MCIEA is excited to be offering a series of mini-grants for the 2020/2021 school year. Teachers recently face a whole new series of hurdles - time, money, and energy are scarce. MCIEA seeks to support consortium educators to pursue their goals and further the MCIEA mission while overcoming these challenges. Through these new mini-grants, teachers have the opportunity to focus on the work that is most important to them while helping to transform student assessment in Massachusetts.
MCIEA is awarding grants of up to $5,000 to consortium educators interested in dedicating time to performance assessment design, school quality measures, or for receiving coaching around equity and classroom transformation. Each mini-grant goes toward stipends, hiring substitute teachers, purchasing materials, and more.
MCIEA is awarding grants of up to $5,000 to consortium educators interested in dedicating time to performance assessment design, school quality measures, or for receiving coaching around equity and classroom transformation. Each mini-grant goes toward stipends, hiring substitute teachers, purchasing materials, and more.
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How do I get started?
Applications for the the 2020/21 school year are now closed. Please look out for our next RFP this coming fall.
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Take A Look at This Year's Mini-Grants
Using foundational experience with MCIEA to meet needs
Mini-grants are presenting opportunities for schools and districts to deepen work and spread QPAs within schools, using educators with previous experience with MCIEA/QPA to lead the work.
Attleboro: Two projects (one at Attleboro HS and one across the three middle schools) are being led by educators who have participated in MCIEA Institutes and received QPA coaching. Boston: The Grew Elementary School was a MCIEA Cohort 2 school and their mini-grant project is being led by teacher leaders who went through MCIEA institutes and QPA coaching. The Grew will be using context-specific SQM surveys as a pre- and post- measure of their revised QPAs. Milford: Woodland Elementary was a Cohort 4 school and is using a mini-grant to build out Math QPAs led by a team of teachers that went through the QPA process. A QPA coach provided a “QPA 101” session for new teachers, but the project is led by the teacher leaders. |
Explicit focus on equity and social justice
Several districts and schools are using the mini-grant projects to explicitly take on equity and social justice-seeking work.
Boston: Orchard Gardens is creating a math-based social justice QPA focusing on nutrition, food desserts, and racism in Boston. Additionally, ODA is leading a district-wide project seeking to understand how QPAs can lead to a more anti-racist assessment system. Lowell: Butler MS is using SQM survey to help design equity-seeking PD opportunities. Milford: Stacy MS is developing an interdisciplinary unit and QPA addressing social justice, race, and equity. Revere: Paul Revere Innovation School is using SQM data to better understand how teachers are understanding and incorporating professional development focused on dismantling racial bias. |
Integrating QPA and SQM
Projects are using QPA and SQM together to inform practice and build something new.
Boston: The project at the Grew involves both QPA and SQM, with the school team working with the SQM coach to adapt SQM questions for elementary school grades and implementing a pre- and post-survey. The team will then use the SQM data to inform the design and revision of QPAs. Lowell: A QPA and SQM coach are working with a team at Lincoln Elementary School, using the SRI-Atlas protocol to analyze SQM data. The results of this analysis will then be used to inform QPA design and revision. |
Collaboration
The mini-grants are enabling further collaboration at several levels.
Within school collaboration: several projects are building interdisciplinary teams to design new QPAs (e.g. Attleboro HS, Grew Elementary in Boston, and Stacy MS in Milford) Within district collaboration: Several projects include teachers collaborating across schools in the same district (e.g. Attleboro middle schools, Boston has teams working across schools and grades to develop QPAs) Cross-district: A few projects are focused on middle school Civics/Social Studies enabling MCIEA coaches to build cross-district teams of teachers to provide examples and feedback on work. |
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