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College and Career Readiness

April Regional College Readiness Workshops

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, in partnership with the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, is pleased to sponsor four regional workshops designed to improve college readiness and high school-college alignment.

Regional partners for these workshops include: The CONNECT Partnership, The Colleges of Worcester Consortium, The University of Massachusetts/Lowell, The Five College Public School Partnership, The Boston Regional Partnership, and The Berkshire Compact for Higher Education.

About the Regional College and Career Readiness Workshops

The workshops have been designed to help support existing effective school-college partnerships or foster new ones. Dr. David Conley and his staff at the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) at the University of Oregon have been selected to conduct the workshops and will provide specific strategies to increase college readiness and alignment between high school and college. Dr. Conley is nationally recognized for his work on college readiness, including the book, College Knowledge: What It Really Takes for Students to Succeed and What We Can Do to Get Them Ready.

During the daylong workshops in April teams will meet to create or refine high school-college alignment action plans. The staff from EPIC will review the action plans and provide technical support to the teams during the spring and summer of 2008. Support will be in the form of planning assistance for continued partnering, materials support for alignment and college readiness protocols, syllabus analysis, technical support for senior seminars and linked high school-college courses. Funded by an Advanced Placement Incentive Program grant from the United States Department of Education, both the April sessions and the technical support will be will be provided to participants at no charge.

Please refer to the Attachment that accompanies this memo for more information about the techniques that Dr. Conley will present. His monograph, Toward a More Comprehensive Conception of College Readiness, commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and additional information about his research and the services provided by EPIC may be found at the EPIC website: http://www.epiconline.org/.

Regional Workshop Dates and Locations

Regional workshops will be held from 9 am to 3 pm at the following locations and dates:

Regional College Readiness Workshop Registration

High school principals are encouraged to send a team to the workshop in their region of the state. The team may include three to four members, such as the district curriculum coordinator, a high school principal, high school English and/or mathematics department chairs, or high school guidance director. The Board of Higher Education will recruit college and university faculty from each region to participate.

The deadline for registration is March 14, 2008. Because space is limited, you are encouraged to register your team as soon as possible.

The links for registration to each of the sessions are listed below.

If you have questions about the workshops, please contact Richard Salus at 781-338-6252 or rsalus@doe.mass.edu.