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.

The Virginia Community College System (VCCS) is partnering with national nonprofit organization Single Stop to help eligible students at all 23 of its colleges connect with critical services and public benefits to address food and housing insecurity as well as other potential barriers to success. REL staff are partnering with VCCS leaders to understand the quality of existing Single Stop data for VCCS students and to collect additional data that VCCS can use to support program planning and inform the design of a future evaluation study.

In response to local needs identified by both educators and employers in northeastern Tennessee, REL Appalachia is engaging district and school leaders to enhance their understanding of research-based strategies that build students' employability skills for career success. This training project is intended to help leaders serve young people in varied career pathways, from those considering college to those intending to enter the military or workforce after high school graduation.

The Teaching Math to Young Children Toolkit includes diagnostic and monitoring tools for teachers and instructional leaders, professional learning resources and recommended classroom activities, and institutional supports to sustain and scale evidence-based math teaching practices. REL staff are conducting a randomized controlled trial to study the impact of the toolkit’s teacher professional learning resources and classroom activities on teacher practice and preschool students’ math learning outcomes. REL staff will work closely with school leaders and teachers to collect reliable and valid quantitative and qualitative data on how the toolkit improves teachers’ pedagogical knowledge, confidence, and practice and what additional improvements and supports are needed to improve math teaching and learning for young students.

The Empowerment Collaborative is a multifaceted middle school reform program that aims to improve school-community relationships and strengthen work-based learning. REL staff are providing technical support and coaching to increase the capacity of Empowerment Collaborative partners to (a) design a feasible research plan to measure school-community partnerships within the context of their overall program research plan, and (b) assess schools’ readiness to implement the Empowerment Collaborative program.

CareerConnect is a program that provides students with the opportunity to explore career paths, develop essential employability skills, earn workforce readiness credentials, and gain real-world work experience. REL staff are conducting a randomized controlled trial to study the impact of CareerConnect on student outcomes, including students’ perceptions of their employability skills, ACT WorkKeys scores, career and technical education course completion and concentrator status, and earning an industry credential. REL staff will also use a mixed-methods research design to assess implementation across the 23 high schools in the study, assess the associations between levels of implementation and impact, and conduct a cost analysis of CareerConnect.