Use of Mentor Education in Nursing Dedicated Education Unit (DEU) Clinical Models: Correlation to Student and Preceptor Satisfaction Levels

The project focuses on implementing preceptor education for those within the dedicated education unit clinical model and its correlation to increased student and preceptor satisfaction. Implementing Dedicated Education Units (DEU) aims to increase satisfaction within the learning environment, thus creating greater student engagement in the clinical experience. Nursing students who participated in the DEU model report positive learning experiences, increased self-confidence, supportive learning environments, teamwork and communication, and decreased cognitive loads and stress levels after participating in the DEU clinical experience. It is essential to have preceptors who have been well-prepared to involve students in the care they are providing while meeting students’ learning needs. A literature search utilizing relevant keywords was conducted, focused on nursing education, limiting articles from 2019-current. Providing effective education to nursing preceptors provides essential skills to be utilized during the DEU model, such as providing feedback, setting goals, therapeutic communication, and critical thinking. Nurse preceptors who receive adequate training are better equipped to serve as competent preceptors, improving satisfaction for students as well as preceptors

School Climate: Practices for Implementation and Sustainability

The National School Climate Center (NSCC) School Climate Practice Briefs -- Practices for Implementation and Sustainability -- present the latest in research and best practice for effective school climate reform from leading experts. The 11 issues selected to be included in this set of Practice Briefs are based on NSCC's decade-long work with the entire academic community -- teachers, staff, school-based mental health professionals, students and parents -- to improve a climate for learning.These School Climate Briefs for Implementation and Sustainability focus on both the "what?" - what are the foundational standards, research and measurements of school climate; and the "so what?" - what practices individuals, schools and communities can employ to measure and improve school climate for maximum impacts. We encourage a review of the entire set of Briefs as they demonstrate how school climate aligns with current opportunities and challenges schools face to ensure quality, safe, equitable and engaging environments for students and adults

Positive Student Outcomes in Community Schools

Analyzes links between participation in community school supplemental programs in extended learning, family engagement, and support, and student outcomes such as English language development scores and attitudes about school. Makes policy recommendations

Improving School Leadership: The Promise of Cohesive Leadership Systems

Describes Wallace grantees' work to create a cohesive leadership system of coordinated policies between states and districts and across state agencies, states' and districts' efforts to forge cohesive policies, and the impact on instructional leadership

Engaged in Learning: The ArtsSmarts Model

Approximately a dozen internal research studies into student learning and program effectiveness were conducted during ArtsSmarts' first eight years. In the spring of 2006, we compiled the results of those studies, along with a like number of reports by outside researchers, to create a synthesis of possible directions for future work. Although we used a small sample of available outside studies, it was immediately and glaringly evident that the arts and educational communities are hungering for research that will "help us understand what the arts learning experience is for children, and what characteristics of that experience are likely to travel across domains of learning" (Deasy, 2002:99). It was equally evident to all ArtsSmarts partners that, while future ArtsSmarts research could be taken in any number of directions, it made the most sense to identify and build from ArtsSmarts' own strengths and successes. We also felt the need to align the research direction and the methods of data collection with our intended audiences.Different groups would find different aspects of ArtsSmarts compelling, and distinctly different types of data would be required for each. Partners identified educators (teachers, administrators, and senior Board office personnel) as the audience they most wanted to reach.With that in mind, the decision was made to develop a theory of learning that would serve the dual purposes of explaining ArtsSmarts' impact in Canadian classrooms and framing the research work of the next few years. We felt that establishing an ArtsSmarts theory of learning would help to answer the question, "If ArtsSmarts didn't exist, what would be lost?" Further, a theory of learning would assist teachers, artists and partners in identifying key, essential components of the ArtsSmarts experience, and would also prevent ArtsSmarts from being viewed as a pleasant but unnecessary add-on to classroom activity. The paper that follows develops an ArtsSmarts theory of learning centred on the concept of student engagement

Developing transformative schools : a resilience-focused paradigm for education

For the better part of the past century, the field of education has witnessed repeated calls and initiatives for change, reform and improvement of our schools. Yet today, the problems of improving academic achievement and social adjustment among youth continue unabated. An explanation for this ‘change without change’ phenomenon is offered which differentiates innovative change from transformative change processes. A review of the research evidence regarding resilience and positive youth development, both academically and socially, is utilized to formulate a conceptual framework for guiding educators in creating resilience-focused, transformative schools. Specific attention is addressed to the application of such concepts as mindsets, resilience, socialemotional competencies, and supportive social environments (family and school) in adopting a new, transformative paradigm for developing more effective schools and more capable youth.peer-reviewe

Forgotten Youth: Re-Engaging Students Through Dropout Recovery

Each year, thousands of Massachusetts students drop out of school. The path forward for these students is difficult, and failing to fully educate the next generation of workers and leaders has substantial long-term consequences for our shared economic and social well-being. To address this, policymakers have devoted significant attention in recent years to raising high school graduation rates through dropout reduction strategies. Missing from this agenda, however, is any significant focus on dropout recovery, the act of re-engaging and re-enrolling students who leave school before graduating. Without a more systemic approach to connect with out-of-school youth, we will continue to struggle to fulfill our commitment to educate all students.To address this need, Boston Public Schools has established the Re-Engagement Center, a dropout recovery program that strives to re-enroll out-of-school youth through outreach, personal connections, and a variety of educational options that support students to graduation. The Rennie Center conducted a case study of the Re-Engagement Center in Spring 2012, the findings of which are highlighted in the policy brief Forgotten Youth: Re-Engaging Students Through Dropout Recovery.The purpose of this brief is to make a contribution to a growing body of work about dropout recovery. The brief begins by discussing the role of dropout recovery as a strategy to increase the graduation rate, identifies common practices in other dropout recovery models, and documents the development and operation of the Re-Engagement Center. Forgotten Youth then identifies promising practices and ongoing challenges of this program, and concludes by offering considerations -- based on literature and research findings -- for school and district leaders, community partners, and state policymakers

Productive pedagogies : is it an intelligible language for preservice teachers?

