These are hard times for educators. Students are striving to make gains after the biggest disruption to student learning in the history of American education. Students and adults have significant social-emotional needs, staffing shortages are real, and districts are confronting everything from budget shortfalls to political battles. From my own experience as principal of Burroughs Elementary, it is possible to make significant gains in student outcomes and create a joyful, sustaining school culture – by narrowing your focus.

Our school serves a wonderfully diverse community a stone’s throw from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. When I first became principal, I had these grand ideas of eight or nine initiatives that we were going to focus on throughout the year. But what I noticed as the year went on was that we were not getting great at any one specific thing. It just felt like we were maintaining the status quo.

Around that time our school and area superintendent started working with a coach from Relay Graduate School of Education. She encouraged us to pick one or two areas of focus and stick with them for the year. And she gave us a tool to help with that: A leader’s Playbook, which is both a document and a process that helps school leaders identify their highest-leverage priorities and build their teachers’ skills in those areas. 

We started by looking more closely at student work and classroom practice to identify one or two areas of focus that were likely to make a meaningful difference in student learning. Then we spelled out exactly how we would use our time to build the team’s skills — whether through professional development sessions, weekly team meetings, student work analysis, coaching cycles, and more. Creating a Playbook kept me centered on my priorities and plans to address them – day by day, and week by week.

The first year we tried this we landed on the priority of strengthening small-group instruction in order to provide more targeted instruction. That year we saw meaningful improvements in student learning – something we hadn’t seen the year before. I saw that when you don’t focus on too many things, the team really takes ownership. When the instructional team coaches their peers on just one or two things at a time, both the coaches and the teachers get really good at it. We utilized coaching cycles and planning meetings with teachers that allowed them to grow and thrive. And we had a monthly focus on small-group instruction during staff meetings. And that builds confidence. 

Once teachers became experts in teaching in small groups we shifted focus to more personalized small group instruction. We set up groups based on need and flexibility, ensuring they were meeting students where they were, instead of having them remain in the same groups throughout the year. Later we shifted again to dig deep into student discourse, helping students learn to clearly articulate their ideas, listen to others, and test their thinking – in both ELA and math. Teacher feedback was also crucial here. We worked individually with educators who requested help in this area to provide personalized coaching, to build on top of other priority areas. Student discourse is now one of the cornerstones of our culture at Burroughs, as it not only deepens student understanding of the material but contributes to a collaborative, warm culture. With student discourse now established across grades, we’ve recently prioritized challenging but quick writing tasks, so teachers can monitor and respond to student work more frequently. 

Vicki Bullock, a K-5 Math Instructional Coach at Burroughs Elementary School has seen the value of having students articulate what they are doing, ask questions, and listen to each other – especially in the math classroom. She likes to remind her teachers, “If the students can’t talk about it, they can’t write about it.” Through professional development and feedback sessions, she coaches teachers to ask students,” What do you see? What do you notice?” before they simply dive into solving a problem. Students then learn not just to focus on their own ideas, but to listen to others, which helps expand their thinking and teaches real-world soft skills. 

In October 2023, the nonprofit EmpowerK12 named Burroughs Elementary School a “Bold Performance School.” This was the second year in a row we received the honor, which goes to schools that have made academic strides and serve predominantly “priority students — students designated as at-risk, students with disabilities, and students of color.” We’re really proud of our results – in 2022-23 our ELA proficiency grew by 11%, and math by 17%. 

While not perfect, things are feeling good at Burroughs Elementary. Teachers are in good spirits. The kids are in good spirits. Of course, there are a lot of factors that contribute to school success – from establishing a positive, safe, and structured school culture, to high-quality curriculum, to teacher content expertise, to working closely with our instructional superintendent, Tenia Pritchard, and our Cluster 3 peer schools (two others of which have also been named Bold Performance Schools). We know that prioritization and focus has created a sense of unity and purpose at our school. We give educators the time they need to internalize and refine key skills – a practice we also want to model for our students. We will keep narrowing our focus to the few things at each moment where we know we can improve. We’re in it for the long haul.

LeVar Jenkins is the principal of Burroughs Elementary School, District of Columbia Public Schools

The post Go Slow to Go Fast: Change Through Focus appeared first on Getting Smart.

Education has long been focused on achievement, something that’s tough to square with the loss of schooling due to COVID-19. Both this achievement gap and the accelerated mental health crisis can be combatted through the utility of data and analytical practices. Unfortunately, access to big data and deep analytical methodologies is often limited in the education sector. Creating educational organizations with baseline capabilities of leveraging and analyzing big data marks a shift from being “forward-focused” — where traditional mental models underpin analyses of achievement linear to standards — to “future-focused” — where multiple measures of ability, achievement, strength, cognitive development, and social-emotional wellness are core metrics of success. This holistic shift will facilitate divergent and personalized systems. When I served as Superintendent of Schools, I sought to make these shifts a reality and was confronted with the obstacle of standardized tests. using the Anchors of Innovation Science and Excellence Loop from the Disruptive Effect Model, I was able to design a model for literacy and social-emotional outcomes.

An Interdependent Model for Social, Emotional, and Academic Acceleration

During my tenure as a Superintendent of Schools — where innovation, excellence, and transforming norms reauthored the literacy framework of instruction — I interfaced with academic data and a strength-based rating scale (i.e., Devereux Student Strengths Assessment) to lament pedagogical differentiation in my learning organization. Working with my team, I was able to create and scale Models of the Multi-Tiered System of Support. 

Expectations Gap: At the core of the model, the learning organization must have a deep understanding of every student including knowing their interests and strengths. The expectation for all stakeholders is to provide relevancy through instructional practices that are differentiated for cognitive and social-emotional growth. High-stakes discussions rooted in data from the DESSA allowed for the strengthening of both the literacy model and social-emotional development. For example, one might take linear data sets of standards achievement and interface it with key social-emotional information. This would enable more differentiated and tailored pedagogy for each student. This approach led to academic and individual practices to ensure relevancy in every student’s literacy trajectory. 

Preparation Gap: Learning organizations must unwrap both academic and social-emotional data sets to align strategies for pedagogy to close the preparation gap. In my experience, leaders and teachers held collaborative discussions aimed at fostering positive relationships. In elementary, this looked like teams unpacking data and challenging existing practices to effectively build relationships using cycled formative benchmark metrics. Additionally, social engagement strategies were employed so students could access core content at grade-level expectations. Moreover, having analytics from the DESSA created a pathology where the instructional climate facilitated the opportunity for students to take calculated risks with content that had historically been arduous to access because of rigor demands. 

