The Collaboration and Community Outreach (CCO) Division advances the most basic value of the Center’s mission – “to deepen our understanding of boys’ and girls’ development” – through involvement in a variety of school and youth organization contexts outside the member school collaborative. The Division consists of research, consultative, and outreach initiatives intended to extend the scope and knowledge base of the Center while allowing our primary commitment - serving member schools and refining our model - to remain in sharp focus.
Public School Partnership Projects
Since 2008 CSBGL has partnered with The Young Women’s Leadership School at Rhodes on two participatory action research (PAR) projects and began a research collaboration with Bethune Elementary School in 2009. Both of these public schools are located in North Philadelphia and serve low-income communities. The schools are also both managed by Victory Schools, an educational management organization.
At TYWLS at Rhodes, we are which students stay at the school up until graduation and which students transfer to another school or drop out by collecting archival, survey, and student focus group data. School teams are also looking at state achievement test scores from middle and high school to help paint a better picture of why student achievement fluctuates over time. By using a combination of qualitative and quantitative measures and including both test and archival data as well as student voices through surveys and focus groups, we are beginning to form a much richer understanding of who the student population is, their reasons for staying at or leaving the school, and how the school can best serve them.
The in-school research team at TYWLS also decided to focus on student and teacher leadership within the school. At the end of the 2008/2009 school year the PAR team conducted a professional development session with the entire faculty as a way to give teachers time and space to discuss what leadership means for students and how it can be nurtured by the school. A teacher from the team drew on this data as she organized a leadership speaker series for students and another teacher has worked on a series of leadership professional development sessions for teachers. The PAR team will continue this project by supporting teachers as they create additional leadership opportunities for themselves and their students.
At Bethune Elementary the team decided to begin by broadly focusing on student behavior, with a particular interest in student anger. In-school researchers have been using a behavior log sheet that was developed collaboratively to track student behavior and replace general and anecdotal impressions of behavior with systematically collected data. After formulating an action plan from the data the team will continue to meet and engage in the cycle of action research: instituting action, assessing the effects of that action, and collecting more data and altering the action steps as needed.
Research across the work of CSBGL
CSBGL members also conduct meta-research on the Center’s model broadly, including the recently published article “Building Research Collaboratives Among Schools and Universities: Lessons From the Field, written by the Center’s directors and published last year in the Journal of Mind, Brain and Education. A new article on the ethics of PAR research and university/school partnerships is currently under review for publication. Additional meta-research on the new partnerships with public schools is currently in the data-collection phase and we hope to publish and present on our findings in 2011.
Partnerships and Collaborations with Other Organizations
In addition to bringing the PAR model to public schools, the CCO division maintains relationships and partnerships with other organizations. We continue to work with the National Conference of Single Sex Public Schools (www.ncssps.org). Michael Reichert and Sharon Ravitch took part in panels about boys’ and girls’ education at the 2008 NCSSPS conference and Michael Reichert presented his research findings on teaching boys at the 2009 conference.
We are also continuing to partner with other national and international school organizations, such as the International Boys’ Schools Coalition and the National Girls’ Schools Coalition to conduct research on boys and girls schooling.