Northwest Christian School in Puyallup, Washington, received recognition in January 2025 as a Marzano High Reliability School — Level 2.
The awards ceremony took place at the national HRS Summit in San Antonio, Texas. Robert Marzano, a leading education researcher, handed the NCS team the certificate of completion. HRS Level 2 certification represents the next step in what has already been a long journey.
In 2022, the NCS school board voted to officially pursue Marzano’s HRS certification as a vehicle for helping teachers make the transition into standards-based teaching and learning.
When starting the journey three years ago, it felt like alphabet soup at times as the team parsed through the many new terms and concepts such as proficiency scales, PLCs, priority standards, NASOT and many more structures that accompany the standards-based shift.
NCS leaders have been asked several times by colleagues in Adventist education if this Marzano journey has really worth it. The short and simple answer is yes!
Marzano‘s HRS model has provided the school with a framework for operations and improvement that has kept them aligned over the course of the last three years.
Allowing their journey to be guided by the HRS model has prevented institutional drift, a common dynamic, and has allowed for much smoother and clearer processes with new teacher onboarding and orientation, providing predictable norms and expectations for their work.
The HRS model is a research-based framework that helps schools identify the handful of key operational indicators that all great schools have in common. The HRS framework does not dictate how a school approaches these indicators, but rather highlights their existence, allowing the school’s team to be creative and pragmatic in crafting their plans to address each indicator.
The key indicators that have made a significant impact and propelled NCS forward over these past three years include: establishing a collaborative professional culture, adopting a school-wide plan for instruction, conducting curricular vertical alignment exercises, as well as the alignment of teacher professional growth plans with regular classroom evaluations.
The students enrolled at NCS are now benefiting from increased transparency and predictability in their academics, pedagogical and curricular alignment from classroom to classroom and a common language that flows throughout the school.
NCS teachers have learned to be data driven in their approach to classroom instruction, setting learning goals and making decisions regarding resources and curriculum. The school’s data-driven approach has significantly elevated the level of discourse that teachers have about their students’ academics and it has enabled a diagnostic type depth in the area of teacher-parent communication.
NCS educators have also come to the awareness that the pursuit of HRS certification is not a linear project. They are finding that it is much healthier to apply similar thinking to this process as NAD accreditation, with a focus on continuous school improvement. HRS certificate, levels, require continuous monitoring and adjustment, even as work progresses toward higher levels of certification.
NCS is now focusing on achieving HRS Level 3 certification, monitoring and adjustments to levels one and two are ongoing, continuously evolving to meet the needs and demands of its school community.
While this has been an honest report of one school’s journey over the past three years, Adventist educators nationwide are experiencing a variety of emotions and opinions about Marzano, standards-based education and the future the Adventist school system.
HRS certification is not necessarily the right route for every school in the Adventist system, and that is okay. It may indeed provide a very helpful framework for many schools, but it is not the only path that one may take on a collective journey to excellence. However, the proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
Three years in, NCS is experiencing an increasingly safe, supportive and collaborative school culture and effective teaching in every classroom. These are the overarching goals of HRS Level 1 and Level 2. There is synergy and a level of excitement in the building regarding the pursuit of HRS Level 3 with its goal of “offering a guaranteed and viable curriculum.”