Performance Gap: A current contention in the standard literacy model is the linear delivery of pedagogical methods and strategies. To reach all learners, applying analytics focused on cognitive growth will challenge the education ecosystem to move beyond mastery of standards. Thus, improving the performance of all to examine data, students, and content with the whole child in mind. The DESSA assisted with unpacking the authentic needs of students specifically with closing performance gaps from COVID-19. Unpacking cognitive abilities through data analytics will germinate culturally relevant learning experiences in each tier of the integrated MTSS framework which will enhance the performance of leadership and classroom practitioners holistically.

Access Gap: As Superintendent of Schools, an educational priority was to create a learning organization where access and opportunity were equalized in all aspects of the instructional model. Creating an iterative literacy model that focused on academic ability and social-emotional success was a paradox for many stakeholders in the learning organization. Through data-informed discussions and culturally responsive pedagogy, the barriers of access were eliminated. Classroom practitioners would target grade-level text for a shared reading activity (i.e., tier I of the MTSS Framework) with content that focused on resilience and self-management skills. This hybrid connected two phenomena – text structure and social-emotional capabilities among students.

Bridging social-emotional and academic data together for analytical analysis will exponentially raise academic outcomes in a culturally responsive manner while contextually accelerating the process of closing the gap on the loss of schooling created by COVID-19.

The post Closing the Loop on Excellence appeared first on Getting Smart.

Here is the latest list of can’t-miss education conferences for your 2024 planning:

FETC

January 23-26, 2024; Orlando, Florida

FETC is the largest national independent EdTech conference discussing tech trends, strategies and best practices for student and school success. This annual event will focus on the Future of Education Technology and gathering a group of dynamic and creative education professionals from around the world for an intensive and highly collaborative event exploring new technologies, best practices and pressing issues.

BETT

January 24-26, 2024; London

With almost 30,000+ attendees from 123+ countries, representing 600+ leading companies and where 5,000+ people connect, BETT is the world’s largest EdTech conference. Taking place in London, BETT believes in creating a better future by transforming education. This conference is premium, inclusive and game-changing. At every level of education, the themes for BETT  are based on the real needs of the education community, from the tech-nervous newbie to the cool geeky early adopter. BETT themes at the heart of education.

TCEA

Feb 3 – Feb 7, 2024;  Austin, TX

Spanning five days with over 700 sessions and workshops, TCEA is the largest state convention and exposition in the US. TCEA’s Convention & Exposition is the place to meet industry peers, collaborate with other educators, and build a tight-knit, professional learning community. 

Digital Learning Annual Conference

February 26-28, 2024; Austin, TX

DLAC aims to bring together practitioners working on real change and is designed for a wide range of attendees, including educators, companies, non-profit organizations, researchers and state education agencies.

AASA National Conference on Education

February 15-17, 2024;  San Diego, CA

This year’s Conference highlights the crucial role that public school superintendents play in creating a supportive, inclusive, and empowering educational environment that meets the diverse needs of all students. By keeping the students at the center of everything we do, we can work together to create a better future for them and for society.

At this conference, researchers, educators and practitioners will experience personal growth, enjoy time for connections and find joy in discovering new research and strategies. 

Green Schools Conference

March 5-7, 2024; Santa Fe, NM

The Green Schools Conference (GSC) brings together everyone involved in creating and advocating for green schools, with a focus on those leading their schools and school systems toward whole-school sustainability. Attendees explore interdisciplinary content in general sessions and collaborate with peers to address specific challenges, exchange best practices, and enhance green school initiatives nationwide.

SXSW EDU

March 4-7, 2024; Austin, TX

The internationally recognized SXSW EDU will include four days of sessions, workshops, learning experiences, mentorship, film screenings, policy discussions and so much more all aimed at impacting the future of teaching and learning. The event will host hundreds of sessions and speakers and continues to stand out as a true thought leadership summit. Check out our live podcast from SXSW EDU 2022 and some of the conversations we recorded at SXSW EDU 2023

We are excited to be a media partner at this event, as well as the co-presenters on a number of sessions! 

CUE Conference

March 21-24, 2024; Palm Springs, CA

At the 2024 Spring CUE Conference in Palm Springs, educators will unite to ignite inspiration, foster connections, and explore cutting-edge teaching techniques and educational technology for their classrooms.

CUE is the largest and oldest EdTech conference in California and is targeted towards educators and EdLeaders looking to advance student achievement by using technology in the classroom. The conference has been a go-to event for educational innovation for almost 40 years and provides a best-value, three-day experience for thousands of educators.

Carnegie Foundation Summit on Improvement in Education

March 24-27, 2024; San Diego, CA

Since 2014, the Summit on Improvement in Education has developed a vibrant learning community by engaging diverse groups of educational professionals—such as school and district leaders, staff from charter management organizations, leaders in state departments of education and professional organizations, entrepreneurs, faculty from higher education organizations, students, parents, and community leaders—in service of addressing complex problems and issues of inequity in educational outcomes.

Deeper Learning Conference

March 26-28 2024; San Diego, CA

Deeper learners from around the world gathered for this beautiful reminder of why educators do this work, and of the limitless potential of schools to be places of hope, healing, and inspiration. DLC has been running incredible gatherings for over a decade! Here’s a recap from our time at the DL2018.

School Climate and Culture Forum

Multiple Dates; Multiple Locations

The Summit offers 4 or more topic-specific conferences so you can learn from experts and colleagues throughout North America. These multi-day events provide an opportunity for administrators, teachers, counselors and other educators to learn about new insights and strategies for reaching and teaching students.

NSBA (National School Boards Association)

April 6-8, 2024; New Orleans, LA

The NSBA Annual Conference and Exposition is the one national event that brings together education leaders to learn about best governance practices, gain insight into child development and learn about new programs and technology that can help enrich student learning. This event is one of the few—if not the only—places where school board members from around the country can receive the training necessary to address the instructional needs of students and how to improve the efficiency of district operations.

CoSN

April 8-10, 2024; Miami, FL

CoSN is the conference to attend if you’re a district tech director or leader to reimagine, redesign and renew. Attendees should be prepared to renew your commitment to advancing digital learning and let the Three “R’s” serve as a collective Call to Action. 

