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Align Priorities for Coherence & Synergy

To successfully integrate Elevate into the improvement work of your school or district, it is important to make clear connections between how you are using Elevate and the broader priorities for improvement that have been communicated to teachers and leaders. When educators can clearly explain how what they’re learning through Elevate is helping them to reach high-level goals, they are more likely to have initial and sustained investment in using Elevate to improve students’ experiences.


These same steps could be applied to grade level teams, departments, or other organized groups of educators in your school/district community.

Steps to Align Priorities Case Study 
Follow these steps to align priorities with Elevate.

A. Articulate how Elevate supports and complements school priorities.
  1. Clearly share school/district priority areas with teachers prior to introducing Elevate.

  2. Make connections between Elevate learning conditions and/or focal groups and school/district priority areas.

    1. Take some time to document these connections from leadership’s perspective.

    2. Introduce Elevate to teachers and facilitate a conversation where teachers make connections between the learning conditions and/or the use of focal groups and school/district priorities.  

    3. Invite teachers to make predictions about the learning conditions that they are doing well on and the ones that they think will be areas for improvement.

  3. Emphasize that Elevate is a tool for improvement, and will not be used in any evaluations of teachers or the school. Elevate is intended to give teachers timely feedback that they can use to make adjustments to their practice and monitor the resulting changes over time.  They are not designed to evaluate educators. It would be invalid to evaluate teachers based on students’ impressions because students enter the classroom with mindsets and expectations that have been shaped by their prior experiences.


B. Reserve time for teachers to collect, reflect on, and intentionally respond to their Elevate data.
Support teachers to process and debrief their Elevate results through the lens of school/district priorities.
  1. Focus on the learning conditions and/or focal groups that teachers agreed were most connected to school/district priorities. 

  2. Look closely at the measures under each learning condition and/or focal group results to identify areas for celebration and areas for improvement. 

  3. Set a clear goal for improvement connected to your school/district priorities.

  4. Create structures for teachers to collaborate as they try out new strategies and schedule additional cycles of Elevate to monitor progress towards the goal.

 

C. Recognize and reward teachers who are committed to using Elevate.
  1. Use school/district wide communications or meetings to give participating teachers the opportunity to share their learnings and invite others to join. 

  2. If possible, provide teachers who actively participate in Communities of Practice with professional learning credit (e.g., salary points or continuing education credits).

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