EXCELLENCE & ETHICS

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  Conference Celebrates National Sportsmanship Day

  Institute for Excellence & Ethics posted in Character Blog at 7:30 pm on March 1, 2011 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  

  On March 15-16, Matt Davidson will present at the PIAA-sponsored conference entitled “Schools Shaping the Culture of Sport” at the University of Scranton. The conference also features John Walsh, executive vice president and executive editor of ESPN, Inc. The conference includes workshops for coaches, athletes and parents, an award dinner and a panel discussion about values and character in sport at the national level.

  See more information: http://matrix.scranton.edu/news/royalnews/articles/2011/03/01/National-Sportsmanship-Day.shtml

  

   

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  Integrity in Action: Leadership Academy for High School Students

  Institute for Excellence & Ethics posted in Character Blog at 11:43 am on January 13, 2011 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  

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  The first IEE Excellence & Ethics Academy for Winter 2011 has been rescheduled for February 12, 2011.

  

   
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  Intermediate and Primary CEEA Surveys Available

  Institute for Excellence & Ethics posted in Character Blog, Power2Achieve Community at 11:52 am on November 19, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: assessment (5), elementary schools (4), middle schools, school climate and culture

  Over the last several months IEE has been working with our partners at Allen Creek Elementary (Pittsford school district, NY) to modify the original CEEA student and faculty surveys for the elementary schools. After several rounds of reviews by ACE and IEE teams and some pilot-testing with students in local schools, we now have two versions ready for full-scale field-testing. Pittsford schools will be the first to roll them out!

  The two versions are Intermediate and Primary. With school districts having varying configurations of elementary and middle grades and varying levels of reading skills among students, we thought it would be helpful if schools could choose what they would see as most appropriate. Thus, the intermediate version can be utilized in a broad range from upper elementary grades (5-6) through low middle (6-7), and even for all middle grades, if consistency of content is deemed important. The primary version is designed for lower elementary grades, and depending on the reading skills of students could be used from grade 1 through grade 5.

  Both versions of the CEEA survey have corresponding faculty surveys where items about student competencies, culture and climate, and teaching practices are completely matched.

  You can review the student forms on IEE website:

  Intermediate Student CEEA Survey
  Primary Student CEEA Survey

  These surveys will be fully available for schools to use in Spring 2011. Interested schools can also participate in the field-testing in winter 2011. Please give us your feedback and let your colleagues know about this new assessment option from IEE.

  

   
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  2010 Ray Character Award video

  Institute for Excellence & Ethics posted in IEE & Partners' News at 11:53 am on November 17, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: character award

  As you know, on October 23rd Matt Davidson, President of IEE, and Dr. Tom Lickona, Director of the Center for the 4th & 5th Rs at SUNY Cortland, received the 2010 Robert D. Ray Pillar of Character Award from Character Counts In Iowa!

  See a video prepared by our friends at ICD and KDSM-TV (Des Moines, IA) for this event.

  

   
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  Why use CEEA surveys?

  Institute for Excellence & Ethics posted in Character Blog at 2:08 pm on July 29, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: character competencies, school climate (2), school culture (2), survey assessment

  In the weeks after the Summer Institute, we have prepared and posted on the IEE website two new documents about CEEA surveys. We hope they can clarify why schools might choose the Culture of Excellence & Ethics Assessment™ Surveys as their assessment tools of choice when measuring school climate and culture.

  The first document is a series of FAQs, with straight-forward answers about what CEEA surveys measure and how one could use them. For example:

  What does CEEA survey measure? As the name suggests, CEEA surveys measure the extent to which the climate and culture of a school are conducive to the development of student competencies of excellence and ethics, or their performance character and moral character. In addition, CEEA surveys measure whether the school climate is safe, supportive, and engaging for students; whether staff engage in supportive collegial relationships; and the extent to which the school engages student families in support of student learning.

  The second document is a conceptual description of the components of CEEA surveys. It tries to provide a brief research basis for the selection of the specific aspects of school culture included in the surveys. We believe that by focusing on those aspects of school culture that promote excellence and ethics, performance character and moral character, and by measuring them simultaneously along multiple dimensions and from multiple sources (student self-efficacy beliefs, perceptions of peers, perceptions of faculty; staff perceptions of themselves, of students, of colleagues, and of student families, plus the perceptions of the relevant constructs reported by parents), we have created a powerful instrument. The power of this assessment tool lies, however, not in its ability to identify individuals who underperform and are in need of improvement, but in its rich findings about the school culture: these findings can serve as a basis for multiple in-depth conversations among school leaders, staff, and among students, helping all stake-holders to understand their current state and formulate their desired state.

