Advancing Evidence-Based Practices in the REL West and Northwest Regions
Danny Torres in conversation with Katie Drummond and John Rice
John Rice:
And so what we do as RELs, we know we’re not going to come in and just through REL work be able to solve the entire issue within a five-year contract. But what we can do is work as collaborators looking at the entire suite of things they’re doing to try to address these issues and be a value add, be someone at the table who helps bring evidence and data use to bear to help our partners move the needle forward on some of these issues that they’ve been grappling with for quite a while.
Danny Torres:
Welcome to Leading Voices, a podcast brought to you by WestEd, a national nonprofit, nonpartisan research development and service agency. This podcast highlights WestEd’s leading voices shaping innovations and applying rigorous research in ways that help reduce opportunity gaps and build communities where all can thrive. My name is Danny Torres. I’ll be your host.
For nearly 60 years, the Regional Educational Laboratories have collaborated with schools, districts, state departments of education, and other partners to help improve outcomes for students. WestEd has operated the Regional Educational Laboratory West, or REL West, since its inception. REL West serves education agencies in Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah. And in 2022, WestEd began operating the Regional Educational Laboratory Northwest, or REL Northwest, which serves education agencies in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington.
Today we’re here with two REL directors, Dr. Katie Drummond and Dr. John Rice. Dr. Drummond serves as director of REL Northwest. She brings more than 20 years of experience focusing on evaluation and technical assistance projects related to literacy, early childhood, and professional development. Dr. Rice serves as director of REL West. For the past two decades, he has led collaborative research projects with school districts focusing on college and career readiness. He has also led several large-scale evaluations of statewide projects.
Dr. Drummond and Dr. Rice, it’s great to have you both on the program.
Katie Drummond:
Thanks, Danny. I look forward to the conversation.
John Rice:
Thanks, Danny. It’s great to be here.
Danny Torres:
So now that it’s been about 3 years since the COVID pandemic began, what educational issues are coming up as priorities in your regions, and how are the RELs responding to those issues?
John Rice:
Yeah, that’s a great question, Danny. So, for the past year, even longer, we’ve been going out and talking to partners and potential partners about really what are the pressing needs in their states and their districts. And in the West at least, we’ve discovered some key, what we’d like to call problems of practice, that are fairly common across our region. One, as you probably know, the pandemic really exacerbated student chronic absence as well as disparities and academic achievement, particularly for students who have been historically underserved. So a big need that we’re working on in our region is helping districts and state departments of education deal with issues around student attendance and also their work on learning recovery and helping them improve classroom instruction, both in mathematics and English language arts.
I would say another big issue in our region is retaining high-quality teachers. I think we’ve all seen a lot in both the popular press as well as in education periodicals and so forth just how much of an issue the teacher shortage is and how it varies and so forth. But that’s a pressing issue in our region.
And I would say another issue is related to learning recovery, but also a long-standing issue in and of itself is providing better supports for English Learners. Our four states in the West region—Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada—have very large proportions of English Learners in their districts.
And the last thing I’ll say is that in all of the work we do, we’ve really tried to intentionally focus on issues around equity. As you know, during the pandemic, issues of inequity, particularly racial inequities, really came to the fore, issues that had always been there but that were exacerbated again by the pandemic and other things going on. And so, we find that many states and districts in our region really want us to help them focus on these equity issues.
Danny Torres:
So you mentioned learning recovery. What does that term mean?
John Rice:
Right. So when we say learning recovery, we’re really recovering for lost time where learning for students really wasn’t as robust as it would’ve been in the physical classroom.
Katie Drummond:
And I think along with that, there were lost opportunities for student engagement and social–emotional well-being that just comes from being with your teachers and peers. So it’s not only the academic parts of it, but the other piece as well.
John Rice:
Right. So that’s why people had originally used the term learning loss, but that makes it sound like all of them went backwards, and they didn’t necessarily forget things. But there certainly was that lost time. I think that’s the way better way to think about it. So learning recovery is really trying to prepare schools and teachers to make up for some of that lost learning time.
