For more than 50 years, the RELs have collaborated with school districts, state departments of education, and other education stakeholders to help them generate and use evidence and improve student outcomes. Read more
Home REL Pacific About REL Pacific Hawaii Hui for All to Benefit from Hawaiian Education
Contributing to the national conversation around equity and the need to support each student to meet their full potential, this partnership seeks to promote ‘āina-based, place-based, and project-based learning by grounding instruction and assessment in shared ways of being, knowing, and doing to respond to the needs of Hawai‘i students and their families.
Through a networked improvement community (NIC), REL Pacific, partnership members, and project members from schools across the state are exploring high-quality performance assessments and instructional practices to refine a model that other Hawai‘i schools may implement within their own local contexts, with an overarching goal of positively affecting school performance and accountability policy for Hawai‘i schools.
Core partnership organizations: REL Pacific, Kamehameha Schools, Hawai‘i Public Charter School Network, Ho‘okāko‘o Corporation, Hawaiian-focused charter schools (HFCS indicated below).
Cohort of charter schools in the action-research NIC project: Kamaile Academy [HFCS], Kanuikapono Public Charter School [HFCS], Ke Kula ‘o Samuel M. Kamakau [HFCS], Mālama Honua Charter School [HFCS], the School for Examining Essential Questions of Sustainability (SEEQS) Public Charter School.
Cohort of charter schools in performance assessment development (SY2022/23): Connections Public Charter School, Hawai‘i Academy of Arts and Science, Kihei Charter School, and Waimea Middle Public Conversion School.
Cohort of charter schools in performance assessment development project (2023–2024): Kāne‘ohe Elementary School, Mokapu Elementary School, and Waiāhole Elementary School.
REL Pacific team: McREL International, National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, Pacific American Foundation, Seneca Consulting, and Ng-Osorio Consulting.
This coaching project is supporting the Hui schools to collaboratively engage in Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) inquiry cycles to test and refine the networked improvement community’s common working theory of improvement. Coaching topics include the identification of what to measure; reviewing existing instruments; planning data collection routines and building school-level data teams, processes, and structures; evaluating and refining practical measures; and planning for data discussions.
In this training and coaching project, REL Pacific worked with a cohort of Hawaiʻi charter school leaders and educators to establish and conduct a networked improvement community (NIC) exploring best practices for place-based, project-based, and ‘āina-based instruction and assessment. With REL Pacific facilitation support and resources informed by research, the cohort began establishing their NIC processes, components, goals, monitoring measures, and identifying common design elements and implementation practices that support high-quality place-based, project-based, and culturally sustaining learning. The cohort of five schools completed four training and coaching sessions between July 2022 and February 2023.
This project supported capacity building for Hawai‘i school administrators and teachers as they designed performance assessments that measure standards-aligned student learning outcomes in place-based and project-based tasks. The project is centered on the use of high-quality, curriculum-embedded common performance assessments because of the potential to positively influence teaching and learning. The cohort of educators from four schools completed 10 modules and attended monthly coaching sessions between October 2022 and May 2023.
REL Pacific Logic Model (File pending)