  See, for example, the winter/spring 2010 issue of our newsletter, excellence & ethics, for one school’s powerful story of how they used survey data on the culture of their school to engage staff and students in reflections about the school, formulating what to do to improve it, and committing to real change.

  For a discussion of why cultural assets, such as those measured by CEEA surveys, are essential for all schools working on improving teaching, learning, and collegial relationships see, for example, CEP White Paper on Developing and Assessing School Culture.

  

   
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  The Science of Genius

  Institute for Excellence & Ethics posted in Character Blog at 10:51 am on July 19, 2010 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: continuous improvement, high standards, talent vs practice

  Marthe Seales has just reminded me of this great source for ideas and discussion on the role of genes versus practice in achieving great success — the Blog on Freakonomics. Check it out:

  http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/the-science-of-genius-a-qa-with-author-david-shenk/?emc=eta1

  The comments are fascinating, and there’s abundance of resources for those who need extension materials for Power2Achieve Focus Area 4: Commit to High Standards and Continuous Improvement.

  

   
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  DOE Proposes Doubling Federal Funding for Parental Engagement

  Institute for Excellence & Ethics posted in Power2Achieve Community at 10:51 am on May 18, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  

  U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the Education Department’s proposal to double the amount of federal dollars set aside for family involvement. The Department also proposed allowing states to use federal funds to hold a competition to generate the best local ideas on family involvement. (More …)

  

   
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  CEEA v4.2 Reliability/Validity Reflections

  Institute for Excellence & Ethics posted in IEE & Partners' News, IEE Insider at 4:43 pm on May 10, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: assessment (5), CEEA (2), research (3)

  I just posted current validity information about CEEA v4.2 (formerly, CREE) on IEE’s website. Currently, 12 schools have collected the surveys from at least part of their student body and staff, and we had data from over 20 schools in the fall.

  The preliminary data results can be seen at: http://excellenceandethics.com/assess/CEEA_v4.2_ReliabilityValidity.pdf

  As I shared before, all scales, including the ones added in version 4.2, have Cronbach’s alphas that range from .83 to .94. These are excellent results for the internal consistency of the scales supporting reliability and validity of CEEA. Validity of a survey is further demonstrated by how well the pattern of relationships identified in the data confirms what can be expected theoretically. Let me mention just a couple of observations that point to strong validity of CEEA.

  Individuals tend to perceive themselves more positively than others, especially if they are asked to report on ability, rather than actual behavior. In these data, just as one would expect, students on average report much higher perceptions of their own Competencies of Excellence/Ethics (3.74/3.82), compared to their reports of peer behaviors captured in the scales of Culture of Excellence/Ethics (2.88/2.91).

  When examining the pattern of bivariate correlations in student data, the highest predictors of student competencies and school culture are faculty practices impacting excellence/ethics and faculty support for & engagement of students. At the same time, Student Safety is barely correlated with students’ reports of competencies and strongly correlated with their perceptions of student culture. Again, taken together, this pattern of relationships confirms what would be expected theoretically.

  There is a similar pattern in the faculty data. Faculty give highest responses on the items about their own practices impacting excellence and ethics (4.17 and 4.09). However, in the correlations data, we see that these same scales are just barely correlated with faculty assessments of student competencies and student culture of excellence and ethics (from .111 to .169). Instead, faculty perceptions of what other faculty do (measured by such scales as Faculty Support for & Engagement of Students, Faculty Beliefs & Behaviors) are all much strong predictors of student competencies and culture (from .412 to .553).

  For students, perceptions of peers (the Culture scales) are only modestly correlated with reports of students’ own competencies (from .269 to .306). In faculty data, however, student culture scales are stronger predictors of student competencies than any of the faculty practices/behaviors (from .610 to .688). This is to be expected, as faculty tend to think similarly about students and somewhat differently about themselves and colleagues. (In statistical and research methods language, one would refer to this pattern of findings as evidence of divergent/convergent validity).

  More work remains to be done to collect the remaining data and generate school CEEA (CREE) reports. While giving strong support to the validity of the instrument, these results also identify a range of concerns, such as the discrepancy in faculty’s beliefs about their own work and what happens around them in the school I just mentioned. When studied carefully and discussed with an open mind by school leadership teams and faculty, the CEEA reports should provide excellent entry points for serious dialogue and decision-making for improvement.

  

   
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  New CEEA Survey Scales Show Excellent Reliability/Validity

  Institute for Excellence & Ethics posted in IEE Insider at 12:18 pm on May 3, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  

  Field-test schools in Iowa and Kansas have started collecting spring survey data using the new version of our CEEA instrument (v 4.2). In this version, we added two new sections. The first is the measure of Safe, Supportive, and Encouraging Climate consisting of two scales: Student Safety and Faculty Support for and Encouragement of Students. These climate scales are indicative of the conditions “needed for” good learning and development of students (although in our view they may not be “sufficient”). With a lot of emphasis currently placed on assessment of school climate, we felt this addition would make the instrument more complete.

  We also added three scales on the faculty/staff survey that focus specifically on professional relationships in the school. These are Leadership Practices, Faculty Professional Beliefs & Behaviors, and Home-School Communication & Support. Whereas these are not exhaustive measures of PELC or home-school relationship, we feel they provide sufficient data to initiate discussions focused on improving the professional community in the schools.

  In the last week, I started designing the new report templates and ran reliability and validity analysis on the data that came in so far. The early results show high Cronbach’s alphas of internal consistency for each of the five new scales, and therefore are very encouraging. More information comes in daily, and there will be several updates in the next couple of months. Yet, I believe our second wave of field-testing of our new assessment instrument is off to an excellent start.

  

   
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  JTF Progress Report: Strategic Partnerships

  Institute for Excellence & Ethics posted in IEE Insider at 11:32 am on April 30, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  

  We continue to make progress in building the strategic partnerships with aligned organizations that are helping us go to scale with the Smart & Good vision.

