NYKids Partners with HFM BOCES: Galvanizing Shared Leadership for Equity in 2023

By Kristen C. Wilcox and Jessie Tobin

Wondering what to focus on in the 2023 school year and how to launch improvement efforts for equity this summer? Whether it’s tackling student engagement challenges or plugging holes in the educator workforce – school and district leaders have a lot of challenges to tackle in the coming year.

According to a recent study report entitled Striving for Coherence, Struggling with Incoherence and based on interviews, observations, and documents collected in a variety of school systems in the U.S, and globally, system leaders “…surfaced challenges that transcended instructional coherence and encompassed issues of educational equity, which included and reached beyond students’ classroom experiences”.

This expansive view of the opportunities for and barriers to achieving equity that exist both within classrooms and outside of them has been echoed in NYKids’ own research. For example, two major themes NYKids identified in our most recent study of positive outlier schools, relate to  “empowerment and collective responsibility” and “adaptive and innovative systems”.

In this blog we share some of the tools and tips NYKids and Hamilton, Fulton, & Montgomery (HFM) BOCES leaders explored in our summer institute in an effort to promote coherence around achieving equity in preparation for the 2023 school year.

HFM and NYKids: Promoting Coherence and Teamwork

As we’ve reported in previous  , one of NYKids’ core missions is to support stakeholders in their work to improve the experiences and outcomes for young people in our state. To this end NYKids draws upon the knowledge of expert facilitators, and a variety of other organizational leadership lessons on the centrality of teams as we engage with our school and district partners using a process we call  .

Importantly, NYKids’ research focuses attention on equity – this extends from our demographic considerations as we sample positive outlier schools in our studies to what we explore in our data collection and in our reports.

In our most recent COMPASS institute, we leveraged the expertise of Nancy Andress and Meg Rooney (both with extensive experience in K-12 schools) and partnered with HFM BOCES to connect their “Core Beliefs” to their planning for equity in the coming school year.

To do this work, NYKids has learned that starting with belief statements like HFM’s accelerates the process of developing coherence and so too does establishing a culture of collaboration and structures for teams to work together.

Tools and Tips to Build Leadership for Equity Capacity

Some of the tools and tips NYKids and HFM offer to others seeking to galvanize shared leadership for equity in the coming school year are:

• Start with strengthening relationships: COMPASS institutes always begin with activities that promote acknowledging the strengths of different members of the school and district community. We use variations of compass points activities to get the ball rolling.
• Next, we use NYKids COMPASS process and tool to begin exploring promising practices, assessing priorities, and identifying high leverage change ideas through
• From there we circle back to existing goals and ask the question: “How well do these goals match what we really need to focus on, and are they inclusive and equitable?”
• The work continues with attaching a measurement plan to goals and articulating an action plan for rolling out the plans.

Some of the benefits of allotting the time for this kind of collaborative work is reflected in HFM BOCES participant’ take-aways:

“A successful team utilizes all different personality types.”

“Having this time to collaborate and communicate as a team was great. We all noted different areas of growth that our program needs and work together to identify what to fix.”

“We discussed finding time for staff to share and feel heard in a setting that is also confidential when discussing students.”

“Having conversations with different departments within our school helps view the school as a “big picture” rather than a view of my individual teaching.”

“Reviewing and reflecting on what we do and how we did it is critical to the work we do.”

“NYKids and HFM core beliefs are aligned.”

“One key takeaway for me is the importance of group work – areas I identified as being of need matched with my team, but priority areas I didn’t expect clearly emerged.”

“Working in our different buildings you can feel on an island. This morning helped me to see others are feeling the same things even if not expressed.”

“Group discussion cast a light on areas of concern that I wouldn’t have identified on my own.”

“One key take-away from this morning for me is we need to collaborate as a team and rely on one another.”

If you or someone in your organization is interested in partnering with NYKids for team workshops, full-day institutes, or sessions with any of our research team about NYKids research, please contact us at nykids@albany.edu

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