Project Details

Agency name : Texas Education Association

Agency Type : State Agencies

Services : Technical Assistance and Technology Solutions

Client Goals

The TEA needed support to provide statewide technical assistance, resources, and coaching with the goal of ensuring successful implementation of TEA’s College and Career Ready Secondary School Models. And to provide support for conducting a coordinated ECHS/T-STEM approach for providing each of the five key areas: Technical Assistance and Support, Leadership Coaching, Communications Network, Formative/summative Feedback, TEA Designation Assistance.

Safal Approach

Safal is engaged to provide technical assistance and technology solutions to four innovative high school models in Texas, as part of the College and Career Readiness School Models (CCR School Models) program at the TEA. The four models are: Early College High Schools (ECHS), T-STEM schools, Industry Cluster Innovative Academies (ICIA), and P-TECH schools. Safal first partnered with Educate Texas to provide technical assistance to ICIA schools in August 2017. Starting in September 2017, Safal became the technology partner on Educate Texas’ contract to support ECHS and TSTEM coaching and TA. Safal built a website, developed a community of practice (CoP), and built a custom Drupal coaching portal. The coaching application proved to be a great success in streamlining the coaching process and improving efficiency. Coaches used to complete coaching reports on Excel sheets, which were then hand-read and entered into consolidation spreadsheets. We now allow Educate Texas supervisors and coaches to quickly see metrics across coaching effectiveness, coach accountability, and school performance. The tool had multiple user-types, and we were able to facilitate not only the coach reporting but also allow over 300 school users to access the site and complete their own self-assessments.