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| February 22, 2010 |
Read the latest news about SERP's work: Bryk joins Board | Word Generation Use Skyrockets | Quinn and Daro Lead Standards Efforts | MA Grants Support Districts' Use of SERP Program | Baltimore and Pittsburgh Test SERP Product in IES-sponsored Trial | SERP to Deliver Presidential Session at AERA | Bilingual Educators Innovate with Wordsift | MSAN-SERP Algebra Work Shows Promise | Globe Story Tied to Internal Coherence Work |
| SERP Welcomes Tony Bryk Tony Bryk, a leader in the field of education research and policy, is joining the SERP Board. |
 Anthony S. Bryk, president of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has joined the SERP Board of Directors. Bryk held joint appointments in the Stanford University School of Education and Graduate School of Business from 2004 to 2008. Prior to that he was on the faculty of the University of Chicago’s sociology department where he helped found the Center for Urban School Improvement and created the Consortium on Chicago School Research. “Tony has been an intellectual leader as well as a doer in the arena of research and development that targets education policy and practice,” said Bruce Alberts, chair of the SERP Board of Directors. “SERP has a very engaged board, and we stand to benefit a great deal from Tony’s involvement. We are delighted to have him join us.”
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| Web Hits for Word Generation Skyrocket Visitors by the thousands have flocked to the SERP web site to access the popular Word Generation program. |
 Thanks to the Leon Lowenstein Foundation, Inc. SERP was able to create an innovative web presence for its academic language program Word Generation. The Noyce Foundation provided additional support. As the site celebrated its one-year anniversary, it had welcomed visitors from every state and 114 countries, recorded over 100,000 page views during some 28,000 visits from 17,000 unique visitors, and seen the number of visits per month triple. To date over 1,600 district administrators and educators have registered to download the free student and teacher materials. To access the Word Generation program and professional development, go to www.serpinstitute.org/wordgeneration.
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| SERP-San Francisco Scientists Work with NRC Two members of the San Francisco SERP science leadership team will serve on the National Research Council’s committee to develop a conceptual framework for the new science education standards. |
 Helen Quinn, professor of physics at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, will chair a National Research Council (NRC) committee of experts in the fields of science and science education to develop a conceptual framework that will identify the core science ideas that are critical to curriculum organization, teaching and learning. The NRC project is funded by the Carnegie Corporation. Jonathan Osborne, who holds the Shriram Family Professorship in Science Education at Stanford University, will also serve on the committee. Both Quinn and Osborne are instrumental partners in SERP’s work with the San Francisco Unified School District to improve science instruction. Phil Daro, SERP's San Francisco Field Site director, was the mathematics chair of the Standards Development Group in the Common Core State Standards Initiative. More about SERP's work in San Francisco.
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| Massachusetts Offers Districts Word Generation Grants Several districts in Massachusetts have received state grants to implement Word Generation in partnership with SERP. |
 The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education offered districts the opportunity last fall to apply for one-time grants to improve literacy instruction. A consortium of districts known as the Cape Cod Collective along with Marlborough, New Bedford, and Worcester Public School Districts applied for funds to support the introduction of the SERP Word Generation program into their schools. The Boston Public School District applied to expand the number of its schools involved in the program. All five proposals have been funded, and SERP is providing the respective districts with professional development. Word Generation was developed under the leadership of Harvard professor Catherine Snow, with SERP Word Generation director Claire White, in the SERP-Boston Field Site. The site was supported from the start by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. Currently Word Generation is also being studied under a five year grant from the Institute of Education Sciences.
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| Baltimore and Pittsburgh Partner with SERP on IES Grant The Institute of Education Sciences has awarded a five year grant to Harvard University to conduct an experimental study of the SERP Word Generation program. |
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| SERP to Give Presidential Session at AERA A symposium from the five-year old SERP-Boston Field Site has been selected as an AERA presidential session. |
 When the Spencer Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation first joined forces to fund SERP's inaugural field site with the Boston Public Schools in 2005, many were skeptical that a partnership between university researchers and district educators and administrators could be highly productive in a meaningful timeframe. But the almost five-year-old Boston Field Site will soon have the chance to share its substantial accomplishments with the research and practice community. Use-inspired Research and Development: Solving Middle School Challenges in the SERP-Boston Field Site, will be chaired by Suzanne Donovan, SERP's executive director, and will feature Catherine Snow (Harvard), Richard Elmore (Harvard), Lowry Hemphill (Wheelock), and John Sabatini (ETS), along with Janet Palmer Owens, chief academic officer from the Boston Public Schools. The 2010 AERA Annual Meeting is from April 30-May 4 in Denver.
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| WordSift Workshop at Bilingual Education Conference Partners from the SERP-San Francisco Field Site will give a workshop on the innovative tool known as WordSift at a conference for bilingual education in March. |
 Lisa Ernst, a SERP science co-developer in the San Francisco Unified School District, and SERP researchers Diego Román and Karen Thompson from Stanford University will give a workshop on WordSift at the California Association for Bilingual Education conference in San José on March 11, 2010. Ms. Ernst is a 6th grade teacher at the Alice Fong Yu Alternative School. WordSift, developed under the leadership of Kenji Hakuta, a professor at Stanford University, enables teachers to capture and display the vocabulary structure of texts while exploring the richness and wonders of language with their students. The workshop entitled, “WordSift: A Free Interactive Web-based Vocabulary Development Tool,” will provide information about the conceptual theories behind the tool as well as its practical applications in science classrooms. The SERP-San Francisco Field Site, where WordSift was developed, is funded by the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation. To learn more about this tool, go to www.wordsift.com.
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| Algebra Innovation Work to be Presented at AERA An algebra assignments experiment conducted in the SERP-MSAN Field Site will be presented at the upcoming AERA meeting. |
 The SERP-MSAN Field Site partnership, supported since its inception in 2006 by the Goldman Sachs Foundation, has been involved for the past two years in an Algebra Assignments Study in which Ken Koedinger (Carnegie Mellon) and Julie Booth (Temple University) in collaboration with district staff designed and tested innovative assignments. One of those experiments will be described in a paper entitled, “Transforming Equation-Solving Assignments to Improve Algebra Learning: A Collaboration with the SERP-MSAN Partnership.” The findings have significant implications for how to design textbooks and assignments for all math and science classes. A proposal in support of expanding the work is currently under review at the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. For more information about the SERP-MSAN Algebra partnership click here.
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| Boston Globe Calls Attention to Schools’ Need for Coherence Academic superintendent Mary Nash applies training from SERP partnership work led by Richard Elmore. |
 SERP’s Internal Coherence (IC) initiative focuses on building schools’ organizational capacity to improve instruction across classrooms and across time. For the past three years Harvard professor Richard Elmore has led the internal coherence work and, with SERP research associate Michelle Forman, has been conducting training with Boston school district administrators on a model to assess and improve IC. A recent story in the Boston Globe highlights the transformation in school culture that occurred at the Greenwood School with a change in school leadership. Mary Nash, an academic superintendent in the Boston Public Schools, commented, “All in all, I would say that both the Internal Coherence training I have received, together with Richard's [Elmore] Instructional Rounds work with us, has most definitely played a large role in our work at the Greenwood.” To read more about school coherence, go to http://www.serpinstitute.org/tools-and-resources.
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Strategic Education Research Partnership |
Building on five years of development work and pilot testing in the Boston Public Schools with support from the 