As the director of REL Pacific at McREL International, and on behalf of all REL Pacific staff, Id like to personally express our appreciation for the opportunity to continue to serve the Pacific region during the 2017-2022 Regional Educational Laboratory contract cycle, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education. We're excited about the opportunity to build on the work we've done together during the 2012-2017 contract cycle, and to continue to support our stakeholders as we work collaboratively to address high-leverage issues across the region.
As one of 10 Regional Educational Laboratories, we serve seven state- and nation-level jurisdictions: American Samoa; the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands; the Federated States of Micronesia, which include Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap; Guam; the state of Hawai‘i, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau. Our region is geographically very vast, spanning an area that's larger than that of the entire continental United States, and linguistically and culturally very diverse.
Find out what priority areas the Partnerships are currently working on in the REL Pacific
Chart depicting partnerships of education stakeholders in the Pacific.
Our work with these Partnerships currently focuses on four priority areas, as determined by stakeholders in the Pacific region:
- College and career readiness and success: How can we help more students prepare for and succeed in college, careers, and life?
- Professional learning: How can we design professional learning systems that help teachers change their practice to improve student outcomes?
- Early literacy: How can we help more early learners be proficient readers by third grade in English or Pacific languages of instruction?
- Pacific cultures in education: How can we make teaching and learning more responsive to Pacific cultures?
During this contract cycle, we've also partnered with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, a leading advocate for improvement science methods in education, to create a Pacific Networked Improvement Community, a professional learning group dedicated to solving specific problems of practice across jurisdictions and organizational contexts. Look for more on that in a future blog post, but in the meantime, we'd love to hear from you. What do you hope to accomplish in 2018? Can REL Pacific help you achieve those goals? Feel free to email me directly at pherman@mcrel.org, or send a note to our information line at relpacific@mcrel.org.
