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Dissemination
Dissemination Efforts
Community Day Charter Public School was awarded one of the first Charter School Dissemination Program Grants by the Massachusetts Department of Education in 2001. The primary purpose of that two-year grant was to disseminate effective practices that have been designed, developed, tested, and proven successful at CDCPS with charter schools and other public schools in Massachusetts. Highlights of dissemination activities in 2005-2006, and major activities being implemented in 2006-2007 are described here.
Dissemination Highlights
As a Massachusetts Compass School, CDCPS hosted a series of three Best Practice Showcases providing visiting educators from seven charter public schools and the Lawrence Public Schools with opportunities to directly observe effective strategies for using student data to inform and guide classroom instruction. Use of student data in conjunction with grade level learning standards, curriculum mapping routines, implementation of weekly highlight reports to track specific curriculum goals, processes that hold teachers accountable for development of student-specific action plans with clear and measurable benchmarks of performance, were among the methods and strategies shared with colleagues across the Commonwealth.
CDCPS's Data Analyst was a panelist at a conference hosted by the Charter School Growth Fund in Denver, CO. He discussed the school's demonstrated capacity to improve student achievement through the integration of curriculum and student test data. Conference attendees included national leaders in the fields of business, data analysis, assessment, and educational philanthropy who came together to share expertise related to charter school operations and strategic business planning.
Two faculty members traveled to San Diego, CA to accept the Excellence in Education Award presented to CDCPS by the National Center for Urban School Transformation (NCUST) at San Diego State University, and to conduct a presentation for a national audience of public school educators and university faculty members at the NCUST Symposium Lessons from High-Performing Urban Schools and Districts.
CDCPS conducted a workshop titled Stoplight Standards: Using MCAS Data to Inform Instruction at the 30th Anniversary Massachusetts Title 1 Conference.
CDCPS's
Data Analyst was part of a presentation team for the workshop titled The
Latest in Charter School Research in MA and Beyond, discussing CDCPS's best
practices for school-level research and data analysis for an audience of MA
charter school leaders.
With the
support of a Community-service Learning Partnership Grant from the MA Department
of Education, CDCPS and the Lawrence History Center will be sharing best
practices developed in the use of community-service learning as a method for
implementing the learning standards of the History and Social Science
Curriculum Framework with the Lawrence Family Development Charter Public
School. Further dissemination practices were achieved through a one-day seminar
for teachers from other Lawrence schools.
As a high-performing charter school in a high-need community, CDCPS will work in collaboration with the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association's US Department of Education Grant funded project titled Keeping the Promise: The Massachusetts Charter School Dissemination and Replication Project. CDCPS will document, analyze and determine the elements of its success and disseminate these findings to a state and national audience of educators and policy makers to facilitate their replication here in Massachusetts.
For
further information about these and other dissemination activities, please
contact: Sheila Balboni, Executive Director, Community Day Charter Public School,
sbalboni@cdcps.org. You can also
visit the website of Community Partners
Initiative, a consulting organization that shares many of the best practices
developed at Community Day.