Empowering Educators to Meet the Challenges of Education
in the 21st Century

This document provides an overview of SEER's work with its member state education agencies to devevlop "State-based EIC Model™ School Networks." These state-based networks are devevloped to meet the sepcific needs and educational structures of each state.

The following sections provide a general overview of these networks.

• STATE-BASED NETWORKS OF EIC MODEL™ SCHOOLS
• PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR EIC MODEL™ PROGRAMS
• FRAMEWORK FOR EVALUATION TO ASSESS EIC IMPLEMENTATION
• GOALS OF SEER's PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SEMINARS

STATE-BASED NETWORKS OF EIC MODEL™ SCHOOLS
As the EIC Model™ has become better known in the education community, there has been growing interest in establishing networks of EIC Model™ sites in both public and private schools. The creation of state-based networks of EIC Model™ demonstration sites has helped to strengthen the EIC Model™ implementation process. EIC Model™ school networks are in various stages of development in eight SEER states. Each of these demonstration school networks is unique, representing a variety of funding sources, implementation approaches, leadership strategies and support mechanisms. SEER has initiated EIC Model™ School Networks in the following states: California, Georgia, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, South Carolina, Texas and Washington. Three examples of such networks include:

Minnesota — In cooperation with SEER, the Department of Children, Families and Learning (DCFL) initiated a network of Minnesota EIC Model™ schools beginning with its first cohort of teachers in 1999. A second cohort was added in 2000, bringing the total number of schools in the network to 12. SEER conducted professional development with both cohorts and the EIC implementation specialists. A teacher on special assignment works with SEER’s staff to provide ongoing program implementation assistance. SEER continues to monitor the implementation process and recently field tested a new EIC Model™ program evaluation instrument with Minnesota’s EIC Model™ schools.

Maryland — The Chesapeake Bay Foundation is working with SEER and the Maryland State Department of Education to support the pilot phase of the Bay Schools Project, a network of nine Maryland schools that are using the EIC model. The selected schools include four elementary schools, two middle schools, two high schools, and one private school representing diverse economic, social and geographical regions throughout the state. SEER staff members provided professional development to the Bay School leadership team and led sessions in the teachers’ August 2000 Summer Curriculum Summit. SEER regularly consults with the coordinators of the Bay Schools Project and is providing further professional development in Fall 2001.

New Jersey — Ten schools were selected from almost 60 applicants to form a network of EIC Model™ demonstration sites that involves a collaborative effort between SEER, New Jersey Department of Education, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Alliance for New Jersey Environmental Education and New Jersey Commission on Environmental Education. The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation provided a grant to initiate this program and has indicated their willingness to provide ongoing support. SEER is providing technical support to initiate this effort and conducted professional development workshops for the school teams in Summer 2001.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR EIC MODEL™ PROGRAMS
SEER designed its EIC Professional Development Program specifically for teams of teachers and administrators of grade levels K-12. The seminars provide educators with minds-on, collaborative activities that are the tools for implementing an EIC program in their schools.

SEER’s professional development specialists train teachers and administrators in the principles of the EIC Model™ in four- to five-day institutes for up to 50 participants. The schools are encouraged to send interdisciplinary teams representing at least three disciplines, grades and/or specialties. Each highly interactive seminar is designed around collaborative activities to help the school teams learn to:

• integrate instruction and learning across traditional disciplines, using SEER’s curriculum-mapping process;
• provide hands-on learning experiences through problem-solving and issue-based studies;
• work successfully in interdisciplinary team structures;
• develop learner-centered, constructivist approaches adapted to individual students and their unique skills and abilities; and,
• identify community and natural settings that can be used as real-world contexts for EIC-based learning and instruction.

The EIC Model™ professional development program also utilizes activities, discussions and team-based working sessions to:

• explore the change process;
• discuss brain-based and other learning theories as they relate to the EIC Model™;
• examine the role of service-learning and reflection in the EIC Model™ implementation process; and,
• utilize authentic assessment methods.

The seminar facilitators model the process that teachers will use with their students as they guide the participants through activities, small-group work and outside explorations to help them fully understand the EIC Model™. As the school teams conduct investigations in local natural and community settings, they discover learning and teaching opportunities that advance thinking skills and improve acquisition of content knowledge in a variety of traditional disciplines.

Participants discover how various subject areas can support and enhance the instructional success of the curriculum. They learn how state and district standards can be simultaneously addressed through the EIC Model™ as they integrate learning across the disciplines. The educators also identify problems and issues that may potentially lead to student projects and service-learning activities.

A variety of tools support the SEER’s EIC Model™ Professional Development Program. These resources are used to introduce the EIC Model™, present the benefits of environment-based educational approaches and guide educators through the design and implementation of the EIC Model™ in their school.

Participants in SEER’s EIC Model™ Professional Development Program receive the following materials:

