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Level 2 HRS Certification for Northwest Christian School
The NCS HRS Journey
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he last week of January 2025 was a big week for our little school in Western Washington. Three years ago, the school board at Northwest Christian School (NCS) voted to officially pursue Marzano’s High Reliability School (HRS) Certification as a vehicle for helping our teachers make the transition into standards-based teaching and learning. During that week’s national HRS Summit, our school was officially granted level two certification. The status represents years of growth, hard work, and critical decision-making by the teachers and administration at NCS.
I have been asked several times by colleagues in Adventist education if this journey was really worth it. The short, simple answer is, yes! Marzano’s HRS model has provided our school with a framework for operations and improvement that has kept us aligned over the course of the last three years. Allowing the HRS model to guide our school’s journey, has enabled our educators to focus on a single research-based framework that has produced amazing results. The model has also allowed for a much smoother new teacher onboarding and orientation, providing predictable norms and expectations.
The HRS model is a research-based framework that helps schools identify the handful of key operational indicators that all grade schools have in common. The HRS framework does not dictate how our school approaches these indicators, but rather highlights their existence, allowing our team to be creative and pragmatic, and create plans to address each indicator.
The key indicators that have really propelled NCS forward over these past three years include establishing a professional collaborative culture, adopting a school-wide plan for instruction, conducting a vertical alignment of our schools correctly from a standards perspective, and the alignment of teacher professional growth plans with 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 from classroom to classroom. Our NCS teachers have learned to be data driven in their approach to classroom instruction, setting learning goals, and making decisions regarding resources and curriculum. Our school’s data driven approach has significantly elevated the level of discourse that we have about our students’ academics, and it has embedded a diagnostic-type depth in the area of teacher/parent communication.
Our school has come to the awareness that the pursuit of HRS status is not a linear project. Rather, as our school now turns our collective attention to achieving HRS Level 3 Certification, ongoing monitoring and adjustments will be made to the Levels 1 and 2 indicators. The HRS framework has truly embedded within our school a continuous school improvement process that aligns well with NAD accreditation and performance standards.
This has been an honest report of our school’s journey over the past three years. Nationwide, Adventist educators are currently experiencing a landscape where there is a variety of opinions about Marzano’s standards-based education, and the future of our precious Adventist school system. From the perspective of a career principal and someone who has served many schools as conference superintendent, I plainly recognize that HRS certification is not for everyone. However, the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. For three years now, NCS has been experiencing an increasingly safe, supportive, and collaborative school culture and effective teaching in every classroom; the overarching goals of Levels 1 and 2. There is synergy and a level of excitement in the building regarding the pursuit of Level 3 and exploring the dynamics of offering a guaranteed and viable curriculum.
Craig Mattson
Principal - Northwest Christian School
Craig Mattson is a product of Adventist education, having attended Thunderbird and Auburn Academies, Newbold College in England, and Andrews University. For four years he served as principal of Tulsa Adventist Academy. He has been serving the Washington Conference as elementary principal at Northwest Christian School, a position he has held twice for a total of 10 years, and Vice President for Education.
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