ASU+GSV Summit

April 14-17, 2024; San Diego, CA

This annual conference is the “only conference during the year where you’ll have access to the smartest and most influential Learning & Talent Tech minds from around the world.” The three-day event will host world class speakers in business, entrepreneurship, higher ed and education innovation. Here is our recap of the 2021 summit.

SMU +GSV Mission Summit

May 22-24, 2024; Dallas, TX

The SMU+GSV Mission Summit is an event to accelerate ideas that combine “purpose and profits”. Capitalism needs a refresh. It is our belief that the leading companies of tomorrow will have the ambition of a for-profit and the heart of a non-profit. Join global leaders from across investment, government, entrepreneurship, and philanthropy communities to shape the future of business.

ISTE

June 23-26, 2024; Denver, CO

As the “epicenter of edtech,” ISTE Is where educators and school leaders go to learn about new tools and strategies. This event boasts endless learning opportunities perfect for industry reps, teachers, tech coordinators/directors, administrators, library media specialists and policymakers.

PBL World

June 24-27, 2024; Napa Valley, CA

PBL World is a multi-day Project Based Learning conference presented by PBLWorks. This event brings together educators – K-12 teachers, instructional coaches, school and district leaders – who want to begin and advance their Project Based Learning practice, and connect with a community of their peers. 

ASCA Annual Conference 

July 13-16, 2024; Kansas City, Missouri

Join thousands of school counseling professionals in Kansas City, Mo., for the premier school counseling professional development. Learn, network and re-energize yourself.

Uncharted Learning National Summit 2024

July 16-17, 2024; Chicago, IL

Uncharted Learning’s member schools and guests gather in Chicago’s tech and food hub, the Fulton Market Neighborhood, for two full days of entrepreneurship-focused, master-class-style workshops and events. The festivities conclude with the 2024 INCubatoredu National Student Pitch and Student Showcase on July 17.

JFF Horizons

July 22-23, 2024; Washington, DC

Expect to envision new ideas and capture insights through our workshops, panels, and interactive discussions at this event where more than 1,000 leaders, funders, innovators, workers, learners, and more will share their expertise. Leading thinkers and innovators transforming the education and workforce systems will join forces at this annual summit.

Big Picture Learning Big Bang

July 22-25, 2024; Memphis, TN

Big Bang is Big Picture Learning’s annual conference on student-centered learning, an intergenerational collaboration where students, educators, leaders and partners come together as equals to learn from one another and from our host community. In a nutshell, it’s a celebration. Check out our podcast about our recent Big Bang attendance. 

PLTW Summit

October 3-5, 2024; San Diego, CA

PLTW Summit will continue to be offered every two years in the fall. Mark your calendars for time to connect with STEM educators from across the country where you’ll be a part of transformative professional development approaches and connect with Master Teachers, PLTW partners, classroom vendors, and peers.

Aurora Symposium

November 3-5 2024; New Orleans, LA

Aurora Institute’s annual conference is the leading event for K-12 competency-based, blended and online learning. With hundreds of sessions, it brings together experts, EdLeaders and educators to explore next-gen learning for K-12 students. Here are 10 reasons to attend.

National Rural Education Association Conference

October 31-November 1, 2024; Savannah Georgia

The Rural Schools Conference has been designed to create an environment for collaboration and innovation with a diverse community that includes, national experts, K–12 and higher education practitioners, leading researchers, policymakers, and philanthropic leaders. The goal is to help communities innovate and leverage local assets to create meaningful learning experiences for rural students.

Big Picture Learning: Front Range Leadership

December 2024; Colorado

The annual Big Picture Learning Leadership Conference aims to empower leaders to build strong connections with individuals, communities, and networks to enhance, sustain, and elevate their work. Leaders engage with peers through school tours and advisory sessions to discover valuable tools, innovative ideas, and resources for effective implementation. The ultimate objective is for leaders to rejuvenate and strengthen themselves, enabling them to lead with love, care and vulnerability. 

National Alliance of Black School Educators

Date coming soon…..

The National Alliance of Black School Educators (NABSE) is the nation’s premier non-profit organization devoted to furthering the academic success for the nation’s children – particularly children of African descent and host an annual event with over 50 years of leadership and learning. 

HipHopEd Conference

Dates and Location TBD

The annual HipHopEd Conference is a unique event that brings together educators, school leaders, students, and community members to explore the intersection between hip-hop and education. This conference is the premier event in the field of hip-hop and education, and it is dedicated to advancing innovation, scholarship, and practice.

At the HipHopEd Conference, participants engage in workshops and keynote sessions that showcase the latest research, practices, and trends in hip-hop education. The conference is designed to create a space and community where hip-hop educators can gather, connect, and collaborate to reimagine education. Practitioners and scholars present workshop presentations and peer-reviewed papers that exemplify the conference theme. The HipHopEd Conference is not your traditional education conference; it includes student performers and highlights the creative elements of hip-hop culture. 

Education Leaders of Color National Convening 

TBD

At the EdLoC conference, bright spots where change-makers, entrepreneurs, and cross-sector collaborations are dismantling systemic barriers and transforming life trajectories in our communities are on the stage. Presenters and attendees will have space to demonstrate, discover, and discuss how their organizations, programs, advocacy, and/or models are supporting young people and communities of color in earning more, building wealth, and thriving.

Did we miss one of your favorites? Let us know in the comments!

The post Can’t Miss Education Conferences in 2024 appeared first on Getting Smart.

In 2020, however, the pandemic enabled families to see (and often engage in) their children’s school experience. This window into school made transparent the quality, types of learning and community that made up the lived experience of their children. For some, low satisfaction fueled renewed interest in microschooling led by parents, political support and philanthropic dollars.

The last two years of microschool growth (estimated enrollment by the National Microschooling Center at 1-2 million current students), heavily subsidized by the philanthropic sector, demonstrated that the demand exists. Alongside this resurgence, key questions arise: Are microschools sustainable? What outcomes should they measure (if any)? Are they compatible within the public sector? Can they scale? 

Below, we briefly hit upon the first three questions and then dive into the question of scaling.

Sustainability

Most microschools operate in the private sector, sustained by public funds (via Education Savings Account structures) or private tuition. Both of these funding sources supply individual students with far less than can be found in the public sector, making the business models and staffing (1-2 educators and a handful of students without the support of larger operations systems) challenging over time. Organizations like Microschool Revolution (investment model) and Prenda (service and support model) have emerged to address this issue.

