What we do
ECE Audits – Special Education, Compliance, and Best Practice
The ECE Audit provides an objective look at schools ECE operations and programming and compare those operations and programming to what people have planned for the school, to what they think is happening at the school, and to what the review team observe 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 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.
An ECE audit is a specific study of one aspect of school operation (i.e., special education compliance and best practice) by a set of observers from outside the school – observers who have been trained to collect, organize, and interpret a variety of data streams, analyze the information, and make recommendations for the district and/or the specific school.
It is important that the faculty and leadership understand that the purpose of the ECE Audit is not to evaluate teachers or school leaders. The purpose is to look for opportunities for growth in areas where there is a perceived lack of congruence between school activity and best practice or in areas that the team believes represent a school strength that should be nurtured to provide a basis for school improvement. Our process includes:
The ECE Audit team includes a senior Educational 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.
Educational 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 ECE Audit, a data specialist, program specialist, or instructional specialist may be added to the team.
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