Systematic Improvement Practices Review | Ohio Leadership Advisory Council

Acceleration
The practice of placing an academically talented student in a grade or class where the level and pace of instruction match up with his or her advanced level of performance and rapid learning rate. Includes practices such as grade-skipping, cross-grade placement for subject matter instruction, early entry to kindergarten, and early admission to college.

Accountability System
A plan that places student achievement scores in context by reporting additional data that shed light on the causes for variations in student achievement. A comprehensive accountability system systematically examines curriculum, teaching and leadership practices leading to the recognition of success, the recognition of error, and the continuous improvement of teaching and learning.

Action Steps
Specific steps to operationalize a strategy and achieve a goal.

Adaptive Leadership
A leadership framework that helps individuals and organizations adapt to challenging environments by distinguishing between decisions that can be made based on existing organizational knowledge (technical) and those that require completely new and creative responses that often involve bridging diverse interests and values (adaptive).

Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)
Adequate Yearly Progress is a measure defined by the United States federal No Child Left Behind Act that allows the U.S. Department of Education determine of how a school or school district is performing academically according to standardized test results.

Advance Organizer
A conceptual or representational overview that prepares students for material they will soon be encountering in a lesson by linking the new material to material with which they are already familiar.

Alternate Assessment
State assessment aligned to Ohio's Academic Content Standards-Extended, for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities who are either completing a curriculum that is modified substantially (in form and/or substance) by the IEP from the general education curriculum or completing the general education curriculum but have a disability that presents unique and significant challenges such that the IEP provides for accommodations that exceed the allowable criteria for statewide assessment accommodations.

Aspiration
A strong desire to achieve something: a fervent hope, wish, or goal; often the basis for helping individuals move beyond personal interests and parochial perspectives to find common ground.

Authentic Assessment
Assessment that simulates real- life learning experiences. It includes recording evidence of the learning process, applications of knowledge in products and performances. Portfolios, performance tasks, and oral presentations are types of authentic assessments.

Average Daily Membership (ADM)
Average Daily Membership is the membership of a school during a certain period divided by the number of days the school was actually in session during the same period.

Baseline Measure
A beginning measurement point that establishes a starting point for intended growth.

Big Ideas
Realizations, discoveries, or conclusions students reach on their own during or after instruction. These are lasting understandings that students will take with them after the course ends.

Black Box
This is what Black and Wiliam (1998) refer to as the actual classroom. It is the environment where the most educationally important variable (the teacher) operates. Educational policy makers have often looked at the educational inputs (time, money and other resources) in order to measure the impact of accountability through outputs (achievement scores).

Board of Education
Also referred to as a School Board. A board of elected or appointed individuals in charge of the governance and administration of local, city, exempted village, and joint vocational public schools; consists of three, five, seven, or nine members. Governance is the process, or power or act of making and administering policy; to have or exercise a determining influence.

Border Crossing
The process of navigating between the home or community culture and the mainstream culture.

Budgeting
A process consisting of identifying the needs of students, establishing goals to meet those needs, identifying strategies and programs to accomplish those goals, creating a budget to fund those strategies and programs and evaluating their effectiveness in meeting those goals.

Building Leadership Team (BLT)
A team of individuals who promote a culture of common expectations or commitment by maintaining a school-wide focus on improving student achievement. BLTs foster shared leadership and responsibility for the success of every child through the creation of purposeful communities.

Candidate
A student in a higher education program that leads to professional licensure.

Capacity Building
The process of providing opportunities such as job-embedded staff development, coaching, and time for reflection on effective instructional practices that enhance the ability of teachers and administrators to positively impact student learning.

Change Process
The process through which people and organizations move as they gradually come to understand and become skilled and competent in the use of new ways.

Change Theory
Using one or more accepted models to facilitate change.

Claimant
One that asserts a right by position rather than accepting a responsibility related to that position; specifically, one who demands some benefit (as the result of being a taxpayer, for instance) rather than accepting the responsibility that attends to citizenship or residence in a community.