Outcomes

In the public sector, there is a heavy focus on narrow slices of accountability which challenges  many families. Although microschools have far fewer accountability expectations outside of the public sector, they do have a responsibility to ensure that every child finds success. As a sector, we remain in the early stages of alternative, efficient, adaptive and flexible forms of measurement addressing both academic and whole child development.

Public Sector

With increasingly diminished enrollment in many districts (3% post-pandemic), the public sector needs to imagine the power of microschools within their existing communities. More specialized approaches, autonomy for teachers and small communities that benefit from larger districts will better serve all students. High school academy models such as CAPS and NAF have scaled around professional pathways to provide more opportunities for high school students.

Scale

Roughly 1-2 million students are enrolled in some form of a microschool, just 2% of all students enrolled in K-12 schools (estimates are difficult as many microschools are not required to report enrollment numbers). If demand is high for microschools – and demonstrated success continues, then scaling support is needed. ASU Prep in Phoenix, Arizona built a Microschool Entrepreneur Fellowship Program program to help facilitate this scaling. Based on the success of their microschool options — powered by ASU Prep Digital and partnered with ASU Prep school or ASU higher education campus — ASU Prep wants to support others in this journey. 

The size of microschools may provide the sense that they are easy to start and run. Yet, anecdotes from the field indicate challenges with sustainability and operations. Partner organizations and programs, like ASU Prep’s Microschool in a Box fill a needed space in the ecosystem to help these programs thrive and scale.

The ASU Prep Microschool Entrepreneur Program provides training and support for microschools. The fellowship spans one year with coaching calls starting for those accepted as early as October. A 3-day in-person Fellowship gathering in February in Tempe, Arizona kicks off the formal programming which leads to an online community of practice designed to build community amongst fellows. They then round out the year with frequent resources and ongoing mentorship and support. The program will support the launch of several new microschools in the Fall of 2024 to serve diverse learners across the country leveraging the assets of ASU Prep. The fellowship covers a range of topics including:

1. Policy and funding. Policy, rules and regulations, and funding models are the lifeblood of the microschool. Adhering to local and state regulations and securing appropriate funding is a key priority that ASU Prep will support.
2. Operations. Hiring, space design, leadership training, and general operations (schedules, transportation, facilities, etc.) can be overwhelming for microschools with 1-2 teachers and no administrators. Using established templates and resources, ASU Prep guides the construction of the operations of the microschool.
3. Pedagogy. While most microschools founders have some ideas of the approach for a school, ASU Prep’s robust resource base from a variety of approaches allows for more rapid development in this area. ASU Prep’s experience with professional learning and growth supports microschool leaders as they maintain relevance in the education landscape.

Funding is often a barrier for entrepreneur support programs like this but the Stand Together Trust has funded this program enabling up to 20 full grants for fellows. Similar programs from the Learning Innovation Fund at Getting Smart Collective and Community Partner Grant Program have also funded microschool models.

Microschools are meeting strong market demand for more personalized, more contextualized and more relevant learning for every student. Programs like ASU Prep’s Microschool in a Box make it possible for more learners to become future-ready with access to affordable, relational microschool learning.

The post Microschool in a Box: Programs Enabling the Microschool Movement appeared first on Getting Smart.

Teachers often report feeling anxious, stressed, and eventually burned out from technology. Oftentimes, it’s due to a lack of effective training.

More than 50 percent of teachers said their edtech professional development training was a one-time event with little follow-up coaching or mentoring. Behind the data is a pattern that many superintendents and principals should recognize. Often a leader hears powerful claims about a new tool, gets educators excited about how the technology can unleash teacher capacity, implements the tool and then turns their attention to the next big tech trend. Teachers are left swimming alone in the deep end, trying to figure out how to effectively use the new technology.

Leaders can break this cycle by easing the edtech learning curve for teachers with professional development experiences that focus on teacher-centered mentorship, practicing and modeling patience and setting realistic expectations. It’s a philosophy that Concord Community Schools in Concord, Michigan recently took to heart. 

Redesign Training as Teacher-Centered Mentorship

Many traditional professional development and training models are built on the same “sit and get” approach that leaders are trying to move away from in classrooms. In contrast, a teacher-centered mentorship model enables teachers to learn in ways that supports diverse learning levels, provides ongoing support and becomes self-sustaining so new teachers can easily adopt technology. 

At Concord Community Schools the transition in professional development began as the district explored the power of the Modern Classrooms Project (MCP) framework as an instructional shift in classrooms. The model centers on blended instruction, self-paced learning and mastery-based grading, as opposed to a traditional lecture-based model. Using the model, teachers leverage technology to engage students with a broad diversity of learning levels and social-emotional needs through bite-sized teacher-created videos, and one-to-one and small-group classroom learning. The MCP framework also enables parents, guardians, or other people in a student’s life to get involved, because they can access the content just like a student would and support the student’s learning.

As part of adopting the model, school leaders and an initial cohort of teachers, completed a modern classrooms mentorship program. The district experienced how mentorship could help teachers learn new instructional skills, inspiring them to think about how it could be used in other forms of professional development.

Along with in-person training, the district converted professional development sessions into self-paced virtual units so educators could rewatch the material as needed. Educators at Concord Community Schools also continue to receive ongoing coaching to maximize their impact in the classroom and even guide their fellow educators in developing new skills in everything from technology use to instructional models. One educator described the experience as, “It’s a challenge, but worth it. What worked 10-20 years ago, just isn’t as effective anymore! This is the method all schools need to be introduced to, in order to be relevant in this time of teaching kids.”

Practice Patience with Yourself and Your Team

In a world of instant gratification, it’s easy to stop innovating when challenges arise. However, learning to use new technology, especially if it impacts how teachers teach, takes time, dedicated and intentional work and a resilient attitude. When scaling innovation, a leader must practice patience and not cut the process short because someone is struggling or stakeholders are questioning a district’s progress.

Practicing patience starts with understanding not all teachers will be ready to change. Leaders will be best served by starting small and focusing on a coalition of the willing. 

