Callie Edwards

The National Juntos Consortium (NJC) and STEM AP is a transformational, interdisciplinary, collaborative project that will prepare Latinx youth to become the next generation of leaders and workforce in STEM and Agriscience. Led by NCSU, STEM AP will improve STEM participation, persistence, and career readiness among Latinx youth in North Carolina and Washington. The project draws from culturally responsive pedagogy, behavioral science theory, and evidence-based practice, and will establish a replicable, scalable program that improves Latinx youth representation in post-secondary STEM education programs and advances DEIA work within the LGU Extension System. The project objectives include: 1. Increase opportunities for Latinx youth to engage in STEM education and workforce activities; 2. Enhance the skills and capacities of Latinx youth to engage with STEM APP learning and career opportunities; and 3. Increase the motivation of STEM APP youth to engage in STEM-related learning and career opportunities. 4. Develop the National Juntos Consortium to support the scalability and sustainability of Juntos and Juntos STEM AP. Through this innovative approach, combining 4-H Thriving Model, positive youth development, and the behavior change process as defined within the COM-B framework, the project will increase Latinx youth STEM identity (i.e. seeing themselves as successful in a STEM career pathway) and the likelihood to pursue and be successful in a STEM (agricultural sciences) career. The project will also launch the National Juntos Consortium, a first-of-its-kind collaborative Extension initiative with representation in all national regions focused on diversity, equity, inclusion, and access.

The primary goal of this work is to develop a comprehensive and responsive evaluation plan that details programmatic strategies and intended outcomes, measures for assessing and improving program impact, a timeline of evaluation activities, and an estimated budget. Working collaboratively with TIP leadership, North Carolina Public School Units (PSU), and the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI), the Friday Institute Program Evaluation and Education Research (PEER) Group will ensure evaluation efforts for the NC HTLA are: 1.Aligned to the program goals and priorities of the TIP leadership team; 2.Inclusive of legislative and funder-specified reporting requirements; and, 3.Responsive to the context and needs of North Carolina Public School Units. A secondary goal is to document design, development, and implementation efforts during the first year of the initiative using an ethnographic approach. Reporting of these efforts is intended to inform program stakeholders and external audiences of the progress made towards program objectives, design decisions and rationale, and successes and challenges experienced by program leadership and participants.

The Program Evaluation and Education Research (PEER) Group at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation will partner with the MPAACT project team to support their collection, analysis, and reporting of formative and summative evaluation data. Dr. Callie Edwards, Associate Director of the PEER Group, and a Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) will serve as evaluation staff. In Year 1 of the project, evaluation staff will convene quarterly with members of the project team to provide consultation and technical assistance on the design of evaluation instruments. In Years 2 and 3 of the project, evaluation staff support the execution of the corresponding evaluation questions.

The evaluation questions developed for this proposal are explicitly aligned with the strategic objectives of the NCEC. Collectively, the evaluation questions are intended to help NCEC better understand: Q1.How, and to what extent, does NCEC foster effective partnerships with schools to implement research-based programs that support teachers and help students thrive? Q2.How, and to what extent, does NCEC activate untapped talent by connecting Corps members to partner schools?????????????????? needs? Q3.How effectively does NCEC train corps members for high-impact tutoring, and how can training better meet the needs of corps members and partner schools? Q4.How effective are ongoing supports provided to corps members, and how can NCEC better support members in-service and in pursuit of public service careers? Q5.To what extent does NCEC implement high-impact interventions that improve early literacy and social-emotional outcomes for students? Q6.How can NCEC improve and grow program services to better serve public schools and children in need?

In this three-year project funded by the Oak Foundation, the Friday Institute will continue to offer its high quality professional learning experiences that focus on learning differences, social and emotional learning, and learner agency. It will build on these experiences in providing additional administrator supports and school-wide deep dives. It will also conduct research to discover evidence-based lessons learned for the field, and contribute to transferable knowledge that extends beyond the life of the grant. The FI will also sustain this high quality content by leveraging existing partnerships, developing new partnerships, and using open source technologies to support organizations in integrating and customizing the FI??????????????????s content to meet their unique needs and contexts.