Co-teaching
(also called "cooperative teaching") a staffing arrangement in which both a general education teacher and a special education teacher are placed together in the same general education classroom so that they work collaboratively to provide effective instruction to all students.

Collaboration
A systematic process in which people work together, interdependently, to analyze and impact professional practice in order to improve individual and collective results.

Collaborative Structures
In the OIP, designated as the interrelated system of District/ Community School Leadership Team, Building Leadership Teams and Teacher Based Teams.

Collective Inquiry
The process of building shared knowledge by clarifying the questions that a group then explores together.

Common Core
National academic standards in math and English/language arts adopted by nearly every state in the nation, including Ohio. With development led by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association (NGA), these standards are (1) research and evidence based, (2) aligned with college and work expectations, (3) rigorous, and (4) internationally benchmarked.

Common Formative Assessments
Teacher generated periodic or interim assessments that are collaboratively designed by teams for specific units of instruction. Created as short matching pre- and post- assessments to ensure same- assessment to same-assessment comparison of student growth, common formative assessments usually contain a blend of item types, including selected response and constructed response, representing power standards.

Common Language
Common language refers to the use of a shared and commonly understood vocabulary around instruction and achievement that fosters shared work and responsibility.

Community Engagement
(also public engagement and authentic engagement): A process that brings people together to address issues of common importance, to solve shared problems, and to bring about positive change; effective engagement invites school community members to get involved in deliberation, dialogue and action on issues of real significance to the school community.

Community School Leadership Team (CSLT)
A team of individuals from community school stakeholder groups who promote a culture of common expectations or commitment by maintaining a community school-wide focus on high achievement for all students.

Comprehensive Continuous Improvement Plan (CCIP)
A unified grants application and verification system that consists of two parts: the Planning Tool and the Funding Application. The Planning Tool contains the goals, strategies, action steps and district goal amounts for all grants in the CCIP. The Funding Application contains the budget, budget details, nonpublic services and other related pages.

Consensus
Consensus is achieved when (a) all points of view have been heard, (b) group members can paraphrase the issue, (c) those that disagree indicate publicly that they are willing to go along for an experimental try for a prescribed period of time, and (d) all share in the final decision.

Cooperative Teaching
(also called "co-teaching") a staffing arrangement in which both a general education teacher and a special education teacher are placed together in the same general education classroom so that they work collaboratively to provide effective instruction to all students.

Correlate
Something that shares mutual or complementary properties with something else.

Critical Friends
A technique by which the teachers on a team, such as a TBT, provide feedback to one another about instructional events or work together to solve common instructional problems.

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
A framework for providing instruction that is attentive to the cultures-including their values, norms, and practices-of the students in a particular classroom. This framework encourages respect for diversity and works to minimize the influence of damaging stereotypes.

Culture
The personality of an organization, consisting of the assumptions, values, norms and artifacts of member behaviors; the often unstated expectations that influence individual behavior in an organization: "the way we do things here."

Curriculum
In formal education, a curriculum is a set of courses, complete coursework, and/or the content of such courses, offered at a school. Crucial to any curriculum is the set of learning outcomes or objectives. In curriculum theory, there are several types of curriculum, including the written curriculum, taught curriculum, tested curriculum, and hidden curriculum.

Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM)
An approach to measurement that is used to screen students or to monitor student progress in mathematics, reading, writing, and spelling. With CBM, teachers and schools can assess individual responsiveness to instruction. When a student proves unresponsive to the instructional program, CBM signals the teacher/school to revise that program.

Data Teams
Data teams are small grade-level, department, course, or like-content teams that examine work generated from a common formative assessment [Source: McNulty & Besser (2011). Leaders make it happen: An administrator's guide to data teams.]

Decision Framework (DF)
A needs-assessment tool that is populated with student achievement and other district specific data. The DF includes essential questions to assist districts and schools in identifying and analyzing critical components for improving the academic performance of all students, including subgroup populations.