Katie Drummond:
Yeah. So just going back to, I think, your initial question about REL priorities, definitely figuring out how to provide research and technical support where it’s most needed is one of our goals. And that relates to something John said in terms of trying to focus it in terms of the inequities of education opportunity and outcomes. And again, those were magnified during the pandemic, but certainly they still existed prior to the pandemic.
For REL Northwest, we have also spent time talking to state, local, and other education organizations to find specific projects that are well poised for partnership with the REL. And that means that we want the topics to be high leverage in terms of being change-oriented and ones that can lead to measurable outcomes or measurable improvement in student outcomes. And we also try to focus largely on existing initiatives, for instance, programs that are already being implemented or policies that are high priority. And then the REL can come in to help strengthen and bring more research or better measurement and evidence to these existing programs.
In the Northwest, we’ve heard priorities in diverse topic areas. We’re working with multiple states that have statewide initiatives focused on literacy. Of course, reading never went out of style, but I would say there’s renewed attention to literacy. And again, this relates to what we were saying before, learning loss during the pandemic. I think a lot of states are seeing that literacy achievement scores really have decreased from what they were prior to the pandemic. And it may be that they weren’t exactly happy with proficiency levels even back then.
In the Northwest, there’s also attention to raising high school graduation rates, particularly for traditionally underserved student groups. And another big concern in our states, just like the West and the nationwide trend, is improving teacher shortages.
John Rice:
Picking up on something Katie mentioned with regards to our process of needs assessment, or need sensing as we sometimes call it, the work we do as RELs is always based on the needs of that particular district or state or other education entity we’re working with. So although these are common problems of practice in our region that Katie and I have outlined for you, when we go into a district or a state education agency or with any partner, they really guide what the work’s going to be and that it’s always going to be focused on something that they want improved or an education issue they want to focus on. We don’t come in with any predetermined agenda, and that’s what makes the work so . . . one, the work is very responsive, and two, that’s why the buy-in is so high. We really work with partners who are motivated to work with us and allow us to help them. We work towards their outcomes that they’re trying to achieve.
Katie Drummond:
I think that’s one of the benefits of the REL being managed by WestEd is because we have such a wide, deep bench of experts, we’re really able to be pretty nimble in terms of that responsiveness that John mentioned.
Danny Torres:
So it sounds like your work is really focused on what’s going on at the local level, and I think that’s really important. You also mentioned the term “need sensing.” There may be some listeners who don’t know the term. Can you explain what that means?
Katie Drummond:
So it involves a series of conversations with different practitioners at the state, district . . . it could be associations, school boards, any number of entities in the education world, and really just hearing more about what are their priorities right now, what challenges are they encountering, what would it look like if they were succeeding, and where can they identify that they might need help or lack some capacity in their organization that could be strengthened. John, are there other things that you do?
John Rice:
No, I would say we approach need sensing more or less the same way. I think the only thing I would add, and I think REL Northwest finds this as well, is that the policymakers and practitioners that we’re working with have usually already got some strategies or some programs or some policies where they’re really trying to address the issues that come out through need sensing. These aren’t new issues for them. And so what we do as a REL is we know we’re not going to come in and just through REL work be able to solve the entire issue within a 5-year contract. But what we can do is work as collaborators looking at the entire kind of suite of things they’re doing to try to address these issues and be a value add, be someone at the table who helps bring evidence and data use to bear to help our partners move the needle forward on some of these issues that they’ve been grappling with for quite a while.
Danny Torres:
Can you provide some examples, concrete examples of the work that you’re doing in the localities within the states?
Katie Drummond:
Yeah, I can jump in here. I know I mentioned literacy as a topic area of focus in the Northwest. We have a couple active literacy focus partnerships. In Montana, we’re working with a literacy leadership team in a particular district, which is Laurel Public Schools. And our work involves helping Laurel strengthen and bring greater fidelity to their multiple tiered systems of support. So in other words, they want to improve how educators use student data to inform instruction. And if there are students who are struggling, help find the right evidence-based interventions to address those skill gaps. And if anyone’s interested, we did release a blog on our website, so feel free to read that if you want to know more.
