REL Southwest is providing coaching to Arkansas Department of Education staff on strategies to evaluate the agency’s THRIVE Leader Academy initiative, which trains Arkansas school leaders to support students’ positive behavior and mental health. The coaching is helping agency staff develop a logic model, explore analytic approaches for evaluating the program’s implementation and impact, and consider priorities for targeting recruitment and admissions to districts that are most in need of the program and representative of the demographic and geographic characteristics of the state.

As part of the Arkansas Initiative for Instructional Materials (AIIM), Arkansas educators receive high-quality professional learning (HQPL) to help ensure all students in the state have equitable access to high-quality instructional materials (HQIM), grade-level instruction, and responsive practices leading to opportunities to reach college, career, and life goals. Through a series of virtual coaching sessions, REL Southwest is building the capacity of Arkansas Department of Education staff to develop a survey to track how well districts are integrating HQIM and to develop a plan for administering the survey annually to conduct a formative evaluation of AIIM. Coaching topics will include best practices in formative evaluation, how to design a survey to collect data on the implementation of HQPL and HQIM, and how to use data for program improvement.