Through a sustained partnership with a MRSH leadership coach, the principal and coach focus on the best research-based strategies for improving the learning of every student. Ongoing coaching sessions emphasize using existing data, establishing clear benchmarks for improvement, and implementing processes that foster effective collaboration.

Active collaboration is a critical component in school improvement, but it can’t be left to chance. Working closely with the principal, the Leadership Team works to ensure that Action Teams put the school’s annual improvement plan into practice. The MRSH Leadership Coach facilitates sessions of the Leadership Team and Action Teams, building their capacity to drive improved student learning.

Change comes with its own set of challenges, and we provide you with the tools to face them. Using the highly respected Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® (MBTI^®), among other tools, MRSH helps staff members recognize necessary shifts in priorities, changes in morale, and challenges to group decision making.

MRSH helps teachers and administrators use available student achievement data to improve the quality of classroom instructional decisions. After identifying target areas of weaknesses, school data teams will collaborate to identify possible explanations, evaluate evidence on solutions, and plan strategies with maximum impact on the targeted areas.

Looking critically at student work is one of the best ways to improve student learning and achievement. Collegial discussions of student work are proving to be one of the most potent ways to improve classroom discussion, and it is critical for schools with adequate, but flat, achievement levels. MRSH facilitators demonstrate the process of analyzing student work and establish a number of discussion groups involving all educators – by grade, department, or team. Then, MRSH provides on-site coaching and debriefing for school facilitators – ensuring that the processes are institutionalized and reflecting on changes in practice becomes part of the agenda for these discussion groups.

Today’s educators must understand and apply cognitive science if they are serious about leaving no student behind. Through case studies, interactive discussions, and collaborative planning, MRSH helps you integrate into the classroom the most current research about how students learn. You will interact with classroom transcripts and video examples of how teachers successfully use learning science. MRSH consultants and school staff work collaboratively to incorporate the seven critical actions into lesson planning.

In order to meet the needs of each student, educators must employ effective strategies for differentiating instruction. MRSH works collaboratively with your elementary, middle, and high school teachers to identify the needs of their students and tailor learning experiences to those needs. Professional development can be customized to address specific subject areas or student subgroups that may not be making AYP within your school or district. We use group discussions and demonstrations to share strategies such as scaffolding of assignment and assessments. In addition, through video case studies, well-known experts Gayle Gregory and Carolyn Chapman offer participants a look inside classrooms that successfully implement differentiated instruction.

Teachers with a deep understanding of content and a strong grasp of appropriate strategies are better able to uncover and correct misconceptions and help students integrate concepts with the big picture. MRSH works with you to examine school data to determine which strategies will increase your students’ achievement. Through interactive, hands-on sessions, MRSH content experts share conceptual frameworks, best practices, and exemplary materials for building students’ understanding. Professional development can be configured to accommodate an entire staff or smaller groups by grade level or content area.

MRSH helps teachers continually assess and adjust instruction to meet the needs of students and determine progress toward mastery of standards. In these sessions, which can be customized in a number of ways—by grade level, subject matter, or even specific areas in which a school may not be making AYP, participants develop rigorous and engaging assessments that are aligned with standards and learn how to create and use rubrics to help direct student learning, provide reliable measures of performance, and nurture students’ understanding of excellence. MRSH experts share a wide range of exemplars that can be used in the classroom. District representatives are often included to serve as coaches for teachers implementing new assessment strategies.

Student learning is maximized when classroom norms create a safe and efficient environment. MRSH guides your staff in identifying patterns of behavior problems along with root causes. Consultants and staff members together articulate the behavioral norms that maximize students’ ability to learn. Working collaboratively, teachers and administrators establish rules, procedures, and practices to be used in classrooms and common areas. After an initial session, the MRSH consultant provides coaching and troubleshooting as teachers implement the practices identified initially. Teachers and administrators work with our consultant to help build strategies for monitoring and supporting the implementation of a discipline plan.

Your school faces the challenge of serving every student who walks through the door. Beating the Odds professional development helps teachers and principals focus on the needs of students who live in poverty. We do not approach the issue of poverty from a deficit model, focusing on what students do not have; rather, we help educators build on the intellectual capacity, the resilience, and the strengths these students bring to school. The goal is to increase teacher efficacy by connecting attitudes and expectations to student achievement. Teachers will examine preconceptions students from poverty have toward education and school, the role parents play in the success of those students, and the differences between student and teacher expectations of school. The sessions focus on acceptance, accommodation, and affirmation—the concepts necessary for success with children of poverty. An added benefit, through partnership with the Video Journal of Education, is the insight of Dr. Mary Montle Bacon. Dr. Bacon, an experienced teacher, university instructor, psychologist, and administrator, is a national leader in working with students of poverty. She brings a unique perspective, having been raised in poor communities and through her work with poor children from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.

