Starting Small for Big School Improvement (pdf) by Helen A Scharff, Deirdre A. DeAngelis and Joan E. Talbert
Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category
SAM II Evaluation Report
SAM II Evaluation Report 10-30-09
Getting small to get big: An introduction to data-driven Inquiry
This stand-alone introduction to inquiry for the very beginner was distributed to all participants in Boston’s new fifteen-school inquiry initiative (the design and curriculum of which is adapted in SAM-Boston). It combines both pep and process by including a message from the superintendent and evidence of success from SAM-Boston schools while distilling the unique characteristics [...]
Inquiry Process Map and Supplemental Materials
This new and improved Inquiry Process Map (a.k.a Action Research Process Map) asks inquiry teams to record the steps of their inquiry (or action-research) cycles for two reasons: first, by laying out each decision and testing it against all data, hypotheses, and observations available, teams can more readily spot any logical gaps, mis-alignments, or leaps [...]
Challenges: Teams
Challenges: The major challenge we face working in and with teams, at the present time, is how to assess individual contributions to a group effort. Our strategy has been to evaluate each team based upon: (a) the quality of what it produces in response to team-based prompts; and (b) feedback from team members on the [...]
Article: Teams
The unit we have selected to work with is the team. Why teams? Anyone who has spent time in and around schools over the past 10 years has heard administrators, teachers, and yes students complain that, “this is just not doable by one person!” A least not the way we are defining “this” and given the number of hours allotted and the resources available. We couldn’t agree more!
Article: The Givens
We thought we would begin by making explicit our under lying assumptions: the ideas we have chosen to accept as true. They constitute the “givens” in our SAM experiment and as such we do not, as a matter of course, interrogate them — this, by the way, takes a certain amount of vigilance and discipline!
Welcome to the SAM blog
The Scaffolded Apprenticeship Model a.k.a. SAM, is an approach to school reform that integrates improvement in student achievement with instructional and leadership capacity building and succession planning. It has been developed with the generous support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
