InPractice: Lessons for and from Practitioners

High-dosage tutoring (HDT)—or three tutoring sessions of 30 minutes or more a week—is an effective way to improve academic outcomes for K-12 students. Ellen Kim, program manager of Chicago Public Schools’ Tutor Corps, speaks about the successes and challenges of developing an HDT program.

This blog post describes eight processes and cultural shifts that the NYC Human Resources Administration and the Santa Cruz Human Services Department implemented to encourage innovation among staff members in response to the COVID-19 pandemic—and how each of the processes came to life.

As part of the Building Evidence on Employment Strategies project, researchers conducted virtual interviews with staff members at 10 workforce programs to learn how they used technology to adapt their services during the COVID-19 pandemic. This blog post examines five adaptations they made.

The Houston Housing Authority (HHA) joined an MDRC-led research project called MyGoals for Employment Success, an innovative employment coaching intervention informed by behavioral psychology. This blog post describes the experiences of HHA staff members and the MDRC team and how they used participatory research methods to inform decision-making. 

There is limited evidence on how best to implement high quality early care and education curricula and professional development that is aligned with the diverse backgrounds of children in pre-K settings. An MDRC research team led a project to learn more about how that might be accomplished.

Many program managers are integrating self-care into their management strategies to address work-related stress. This post offers two group activities that managers can use to boost staff morale and promote well-being: wellness communities and monthly staff celebrations.

An increased focus on staff well-being has been an unexpected benefit of the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. MDRC has helped program managers use a variety of tools to support their workers, including self-care plans that individuals can use to assess and address the stress of their jobs.

This blog post looks at how community colleges participating in MDRC’s Scaling Up College Completion Efforts for Student Success (SUCCESS) project use data-driven program management to keep tabs on key performance measures in real time and then act when those measures aren’t moving in the right direction.

Homeboy Industries’ (HBI) experience implementing a new data system was described in an earlier InPractice post. This post examines the complexities and challenges that must be addressed before successful implementation can take place, and how HBI managed that change process.

How does your organization keep track of its progress toward meeting key performance benchmarks? In this edition of InPractice, we share a few tips on how to use staff meetings to make sure your team is staying on-target.