NNPS offers members customized professional development workshops, including basic training for districts and for schools to start their programs, and advanced topics for NNPS members who are ready to tackle tough challenges to involve all families in their locations.

The on-site workshops prepare leaders to plan their work and to facilitate schools’ partnership programs. The workshops also guide schools’ Action Teams for Partnerships to organize and strengthen their programs.

NNPS Workshop topics include:

• NNPS One-Day Workshop for schools’ Action Teams for Partnerships
• Special sessions for district, organization, and state leaders
• Advanced topics such as improving family and community involvement to involve fathers and multicultural families in ways that support student learning in reading, math, and other subjects

More information on the Workshops on the Road Brochure.

Arrangements for Workshops on the Road are made with NNPS Facilitators, on a mutually-satisfactory schedule and on a first-come, first-served basis.

NNPS offers three evaluation services to help district and state leaders connect measures of the quality of partnership programs with school improvement goals and students’ educational outcomes.

1. Use NNPS resources and data to identify program strengths and weaknesses.

(a) Schedule training in the use of NNPS evaluation tools and resulting data in your location.

(b) Request NNPS to prepare a detailed one-year or multi-year summary of school UPDATE data from your location.These services will help members make better use of NNPS evaluation tools and apply the results of these evaluations in their own locations.

2. Combine NNPS resources and locally-collected data.

(a) Use NNPS surveys to collect parent, teacher, and/or student perceptions of school partnership programs, and request data analyses and a customized report of your survey results.Leaders in some schools and districts want to conduct surveys of parents, teachers, and/or students to learn their attitudes about partnership experiences and ideas for improving family and community involvement programs.  NNPS’s surveys may be used  for these purposes.  NNPS evaluators can, under contract, conduct the surveys, analyze the data, and provide a report.

(b) Plan with NNPS and your district’s evaluation office to connect schools’ UPDATE data to longitudinal student achievement, attendance, or other data to learn if the quality of partnership programs contributes to student outcomes.This service will help members connect their own achievement test score data to the scales and measures that NNPS collects each year.

This will enable districts with a sizable number of schools in NNPS to address the question: Does the quality of our schools’ partnership programs contribute, independently, to changes in student achievement test scores at the school level, after accounting for the prior year’s test scores?

3. Add measures of partnerships to your comprehensive data system.

Learn to add measures of the quality of schools’ partnership programs to your state’s or district’s general data/accountability system.  Evaluate all schools (whether they are members of NNPS or not) and integrate measures of family and community involvement in your assessments of schools and in reports to parents and the public.

For more information on the nature and costs of these services, or to arrange workshops, leadership training, or contracts to conduct evaluations or to analyze and report NNPS data from your schools, contact Dr. Steve Sheldon, NNPS Director of Research, at ssheldon@jhu.edu or 410-516-5489.

Other professional development training workshops and presentations can be arranged. Call an NNPS Facilitator or Researcher to discuss the topics on school, family, and community partnerships that will help improve your program.