Supporting Educators’ Professional Learning at Lansing Eastern High School
The Office of K-12 Outreach has been fortunate to collaborate with a variety of school districts and educational entities statewide. These partnerships have taken K-12 Outreach facilitators from the west side of the state, presenting at a conference for educators from Benton Harbor Area Schools and advancing the school-renewal work of Western Michigan University’s High Impact Leadership Project, to its east, supporting new educators and providing coaching to experienced administrators at Eastpointe Community Schools. Further, through related efforts, K-12 Outreach staff members have covered the length of Michigan from the south of the state to the Upper Peninsula. For example, they have engaged with educators from communities like Jackson and South Lyon via Emerging Leaders and the Education Policy Fellowship Program (EPFP), held multiple Fellowships of Instructional Leaders and other professional learning engagements for Flint Community Schools, and facilitated trainings in Munising for Michigan Department of Corrections educators.
While the Office of K-12 Outreach is focused on having a broad impact across Michigan when it comes to providing direct, customized support to educators and administrators, it also prides itself on having a deep impact on its more immediate surrounding communities. Emblematic of this desire to partner with MSU’s most proximate neighbors has been K-12 Outreach’s collaboration with the Lansing School District. Representatively, over the last few years, K-12 Outreach facilitators designed a Fellowship of Instructional Leaders for Lansing’s instructional leadership teams (held during the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years); hosted a series of Lansing Leadership Modules and a Lansing Leadership Institute for aspiring district leaders; engaged Lansing central office staff members and educators via various iterations of EPFP, Enhanced EPFP, and Emerging Leaders; and aided district strategic planning efforts. With that, Lansing educators and administrators have supported K-12 Outreach action research and spoken as practitioner-experts at events like “ESSER Spending for Success: An Evaluation Workshop.”
This fall, aware of this mutually beneficial partnership’s long history, the Office of K-12 Outreach and administrators at Lansing Eastern High School developed a plan for MSU Outreach Specialists to provide support for the schools’ educators via four professional learning sessions throughout the 2024-25 academic year. The programming, which is being developed and delivered by K-12 Outreach Director of Data & Evaluation Dr. Jacqueline Gardner and Outreach Specialists Becky Stauffer and Patty Trelstad, with guidance from Lansing Eastern’s leaders, has two core goals. First, it is focused on using data (especially student achievement measures connected to the NWEA assessment, PSAT, and SAT) to drive school-wide instruction. Additionally, the initiative has been designed to help deepen Lansing Eastern teachers’ knowledge of aligned instructional strategies. Along the way, this MSU-Lansing collaboration is set up to advance the school’s progress on its Michigan Department of Education (MDE) Partnership Agreement goals and objectives outlined in Lansing’s Michigan Integrated Continuous Improvement Process (MICIP) plan. So far, K-12 Outreach facilitators and Eastern High School staff members have gathered twice to inaugurate and advance this new MSU-Lansing cooperative engagement.
First, on Monday, January 13th, the K-12 Outreach Team made the short trip to Lansing Eastern High School to kick off this collaboration. After a welcome from Marcelle Carruthers, the Principal of Lansing Eastern High School, the group developed some norms to govern their time together; considered how they could challenge traditional approaches to staff meetings to make these sessions transformative; reviewed K-12 Outreach’s unique approach to professional learning to change thinking, practice, and results; and individually and collectively assessed what is exciting and worrying about this chance to collaborate. While these components might not seem directly connected to Lansing and MSU’s aforementioned programmatic goals, they reflect a K-12 Outreach ethos that prioritizes preparing learners to engage in difficult material before jumping into it. As such, these topics were included and prioritized to set the stage for this session and others, build rapport among Lansing Eastern’s educators and K-12 Outreach facilitators, and ensure that participants had a voice in designing their learning. With the ground readied, the group dove into the heart of the professional learning series – Lansing Eastern’s student achievement data, especially on the PSAT and SAT. In doing so, the MSU leaders reviewed the school’s MDE Partnership Agreement goals and performance in the School Index System, emphasized the importance of advancing student growth to achieve added proficiency in reading and math, and helped structure educators’ thinking about their students’ current assessment data. Finally, in considering how future sessions can support educators’ work with students, the K-12 Outreach team reviewed some key skills for pupils to master on the PSAT and SAT and asked attending educators to consider which areas are current strengths and which ones could use some added attention.
With a strong foundation from the January session, K-12 Outreach facilitators and Lansing Eastern educators met again on Monday, February 10th. This time, the group sought to move from preparing for engaging professional learning and taking a big-picture look at Lansing Eastern’s student achievement data to specifically analyzing the school’s NWEA results to identify areas where focused instruction, including on text structures, could impact student growth on this assessment and others. To dig into this thread, the MSU team started by sharing some school-wide reading data from the NWEA Student Growth Summary and Grade reports. Collectively reflecting on their students’ current state, the Lansing Eastern educators worked to explain variance across grade levels, identify strengths, and brainstorm where there are opportunities for growth. In response to these shared data, in alignment with the vision of Lansing Eastern’s leaders, and based on research, the K-12 Outreach team posited that a high-impact strategy for supporting Lansing Eastern students would involve added direct instruction on text structures and further use of graphic organizers when it comes to reading generally and engaging with PSAT and SAT questions in particular. To conclude the session, the group worked through a 1-2-3 formative assessment that had participants share one connection they made between NWEA data and instruction, two thoughts about teaching and text structures, and three reflections on what they are hoping for from future gatherings.
Through these two sessions and two additional ones in March and April, the Office of K-12 Outreach is excited to work with the dedicated educators and administrators of Lansing Eastern High School to enhance these individuals’ skills to support students and improve their performance on standardized tests. Thanks to collaboration with Lansing leaders concerning the design of this programming, the use of district data to inform this professional learning opportunity, and the inclusion and demonstration of pedagogical best practices in the delivery of these presentations, the K-12 Outreach team is optimistic that this initiative will achieve its stated goals. Moreover, the hope is for this professional learning series to build on the enduring, successful history of engagement between the Lansing School District and MSU’s College of Education. As Lansing Eastern educators continue their journey, added details about this work will be shared via the In Focus newsletter. Until then, individuals with questions can email the K-12 Outreach team at k12out@msu.edu.
K-12 Outreach Specialists present to Lansing Eastern educators