We have another literacy partnership in Alaska that’s focused at the state level. So as Alaska rolls out their new statewide literacy plan and reading legislation, Alaska’s Department of Education and Early Development wanted help from the REL. And so we’re working with them to create an evaluation plan and improved measures that are going to help them understand how the literacy plan activities are really rolling out and where they can improve them. And those, of course, all aim at improving reading achievement for students.
So, speaking of Alaska, we have another interesting partnership focused on the whole child. We all know from past research that childhood trauma can have large effects on learning and behavior, and unfortunately, nearly two thirds of Alaska’s youth have experienced some kind of traumatic event. So again, the Department of Education and Early Development, along with other health organizations and agencies, have developed a comprehensive framework for the state. And it has an accompanying toolkit that’s aimed at mitigating effects of trauma. So the REL helped the department as they developed and then delivered a statewide survey aimed at understanding perceptions and implementation of the toolkit resources.
And now, next, the REL is going to do a more in-depth implementation study that will be used to improve toolkit resources. We’ll be looking at districts that had lower levels of implementation as well as districts that had higher levels of implementation to try to understand what’s really driving the difference there.
Danny Torres:
Great. Yeah, we’ll put the toolkit that you mentioned earlier in the show notes to link to that.
John Rice:
I’d be happy to talk about some of the projects and partnerships that we’re conducting in the West region. I mentioned chronic absences being an issue in our region. In Nevada, for example, we’re partnering with the Washoe County School District on reducing chronic absence. And as I mentioned before, this has been a problem for many districts across the region and the country, particularly because of the pandemic. And what we’re doing in Washoe County School District is we’re particularly focusing on strategies that’ll help improve attendance for students with some of the highest chronic absence rates in the district. That is Latino and Latina students, indigenous students, and students who are experiencing homelessness.
There are several things we’re doing there. The first is we’re just helping Washoe County School District take an inventory of the various chronic absence interventions at different tiers. Katie mentioned multi-tiered systems of support, and part of the MTSS work in Washoe is around chronic absence interventions. So we’re helping them take stock of which schools have been implementing which interventions. And then, once we do that, we’re going to pick one to three of those interventions, probably an intervention at each tier, to test the impact of the intervention, seeing how well it’s being implemented, et cetera.
Another partnership that we launch is with the Utah State Board of Education. The project is focused on improving retention of effective teachers, particularly during their first 5 years in the teaching profession where you see a large proportion of teachers leaving the profession in Utah. So that partnership will gather an inventory, relevant local and regional information data, to develop a better understanding of the root causes of why teachers are leaving, the different reasons they’re leaving, and how that varies across different type of districts. And then we’ll pilot and test one or more initiatives that are designed to significantly reduce the number of teachers who leave early in their career. So that’s being done at the state level in Utah, but as the work proceeds it will involve several districts.
I mentioned equity earlier. One partnership in particular with a very intentional focus on equity is with the San Francisco Unified School District. We’re working with that district to help reduce the disciplinary actions taken against Black students and reducing the disparities between disciplinary actions against Black students compared to their non-Black peers in the district. Part of that work is working with the district to develop continuous improvement processes so that individual schools, as well as individual teachers within schools, can test, refine different practices that will help address these disparities. And then the partnership through this work can really look at its entire system for solutions to the problem.
Something else we’re doing with San Francisco Unified School District to address this issue is studying two interventions, one that focuses on students and the other that focuses on teachers. One is a self-affirmation intervention. What I mean by that is this is an intervention where students are reminded of the fact that their capacities to learn and to engage at school are not limited. It’s really focused on growth mindsets for Black students. And so that’s a self-affirmation intervention that we’re testing there that has some previous evidence, but we really want to see if that can help Black students in that district overcome things like stereotype threat, which is a phenomenon that often takes place among students who have been minoritized.
The other intervention is really looking at empathic instruction, and this is focused on teachers and really getting teachers to look at how they’re interacting with students from different cultural backgrounds, students who might be presenting some issues in the classroom as far as classroom management’s concerned, really getting to look at those behaviors in a different way so they can work with students empathically and try to reduce the amount of disruption in the classroom that way, and again, ultimately reducing the number of disciplinary actions, namely suspensions against Black students in the district.
