Flipping the Script: Are Schools and Colleges Ready for Today’s Students?
By Kristen C. Wilcox & Jessie Tobin
From April 23rd -25th the NYKids team participated in the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s Annual Summit in San Diego, California. The event hosted funders, teachers, school and district leaders, improvement specialists, researchers, and a variety of others interested in improvement in education.
In addition to attending sessions described below, NYKids Director Kristen C. Wilcox co-facilitated a workshop on the teaching and learning of improvement science and with NYKids Graduate Assistant and doctoral student, Jessie Tobin presented a poster on our research-practice partnership work with Tech Valley High School and the Chatham Central School District and facilitated by the American Institutes for Research. We were delighted to meet up with our Chatham colleagues at the Summit and meet new colleagues with shared interests and networks.
In its 10th year, the Summit centered discussions on continuous improvement for equity. Attendees joined interactive sessions focused on real-life stories and examples of how continuous improvement methods can be applied to address a multitude of problems of practice.
Many sessions were focused on using collaborative approaches to meet students’ needs, such as building better conditions for learning in the classroom and adjusting practices to support multi-lingual students and those from diverse cultural backgrounds.
A common sentiment shared among conference collaborators was that students’ needs have shifted throughout the COVID-19 pandemic era, and it is now more important than ever to meet students where they are.
What Does It Look Like to Ask and Act Upon the Question: “Are We Student Ready?”
The first keynote at the Summit featured Shirley Collado, the President and CEO of College Track. Collado, the first Dominican-American to serve as president of a four-year post-secondary institution, discussed the need to look at what P12 school systems are doing to adapt to students’ needs and dreams. This discussion with Timothy Knowles (the President and CEO of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching) prompted Summit attendees to think deeply about what we hope to build coming out of the pandemic.
As NYKids has been conducting research on the impacts of the pandemic in P12 schools in New York State and identifying promising practices, this line of questioning resonated with us. We share a few considerations and resources for educators and leaders seeking to adapt and build new systems with students at the center:
- To apply a user-centered (e.g., student, parent, caregiver) approach. At the Summit, many presenters shared strategies to more actively engage youth voice to better understand what specific adjustments are needed according to students’ perspectives. Strategies for tapping into youth voice include student surveys, empathy interviews, and hosting student-led panels.
- To innovate systems through the lens of equity. At the Summit collaborators highlighted issues that resonated with NYKids latest study with regard to the differential impacts of the pandemic. Systemic reforms discussed span from access to early childhood education to removing barriers to post-secondary study, including pathways from 2-year to 4-year institutions. The UCLA Community School highlighted in one Summit session provides just one example of tackling the common high-leverage problem of chronic absenteeism through a research-practice partnership.
- To build our learning communities with wellness and love at the center. “Well-being” and “Love” were woven through a number of sessions at the Summit and also held a prominent place in NYKids’ study. For students, innovative new frameworks were introduced such as the Rennie Center’s new Strategic Learning for Equity & Improvement (SLEI) framework and frameworks to focus attention on educators’ well-being such as the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Joy in Work and Workforce Well-being
We are grateful at NYKids to be part of the Summit conversation, to collaborate with our school-based partners in sharing our research, and in continuing to work to help educators be “student ready.”
Thank you for your interest in NYKids. You may visit our webpage for the latest research and news, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, for announcements.
