Maximizing evidence-based teaching and learning, assessment and homework practices at NYC school

Abstract

This capstone project is a case study addressing several problems of practice inside NYC school: homework, assessment, teaching, professional development effectiveness and the school’s trust climate. The purpose of this project is to design an improvement proposal that can inform the school leaders regarding its climate of trust, guide professional development and the creation of improvement teams for enhancing evidence-based teaching and learning strategies in the classrooms with a focus on assessment and homework practices. This capstone project is based on the four-dimensional school learning model adapted from synthetizing Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model with the classical multi-level analysis from social sciences to explore the underlying NYC school’s problems of practice and the respective critical research questions. First, to what extent does NYC school’s leadership reinforce a climate of learning, support and trust, psychological safety and experimentation for its faculty? Second, how does NYC school implement an effective professional development program and how do teachers perceive its relative impact on their teaching craft? Third, to what extent do classroom instructional practices utilize evidence-based teaching and learning strategies in their pedagogical approaches? Fourth, how do current assessment and homework practices use high-quality design consistent with evidence-based learning and subject matter standards? These questions also guide the research design and the outline for a set of interventions and recommendations based on the evidence found through a mixed sequential methods approach of qualitative semi-structured interviews, quantitative survey research and open source public documents collected, as well as with the insights from experimental, quasi-experimental and scholarly research.