Decisional Capital
The professional capacities (knowledge, skills, and dispositions) that a school or district accesses as the basis for making wise decisions.

Deliberative Framing
Issues framed in ways that clarify a range of approaches to a problem, in ways that community members can readily understand and relate to; involves clarifying the range of positions surrounding an issue so that participants can better decide what they want to do, rather than defining an issue to one's advantage in the hopes of getting an audience to agree.

Dialogue
The word dialogue comes from the Greek dialogos. Dia means "through" and logos means, "the word." In this "meaning making through words," group members inquire into their own and others' beliefs, values, and mental models to better understand how things work in the world. In other words, its purpose is to explore meaning-to create mutual understanding, not necessarily to come to an agreement, a decision, or a solution. Dialogue is a balancing act-balancing speaking and listening, reflection and assertion, advocacy and inquiry.

Differentiated Instruction
Tailoring the curriculum, teaching environments and practices to create appropriately different learning experiences for students in order to meet each student's needs. To differentiate instruction is to recognize students' varying interests, readiness levels, and levels of responsiveness to the standard core curriculum and to plan responsively to address these individual differences.

Digital Natives
Learners who were born after the advent of the "digital age" (roughly the mid-1980s) and therefore feel comfortable with a range of ever-changing digital applications and media.

Discussion
The term discussion shares linguistic roots with words such as percussion, concussion, and discuss. Often it takes the form of serial sharing and serial advocacy. Group members attempt to reach decisions through a variety of voting or consensus techniques.

Distributed Leadership
Sometimes referred to as shared, democratic, collaborative or participative leadership. It is a model of leadership that empowers members of an organization at all levels to share in leadership that is focused on moving the organization toward change and improvement.

District Leadership Team (DLT)
A team of individuals from all district stakeholder groups who promote a culture of common expectations or commitment by maintaining a district-wide focus on high achievement for all students.

Educational Innovation
This is what Hattie (2009) refers to as a strategy or technique that has an effect on student achievement or learning.

Educational Inputs
Things that are put into the educational system with the intent to make an impact on the output.

Educational Leadership Constituents Council (ELCC)
An organization that sets building level and district level standards that influence higher education programs for the initial preparation and ongoing professional development of teachers, principals and superintendents.

Educational Outputs
That which is measured in order to determine return on investment of the educational inputs.

Effect Size
A descriptive statistic that is used in order to report on the strength of relationship between two variables. When the statistic is positive, it would indicate that as one variable increases, so does the other. Conversely, a negative effect size would result in an increase in one variable and a decrease in the other.

Efficacy
Knowing that one has the capacity to make a difference and being willing and able to do so.

Enrichment
The practice of building on the learning of academically talented students who have already mastered particular content.

Equity Audit
A series of questions that promote collective conversation on how a range of educational services are provided across separately funded and legislated disciplines. As a result service delivery can be examined to address the needs of all students.

Essential Leadership Practices
The six essential leadership areas for superintendents and district, building and teacher leadership teams to effectively improve instructional practice and student performance, as identified in Ohio's Leadership Development Framework.

Essential Questions
Questions that are derived by teachers from the "unwrapping" process and are open-ended, non-judgmental, provocative, intellectual, and concise. The ultimate goal is for the students to be able to answer the Essential Questions with big ideas expressed in their own words.

Evaluation
The practice that DLTs and BLTs engage in to critically examine and analyze monitoring data to assess the extent to which the plan implementation and processes produced the desired results.

Extended Standards
An extension of the core standards that are applicable to students with severe cognitive disabilities.

Facilitation
To facilitate means, "to make easier." A facilitator is one who conducts a meeting in which the purpose is dialogue, shared decision making, planning, or problem solving. The facilitator directs the processes used in the meeting, choreographs the energy with the group, and maintains a focus on one content and one process at a time.

Facilitator
One of two or more individuals who lead an engagement session and who provide feedback to each other on the overall process and on the progress of the various small groups in the session.

