Individual schools: Chicago Schools Alliance
The Alliance is a membership network of diverse Chicago public schools—charter, contract, autonomous small
schools, regular public schools—including elementary, middle and high schools.
The Alliance is a community of practice that:
- Strengthens effective, innovative practices in each member school.
- Builds collaboration and mutual support among the schools.
- Promotes proven educational practices that can be adopted across the city.
- Joins together to advocate in positive ways for district policies that support their proven innovative
practices.
The Chicago Schools Alliance is a membership partnership of some of these new schools, who have joined together
to build and sustain their excellence as institutions of learning. The Alliance is organized by Business and
Professional People for the Public Interest (BPI) and Illinois Network of Charter Schools (INCS).
The Alliance provides Practice-Based Inquiry visits of each school to its members. The Alliance sees Catalpa's
focus on "Bringing professional practice into focus" as making a direct contribution to its purpose of building an
effective community of practice.
The majority of all Alliance Practice-Based Inquiry Visit teams are drawn from the faculty and leaders of other
member schools. The straight forward, direct reports about how well each school is doing in providing good learning
and teaching are usually copyrighted by each visited school.
By March 2006, Catalpa had designed and conducted visits to four member schools. The visited schools have found
the reports demanding, but unusually helpful. In spring 2006, Catalpa will carry out visits to at least one additional
school.
The Alliance and Catalpa are exploring ways to strengthen the Alliance's capacity to conduct school visits. The first
step is to train Chicago teachers so they can be certified as Practice-Based Inquiry chairs. Further, the Alliance is providing staff support to the pilot "in-school visit" at Perspectives with
the purpose of developing solid "self-study" approaches using Practice-Based Inquiry. (See Perspectives, below)
The responses of both team members and the visited Alliance schools to the visits have been thoughtful and
extremely positive. See Sidebar and Resource Documents.
Perspectives: Practice-Based Inquiry® and school self-study
Perspectives, a member school of the Chicago Schools Alliance, hosted an Alliance Practice-Based Inquiry visit in
2005. The school found that the visit team's findings were powerful and useful as input in its ongoing school
planning.
In 2006, Perspectives asked Catalpa to design and conduct an internal inquiry process that would serve both the
objectives of both professional development and school planning. See News for more detail.
Resources: Documents
Chicago Schools Alliance. School Visits: A Tool for Improvement. January 2006. Download
Chicago Schools Alliance. PBI School Visit Team Member Reflections--2005. May 2005. Download
For more information:
Contact:
Kim Zalent, Director, Public Education Initiative
Business and Professional People in the Public Interest
Email: kzalent@bpichicago.org
312-759-8258
Web site: http://www.bpichicago.org/pe/public_ed.html
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