And so really what we’re trying to do there is look at the whole system, looking at systemic issues that lead to the disparities in disciplinary actions against Black students as well as potential biases among staff, and then trying to work with students so that they can help overcome some of those systemic and bias issues simultaneously while we’re working on them.
Katie Drummond:
We have a project for Northwest that’s related to this topic that I haven’t yet talked about. It is our partnership focused on Oregon Department of Education Student Success Plan. The success plan program was written to address barriers to educational outcomes for historically underserved student groups. So, for example, there’s particular programming and plans for African American Black students; another one for American Indian, Alaska Native students; another for Latino, Latina, Latinx, and indigenous communities; and a plan for LGBTQ2SIA+ students. The idea with the Student Success Plan is to allow community-based organizations and districts to serve students in a culturally responsive, customized way that speaks to their engagement and well-being and leads to better academic outcomes. The REL has partnered with ODE to shore up their measurement and metrics so they can help show outcomes of the plan.
Danny Torres:
So how do the RELs measure success in this work?
John Rice:
One way to think about success in the REL work is in the short, medium, and long term. So if in the short term we’ve been able to change our partners’ understanding of data use and they have a better understanding of the evidence to bear on a certain topic, we consider that a short-term success. A medium-term success would be changing the behaviors of our partners in some way. So they’re using the evidence to inform their decisions or their policies around a certain topic. Or we’ve built their capacity to use data more nimbly to address a problem of practice. And finally, long-term success, which we try to get within the 5 years of our RELs’ contracts, would be to start seeing some changes in student behaviors or outcomes that the folks we’re working with are trying to address. So it might not change the outcome to the degree that they ultimately want, but it is starting to see progress on that outcome, and that we consider a longer term success.
Katie Drummond:
It is the case that each one of the REL partnerships designs a REL logic model in terms of how we’re going to work with the agencies and the short-, medium-, and long-term outcomes that we’ll be aiming to achieve through our REL work. And there is a lot in there about building capacity, building the capacity of our partners, building new tools or ways of using data, new ways of evaluating pieces that they’re engaged in with the idea being that once the REL steps back, then we have built additional capacity with the agencies with whom we partner. And of course, many of our partnerships have long-term outcomes that really get at systemic change and improvement in student outcomes or teacher outcomes. If our listeners wanted to see each and every logic model of the partnerships that John and I have described, they are actually on the REL website, so maybe that can be included in links that are provided.
Danny Torres:
Absolutely. We’ll include that in the show notes for sure. Dr. Drummond and Dr. Rice, thank you very much for taking the time out of your busy schedules to talk with me today, and thank you for your leadership in this work. Where can our listeners find you online, and where can they learn about REL West and REL Northwest?
Katie Drummond:
Both REL West and Northwest are on social media. Our handles are @relnw and @rel_west.
John Rice:
If folks out there want to find more information about our RELs as well as any of the other RELs, they can go to the IES website, and they can find information about the RELs as well as more information about our products and our partnerships. And if you go to that website, it’ll also allow you to subscribe to our e-newsletters.
Danny Torres:
Dr. Drummond and Dr. Rice, again, thank you very much, and thanks to our listeners for joining us. All the resources mentioned in the podcast will be available online at wested.org/leadingvoicespodcast, or in the show notes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. For more information about the Regional Educational Laboratories, visit the IES website at ies.ed.gov/nce/rel.
Katie Drummond:
Thanks for having us.
John Rice:
Thanks, Danny. We enjoyed talking to you.
Danny Torres:
This podcast was brought to you by WestEd, a national nonprofit, nonpartisan research development and service agency. At WestEd, we believe that learning changes lives. Every day we partner with schools and communities across the country to improve outcomes for youth and adults of all ages. Today’s episode focused on one really important facet of the work that we do at WestEd, and I encourage you to visit us at wested.org to learn more. And a special thanks to Tanicia Bell, our content manager for the Leading Voices Podcast, and to Sanjay Pardanani, our audio producer. Join us next time on the Leading Voices Podcast. Thank you very much. Until next time.