Evidence Use Spotlight: Jimmy Leak
"The best partnerships involve co-creating research questions, tossing ideas back and forth, getting advice outside of the project, and building trust."
What is your job title? Director of Accountability, Research, and Evaluation
What is the organization you work for? Guilford County Schools
Tell us about a policy or practice that was informed by research.
Guilford County Schools invested heavily in tutoring, and became involved with the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) in 2021-22. Partnering with NSSA gave Guilford an opportunity to learn more from other programs as they were implementing their own tutoring models. For example, districts often struggle to schedule and adhere to regular 30-minute tutoring sessions. NSSA research demonstrated that short bursts of 1:1 instruction by trained staff, paired with independent practice aligned with the 1:1 instruction helped kindergarten students reach their target reading stage.
NSSA and other researchers highlighted the importance of getting dosage right, and district leaders realized they needed to track dosage to show school administrators and teachers how often students were actually receiving tutoring services. In response to the evidence, Guilford implemented a new color-coded system for tracking dosage and alerting school-level staff to specific student needs. Additionally, Guilford learned to overschedule tutoring sessions to achieve adequate dosage. For example, to achieve a target dosage of three times a week, some schools schedule tutoring for 4-5 times a week. Overscheduling is necessary to account for the variety of disruptions throughout the school year, such as field days and weather-related school closures.
In addition to early grade reading, Guilford has been focusing on middle school math. Quick-turnaround research with partners from the Road to COVID Recovery has enabled Guilford to learn along the way. Dr. Ayesha Hashim led qualitative work, including a study that illuminated how researchers and Guilford leaders engaged with evidence to improve and evaluate programs, and how interventions are being implemented by teachers, tutors, and district staff. In addition, we’re working with Dr. Jing Liu from the University of Maryland and colleagues from Harvard and Stanford on M-Powering Teachers, which uses natural language processing to provide teachers with automated feedback on recorded lessons.
What types of structures do you have in place when you work with researchers?
I’m a follower of the National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP) and serve as a broker between researchers and leaders at the school and district level, particularly the math and literacy departments in the district. Guilford is not part of a research-practice consortium like Chicago, but we do have a lot of research partnerships. Once we started to build partnerships, researchers started approaching us. Guilford assesses research partnership requests based on whether the project aligns with districts’ strategic priorities. The best partnerships involve co-creating research questions, tossing ideas back and forth, getting advice outside of the project, and building trust. It’s not just we give you data and you publish a paper in three years; researchers are expected to translate findings for policy / practice audiences. In exchange, we support the researchers with letters of support for grant applications and can help if they’re having trouble recruiting study participants or have questions about the local context.
What resources are valuable to you and your work?
AEFP’s Live Handbook is a great resource. In tutoring, NSSA has a big repository of tutoring studies. If our research partners have expertise in a certain area we’ll go to them for resources. Even if they don’t have expertise, they might know someone who does. I’ve been lucky to go to conferences and learn from other districts. The Council of the Great City Schools has a listserv for research directors, where you can ask questions about issues like Early Warning Systems and people with experience implementing them respond. The Policymaker & Practitioner Community Group at AEFP is another resource for learning about how other districts are using evidence.
From your perspective, what do you wish we knew more about as a field?
We have some information about the influence of coaching, but I’d like to know more. Tutors and teachers receive training and it would be helpful to know what impact coaching has on instructional practices. We’re working with the Research Partnership for Professional Learning (RPPL) on a secondary math coaching project to better understand how coaching influences teaching practice and the role of school leaders in the coaching process.
What advice do you have for researchers who want their work to benefit educational agencies?
Three key things: include information about implementation, share preliminary findings, and present findings in a digestible format. To improve the chances of an intervention having a positive impact, district leaders need information on the quality of implementation, not just on long-term academic outcomes. Researchers have to be comfortable with sharing findings before they have a final paper, since district leaders often have to make decisions based on preliminary findings given when contracts are renewed and budgets finalized. Regarding format, researchers’ deliverables to Guilford tend to be PowerPoints that summarize findings with clear takeaways and policy recommendations in plain language, rather than 20-page reports.