EARLY WARNING SYSTEMS (EWS)
EARLY ADOPTERS LEARNING & SHARING SUMMIT
NOVEMBER 5-6, 2013
GEORGE W. BUSH PRESIDENTIAL CENTER
2943 SMU BOULEVARD
Dallas, Texas
Guiding and Small Group Discussion Questions for Early Warning Systems Summit
Session 1: Enhancing and Advancing Early Warning Indicators – Tuesday Afternoon
Overall Guiding Question:
How can we make early warning or predictive indicators of student success more useful to practitioners and
more impactful on student progress?
Small Group Discussion Questions:
Early warning indicators or predictive indicators of student progress have the potential to improve core
educational outcomes – school readiness at all levels, academic and social/emotional proficiency, high school
graduation, preparation for adult success in college and career – in at least three ways at multiple levels,
including state, district, school, classroom, and individual.
o
First, they can identify the positive and negative factors exhibited by students who do and who don’t
currently succeed.
o
Second, they can help shape prevention activities – what we need to do to – individuals, groups of
students and grade- or school-wide -- for whom, when, and where – to keep all students on track to
reaching core educational outcomes.
o
Third, they can help get the right intervention to the right students at the right time at the scale and
intensity required to help students who are signaling that without effective intervention their odds of
succeeding are low.
To achieve these ends, educational practitioners need to become strong diagnosticians. Good diagnoses in
turn are dependent on good and actionable data.
EWS Summit: Guiding and Small Group Discussion Questions
Based on your experience with, and knowledge of, early warning indicators, discuss the following questions
with your tablemates:
o
What more do we need to know about our students to help them succeed? What additional data, if
any, beyond the core indicators of attendance, behavior, and course passing/credit accrual/academic
performance, help with:

Diagnosing which students need prevention and intervention supports, what those supports
should be, and how they can build upon student strengths?
o
How can existing or additional early warning data be made more accessible/useful/actionable to
school-based educators to enable:

Better, timelier or more consistent analyses of which students need which supports, and at
what level-district, school, classroom or individual- they would be the most effective?
Work Task: Summarize and record key findings from the table discussion, and be prepared to share
with the entire group.
EWS Summit: Guiding and Small Group Discussion Questions
Session 2: Implementation Opportunities and Challenges – Wednesday Morning
Overall Guiding Questions:
What have been the biggest challenges to implementing Early Warning Systems in states, districts, and
schools, and how have they been or can they be overcome?
Small Group Discussion Questions:
Early adopters of innovations are often also first the creators. They work on new frontiers, without guidance,
and learn, frequently from trial and error, how to best structure, use and ultimately benefit from the
innovations. For early warning system innovations to be perfected, expanded and scaled effectively and
nationally, an infrastructure of implementation support and guidance will be needed.
The goal of this discussion is to arrive at core principles of early warning system design and implementation,
at the different levels – state, district, school and classroom – and shape associated guidance for the next
generation of implementers.
Based on your experience implementing Early Warning Systems or helping to spread their use, discuss the
following questions with your tablemates.
o
What is the best advice you would give to someone about to design and launch an early warning
system in their state, district, or school? Consider, for example, one of the following;

Who needs to be involved, doing what at the school, district, and/or state level?

What level and type of mission-building (“buy-in”), professional development, coaching , and
on-going support from whom, is needed for whom?

What supportive school/district/state functions, structures, and policies should be put in place
to best support adoption and implementation?

What is the best way to work with/integrate/leverage community and student support
partners?
What have been your greatest early warning system design and implementation successes-what has worked
really well?
o
What implementation challenges remain in the school(s), districts and/or states you work in or with to
reaching the full potential of Early Warning Systems to propel student success?
Work Task:
Summarize and record key findings from the table discussion and be prepared to report out and discuss with
the whole group.
EWS Summit: Guiding and Small Group Discussion Questions
Session 3: Building Prevention/Intervention Systems – Wednesday Afternoon
Overall Guiding Question:
How can we design evidence-based, prevention/intervention systems that are responsive to the scale, depth,
and variation of identified student needs?
Small Group Discussion Questions:
The most difficult part of Early Warning Systems is figuring out the best ways to effectively respond to early
warning or predictive indicator data. Key challenges include:
o
When and where to focus on prevention and/or intervention?
o
What interventions to use?
o
How to figure out the most strategic level for focusing prevention or intervention efforts at individual,
classroom, school, or district/state/system?
o
How to respond to the sheer scale, depth, complexity, and variability of student needs flagged by the
early warning data?
o
How to build intervention capacity and know-how at the school level?
o
How to build intervention tracking and evaluation systems that increase a school’s capacity to select
the right intervention for the right student at the right time?
The table discussion can only begin this critical dialogue. To do so, we ask you to consider one or more of the
above challenges as you discuss the following:
o
What have you learned about interventions to improve attendance, behavior (including effort), and
course-passing/credit accrual/academic performance?
o
What has surprised you? (e.g., did you encounter something you thought would work that did not
and/or is there something you tried that worked better than expected?)
Work Task:
Summarize and record key findings from the table discussion.
EWS Summit: Guiding and Small Group Discussion Questions