  • During the past three months we have continued to work with the Institute for Character Development (ICD), our principal partner in Iowa, on several fronts.  ICD has contributed significant direct and indirect matching funds towards the research and development of the Power2 series (see Financial Progress Report).   We have worked with ICD during the last three months to support the implementation of Power2Learn and Power2Teach at four Iowa high schools. The schools in Iowa are doing a lesson per week and giving us feedback on how the program is working.
  • Matt Davidson travelled to Iowa from February 24^th-26th to meet with Scott Raecker, Executive Director of ICD, and his staff.  One key part of the trip was a meeting with Scott and Eric Martin which Vlad Khmelkov joined by phone to discuss our program offerings and pricing for next year. The feedback from Scott and Eric was extremely positive. They felt prepared to deliver our Power2 Programming for next year. ICD is committed to continue the partnership in 2010-2011. ICD is currently working with its Board to establish reasonable benchmarks for generating revenues off the sales of Power2Achieve™ programming and assessment services for next year.
  • During his visit to Iowa, Matt Davidson had a two hour meeting with the Iowa Department of Education, which included the staff who are heading up the State’s 21^st Century Skills and Iowa Core Curriculum. We have been meeting with DOE staff over the last two years and continuing to look to align our work with that of the DOE. In this visit we think the fruits of our continued shuttle diplomacy, field research, and our evolving programming really came together. We utilized the new documents to show them a matrix of our lessons and for each lesson the specific competencies (ours and the accompanying 21st century outcome). Then we shared lesson 1.5.4 which features authentic assessment with students demonstrating collaboration, negotiation, creative thinking, and communication. Finally, we shared our new document that demonstrates each item of the CREE and the related 21st Century outcome. In other words, we were able, in about 25 minutes, to show them the theoretical, practical, and empirical development of the 21st Century skills and the Iowa Core curriculum alignment. At the close of our presentation, they said, “Wow.” They were authentically interested in what we have accomplished thus far, what schools were using it, and how it might be utilized through the AEA’s across the state (teacher centers responsible for servicing schools).
  • The Iowa DOE agreed to partner with us in pursuing a Federal Grant on school climate and culture this spring.
  • We met with the 4 Iowa field research sites to lay out for them the 2010?11 program offerings. This was our chance to explain to the schools what version 2 of our programming would look like. We began by laying out the endorsement of the Iowa Business Council (IBC) and the alignment work with the DOE. The sites were very appreciative of the new alignment documents and to learn that the work we have been doing with them is well aligned with the DOE approach. The schools could see that they are actually ahead of other Iowa schools needing to comply with the Iowa Core and the 21st Century outcomes. These alignment documents will help them to demonstrate to staff and school boards why Power2 programming is a good investment of time and resources.
  • During his visit to Iowa Matt also had a successful meeting with staff from the Drake Athletic Department. This meeting helped us define the deliverables involved and the details of the future collaboration. First, we established that the Power2Achieve™ is a very transportable branding, one that allows our tools to be used in a sport context, as well as an educational context. So, the Power2Achieve™ is our general IP brand, and then for the Drake AD, we added Power2Achieve™ Motivational Assembly, which describes the venue we’re working in. We target it for students in grades 6?8, which provides advance marketing for our High School programming. The assemblies are to be delivered by Drake student?athletes. We develop the assemblies from the base tools and materials of the Power2Learn (soon to be Power2Achieve™ school program).
  • As shared in the last update, Scott Raecker has continued to advance the integration of the Power2 series into the Iowa Business Council’s 21^st Century Excellence campaign.  The Business Council’s 2010-2011 focus statement now explicitly identifies the development of moral and performance character as a priority for Iowa schools and businesses, see:  http://www.iowabusinesscouncil.com/files/IBC_CorpBrochure_0.pdf.  We will continue to pursue direct financial support from the Iowa Business Council (IBC) and its member organizations for implementation of the Power2 series.
  • IEE and the Center for the 4^th and 5^th Rs have continued to hold phone conferences with the leaders of the Kansas PCEP Grant during the last three months. The primary focus of these discussions has been on trying to keep the project alive after the PCEP funding was cut. The good news is that all of our combined efforts have helped to keep the project alive. This was made possible by IEE and the Center directing part of the JTF funds toward program delivery, research, and assessment activities with 20 impact schools in Kansas in 2009-2010. Kansas project officers have been told by the Federal DOE officials in a phone conversation that part of their federal grant may be restored. However, they have not received official confirmation yet.
  • In collaboration with Sue Kidd, coordinator of the Kansas federal character education grant, Tom Lickona developed a proposal for seven ways the Kansas External Coaches can more effectively work with the pilot schools to facilitate implementation of the Power2Learn.
  • Matt Davidson continues to work with Ken Fisher, who is based in Colorado, to establish a partnership in that state.  Potential partners include Jim Olmstead and Mark Jennings of the Colorado Foundation for Character Development. Matt will be taking another trip to Colorado to meet with key leaders in June. He also continues to conduct phone conferences and to send e-mails to keep people up to speed with our work. John and Lucia Cataldo, consultants with IEE, have also made contacts with Colorado leaders to share funding opportunities that they might pursue.
  • Kyle Baker continues to have consistent contact with Neil Burti, Alternative High School Principal in the Cherry Hill School District in New Jersey.  A March meeting that had been set up for Matt Davidson and other members of our team to go back and meet with district leaders to plan for the future was postponed due to their budget challenges.
  • During a February trip to St. Louis Matt Davidson was able to meet with Liz Gibbons and Diane Sterling from Character Plus, a network of 59 school districts and nearly 500 schools. Sandy McDonnell helped to broker this meeting. Matt was given 75 minutes to lay out both Power2Learn and Power2Teach for a group of about 30 which included Sandy and Pris McDonnell, Liz, Diane and several schools from the Character Plus network. At the end of the two day visit, Matt met with Liz and Diane who were very interested in a regional partnership. Many topics were discussed with them including our providing more Power2 trainings, an opportunity for them to sell our assessment tools and related support services, an opportunity for them to train on our P2A Toolkits, and a possible opportunity for us to replicate our Summer Institute in St. Louis. They also expressed an interest in teaming with us to pursue grant opportunities in the future.
  • Rich Parisi has continued to contact the Pittsford School District to keep them updated on our programs. He visited there for a special evening program on April 28^th as a follow up to his visit in January.

  Over the last three months we have been working on our business plan for establishing a network of P2A Certified Trainers. We have developed a number of documents and conducted several phone conferences with members of our extended team of National education Consultants to review and revise this plan. We are also planning to have future P2A Certified Trainers attend a four-day certification training from June 29^th-July 2^nd. We are establishing other components of the P2A certification process to assure quality training, delivery, and support of P2A services for our customers.