TopHat Consortium
School Information
| School Name: |
TopHat Consortium |
| School Address: |
Indiana |
| School Phone: |
N/A |
| School Fax: |
N/A |
| Contact: |
Diane Paynter |
| Contact E-Mail: |
diane_paynter@hotmail.com |
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Overview
As of February 2009, the location of this material is at McREL's Success in Sight website: www.mcrel.org/SuccessInSight/Default.aspx?tabid=2402
Overview
A consortium of school leadership teams from Indiana middle and high schools have been working together for several years to increase their capacity to make informed decisions related to the three critical commitments and to build capacity for a shared vision of leadership. It is sponsored by the Indiana State Department of Education.
The following paragraphs provide a perfect overview for this success story and are quoted directly from McREL's Success in Sight online.
In 1999, Dr. Ilene Block of the Indiana Department of Education began calling administrators from high-poverty, low-achieving corporations (a.k.a. school districts) in the Hoosier state and posed the question, "How would you like to improve your test scores?"
Seven corporations took Block up on her offer to participate in the Teaching Optimization Producing Higher Achievement Trends (TOPHAT) Consortium. ...TOPHAT, a bold experiment in state support for low-performing schools, had four key elements. First, it was a long-term intervention that provided ongoing, connected professional development for school teams. Second, it built on a train-the-trainer model, providing schools leadership teams with knowledge and skills they were expected to bring back to their own schools. Third, it pooled state resources to provide more robust professional development than each school would otherwise have been able to afford individually. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the state supported, and McREL trained, a cadre of professionals to provide schools and corporations with ongoing coaching and mentoring between the formal professional development sessions.
Ray of hope
Prior to forming TOPHAT, participants reported that they felt demoralized and overwhelmed by their students' low performance. They knew they needed to improve, but didn't know where to begin or if they could make the necessary changes...
Eventually, what started as small changes grew into comprehensive Improvement efforts. TOPHAT participants developed the capacity to use research-based strategies to address a wide array of school issues, including algebraic thinking, data-driven decision making, early literacy instruction, leadership, professional learning communities, and designing standards-based classrooms.
Results
...More than 4 years after the first TOPHAT session, all seven districts in TOPHAT have seen steady gains in student achievement, some of them dramatic. Knox, for example, has experienced double-digit growth in all subject areas and all grade levels on the statewide achievement test. [Note: The consortium now contains 13 middle and high schools.]
More importantly, participants say their schools have developed the capacity to continue to grow as professionals, looking at the data and asking hard questions and using research to search for answers.