When it comes to actually showing teachers how to use new technology or implement a new approach, leaders have to be the number one risk taker and model self-compassion because inevitably there will be frustrations and failures. Afterall, educators, just like students, learn at different paces and in different ways. Dedicating time to nurture teachers through their struggles, help them identify their strengths and develop a solution together, will soften feelings of fear and self-doubt and help guide teachers from initially learning a new model or technology to competency and mastery and then to advocacy. 

Reaching the advocacy stage is essential to easing the learning curve for teachers who may initially be hesitant about new technology. Amplifying the voices of teachers who successfully adopted a new tool can help those still going through the process see what is possible. It takes patience and a willingness from administrative leaders to create space for teachers to get there.

Set Realistic Expectations

During the pandemic, districts were focused on helping students continue to learn so there was minimal time to thoroughly vet edtech solutions, provide sufficient professional development and communicate changes to families. 

Today, however, districts have the capacity to be more intentional when implementing educational solutions. In addition to easing teachers into using these solutions, district leaders must be transparent with all stakeholders on the progress of the implementation so any issues can be worked out before a new program launches. For example, families who may have concerns about the implementation of a new instructional model can be invited into a conversation to better understand the impact on their students. When introducing new technology or models into the classroom, some educators at Concord Community Schools have created demonstrations for parents and guardians during parent-teacher conferences. Teachers walk parents through the new approach or tool or even create mock assignments where family members pretend they are students. It’s a meaningful step that helps the larger community fully understand the goal of changes in the classroom.  

Bonus considerations for leaders. Reimagining professional development is a journey. The above practices will make the biggest difference, but leaders can also consider:

• Learning alongside educators – joining educators in the process of learning a new tool or model creates a shared experience and demonstrates leaders are invested in the change.
• Centering “why” – communications about new technology should focus on why it is important and the benefits it brings to teachers and students. Leaders should also connect it to a school’s greater mission or strategic plans. 
• Create a continuation plan – learning often doesn’t stop after a single workshop or a few weeks of training. Intentionally creating a plan for ongoing training, follow-ups, and ad hoc questions provides teachers the continued support they need.

As district leaders, we have the opportunity to reimagine how we support educators with professional development through mentorship, patience and setting realistic expectations, preparing them for what’s next in K-12 education and ultimately creating equitable learning environments for our students. 

Becky Hutchinson is the Superintendent of Concord Community Schools in Concord, Michigan.
Kareem Farah is the CEO and Co-Founder of The Modern Classrooms Project, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering educators to build classrooms that respond to every student’s needs

The post 3 Ways to Reimagine Professional Development in Districts appeared first on Getting Smart.

If you’ve done any amount of innovation and redesign work you’ve inevitably had experiences with skeptics. The doubt can come in the form of snide comments about plausibility, subtle questions about data, or outright rejection of any possibilities that don’t fit into a comfortable, already-held narrative about the future. While it might be easier to just dismiss the skeptics and work with like-minded folks only, doing so is often impractical; and frankly defeats the purpose of futures thinking.

At its core, futures thinking, and true innovation, should help people make decisions today that lay the foundation for better futures. If we leave skeptics behind, we’ll end up focusing on the most naturally receptive audiences, ones who are already most likely to make forward-leaning decisions. While overcoming skepticism does make for harder work, it also makes for more rewarding work. More importantly, it often needs to be one of the goals of your futures work because motivating more people to think and take actions for the long-term will have greater impact.

The question is though, how can we productively address skepticism in our audiences?

Push People Past Their Comfort Zones

At a high level, I see my job as a “futurist” as finding the edge of my audience’s comfort zone and helping push them just past that. This means that what is provocative for one group may not be for another, and vice versa. Part of our work as futurists is to discover that comfort limit and help people cross that boundary line into more imaginative possibilities. The bigger the group and the more diverse the audience, the more complicated this task might be.

Balance Fear and Hope

On the other hand, I think there are really just two fundamental emotions pushing people towards action. One is belief or faith in an opportunity (hope), the other is recognition of risk (fear). Ironically, both can lead to inaction as well as action. For instance, techno-optimists might have hope (unfounded or not) that all of our most intractable problems will inevitably be addressed by some as-of-yet un-invented technology—giving them an excuse to not take the difficult actions they might otherwise need to do today. Likewise, too much fear can lead to fatalism or paralysis. If we’re doomed anyway, why take action?

Like yin and yang, the answer is almost always balance. Overoptimism in a future fix can be dampened with a bit of well-placed fear. Similarly, fatalism requires a healthy dose of optimism, often in the form of well-considered opportunities or pathways out of that risk. Part of the job of the futurist is to find that balance and support the best way to motivate change.

I was once working with a client to explore the future of their industry. We identified a number of possible, plausible, and probable visions of the future for them to consider. One of the senior leaders in the room, while reading one of those visions, shook her head. “I don’t like it,” she said. Curious (and a bit anxious) I asked her why. “Because in this future, we don’t exist,” she replied. That story, taken alone, could have been paralyzing—but when we combined potential pathways into the future with plausible pivots so that the company COULD exist, even in that scary future, the work transformed risk into motivation.

Tools to Motivate Skeptics

Any good futures process will focus on including skeptics on the parts of the journey that will give them the greatest sense of ownership. For some that will be the entire process—seeing how data and signals from today come together to form the basis of plausible and possible narratives of tomorrow. For others that will be stepping in to identify preferable futures or describe aspirations. The goal is to share both hope and fear with stakeholders at the moments when they can catalyze the most action. The tools we use at the Institute, when used creatively and at the right moments, can help this process along—once you better understand how to motivate those in your organization.

The futures wheel of “Draw Out Consequences” is a simple tool with immediate impact. Described simply, Draw Out Consequences plays out like a series of “if…then…” statements, helping people think through first, second, third (and beyond) order consequences of some change or disruption. With the right prompting, practice, and diversity of perspectives, it can guide teams to think about how the systems they work within are interconnected. It’s a tool that is easy for people to get into quickly, but robust enough to really help unearth provocative insights. Because of this, it can be deployed with skeptics to allow them to identify the far-ranging consequences of future change themselves—creating “aha” moments that deepen the emotional connection to the work.

Our proprietary “Ride Two Curves” tool is a nice way to systematically think through how a system can switch from one present way of working to a new way in the future—and what the implications and results for your organization might be. Companies, for instance, concerned about disruptive players in their core businesses often find this type of thinking very valuable as they consider how to shift their strategies and how quickly to do it.

