Educator

Educator Information

When you teach, you're in a position to have the greatest impact on student success.

While curriculum, class size, facilities, and time-on-task all effect student outcomes, studies have shown the teacher effect--the portion of achievement attributed to skillful classroom instruction--overwhelms every other factor. As a teacher, you have the opportunity to inspire, challenge, and support student learning every day.

Pathways

Over the last several years, we've learned that students who are on a pathway--who have some sort of college and career goal in mind--do better in all their subjects. In fact, helping students get onto a pathway is one of the three S4C strategies, with initiatives that include the Samper 4th Grade Experience, the Summer Youth Institute for middle schoolers, College and Career Night for high school students, and age-appropriate assessment tools you can use to help your students explore their options.

Alignment

We also know that transitions between schools can be especially challenging, as students adapt to new formats and requirements when moving from elementary to middle school, middle to high school, and high school to college. Our second strategy is to align the efforts of the educational institutions in the county, around student success. S4C facilitates a range of collaboratives--groups of educators from across systems, with a common interest--to facilitate this alignment. The current collaboratives include groups focused on math, English, CTE, and counseling.

Measurement

In an effort to measure broad short and long-term outcomes S4C collects data, such as pre- and post-college visit surveys and professional development evaluations and reflections from participating teachers. In addition S4C monitors several countywide data points regarding math achievement, A-G completion, FAFSA completion, GPAs, and numbers of students enrolling in a 4th year of college-prep mathematics.

S4C is also facilitating a longitudinal view of student success in the county by partnering with National Student Clearinghouse to follow students’ educational progress after high school. The goal is to support the third S4C strategy: measure our efforts, for continuous improvement. View S4C Strategies for more information.