NebraskaMATH - Strengthening the OPS-UNL Partnership

The Northwestern University group led Dr. James Spillane will assess changes in the formal and informal organizational leadership networks of schools in the study in conjunction with the assessment of attitudes in a combined on-line format. The sample size is yet to be determined as it is dependent upon school and teacher participation in the project. A School Staff Questionnaire (SSQ) developed by Dr. Spillane will be used to gather data on leadership in three broad aspects of school organization important for successful implementation of interventions and instructional improvement: 1) school leadership and management, 2) interaction patterns among staff (relational structure), and 3) school norms (normative structure). The group led by Dr. Spillane will use five peer-report and seven self-report items to measure a teacher’s sense of collective responsibility for student learning developed by the Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR). Using a six-item scale from Study of Instructional Improvement, the group also will examine the extent to which teachers know about students’ opportunities to learn content in other teachers’ classrooms and the extent to which cross-grade instructional opportunities are planned and coordinated. Finally, Dr. Spillane’s group will use CCSR measures to examine innovation and teacher-teacher trust. They will use a five-item scale to measure teachers’ attitude towards innovation and a six-item scale to measure trust among teachers. Adapting existing measures on teacher collaboration, Dr. Spillane’s group will construct a mathematics specific collaboration measure to examine the extent to which teachers collaborate about standards for student learning and changes in curricular content related to mathematics and the extent to which teachers know about students’ opportunities to learn mathematics content in other grades and the extent to which cross-grade instructional opportunities are coordinated. The data gathered by