Finally, adopting a robust and regular signals gathering practice—complimented by regular debate and consideration of the disruptive possibilities implied by those signals – is a core practice which provides the concrete evidence that some people need to see. It can be especially impactful to show skeptical leaders signals of competitors wading in, when innovators in analogous sectors are experimenting, or when disruptions caused contemporaries to falter.

While dealing with skeptics might not be easy, it is almost unavoidable in any futures process. Rather than seeing it as an obstacle, I’d encourage you to see it as an opportunity (see how I applied that idea of balance there?). Skeptics will drive you to design better processes, create better content, and be better focused on driving change. Putting in the time up front to understand your audiences, identify where skepticism is coming from, and applying the right tools in the right places will position you well to turn skeptics into champions.

This post was originally published on IFTF.org. You can learn future-ready skills by enrolling in an IFTF Foresight Essentials training based on 50+ years of time-tested and proven foresight tools and methods today.

Wayne Pan is a Research Director at Institute for the Future (IFTF).

The post How to Win Over Your Futures Skeptics appeared first on Getting Smart.

I never intended to start a high school.

It was in the Spring of 2015 while walking with a junior high teacher from the private Montessori school my children attended that I asked a simple question whose answer would fundamentally alter the trajectory of my professional and personal life.

“Has anyone thought about adding a high school to our school?” I asked as we walked together up a path at a local educational farm, kicking muck off our boots as we went. Behind us followed a train of junior high (grade 7-8) Montessori students who had just finished helping a group of Primary (age 3-5) students do an exploratory “swamp walk” through the farm’s marsh to experience first-hand the features of this vital ecosystem. I had joined them as a parent volunteer for the day. The teacher shrugged and said, “It’s been talked about, but it hasn’t really gone anywhere.”

“Huh,” I replied. “Well, if you want to start one, I think I’d be interested in teaching in it.”

Just a few short months later being “interested in teaching” at a Montessori high school morphed into resigning my tenured faculty position at a local university and radically altering my career path to design and launch an urban, community-centered Montessori high school.

Fast forward 5 years to August 13, 2020. On that hot August morning, I found myself standing in a parking lot outside the education wing of a church in downtown South Bend along with my co-founder, Eileen Mariani, taking the temperature of – and handing masks to – the first students to walk through the doors of River Montessori High School (RMHS). In between a couple of arrivals, I looked at her, pulled down my mask, and quietly mouthed the words, “we did it.”

But how? RMHS is an improbable aberration, right? I mean, how did a former professor and elementary teacher go from the notion of starting a school in 2015 to actually opening one in 2020 and standing next to its first graduates in 2023? It’s a question I reflect on quite a bit as I guide others through the process of launching new private schools in my current role as the Director of the Founders Program at the Drexel Fund. Every startup journey is unique, but I’ve noticed three interconnected themes that are a part of each success story.

You ask questions. Lots of them.

Asking questions – and not being afraid of where the answers lead you – is a key part of walking the road to designing and opening a new school. When we see something “not right” in the educational environments around us we can intuitively feel that things need to be different, but we have to interrogate those feelings to get at the core reality that needs to be changed.

Why are students dropping out? What is it about their current environment that seems to be holding them back? What should a graduate be able to do? Who needs this school (i.e., what does my proposed school offer that no one else is doing or not doing well?)

These are important academic model and market demand questions, but there are also a number of vital, non-academic questions to ask, especially if your motivation is to start a school to meet your own child’s needs.

What if the school I start ends up not working for my child? Am I committed to doing this even if things don’t work out for my own family? What if the school’s needs run counter to what my child needs? Am I willing to fail?

While building a school to serve one’s own child is a powerful motivation that can sustain a person through the inevitable challenges of founding a school, it is also a dangerous one. The important takeaway is that when founding a school you need to constantly be asking – and seeking answers to – questions, and not just ones about the academic model. But where do you get your answers or even figure out the questions you need to be asking?

You build a community of supporters…and skeptics.

At a very early stage we invited supporters and skeptics into our visioning and planning process. Hearing answers to our questions from just our “cheerleaders” or our own brains wasn’t enough. We needed to know the questions and concerns of others because honestly, we didn’t know what we didn’t know.

In our case, this first took the form of spending 5 months in early 2016 meeting regularly with a group of individuals who were lovingly skeptical of what was being proposed. That gave us a chance to try out different responses and explore novel ideas. It also forced us to repeatedly narrow our focus and hone in on the core identity of our school. This moved us from general notions of what we wanted the school to look like to very specific principles for how we were going to educate students. It also created a critical mass of individuals who years later would become some of the first board members and parents.

I won’t sugarcoat it though. Hearing people push back against our ideas for innovation was hard, as was making peace with the fact that there would always be people who weren’t going to see the merit in what we were doing. But I’m glad we had so many voices – both supportive and critical – as together they kept us moving forward.

But how does a launch team move from questioning and planning to actually being able to set an opening date and recruit families?

You get your big break(s).

What do I mean by a “big break?” Well, it looks different for every startup journey. It might take the form of someone overhearing you talk about your proposed school and later coming up to you saying, “Hey, I heard you are looking for a school location. I have a place you should look at which has been vacant for the last four years.” Or, maybe a friend of yours is talking with another friend about your school idea at a wedding and as a result of that conversation this “friend of a friend” ends up becoming your school’s first major donor and board president. It could even look like getting an email out of the blue from someone you haven’t talked to in more than a year saying, “Have you heard of the Drexel Fund?”

Turns out, none of the above are hypotheticals: each was one of our “big breaks” (yes, plural). None of these are things we could have scripted or planned, and one might say we were “lucky.” But to quote Seneca, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” By relentlessly asking and answering questions and continually building a community of supporters and skeptics, we positioned ourselves for these moments of opportunity. If you talk to anyone who has successfully launched a school, I’m sure they would tell you similar stories.

So…what now?

If you have a passion for bringing a new private school to your community you might be wondering what some concrete next steps might be.

One option is to attend one of the Drexel Fund’s upcoming information sessions for private school entrepreneurs. At these sessions, you will learn about the pillars of school startup and hear about how The Drexel Fund supports the launch of new private schools. You could also apply for the 2024-25 Drexel Fund Founders Program. Even just completing the application will help you clarify your proposed school model and identify what questions you need to ask during your startup process.

