The purpose of the Promising Practices Project is defined as an opportunity to describe educational practices that have worked well at some SPPS schools and to disseminate the results to educators throughout the Saint Paul Public Schools who are encouraged to:

1.      reflect on the student groups whose rate of progress causes concern for the stakeholders at your school;

2.      compare the strong progress of SPPS students at specific grade levels and/or in specific disaggregated subgroups of students included within this report to the progress demonstrated by the students in the same grade levels or subgroups at your school;

3.      review the findings of promising practices;

4.      consider how students at your schools might benefit from a similar implementation of the described practices;

5.      determine whether to include particular practices within your own, continuous efforts to increase student achievement, and

6.      describe your planned implementation of one or more promising practices within your School Continuous Improvement Plan (SCIP).

Readers have multiple ways to access the information contained within the Promising Practices Project Report.  You can:

Ø     refer to the section of this website titled "Schools Making High Growth - by Subject, Grade Level & NCLB Subgroup" to identify Promising Practices Schools at which particular groups of students demonstrated high rates of progress and then read the brief case studies for those schools;

Ø     use the "School Comparison Measures" section to identify Promising Practices Schools that are similar to your school in terms of: magnet or neighborhood designation, rates of mobility, rates of stability, rates of poverty, ELL, and overall student enrollment;

Ø     read the Ten Strategies section and then search for more specific information within the individual school case studies;

Ø     read several of the brief case studies describing aspects of schools you are interested in looking at and then use earlier sections of this report to further analyze the information and/or consider the “big pictures” described within the Ten Strategies section;

Ø     or use another strategy of your own design to dig further into “what works” – the promising practices within Saint Paul.