Australian teacher educators and teachers have become increasingly familiar with the notion of ‘Productive Pedagogies’, itself the product of longitudinal research on school reform recently undertaken in Queensland, Australia (Lingard et al., 2001a, , 2001b) . One of its strengths has been its efficacy for in-service teachers to use as a language to talk about their pedagogical work and hence a way of reclaiming some of the ground on what constitutes good teaching. In part, this can be attributed to the numerous observations of teachers’ classroom practice that informed the construction of Productive Pedagogies (PPs). That is, many teachers understand these as naming what ‘good’ teachers have always done. In this paper the value of PPs as a metalanguage for developing pre-service teachers’ knowledge and understanding of teaching is examined; whether PPs is a language that is intelligible for pre-service teachers without access to this prior teacher knowledge or whether its elements and dimensions merely constitute an isolated vocabulary. A case study of four pre-service teachers provides the context for this exploration and its empirical data. Drawing on their fieldwork observations of teaching practice, voiced in the language of PPs, the paper argues that PPs language is indeed useful in the development of pre-service teachers’ understanding of teaching, particularly in assisting them to name evidence of teachers’ recognition of and engagement with difference

A new framework for the design and evaluation of a learning institution’s student engagement activities

In this article we explore the potential for attempts to encourage student engagement to be conceptualised as behaviour change activity, and specifically whether a new framework to guide such activity has potential value for the Higher Education (HE) sector. The Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW) (Michie, Susan, Maartje M van Stralen, and Robert West. 2011. “The Behaviour Change Wheel: A New Method for Characterising and Designing Behaviour Change Interventions.” Implementation Science : IS 6 (1): 42. doi:10.1186/1748-5908-6-42) is a framework for the systematic design and development of behaviour change interventions. It has yet to be applied to the domain of student engagement. This article explores its potential, by assessing whether the BCW comprehensively aligns with the state of student engagement as currently presented in the HE literature. This work achieves two things. It firstly allows a prima facie assessment of whether student engagement activity can be readily aligned with the BCW framework. It also highlights omissions and prevalence of activity types in the HE sector, compared with other sectors where behaviour change practice is being successfully applied

Addressing barriers to learning: In the classroom and schoolwide.

IntroductionPublic education is at a crossroads. Moving in new directions is imperative. Just tweaking and tinkering with old ideas is a recipe for disaster.Continuing challenges confronting public education highlight why moving school improvement policy and practice in new directions is imperative. With a view to enhancing graduation rates and successful transitions to post-secondary opportunities and well-being, pressing challenges include:Increasing equity of opportunity for every student to succeed, narrowing the achievement gap, and countering the school to prison pipeline Reducing unnecessary referrals for special assistance and special education; Improving school climate and retaining good teachers Reducing the number of low performing schools.As education leaders well know, meeting these challenges requires making sustainable progress inimproving supports for specific subgroups (e.g., English Learners, immigrant newcomers, lagging minorities, homeless students, students with disabilities) increasing the number of disconnected students who re-engage in classroom learning and thus improving attendance, reducing disruptive behaviors (e.g., including bullying and sexual harassment), and decreasing suspensions and dropouts increasing family and community engagement with schools responding effectively when schools experience crises events and preventing crises whenever possible.In some schools, continuous progress related to these concerns is being made. For many districts, however, sustainable progress remains elusive – and will continue to be so as long as the focus of school improvement policy and practice is mainly on improving instruction. Efforts to expand the use of instructional technology, develop new curriculum standards, make teachers more accountable, and improve teacher preparation and licensing all have merit; but they are insufficient for addressing the many everyday barriers to learning and teaching that interfere with effective student engagement in classroom instruction.Most policy makers and administrators know that good instruction delivered by highly qualified teachers cannot ensure that all students have an equal opportunity to succeed at school.Even the best teacher can’t do the job alone. Teachers need student and learning supports in the classroom and schoolwide in order to personalize instruction and provide special assistance when students manifest learning, behavior, and emotional problems. Unfortunately, school improvement plans continue to give short shrift to these critical matters.We recognize, as did a Carnegie Task Force on Education, that school systems are not responsible for meeting every need of their students. But as the task force stressed: when the need directly affects learning, the school must meet the challenge.The most pressing challenge is to enhance equity of opportunity by fundamentally improving how schools address barriers to learning and teaching. The future of public education depends on moving in new directions to accomplish this.Now is the time to fundamentally transform how schools address factors that keep too many students from doing well at school. And while transformation is never easy, pioneering work across the country is showing the way. Trailblazers are redeploying existing funds allocated for addressing barriers to learning and weaving these together with the invaluable resources that can be garnered by collaboration with other agencies and with community stakeholders, family members, and students themselves.The first step in moving forward is to escape old ideas. The second step is to incorporate a new vision in school improvement planning for addressing barriers to learning and teaching and re-engaging disconnected students. Our analyses envision a plan that designs and develops a unified, comprehensive, and equitable system of student and learning supports. The third step is to develop a strategic plan for systemic change, scale-up, and sustainability.This book highlights each of these matters. We invite you to join us in the quest to enhance equity of opportunity for all students to succeed at school and beyond. And we look forward to hearing from you about moving schools forward to make the rhetoric of the Every Student Succeeds Act a reality