Whether or not you take any of the above next steps, there is one thing I encourage everyone to do who is considering launching a school: talk about it. All the time. Let people know what you are thinking. No one does this alone, and the sooner you get your idea out of your head, build your launch team, and create awareness in your community, the more likely you are to be successful.

Dr. Eric Oglesbee is the director of the Founders Program at the Drexel Fund, a venture philanthropy organization dedicated to increasing access to high-quality private education for low-income families. He is also the co-founder and board president of River Montessori High School (RMHS) in South Bend, Indiana.

The post Talk About It: Why Asking Questions and Sharing Ideas is a Core Part of Starting a School appeared first on Getting Smart.

The Portrait of a Graduate is a unique and locally tailored vision that outlines the competencies and transferable skills that support a learner’s long-term success. It serves as the guiding North Star for systemic transformation. This collective vision not only defines the essential knowledge, skills, and mindsets desired for students upon graduation but also rekindles engagement and enthusiasm among students, teachers, administrators, and community stakeholders. It provides strategic direction for a thorough redesign of the overall educational experience, ensuring the growth, adaptability, and ultimate success of every learner in our ever-evolving world.

Simultaneously, the Portrait of a System elevates this vision beyond aspiration, underscoring the need for a deliberate focus and alignment throughout the entire school district. Collaborating closely with dedicated district leaders cultivates a strategic shift by establishing new conditions, processes, and practices that promote equitable and enduring 21st-century experiences for both educators and students alike. This alignment ensures seamless integration of the vision at every level of the educational ecosystem, fostering a cohesive and purposeful transformation. Districts and schools support these with codesigned learning models, curriculum frameworks, and instructional models.

At the core of this transformative process lies the Portrait of an Educator, recognizing that educators’ competence and dedication can shape the overall learning experience for every student. By purposefully integrating rigorous academic content with 21st-century skills, mindsets, and literacies, educators play a pivotal role in bringing the vision to life. The Portrait of an Educator framework guides the identification and design of essential tools, resources, and support systems, empowering educators to effectively deliver on the district’s new vision with passion and proficiency. Leadership within this systemic design requires more than traditional management traits.

The Portrait of a Leader describes the optimal competencies required by leaders (both at the governance and administrative levels) to support educators in implementing the learning model and helping every student achieve the Portrait of a Graduate. 

This nested approach paves the way for a truly transformative path that upholds the hopes and dreams of a community. It nurtures a generation of students equipped with the essential skills and mindsets to thrive in a dynamic, ever-changing world. The intentional system-wide shift fosters an inclusive, forward-thinking, and learner-centered education, empowering students to become future-ready leaders and active contributors to a flourishing society.

Step 1: Engage with the Broader Community

As school system leaders, there is a responsibility to nurture the education and well-being of every child. To prepare students as lifelong learners and contributors, it’s critical to begin by engaging with the broader community to identify shared aspirations and address essential questions:

• What are the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of our community for its young people?
• In the face of a rapidly changing, complex world, what specific skills and mindsets do our children need to succeed?
• How can we design equitable learning experiences within our school systems, considering all relevant factors?

Step 2: Define the Portrait of a Graduate

Uniquely tailored to each district yet globally relevant, the Portrait of a Graduate acts as the guiding North Star for systemic transformation. This collective vision defines the knowledge, skills, and mindsets desired for students upon graduation, reinvigorating and re-engaging students, teachers, administrators, and community stakeholders. It provides strategic direction for redesigning the overall educational experience, ensuring every student’s growth and success.

Step 3: Align the System with the Portrait of a Graduate

Beyond merely an inspiring vision, a school district must intentionally focus on shifting and aligning the entire system to make the Portrait of a Graduate a tangible reality. Districts must work alongside dedicated school district leaders to facilitate a strategic shift, establishing new conditions, processes, and practices that foster equitable and enduring 21st-century experiences for both educators and students. This alignment ensures the vision’s seamless integration throughout all levels of the system.

Step 4: Empower Educators with the Portrait of a Educator

At the heart of this transformative journey lies the overall learning experience provided to every student. By purposefully integrating rigorous academic content with 21st-century skills, mindsets, and literacies, educators play a vital role in bringing the vision to life. The Portrait of an Educator framework guides the identification and design of essential tools, resources, and support to empower educators to deliver on the district’s new vision effectively.

Step 5: Equip Leaders with the Portrait of a Leader

A Portrait of a Leader serves as a blueprint, outlining the essential competencies and qualities necessary for leaders across different levels of the educational ecosystem. Beyond establishing clear expectations, this portrait offers guidance for navigating of the complex landscape of modern education. In this context, leadership goes beyond conventional management traits. The Portrait of a Leader empowers educational leaders to effectively inspire, guide and empower their teams, fostering a culture of innovation, adaptability, and continuous improvement. It equips leaders to champion and steer the roadmap for systemic change, ultimately leading to more equitable, learner-centered, and forward thinking educational environments.

Review, Refine, and Celebrate

As we collaborate with system leaders to align their aspirations with daily practices, it can be overwhelming to consider the multitude of shifts required. To continue growing and evolving, it is crucial to acknowledge what is working and build from there. Celebrate progress, growth, and successes within your team and beyond. Recognize systems and teachers who are open to sharing their practices, receiving feedback, and collaborating. This commitment is how networks are formed, allowing us all to learn and grow together. Embrace the transformation, continue learning, and celebrate each step of the journey as you create and implement a Graduate Learning Profile that enriches the lives of your students and prepares them for a thriving future.

The post Charting a Course for Educational Transformation: The Power of Aligned Portraits appeared first on Getting Smart.

On April 23-25, 2023, 2000 people from 47 states and 12 nations spanning five continents came together as one community at the Carnegie Summit 2023 in San Diego. This event marked the 10th anniversary of the Carnegie Summit on Improvement in Education, an annual convening of a community of improvers to connect, share work, learn, and be inspired by each other. It is a place to belong to a larger movement for continuously improving our education system to close opportunity gaps for all our nation’s young people.

The first-time Carnegie Summit attendees were welcomed into the community with open arms and told from the start: “You belong”. In the words of one of the emcees Tinkhani White, “The Summit is a homecoming, where we welcome back those who have been with us, welcome new members to our community, celebrate the community, and bring our whole authentic selves to enrich the community.” Woven throughout the three days was a celebration of joy as an expression of resistance, punctuated by the movement of activist dancers from CONTRA-TIEMPO.