MRSH helps teachers and administrators incorporate evidence-based research into classroom practices, build a toolbox of practical instructional strategies, and design coherent plans to meet English Language Learners’ unique needs. We pay special attention to helping ELL students become successful readers and writers. Sessions can be customized to address specific subject areas or grade levels, and subsequent days are provided for classroom observation and coaching.

The engaging classroom is a classroom that is rich in resources and helps facilitate a variety of learning experiences. MRSH helps you create learning environments that encourage exploration and make students active participants in their learning. The Engaging Classroom professional development sessions include enhanced classroom environments and how they support student learning; student differences, including Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences; raising student achievement through instructional groupings; effective organization of the creative classroom environment; and strategies for differentiating instruction.

It’s universally accepted that you have to know where you are before you can make any improvement. This inventory process provides an understanding of what is taught—across grades and subjects—and its alignment with state standards. MRSH consultants guide teachers through a Curriculum Inventory and help them discover gaps, redundancies, and successes present in all grade levels. This collaborative process works for large and small groups alike. Small groups may include grade levels at the elementary school, interdisciplinary teams at the middle school, and subject teams at the high school. Entire faculties may work together to examine coherence of the instructional curriculum.

Through this process, we help you ensure that students experience a coherent, relevant, and challenging curriculum as they progress through the grade levels. Building upon the results of the curriculum inventory, the scope and sequence outlines the topics and expectations students will encounter and serves as the foundation for all curriculum design. MRSH consultants work collaboratively with teachers by grade level, interdisciplinary team, or content area to begin creating or refining a scope and sequence. Teachers determine curriculum organizers, align standards to those organizers, and identify the right assessment strategies. A proposed scope and sequence is shared across all subjects to identify and eliminate needless repetition and gaps and enhance interdisciplinary themes. The completed scope and sequence is an essential tool for raising student achievement – ensuring alignment with state expectations and a more challenging, coherent, and relevant learning experience. Further, it provides parents with a greater opportunity to reinforce or elaborate upon the learning experiences their children have in school.

The National Staff Development Council, in its Standards for Staff Development, asserts that effective professional development must provide teachers with research-based instructional strategies. MRSH Instructional Strategies professional development provides an exploration of research-based, cross-content approaches that reflect current cognitive science. Building upon the National Academy of Science’s work on how students learn and MRSH critical actions, these sessions are customized to fit the staff’s and students’ specific needs. Strategies can focus on student learning needs in target content areas such as reading, mathematics, science, and social studies, or may be focused on mixed groups of participants representing any combination of content areas, and can be configured to accommodate small groups or the entire instructional staff.

Developing specific learning experiences for students constitutes the next phase of designing curriculum. MRSH consultants lead this collaborative process of planning instruction. One unit is completed from start to finish, and then the process is repeated with subsequent units. The unit development cycle includes beginning with the end in mind by determining target standards and how student learning will be assessed, identifying students’ prior knowledge and planning learning experiences to prepare them for assessment, and piloting and refining the instructional unit. Teachers build the capacity to treat the curriculum as a living document to be revisited often, as dictated by changing student needs.

Phonemic Awareness professional development incorporates literacy research and the recommendations of the National Reading Panel. Teachers build understanding of the concept of phonemic awareness, its relationship to reading skill, and strategies for helping students build their phonemic awareness. Strategies and activities presented are designed to work with the school’s current texts and curriculum, rather than requiring new materials. Sessions include the conceptual foundation of phonemic awareness; methods to assess phonemic awareness; instructional strategies that range from simple identification, word comparison, and rhyming to more complex skills such as blending and segmentation of phonemes; and strategies for involving parents.

Phonics professional development focuses on systematic instruction of phonics as an integral component of reading instruction and reflects the research and recommendations of the National Reading Panel. Sessions build teacher awareness of alphabetic understanding and relationships between phonemes and graphemes. Teachers also receive tools to evaluate different approaches to teaching phonics, along with research-supported strategies they can use in the classroom. Strategies and activities work within current curricula, rather than requiring new materials. Sessions include the conceptual foundation of phonics, methods to assess phonics skills, instructional strategies that range from activities for sound-letter matching and recognition of blends to decoding text through phonics strategies, and strategies for involving parents.

Fluency professional development focuses on approaches and strategies to increase fluency, while helping teachers understand the elements of fluency and its relationship to reading comprehension. Teachers also acquire strategies to help students develop rapid, accurate decoding skills, group words into meaningful grammatical units, use punctuation rapidly and accurately, and determine where to place emphasis or pauses to make sense of text. Strategies and activities work with the school’s current texts, rather than requiring new materials. Sessions include the conceptual foundation of fluency; methods for assessing fluency; instructional strategies that include rapid and accurate decoding, phrase reading, accurate use of punctuations, and expressive reading; and strategies for involving parents.