COVID-19 compelled teachers and students to shift to digital teaching and learning promoting the use of educational technology. During the pandemic, North Carolina General Assembly utilized ESSER III State reserve funds to help districts and charter schools monitor student internet activity and help identify and protect young children from related threats such as violence, self-harm, and suicide; child pornography, online predators, and sexual content; cyberbullying or other forms of online abuse; and drug or alcohol abuse. While intuition is that such monitoring software can protect children from various types of attacks, a comprehensive evaluation is still lacking on their effectiveness and the tradeoff between the protection and the sacrifice of children???s privacy. This research study brings together researchers with expertise in educational technology, cybersecurity, school counseling, and program evaluation to examine the effectiveness and impact of the use of software applications to monitor student internet activity and the use of these devices to mitigate cyberbullying and suicide prevention through the following project objectives: ??? Examine what and how monitoring applications were implemented in North Carolina districts ??? Examine the impact of the implementation of the monitoring software applications to protect students from threats and harms ??? Examine the data collected by the software, its access, and data privacy protection ??? Examine the monitoring needs of North Carolina districts and charter schools ??? Provide policy recommendations at the State and local levels

The purpose of the teacher compensation models and advanced teaching roles program is to allow highly effective classroom teachers to teach an increased number of students by assuming accountability for additional students, either by becoming a lead classroom teacher accountable for the student performance of all of the students taught by teachers on that lead classroom teacher's team, or by leading a larger effort in the school to implement new instructional models to improve school-wide performance. In addition, the program enables local school administrative units to provide salary supplements to classroom teachers in advanced teaching roles to create innovative compensation models that focus on classroom teacher professional growth and student outcomes. The purpose of this evaluation is to assess the impact of the teacher compensation models and advanced teaching roles program on teaching and learning as described in North Carolina General Assembly Session Law 2020-78, Section 2.6(b). In addition, this evaluation includes a comparative analysis of program implementation in order to help identify and scale the most effective components of these programs. To provide a more complete understanding of the implementation and impact of these programs, the evaluation will use a mixed methods convergent design, in which different but complementary data are collected concurrently or sequentially. The evaluation will be conducted in several phases and will make use of secondary data collected by NCDPI to provide quantitative estimations of the program???s impact on select teaching and learning outcomes, as well as primary data collected directly from Public School Units in order to examine the similarities, differences, and patterns across program implementation.

To continue building our leadership capacity at the Friday Institute, the Learning Differences project team will enroll in the Center for Creative Leadership's "Lead 4 Success" training program. The proposed cost would cover the enrollment of all five members of the team and would build the team's distributed leadership capacity and further strengthen our culture.

The FI proposes to continue the in-depth work on Learning Differences and to build resources around Learner Agency and SEL by developing modules/courses and micro-credentials to support educators in building and deepening their understanding of these topics. Building capacity for Learning Differences, Learner Agency, and SEL and helping educators and administrators understand how they work together support district and schools in their transition to personalizing learning. The FI also seeks to continue to expand the vertical integration of the program beyond teachers, coaches, and students to include parents, administrators, and entire school buildings, as well as the refinement of tools that are integral to the program??????????????????s success. The proposed work will continue to engage current Oak Foundation partners and practitioners in the field. The FI seeks funding to address the following objectives in the next phase of Learning Differences work: 1. Sustain high impact programs from previous grants. 2. Develop new courses/modules, resources, tools, and micro-credentials to support educator, student, and parent needs. 3. Build capacity across schools with immersion of supports around Learning Differences through a continuous improvement approach. 4. Host convenings for and with the Oak Foundation. 5. Evaluate work for impact on teachers and students.

The Friday Institute proposes the formation of a research-practice partnership (RPP) with the Center for Applications of Psychological Type (CAPT) and A.B. Combs Leadership Magnet Elementary (Combs) to create a new model for application of the MMTIC (Myers Briggs Inventory for Children https://www.capt.org/) to improve instruction and student's social, emotional, and academic decision-making in public schools in Wake County, North Carolina. The RPP will engage in a collaborative and iterative process that capitalizes on the strengths of the practitioner partner (Combs) and the research partners (Friday Institute, CAPT) to develop a product (Best Practice Guide) that is both reflective of the goals, expertise, and needs of the practitioner and of the data collected via a research-based approach to information-gathering and analysis targeted to the key elements of the model.