Welcome to our monthly gallery of best practices and tools from your Center for High School Success partner schools in Oregon and Washington. Below, your coaches have collected timely tools and featured practices from across our region to help support you, your team, and your 9th graders! Please reach out to your coach if you have any questions, feedback, on input.
November 2024
It’s Fall Collab season! In October, many of us gathered for our Fall Collaboratives with Oregon’s occurring this month. We had record numbers of 9th Grade Success Teams participate in Washington (see below for photos from our largest Collaboratives yet, in South Puget Sound and Mount Vernon)! The focus of the Fall Collaboratives is sharing strategies and learning about how to make sure our interventions are effective and efficient. We developed our own Intervention Cycles (see Timely Tool #3). Looking further ahead, our Winter Collaborative will be virtual! We hope to embed presentations from network schools. We heard you loud and clear that you love to learn from each other.
Are you and your team interested in presenting at the CHSS Virtual Winter Collab? Please fill out the form using this link.
CHSS News: Washington State OSPI Update
WA OSPI 9th Grade Success Grant Reminder:
Continue to submit costs! Please reach out with any questions, and if you have any questions about allowable expenditures, how to contact OSPI, or access EGMS support, please see our October SNAPSHOT (scroll to the bottom each month to access previous editions).
Calendar
Oregon Regional Fall Collaborative:
November 21, 8:30 – 3:30 State Library of Oregon. 250 Winter St NE, REGISTER HERE
Virtual Winter Collaborations: Registration links coming soon! Are you and your team interested in presenting at the CHSS Virtual Winter Collab? Please fill out the form using this link.
- WA Virtual Collaborative:
- Session A: February 25 and 26, 2025, 3:30pm – 5pm on Zoom
- Session B: March 3, and 4, 2025, , 3:30pm – 5pm on Zoom
- Oregon Virtual Collaborative: Wednesday, February 18 and 20, 2025, 3:30pm – 5pm on Zoom
Regional Spring Collaborations: Registration links coming soon!
- Central WA #2 (Moses Lake): Thursday, April 24
- Oregon/Portland Area: Wednesday, April 23
- Puget Sound: Thursday, May 1
- Central WA #1 (Yakima): Tuesday, May 6
- Northwest: Thursday, May 8
- Southwest: Thursday, May 8
Timely Tools
Kid Talk Protocol Tools
Here are two great Kid Talk Protocol formats and one support tool (Kid Talk One Pager) that teams in Oregon are using to help everyone manage time and create an effective intervention.
Kid Talk Protocol from Roosevelt HS
The Anxious Generation
This NYT best selling book highlights the role of social media in adolescent mental health, with specific strategies for schools, teachers, and families to utilize to better support our students.
Intervention Cycle Templates!
As reviewed during our Fall Collaboratives, these tools will help your teams plan 6-8 week intervention cycles based on student needs.
Featured Practice

Roadmap Driver: Provide Explicit Instruction and Ongoing Supports to 9th Graders on How To “Do School” Well
We know from research that 9th graders need lots of explicit instruction, support and opportunity to practice how to “do school” well. The opening to teach these skills can be different depending on the school context. Some examples include: daily, weekly or monthly advisory or homeroom, or integrating this instruction into content-area classes if there is no other time during the school day.
When we do not have an advisory-like structure, schools work to find openings for “advisory-like activities” in our classrooms. Academic reflection and prioritization can happen in any classroom, and teachers around our network are finding that students learn more and are more motivated when they have the opportunity to reflect, evaluate and plan for their learning.
As with all social skills instruction aimed at building NEW habits, best practice guidance points us towards teaching fewer skills, and practicing them repeatedly over time (as daily or weekly routines), as opposed to “one and done” lessons that are never practiced. Our goal here: Low risk + high reps! Here is a GOOGLE folder with sample resources from our network schools, and here is a Microsoft folder!
Examples of CHSS Network Schools Supporting students to “do school” well:
The South Umpqua HS team in Oregon used their 9th Grade Success class to teach students how to use binders and in class files to keep student work at school to help 9th graders “do school” and moved from a 50% on track to 90-95% in 4 weeks.
- South Umpqua’s student planning document
Previous SNAPSHOTS
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT DECEMBERAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT NovemberAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT OctoberAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT SeptemberAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT AugustAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT JuneAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT MayAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT AprilAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT MarchAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT January/FebruaryAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT DecemberAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT NovemberAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share: