This coaching project builds the knowledge and capacity of school-based teams to promote mathematical mindsets in Logan County, West Virginia. The professional learning opportunities that REL staff and district and Education Alliance partners co-design and implement include opportunities for participants to learn and reflect across schools as well as within their school-based teams. The coaching activities improve participants’ use of evidence-based instructional practices for building mathematical mindsets and inclusive family engagement strategies, integrating the use of such practices and strategies across multiple touchpoints—in middle school classrooms, in afterschool programs, and at home.

During the first phase of this TCTS project, REL staff support district and Niswonger Foundation partners to develop and prioritize research questions and document data available to monitor implementation of career and college preparation initiatives and student outcomes. Phase II will support Foundation partners to use available data to create user-friendly and replicable data reports to answer those questions identified in phase I. Phase II will also support district partners to properly interpret these data reports and use them to make decisions that impact student access to and success in relevant programs and interventions.

REL staff are supporting district and school staff in Marshall County, Kentucky to leverage existing evidence-based, trauma-sensitive practices and to help staff implement these practices in their everyday interactions with their students to respond sensitively to student and educator trauma. REL staff are providing the district with a recorded trauma-sensitive training that meets the annual training requirements of Kentucky’s School Safety and Resiliency Act and provides teachers with more concrete trauma-sensitive practices they can implement in their classrooms.

This TCTS project is building the capacity of Kentucky Department of Education staff to collect and use data to inform MAF program planning, support MAF coaches, and evaluate outcomes. The project also builds the capacity of MAF coaches to reflect on their practice and use data to improve their support for teachers. To accomplish these objectives, the project includes two interrelated phases: developing the MAF coaching rubric, and designing and implementing an evaluation of the MAF program.

To address the mathematics-related needs of early educators in Virginia, REL staff are developing a toolkit based on the WWC practice guide Teaching Math to Young Children. The toolkit will include three components: diagnostics and monitoring tools, professional development resources built on the foundation of a developmental understanding of early mathematics, and institutional supports for systematic and maintainable implementation of the practice guide recommendations. The toolkit materials will be suitable for preschool, prekindergarten, and kindergarten teachers and the instructional leaders who support them.

Project On-Track is a high-dosage early literacy tutoring program developed by the Niswonger Foundation and currently being implemented across 65 school-based sites in northeastern Tennessee. Beyond Project On-Track's minimum tutoring dosage requirements, schools have some flexibility in when they provide tutoring, who provides tutoring, which grade levels are tutored, and how they identify students within a grade level to be tutored. REL staff are conducting an applied research study to examine how schools are implementing the program across the region and which implementation characteristics are associated with the best outcomes for students.

The purpose of this training and coaching project is to provide Virginia Community College System (VCCS) faculty, staff, and administrators with evidence-based resources they can use to implement trauma-informed practices, and to establish a continuous improvement process to strengthen implementation of these practices over time. In Phase I, REL staff will identify existing resources and co-develop new resources, as needed, to support implementation of trauma-informed practices in postsecondary settings. In Phase II, we will co-develop data-collection protocols and templates that project partners can use to reflect on and improve their implementation of trauma-informed practices. REL staff will also support the project partners to disseminate these resources and data-collection protocols and templates to other VCCS staff interested in implementing trauma-informed practices.