1. The seminar workbook, entitled Planning an EIC Program in Your School, guides the participants through exercises that help them design an individualized EIC Model™ implementation plan. Included in the workbook is SEER’s step-by-step curriculum mapping procedure.
2. The EIC Program Evaluation Action Plan outlines are used by the EIC leadership team and school’s instructional team to determine program outcomes; define indicators of success; designate needed resources and evaluation procedures; and, delineate targeted timeframes.
3. Rubrics, Implementing and Strengthening an EIC Program in Your School, provide participants with a means of self-evaluating their current instructional practices. Educators also make use of these rubrics as formative, self-evaluation instruments.
4. The User-friendly Handbook for Project Evaluation presents quantitative and qualitative methods for conducting outcome evaluations.
5. The research report, Closing the Achievement Gap: Using the Environment as an Integrating Context for Learning, is used to present evidence of the educational efficacy of EIC. Educators are also guided in using these materials to encourage involvement in the EIC program by their colleagues.
6. Two video documentaries entitled Beyond Walls, Across Disciplines and Closing the Achievement Gap: A Video Summary provide a visual accounting of successful EIC programs and the educational benefits of EIC. Beyond Walls introduces an elementary, middle and high school where teachers use EIC to improve motivation, learning and academic achievement. Closing the Achievement Gap features teaching teams using EIC to create innovative, interdisciplinary instruction to enhance group and individual learning.
7. The Education Commission of the States handout documents the inclusion of the EIC model in the ECS “Programs & Practices” listing, signifying that schools can adopt SEER’s program as their means of implementing federally funded comprehensive school reform.
8. A Natural History Magazine article features several of the case study schools that were part of the national research project.
9. A Terrain Magazine article includes descriptions of several environment-based school programs and highlights the educational benefits of EIC.
10. A Green Teacher Magazine article includes essays by teachers and an administrator from six of the study schools.

FRAMEWORK FOR EVALUATION TO ASSESS EIC IMPLEMENTATION
The wide diversity of school structures, instructional practices, student abilities, administrative buy-in and community support have motivated SEER to develop a framework for monitoring and assessing the EIC Model™ implementation process.

SEER has designed a series of instruments that allow educators to conduct both formative and summative evaluations of their progress toward implementing the EIC Model™in their schools. These tools have become part of the schools’ improvement plans for evaluating the success of implementing the EIC Model™ and student achievement results.

Over the past five years, SEER worked collaboratively with its 12 member state departments of education to develop an assessment framework, based on the Concerns Based Adoption Model (CBAM) developed by the University of Texas at Austin and the Southwest Regional Educational Development Laboratory. CBAM is a conceptual framework that describes, explains and predicts probable teacher/user/participant behavior in the change process. The model is intended to measure the adoption of an innovation by educators and includes a set of tools for measuring the implementation of an innovation.

SEER’s assessment framework includes a series of instruments and techniques that allow educators to conduct both formative and summative evaluations of their progress throughout the process of implementing the EIC Model™. This evaluation system allows the participants to assess their understanding of the EIC model; identify their concerns about the process of implementing the EIC Model™; evaluate and monitor their progress toward implementation; and, measure the extent to which the school team has developed leadership and community support.

SEER’s EIC Model™ evaluation approach includes three key components:

• Self-evaluation rubrics;
• Stages of Concern questionnaire (SoC); and,
• Innovation Configuration instrument (IC).

EIC Model™ Self-evaluation Rubrics
SEER has worked with its 12 state representatives to develop a rubric-based instrument to assess the current status of school programs in relation to the principal educational characteristics of the EIC Model™. The rubrics are organized around each of the educational components of an EIC Model™ program as well as considering leadership and community involvement processes. These rubrics establish standards for implementing the EIC Model™ allowing educators to: understand what is expected of them; outline implementation strategies; define performance; and, provide for ongoing program evaluation.

Educators who participate in EIC Model™ Implementation Seminars receive professional development in the use of the rubrics. They are encouraged to gather and use these data as a baseline for comparison in measuring their programmatic growth and as the basis for setting new programmatic goals. School teams are also instructed to utilize the rubrics for ongoing reflection and evaluation of their overall program status.

Stages of Concern
The Stages of Concern (SoC) instrument is a diagnostic tool created by CBAM to explain the lack of teacher buy-in and to propose ways to monitor and increase implementation of education innovations. The SoC instrument is used to measure how people feel about the innovation that they are expected to implement.

SEER administers the SoC questionnaire to teachers as they begin implementing the EIC Model™. The results of the questionnaire provide personal perspective on the participants’ concerns about implementation of the EIC Model™. Periodically, during implementation, the SoC is re-administered to provide a current picture of the teachers’ continued commitment to teh EIC Model™ and professional/personal issues that may arise.

Innovation Configuration
The Innovation Configuration (IC) is a diagnostic methodology created by CBAM to look at the way teachers actually implement innovations in educational practice. SEER worked with a staff consultant from the Southwest Regional Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) to develop an EIC Model™-specific Innovation Configuration instrument. This instrument helps SEER evaluate the qualities of various instructional practice as schools work to fully implement EIC.

SEER field tested its IC instrument in February 2000 with 10 schools in its Minnesota network. SEER plans to administer the IC to teachers in EIC Model™ schools, through an interview process, before the end of the first year of their program implementation and periodically thereafter. Based on the analysis of the data, SEER will be able to offer support, make recommendations for adapting the innovation and communicate progress to various stakeholders.

GOALS OF SEER's PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SEMINARS
GOAL 1 - Participants evaluate the need to change their instructional practices to meet the demands of recent changes in the educational system and the needs of today's students.
GOAL 2 - Participants explore the components of the EIC Model™ and consider teh EIC Model™ as a "system" that can be used to effectively address current challenges in education.
GOAL 3 - Participants examine the concept of learning settings outside the classroom and be able to identify both "subject matter-based" and interdisciplinary learning opportunities in these settings.
GOAL 4 - Participants explore the concept of systems thinking and be able to explain natural and socio-cultural systems, their components, processes and interactions.
GOAL 5 - Participants explore the methodology of community-based investigations, and develop questioning skills and strategies.
GOAL 6 - Participants create integrated-interdisciplinary plans that simultaneously address multiple education standards in the context of community-based investigations.
GOAL 7 - Participants propose service-learning activities derived from the results of community-based investigations.
GOAL 8 - Participants develop Instructional Action Plans for students, teachers, administrators and community members.
GOAL 9 - Participants outline an "Implementation Plan" for their EIC Model™ Program and develop a strategy for initiating the plan.

 

11/22/02