The focus of this 10th Summit centered around the joining of improvement and equity. Tim Knowles, the president of the Carnegie Foundation, opened the event with these powerful words: “Improvement must be about the pursuit of economic and racial justice. Improvement without equity means that achievement gaps don’t close. Improvement with equity means that they can and do.”

Historically, the Carnegie Summit has been the place for educators passionate about improvement science. The community’s collective goals include finding better ways to learn how to improve in general and how to learn fast to achieve quality outcomes reliably at scale, centered around these six core principles of improvement:

1. Identify the specific problem we are trying to solve.
2. Specify what works, for whom, and under what set of conditions.
3. Understand how the current system produces the current outcomes.
4. Measure improvement by tracking key outcomes and processes.
5. Engage in rapid cycles to learn fast, fail fast, and improve quickly, embracing failures as opportunities to learn.
6. Embrace the wisdom of networked communities to accelerate improvements.

There were over 100 sessions and over 50 posters of schools and districts sharing their improvement journeys to engaged audiences.

In recent years, the Carnegie Summit has broadened its tent to include visionary, transformative change for the education sector. With Tim Knowles’ announcement in December about dismantling the Carnegie Unit to shift focus away from ‘seat time’ toward ‘skills’ and Carnegie’s newly announced partnership with Educational Testing Service (ETS) to radically transform assessment, it is clear that the time for a bold and ambitious transformation to our nation’s education system is now.

The XQ Institute joined the Carnegie Summit in 2022 with a vision to improve and reimagine the American high school experience. During the 2023 Summit, XQ hosted two sessions where conference-goers learned about the design journey for two XQ high schools in DC Public Schools and gained hands-on exposure to the XQ Competencies, a comprehensive collection of skills for XQ’s vision of what every American young person should demonstrate mastery of by the time they graduate from high school. The XQ Café was also a popular place to enjoy coffee and chat with other conference-goers about their shared vision for the future of our nation’s education system.

The 10th anniversary Carnegie Summit was a place where like-minded educators came together to be enriched and inspired by each other’s experiences. The education community’s journey from the Summit is toward equity, belonging, connection, joy, and improvement.

The post Carnegie Summit 2023: Improvement For All appeared first on Getting Smart.

In beautiful San Diego, at the 10th anniversary Deeper Learning Conference, attendees were welcomed with an open-air pop-up shop where student entrepreneurs sold carefully crafted goods (shoutout to Quinn’s Creations for clay earrings) and shared their varied stories of design and learning.

It was evident from the onset that this conference, hosted by High Tech High Graduate School Education, would spotlight three core elements of authentic learning: vulnerability, flexibility, community and connection.

Vulnerability

Over the course of the conference, there were several opportunities to move to the jams and demonstrate radical vulnerability with strangers from around the world. Attendees were encouraged to embrace discomfort in sessions and to lean into ways vulnerability can teach. The Inclusive Design for More Equitable Learning Environments session led by the Henry Ford Institute named discomfort as a norm as participants labeled identities core to them such as mother, educator, Latina, husband, and how these identifiers impact the development of learning spaces for adults and young people. The identities inherently will influence decisions and will often shape who is seen and who is heard.

Throughout the sessions, young people sat shoulder-to-shoulder with adult learners establishing a space of both vulnerability and power. The conversations that took place encouraged attendees to rethink their relationship with learners and to see everyone in the space as equals with something of value to share.

Using Comics to Drive Difficult Conversations about Race and History led by Stephane Manuel of TruFikton was a great opportunity to learn from colleagues. It is not uncommon for presenters to acknowledge the brilliance in the room, aside from their own. At Deeper Learning, this went beyond a canned remark at the top of the session. These facilitators allowed for voices to be heard and experiences to be shared for an inclusive learning environment.

Flexibility

Deeper Learning is built in a way that truly supports flexible and variable learning experiences. For example, a conference-goer might attend Den Talks, an informal conversation led by two hosts on a particular topic like school leadership or community support. The beauty is that no two Den Talks are the same in topic or flow.

One conversation centered around school transformation led by Kaleb Rashad, the interim Chief Executive Officer at High Tech High and Eric Chagala the founding principal from Vista Innovation & Design Academy (VIDA), kicked off by gathering questions from the audience. These questions ranged from how to galvanize around school change to what to do when the school environment is reluctant to change and innovate. The hosts shared how Liberating Structures and the Thinking Collaborative shaped their leadership as a response. Listen to their podcast episode of their Den Talk on HTH UnBoxed!

Another Den Talk featured San Diego Met alumna Karla Cruz Godoy and current San Diego Met senior, Sofia Ervin where they engaged in a conversation about the relationship between advisors and students which is a core component of the Big Picture Schools learning model. Each shared how essential and impactful advisory time is to student success. “There have been times when my advisor needed to lean on us more than we needed to lean on him,” Sofia explained to the audience members.

Deeper Learning also facilitates Deep Dives, three-hour immersive blocks to delve into a range of educational topics. Peeling the layers back in sessions related to unlocking fear through art and literacy, education as a practice of freedom, and the power podcasts provide student voices, allows ample time to forge strong bonds with colleagues that last beyond the conference.

Deeper Learning creates an environment that supports learning through freedom of space and time.

Community and Connection

At Deeper Learning, relationship is key. All participants are assigned advisory groups with the sole purpose of making new connections. This advisory time occurred throughout the conference, always with the same advisory leader who facilitates activities for collaboration such as Exquisite Corpse which requires small groups to draw a body without seeing what the precious person drew. This activity drew up flexibility and vulnerability as many participants did not self-identify as “artists.” Guards were down and laughs were up when the final results were revealed and shared.

Finally, as the sun started to set the first evening, attendees sampled food truck offerings key to the west coast from Bar-B-Que to lobster rolls to vegetarian-East African food.

A key component of Deeper Learning is time to share knowledge gained and all learners were offered the opportunity during the exhibition of learning. During this time, participants were able to witness artifacts of Deep Dives from other attendees such as dance routines, art displays, and interactive exhibits.

Transformational learning occurs when these three components are used consistently in learning spaces to inspire and cultivate genuine learning opportunities. All learning experiences can contain vulnerability, flexibility, community and connection to allow rich and meaningful learning to occur.

If you are interested in growing with an innovative and international learning community, register for the Deeper Learning 2024 conference from March 26th -28th.

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