Filter by resource category:
Attendance Plan Reflection Tools for State & Local Education Agencies (Student Engagement and Attendance Center)
The Student Engagement and Attendance Center developed these tools to guide SEA and LEA staff in a review of existing attendance plans and approaches to identify opportunities to strengthen those plans across instructional settings. This tool comprises considerations and reflection questions to help identify areas in which attendance guidance and supports can be strengthened. Additional student engagement and attendance tools created by Student Engagement and Attendance Technical Assistance Center (SEAC) can be found on the U.S. Department of Education website.
Equity Discussion Guide (Student Engagement and Attendance Center)
This guide is designed by Westat Insight (formerly Insight Policy Research) and American Institutes for Research to help state education agencies (SEAs), local education agencies (LEAs) identify and reflect on changes to attendance policies and practices to better align them with equity considerations. The guide invites teams to explicitly focus on one or more groups of students as part of increasing equity in attendance-related work. In addition to consideration of family income or socioeconomic status of student groups, the guide encourages consideration of other student groups that chronic absenteeism may disproportionately affect, such as students grouped by racial/ethnic identity,…
Planning Tool for Youth Engagement (Student Engagement and Attendance Center)
This tool is designed by Westat Insight (formerly Insight Policy Research) and American Institutes for Research to help state education agencies (SEAs), local education agencies (LEAs), and other educators work as a team to leverage relationships with young people and establish meaningful engagement. By using a continuous improvement process, teams at local, district, and state levels will collaboratively assess current youth engagement practices, identify gaps, determine improvement practices that align with the components of authentic engagement, and prioritize practices to implement. Teams will then create an actionable plan to monitor and adjust practices for continuous improvement with the goal…
Planning Tool for Family Engagement (Student Engagement and Attendance Center)
This tool is designed by Westat Insight (formerly Insight Policy Research) and American Institutes for Research to help state education agencies (SEAs), local education agencies (LEAs), and other educators work as a team to move toward practices with high authenticity for family engagement—practices that leverage relationships with families and seek to engage meaningfully with them. By using a continuous improvement process, teams at local, district, and state levels will collaboratively assess current family engagement practices, identify gaps, determine improvement practices that align with the components of authentic engagement, and prioritize practices to implement. Teams will then create an actionable…
Off to a Strong Start: The GRAD Partnership Year 1 Results
Year one of the GRAD Partnership’s implementation of student success systems, the next generation of early warning/on-track systems, occurred in the year following what many teachers and school leaders called the most challenging year of their career. Data from the first cohort of the GRAD Partnership schools indicates that student success systems were up to the challenge: Schools working with the GRAD Partnership to implement student success systems saw fewer course failures and reductions in chronic absenteeism. Read the research brief to learn more about the real, tangible, and meaningful ways student success system implementation benefitted students across the…
Creating Student Support Systems for Post-Pandemic Times: Insights from the Field
To pool the collective wisdom of front-line educators, the GRAD Partnership organized a regional gathering of student support personnel from over two dozen districts across the east coast. This brief shares the key insights from that convening, including key considerations for success.
The Importance of Student Sense of Belonging (IES)
Two-page infographic from IES’s Regional Educational Laboratory Midwest shares five promising strategies for teachers interested in nurturing relationships to support students’ sense of belonging.
Now is the Moment to Lean into Student Agency (The Christensen Institute)
The Christensen Institute shares how supporting student agency emerged during the pandemic as a key strategy for nurture students’ abilities in the face of uncertainty. This 2020 blog post shares three key benefits of fostering agency: engagement and learning, social and emotional well-being, and school operations; and offers practical steps for building toward each in your school.
Why is School Connectedness So Important?
This short post from 2018 summarizes what the authors found in their systematic research review on school connectedness, which aimed to define school connectedness and identify the relationship of four factors (attending, belonging, engaging, and flow) to connectedness. The blog post clearly lays out what looks connectedness looks like, and offers guidance for schools to encourage it, and the literature review takes a deeper, more theoretical approach towards the development of a model of school connectedness.
Structures for Belonging: A Synthesis of Research on Belonging-Supportive Learning Environments (SERN)
Student Experience Research Network reviews research on structural factors related to belonging in access to learning environments; relationships with educators, peers, and families; instructional resources and pedagogy; and system-level policies and practices.