Feedback
In OIP monitoring, continuous data-based analysis provided to DLT/BLT/TBT on progress of plan indicators, team processing and progress, problems being faced, and efficiency of implementation. In OIP evaluation, data-based information that informs the refinement and/or design of future improvement efforts.

Fidelity
The degree to which a program or practice is implemented as intended.

Flexible Grouping
The use of a variety of student grouping arrangements in response to different instructional objectives and learners' needs.

Focused Action Plan
The goals, strategies, adult implementation and student performance indicators, action steps and tasks outlined by a district/community school or building based on data, designed to improve student performance and adult practices.

Formal Assessment
The collection of information or data about student learning that uses traditional testing, including standardized testing, or other procedures under tightly controlled conditions.

Formative Assessment
Assessment for learning; help the teacher and students make changes that will impact the results on a summative measure that comes later; takes place while learning still has a chance to "form." Formative Assessment may also be referred to as "Formative Instructional Practices".

Formative Instructional Practices (FIP)
The formal and informal ways that teachers and students gather and respond to evidence of learnin.

Goal
A broad statement that specifies a desired change 1) in student performance to close a gap, or 2) an improved opportunity or potential for improved learning; and identifies the end result to be achieved within a given timeframe.

Governance
The means and mechanisms an organization uses to ensure that its constituents follow established processes and polices, maintaining oversight and accountability and compliance with agreed policies.

Graphic Organizer
A visual support that represents content in a concise and easy-to-understand manner; graphic organizers can be used before a lesson (e.g., as an advance organizer), during a lesson (e.g., as a reminder of the steps in a process, or after a lesson (e.g., as a way to review the most important concepts in a lesson).

Ground Rules
A set of statements that describe how engagement participants will treat each other and each other's ideas during an engagement session, prepared in advance and presented to the participants in each session for discussion, modification and acceptance.

Guiding Coalition
Alarge enough initial core of believers in a change to, in turn, help bring others on board with the new ideas based on their sense of urgency, their sense of what's happening and a commitment that the proposed action is what's needed.

Human Capital
The capacities (knowledge, skills and dispositions) that an individual employee uses to contribute to the mission of an organization.

Implementation
The act of effectively and efficiently putting strategies, action steps and tasks into place for the purpose of achieving the goals outlined in the focused action plan.

Implementation Management and Monitoring (IMM) Tool
An electronic tool found in every district and building CCIP used to manage the district/building focused action plan; and monitor the plan's strategies, adult implementation indicators, student performance indicators, and action steps through projected and actual progress data. The IMM also generates various monitoring reports.

Indicator
There are two types of indicators: adult implementation and student performance indicators. Adult implementation indicators measure the fidelity of implementation of a specific research-based strategy. Student performance indicators measure the impact of specific research-based strategies on student learning.

Informal Assessment
Appraisal by casual observation, class discussion, teacher-student conference, or by other procedures that are not tightly controlled or do not mirror the administration of a standardized testing instrument.

Instructional Coherence
The degree to which a district has an agreed upon common instructional framework, the degree to which working conditions support the implementation of instructional framework, and the degree to which resources are allocated to support and advance the instructional framework.

Instructional Strategy
Any action, method, or technique a teacher uses to increase student cognition as related to a specific learning target or objective.

Integrated Comprehensive Services (ICS)
(ICS) delivery model is a model that organizes professional staff by the needs of each learner instead of clustering learners by label Staff members are not assigned to a unit or program and placed in separate classrooms. Instead, support staff and general education teachers work collaboratively to bring appropriate instructional supports to each child in integrated school and community environments.

Interdependence
The human need for reciprocity, belonging, and connectedness. The inclination is to become one with the larger system and community.

Internal Stakeholder
Internal stakeholders include those individuals or groups of individuals - such as students, teachers, paraprofessionals, support staff, administrators, and school board members - who work within and/or have responsibility for the administration of the school district.

Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC)
An organization that sets standards that influence higher education programs for the initial preparation and ongoing professional development of teachers, principals and superintendents.

Intervention
The actions and events that people take that are key to and influence the success of change processes.

Japanese Lesson Study
A form of collaborative professional development in which teams of teachers (e.g., TBTs) develop and evaluate the effectiveness of lesson plans that attempt to address particular instructional problems that one or more of the team's teachers have encountered.

Job-Embedded Professional Development
High-quality professional education that takes place either formally or informally as part of an educator's on-going work.

Macro Educational Innovation
An educational strategy that can be widely applied across many settings. For example, while Generating and Testing Hypothesis is an educational strategy, applying it in nearly all educational situations is a misapplication. Conversely, Feedback is an educational strategy that can likely be applied to nearly all educational situations. Its broad application makes it macro.

Mediate
To be the medium of bringing about a result. Literally it means "middle".

Meta-cognition
The information-processing strategy by which an individual acquires an understanding of his or her own methods of learning, monitors those methods, and intervenes in an effort to maximize their effectiveness.

Monetary Resources
All the sources of funding available to the school district including local tax dollars, state assistance, federal assistance, grants, gifts and any other revenues that can be used to support teaching and learning. Effective districts deliberately align monetary resources to support effective instruction and student achievement.

Monitoring
The practice that DLTs and BLTs use to supervise the focused action plan in progress to ensure the tasks, actions and strategies are on-course and on-schedule in meeting goals as measured by progress against indicators.

National School Boards Association (NSBA)
A federation of state school boards. Founded in 1940, though the Federation of State Associations; now represents 95,000 local school board members, most of whom are elected. These local officials govern 14,890 local school districts serving the nation' s more than 47 million public school students. NSBA policy is determined by a 150-member Delegate Assembly of local school board members. The 25-member Board of Directors translates this policy into action. Programs and services are administered by the NSBA executive director and a 140-person staff. NSBA's office is located in metropolitan Washington, DC.

Non-Linguistic Representations
Ways to illustrate or teach concepts (such as diagrams, manipulables, and pictures) that entail methods of communication other than spoken or written language.

Note-taking
A technique for identifying and jotting down the most important information in a lecture, discussion, or text.

Ohio 5-Step Process
An OIP protocol that can be used by all levels of collaborative/shared leadership teams that involves improving and monitoring adult practices based on effective and ongoing data analysis.

Ohio Department of Education (ODE)
Ohio's state agency governed by the State Board of Education, charged with developing and maintaining high standards and quality support for the state's educational system, from pre-kindergarten through adult education.

Ohio Improvement Process (OIP) - NEW
The Ohio Improvement Process is a research based improvement process that uses data driven decision making and collaborative structures at the district, building and teacher level to strengthen instructional practices in all classrooms.

Ohio Improvement Process Implementation Rubric (OIPIR)
An instrument intended for the DLT/CSLT to use to assess the level of implementation of OIP collaborative infrastructure, systems, protocols, and practices.

Ohio Leadership Advisory Council (OLAC)
A 50-member advisory and study group comprised of representatives from key professional associations, businesses, school boards, school districts and buildings, institutions of higher education and the Ohio State Department of Education. The group was co-sponsored and co-directed by the Ohio Department of Education and the Buckeye Association of School Administrators.

Ohio Leadership Development Framework
A report representing the work of the Ohio Leadership Advisory Council that identifies essential leadership practices needed by superintendents and leadership teams at the district and building level to improve instructional practice and student performance.

Ohio Principal Evaluation System (OPES)
Ohio's building principal evaluation system designed to foster the professional growth of principals in knowledge, skills and practice. In OPES, student growth measures (50%) combined with evaluation of principals' proficiency on the standards (50%) determine the level of principal effectiveness. Proficiency on the standards includes professional goal-setting, communication and professionalism, and skills and knowledge.

Ohio School Boards Association (OSBA)
A private, not for profit statewide organization of public school boards. Founded in 1955, OSBA's purpose is to encourage and advance public education through local citizen responsibility. Truly member driven; policies are determined by its members. Membership is open to all public school boards. OSBA's office is located in Columbus, Ohio.

Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES)
Ohio's teacher evaluation system which relies on two key evaluation components, each weighted at 50 percent: a rating of teacher performance (based on classroom observations and other factors), and a rating of student academic growth.

OIP Modules
A set of on-line learning training materials and tools designed to help educators become informed participants in the Ohio Improvement Process in their districts/community schools, buildings or classrooms.

OLAC
The Ohio Leadership Advisory Council (OLAC) is a group of education professionals representing districts, schools, higher education, professional associations, and state education agency representatives that developed Ohio's Leadership Development Framework. OLAC operates under the direction of the Buckeye Association of School Administrators, in cooperation with the Ohio Department of Education.

OLAC Modules
A set of on-line learning materials designed to help educators become informed participants in the school improvement work taking place in their districts.

Organizational Attributes
The overall and overarching organizational characterizes that define a school district and the way that it operates. Districts that are effective in improving classroom instruction and student achievement display the organizational attributes of an ongoing improvement process, highly intentional decision making, defined autonomy, and distributed leadership.

Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)
A multi-state online assessment system aligned to the Math and English/Language Arts Core Curriculum that Ohio students will be administered beginning in 2014-2015.

Peer Tutoring
An arrangement whereby one student teaches material to another; sometimes the students are in the same grade, but sometimes an older student tutors a younger one.

Performance Assessment
Requires students to accomplish complex and significant tasks, while bringing to bear their prior knowledge, recent learning, and relevant skills. Performance assessment is usually not "paper-and-pencil" assessment.

Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS)
A system that builds on positive behaviors in each school to establish a positive school culture, increase academic performance, improve safety and decrease problem behavior.

Poverty
Poverty is defined as an annual income below $23,492 for the average family of four-$1,958 a month, $452 a week, or $64 a day. Extreme poverty is an annual family income less than half of the poverty level-$11,746 a year, $979 a month, $226 a week, or $32 a day for the average family of four (Children's Defense Fund-Ohio, 2013).

Priming
A technique that a teacher can use to give one or more students a preview of the concept or learning activity that will soon to take place.

Professional Capital
The combination of human (individual), social (collective), and decisional (organizational) capacities that a school district deploys in its efforts to improve.

Professional Learning Communities
A professional learning community (PLC) fosters collaborative learning among colleagues and has six characteristics: shared mission, vision, and values; collective inquiry; collaborative teams; action oriented and experimentation; continuous improvement; and results orientation [Source: DuFour, DuFour, & Eaker. (1998). Professional learning communities at work].

Professional Learning Community
A term coined by Dr. Richard DuFour, is a group of teachers and other concerned stakeholders who collaborate by using their shared wisdom and expertise to improve the educational experience and achievement of the students in their charge. "Teacher-based teams" are an example of a Professional Learning Community.

Programmatic Resources
The specific programs adopted, implemented and evaluated by the district to support student achievement. Effective districts tend to adopt research based programs that match their students' needs.

Progress Measure
Short-term measurement point used to regularly assess the progress of intended change relative to the Baseline Measure.

Protocols
Protocols are a set of formal rules describing how to transmit data, especially across a network [Source: Computing Dictionary].

Race to the Top (RttT)
A federal reform initiative, focused on school improvement, in which the state of Ohio is participating.

Reciprocal Accountability
A principle whereby one entity in a system is responsible to another. This principle encourages organizations to build capacity for mutual support and to set high expectations for continued improvement.

Response to Intervention (RTI)
Integrates assessment and intervention within a multi-level prevention system to maximize student achievement and reduce behavior problems. With RTI, schools identify students at risk for poor learning outcomes, monitor student progress, provide evidence-based interventions and adjust the intensity and nature of those interventions depending on a student's responsiveness, and identify students with learning disabilities.