Vocabulary professional development builds teacher understanding of vocabulary acquisition, the part it plays in reading comprehension, and helping students build vocabulary within the context of a wide variety of subject matter. The professional development is adapted to any text currently used. These sessions enable teachers to understand the conceptual foundations of vocabulary acquisition, use new strategies for assessing vocabulary level – including receptive and expressive vocabulary, employ explicit and implicit instructional strategies for vocabulary development, and implement strategies for involving parents in building vocabulary.

Comprehension professional development helps teachers understand how to improve students’ comprehension and provides a wide variety of instructional strategies that target appropriate grade levels. Middle school and high school strategies are designed to be used in the context of subject content. Strategies and activities work with the school’s current texts, rather than requiring new materials. In these sessions, teachers will understand the conceptual foundations of comprehension; acquire methods to assess comprehension levels, as well as assessments of comprehension strategies used by students; adopt instructional strategies and activities for improving comprehension, including activating prior knowledge, utilizing text structure, adjusting rate, predicting, summarizing, using imagery, using cueing systems effectively, generating questions, and monitoring comprehension; and identify strategies for involving parents.

MRSH experts and participating teachers work together to identify strategies that will improve comprehension for adolescent readers. Comprehension professional development focuses on the conceptual foundation of reading comprehension, including the cognitive processes, characteristics of good and poor readers, and common problems with comprehension; and strategies and activities to improve comprehension in the context of any subject, including activating prior knowledge, utilizing text structure, adjusting rate, predicting, summarizing, using imagery, generating questions, and monitoring comprehension.

Vocabulary acquisition is crucial in all subject areas. MRSH consultants work collaboratively with participating teachers to identify strategies that will improve vocabulary acquisition for adolescent readers. Vocabulary professional development sessions focus on the conceptual foundations of vocabulary acquisition, including how vocabulary is acquired, developmental stages, the relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension, and research findings on vocabulary instruction; and explicit and implicit instructional strategies for vocabulary development across the curriculum.

Effective interaction with text requires the student to read rapidly and accurately. MRSH experts and participating teachers work together to identify strategies that will improve fluency for adolescent readers. Fluency professional development includes the conceptual foundations of fluency, including current research on connections between fluency and comprehension, and strategies for improving fluency, focusing on rapid and accurate decoding, phrase reading, accurate use of punctuation, and expressive reading.

MRSH consultants help teachers understand the writing process and state writing assessments. The sessions provide strategies to help students improve writing in a variety of subjects. Writing professional development includes the conceptual foundations, including stages of the writing process, different types of writing, assessing writing, and writing to learn and to demonstrate learning; and explicit and implicit instructional strategies to improve writing across the curriculum.

Designed for administrators, this professional development builds understanding of how to improve literacy instruction and offers strategies that target all subject areas. Strategies and activities are designed to work within a school’s or district’s leadership policies. Session topics include the roles of building or district leadership in establishing effective learning practices and critical actions that must take place in every classroom for learning to occur, basics of effective literacy instruction and the role building or district leaders play in setting conditions for a focus on literacy, strategies for observing classrooms and providing effective feedback and assistance to teachers, strategies to help build a professional learning community, and development of a clear action plan to improve literacy instruction.

MRSH helps teachers increase their overall knowledge of essential mathematics concepts and how those concepts are interrelated. Participants practice hands-on approaches designed to unlock mathematics for students with a wide variety of needs. Teachers leave the professional development sessions ready to put new practices into action in their classrooms. We customize professional development to reflect your school’s strengths and weaknesses. Participants in these sessions will explore analyses of assessment data to determine areas of instructional weakness, specific strategies that will address identified weaknesses, and research-supported strategies for engaging students in mathematics.

Mathematics Instructional Coaching is designed to give teachers embedded, hands-on help in improving achievement in their own classrooms. Through a cycle of collaborative planning between the teacher and coach, model teaching, observations, and feedback, teachers become an active participant in their own learning. Participants receive activities and materials that may be reproduced for use in their own schools or districts. Mathematics instructional coaching follows a standard protocol of analyzing state assessment results to determine focus of coaching and an overview of strategies to be used, model teaching by the MRSH coach, observing participating teachers using new strategies in their classrooms, and providing feedback – offering suggestions for modification and improvement. This protocol is iterative and can be repeated as many times as necessary.

Drawing on the work of Dr. Joyce Epstein and the National Network of Partnership Schools at Johns Hopkins University and MRSH’s own experience with hundreds of schools, we help teachers and administrators build the parent relationships crucial to successful schools. Participants work with our experts to plan strategies to engage parents. Parent Partnership professional development includes helping schools determine which types of partnerships will meet the needs of families and enhance student learning, creating positive and long term relations with parents, and improving strategies for communicating with parents.