Academic Reviews & Support Services
Helping You Find Opportunities in Your Schools and Districts
Educational Directions (Ed Directions) provides a variety of academic reviews for schools, groups of schools, and districts. The reviews are conducted by a team of educators who have been trained to collect, organize, and summarize different types of data that describe current conditions and current practice in schools. All of the review processes include a preparation phase, a site visit, and an interpretation and report writing by the Ed Directions senior team.
We also provide follow up services if needed in the form of leadership development, classroom planning, professional development series, individual coaching, and more.
Working WITH Your Existing Systems, Not Against Them
All our training, intellectual property, and our approach to school improvement works with the system and the resources the district has selected. Our role is to help each school best implement the programs to make sure every student is becoming a confident, self-initiated learner.
Providing Data to Plan
An External View of Internal Workings
Educational Directions has completed audits and instructional reviews in states across the US. These audits have been both general audits of school practice and/or specific audits of curriculum, culture/climate, behavior management and specific content areas.
Our academic reviews provide data to plan:
- New approaches to professional development and outcome-based curricula.
- A more student-focused classroom curriculum.
- Revisions to course, unit, and lesson planning.
- The inclusion of work that is intentional in development of student as learner and performer.
- The meaningful communication of discipline content.
Academic Review Activities
Finding Opportunities for Growth
Our approach has been successful through our 20+ years of working with states and districts. In some years, we achieved a 100% success rate in moving “at risk” schools to their state testing goals. In two different states, Educational Directions worked with the lowest performing school in that state. In both places, the principal and leadership were very effective in making changes and both made enormous progress. One moved from the bottom in the state to the top five in the state in two years. The other had never scored above an “F” and, in two years, was an “A.” In one year alone, Educational Directions worked in 25 districts in the state, and 100% of the schools met their state annual yearly progress goal.
Frequent Questions Regarding Our Reviews
Why Do An Academic Reivew?
The purpose of an Academic Review is to provide an objective look at school operations, compare those operations to what people have planned for the school, to what they think is happening at the school, and to what the review team actually sees going on in the school.
The resulting composite picture is then compared to what is considered best practice for students at a particular level, and a report is generated that identifies the congruence or lack of congruence between what is planned, what people think is happening, what the team sees, and what the artifacts indicate.
The report identifies areas that are strengths or as growth areas when the data is compared to best practice. The report identifies suggested priorities and provides a menu of next steps that can help the target school develop a more intentional school improvement plan and establish priority ad hoc plans to address specific areas within the report that the school believes need attention.
Who Performs The Reviews?
The Academic Review team includes a senior Ed Directions staff design and analysis team, a facilitator to ensure the activities of the team are conducted efficiently and effectively, a team captain who maintains quality control on the different processes and conducts the interviews of leadership staff and other targeted groups, and classroom observers who visit classrooms and observe teachers and students from the time students arrive on campus until they leave.
Ed Directions will provide an electronic, anonymous survey that will be used by the senior team to check role group perceptions of school strengths and needs.
Depending on the purpose and focus of the Academic Review, a data specialist, program specialist, or instructional specialist may be added to the team.