Rubrics
A rubric is anassessment tool for communicating expectations of quality or standards of performance, and for delineating and sharing consistent criteria for "grading."

Scaffolding
A process by which a teacher helps a struggling student learn a skill or concept by providing the student with supports that are gradually removed as he or she becomes better able to use the concept or perform the skill independently.

School Board Member
Elected or appointed person who is a part of a school board.

School District
A geographical district of public schools which is administered together by a superintendent and a school board.

School Improvement Plan (SIP)
A school-based document that identifies the schools' most pressing needs using state, district, and school data, identification of district SMART goals, supporting strategies and their corresponding impact indicators, allocated resources, identified role responsibilities and, a systematic process for monitoring (with appropriate adjustments based on data analysis) the implementation efforts.

Shared Leadership
It is a model of leadership that empowers members of an organization at all levels to share in leadership that is focused on moving the organization toward change and improvement.

Shared Leadership Structures
In this document, "Shared Leadership Structures" is referring to District Leadership Teams, Building Leadership Teams and Teacher-Based Teams.

SMART Goal
A clearly defined goal model used in OIP that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Rigorous, and Timely.

Social Capital
The capacities (knowledge, skills, and dispositions) that enable a group of educators to improve their collective performance and thereby to increase student learning.

Staff Resources
All of the staff utilized by the district including volunteers. Effective staff resource management consists of hiring the most qualified staff, providing well designed and meaningful professional development, providing instructional coaches and trainers, providing time for collaboration, assigning staff to meet the needs of students, and focusing administrative time on teaching and learning.

Stakeholders
Members of those groups in each community with a vested interest in high-quality education (e.g., students, parents, teachers, employers, community leaders).

Strategy
A key approach the district and buildings will implement; written as a specific, measurable statement about what is going to be accomplished to meet a need and get closer to reaching a goal within a given timeframe.

Student Performance Indicator
Gauge to determine if a strategy is met through specific student performance, and to measure the overall impact of the strategy on the designated student performance.

Study Guides
Study guides are instructional materials that help students identify the most important material from their readings and class notes; some study guides include questions that allow students to find the most important material on their own, but others point more explicitly to the content that the teacher believes is most important.

Summative Assessment
Assessment of learning; a final judgment; "sums up" and occurs after significant learning has taken place.

Superintendent
In education, a superintendent (also known as a chief school administrator in many states) is an individual that has executive oversight and administration rights, usually within an educational entity or organization. Is hired by and reports to the school board.

Table Leader
An individual selected and trained to provide leadership to one of several small groups in an engagement process, often around a small table; background is unimportant, but the individual must be familiar with the engagement process and committed and skilled in keeping the small group on task.

Tasks
A listing of activities that need to be taken for an action to be completed.

Teacher-Based Team (TBT)
Often referred to as data teams or professional learning communities, these teacher-based teams meet regularly; develop, administer and analyze the results of common formative assessments; and adjust instruction to meet the learning needs of their students.

Time Resources
The time available for student instruction during the regular school day, outside the regular school day, and outside the regular school year and how that time is managed, allocated and structured for student learning i.e. class size reduction, small group instruction, individual tutoring, scheduling strategies, etc.

Transfer Assurance Guide (TAG) Courses
Discipline-specific core courses that are guaranteed to be transferable among Ohio’s higher education institutions.

Transparency
The concept that emerging networked data sources have made all significant organizational information available to all constituents and that trust for an organization is built on the organization's openness and willingness to share real information, not just information carefully sanitized to support an organization's positions.

Tutoring
The process of providing one-on-one instruction.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
An educational framework designed to make learning materials and instructional events accessible to students with a variety of abilities, challenges, and learning styles.

Unwrapping
An analysis process in which the most important nouns and verbs in standards are teased out. These nouns and verbs represent the most important content and skills that students are to learn.

Vision
A school district's desirable state and strategic planning for the future, which includes making decisions on allocating resources, capital, and people.

Overview