A treasure trove of resources for school staff, youth, and families including tip sheets and training tools, webinars, “Know Your Rights” flyers, postsecondary transition support tools, and much more.

This blueprint helps schools and districts develop school-community partnerships to support youth experiencing homelessness and their families (McKinney-Vento support).

This guide provides practical strategies and resources liaisons can use to support student mental health, improve family outreach, create partnerships, leverage funding, and address compassion fatigue

Use these modules to orient and train new paraeducators and provide a deeper dive into specific areas of practice.

Use these tools to support deeper learning grounded in grade-level, real-world, relevant, and interactive learning. Tools in the classroom support observations, lesson and unit unpacking, and student work review.

Find workshop materials from DESE’s 2025 Instructional Leadership Institute. Session topics included instructional vision and planning, designing for school belonging, scheduling, student support structures, multilingual learners, budgeting, and more.

Ground your learning community in DESE’s vision for Massachusetts students. Available in 8 languages.

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Office of Education Technology (OET) partnered with The Learning Accelerator (TLA) to develop this guide for educational technology (edtech) leaders in Massachusetts. 

This guide presents an overview of information related to K–12 edtech and provides insights and suggestions to support administrative teams as they plan for the future of edtech in their districts and schools.

Session materials from DESE’s first Instructional Leadership Institute in 2023

The Better Together training module helps educators think about and do family partnership. The module is based on the Massachusetts Family, School, and Community Partnership Fundamentals. It includes research, family voice videos, practice spotlights, and a Fundamentals Reflection Process Tool Kit school and district teams can use to identify the next stage or level of their family school partnership.

In recent years, DESE has published and utilized several frameworks and resources that capture elements of great schools and levers to create conditions that improve student outcomes. The Coherence Guidebook pulls them together into one place to illustrate a systems-level path toward deeper learning.

This cookbook is the result of the Massachusetts Wraparound Zone Initiative, an initiative aimed at helping schools tackle both academic and non-academic barriers to student learning, and includes recipes for strengthening school culture, creating strong student success teams, engaging family members as partners, building community partnerships and coalitions, and much more.

Tool kit created by UnboundEd that educators can use to facilitate a “brave conversation” about bias. Includes an overview of the 3-part conversation process, slide presentations with notes and resources, and activities you can use and adapt to support part of the conversation.

The revised Safe and Supportive Schools Implementation Guide & Self-Reflection Tool provides an inquiry-based year-long or multi-year process to document current practices that support students` behavioral health ranging from the whole school community to individual students that require more intensive supports.

This resource is intended to provide administrators with guidance when developing a master schedule that supports a tiered system of instruction and support, inclusive of Tier 1 core instruction and common planning time

This module provides users with an interactive learning experience so that they can learn what they need to know about the special education process. While this guide is geared towards families, it will be useful to anyone who needs to know more about topics like referral, evaluation and eligibility (among others).

Access session materials from the 2018 LEA event on topics including creating a pipeline of diverse educators, developing multi-tiered systems of support, equitable access to high quality curriculum, bilingual education, ensuring racial and cultural equity, effectively engaging families, student mobility, approaches to addressing students’ mental health needs, integrating social emotional and academic learning, and more.

DESE’s October 2019 Leading with Access & Equity Conference had a great line-up of sessions! Access all conference materials here.

This resource mapping template will help you inventory the Curriculum & Instruction/ Interventions, Assessments, and Data-Based Decision practices you are currently using (or have the goal of using) at each tier.