementation of the Common Core State Standards
• Learning from the Past: Mistakes to Avoid when Implementing Standards
• Addressing Practical Classroom Issues: Second Language and Learning Disabled Students
• Dealing With Time Pressures for Teachers
• Classroom Assessment—Fewer Assessments, More Feedback
• Going Beyond the Standards—Floor, Not a Ceiling

In addition, we will provide opportunities for questions and discussion both on-line during the Webinar and off-line directly with Dr. Reeves and Leadership and Learning Center professional developers.

Using nonfiction writing across the curriculum is a proven strategy to increase the academic achievement of ALL students. Discover several immediate, almost effortless ways to increase the amount of nonfiction writing that your students do.   Also, hear the success stories of schools that have dramatically raised their standardized test scores by using nonfiction writing combined with data analysis to get impressive results.

Straining under the Law of Initiative Fatigue, schools fail to implement effective professional development and clutch at a variety of programs distinguished more by marketing than research.  Dr. Reeves candidly assesses what works, what doesn’t, and how teachers and school leaders can improve student achievement and focus on fewer tasks.  Dr. Reeves shares compelling new 2010 research from more than 2,000 schools and provides some surprising findings that include:

• Professional development focus is a key variable associated with both achievement and equity. The fewer the number of programs, the better the achievement.
• Professional development associated with research-based strategies is positively associated with achievement and equity, though not as powerful a factor as focus.
• School improvement plans that are done “perfectly” with regard to format, and revised infrequently in order to retain their stylistic perfection, are inversely related to student achievement.  That’s right – building three-ring binders to the sky is worse than a waste of time – it actually harms student achievement.  

Educational leaders are expert in announcing change, scattering the seeds of promising ideas. But they are considerably less adept at moving aside the initiatives of the previous year so that the seeds of the new announcement have the slightest opportunity for taking root. Join Dr. Douglas B. Reeves for this interactive webinar as he looks at essential considerations for what it takes to change school culture and addresses the following questions:

• What do you already know about change?
• How do you decide if the benefits of change exceed the costs?
• How do you move from planning to implementation?
• How do you sustain change?

Tired of grading systems that are not working?  Based on his newest book, The Elements of Grading (Solution Tree, October 2010), Dr. Douglas B. Reeves will present the four fundamental requirements of grading systems: accuracy, fairness, timeliness, and specificity.  He will offer practical ways to improve your grading systems now and suggest ways to conduct constructive inquiries into the grading systems of your schools.

Educational practitioners are awash in data.  That’s the bad news.  The really bad news is that the data that overwhelm most practitioners represents only half the data they need to make informed decisions and improve student achievement.

Conspicuously absent from most improvement planning documents are clearly described adult cause data (e.g., the actions or inactions of educational practitioners that cause students to perform the way they do) or theories-of-action, to use Donald Schon’s language from his book Educating the Reflective Practitioner, that are subjected to rigorous and frequent public vetting of those “theories” and the degree to which they relate to improved student achievement results.

This webinar is designed to wet the appetite for monitoring, analyzing, and using adult cause data to build and sustain a culture of collaborative inquiry to improve student performance.

Dr. Douglas B. Reeves provides his latest research on student success in high-poverty, high-minority schools.  This seminar particularly focuses on the role of leadership in improving professional practices and student results.

100-day plans help leaders and other stakeholders identify those initiatives that will have the greatest impact on student achievement.  In this webinar, you will learn how to:

• Create a set of focused initiatives and goals that will provide short term winds and long term impact.
• Provide opportunities for stakeholders to reduce the number of current initiatives while going deeper with initiatives that matter most.
• Recognize the advantages and/or disadvantages of parallel processing and task switching.
• Understand the difference between technical and cultural changes.
• Effectively create a 100-day plan using five simple steps.

Finally, participants will learn that quality programs with the greatest impact on student achievement and teach professional practice aren't comprised of mountains of written plans and complex expectations.

100-day plans are about implementation, not about program purchases.  Implementation is free.  When educational organizations determin the most important practices and are committed to sustaining those practices, costs will actually decrease due to better informed resource allocation and drastic reduction in student failure.  Students will no longer have to repeat courses or re-take exams, and extra programs for students who drop out will no longer be necessary.

Everyone wants to make “data-driven decisions” – after all, we’ve never heard a school claim to make “ignorance-based decisions.”  But the problem is not a lack of data – it is that we have too much data that is unhelpful, unspecific, and old, and not enough data that can be used to make effective decisions.  In this interactive Webinar, Dr. Douglas Reeves will discuss practical ideas for improved use of data from the classroom to the board room.  Participants will learn:

• From Opinion to Mathematical Certainty:
  Five Standards of Evidence
• Essential Characteristics of Data
• How to Filter Data and Focus on Essentials
• Case Studies of Effective Use of Data
• Being a Critical Consumer of Data Claims
• Ambiguous and Inconsistent Data
• Comparative Risk in Data Analysis
• Questions and Discussion

When all teachers use writing as a thinking-learning tool, achievement in all subject areas rises. This webinar will highlight the following: the benefits of using writing across the curriculum at all grade levels; the power of abbreviated, common rubrics; and several case studies of schools that have experienced success.

Principals are faced with a variety of demands on their time, energy, and resources.  With all of the demands on them, and knowing that if you have 10 goals, you have none, what are three things that Principals can focus on to maximize their efforts?