Reflections from the Fall 2022 NYKids Advisory Board Meeting
By, Kristen C. Wilcox, Maria I. Khan, Aaron Leo and Jessie Tobin
The NYKids team met with our Advisory Board members for the fall 2022 meeting on November 10. Through these meetings, our team regularly shares updates on its core mission to Inform, Inspire and Improve and to receive feedback on future directions. In attendance were Cheryl Dozier (UAlbany), Ginny Goatley (Chair NYKids Advisory board, UAlbany), Angela Pagano (SUNY), Don Nickson (SAANYS), Mike Piccirillo (CASDA), Gayle Simidian (NYSSBA), Joe Dragone (Capital Region BOCES), and Amy DelCorvo (NYSCATE),
The conversation was initiated through an introductory poll question: “What are important issues in education today?” The NYKids Advisory Board members’ responses affirmed the recent work that NYKids team has been engaging this past year through the emphasis on equity, social-emotional learning, justice, teacher and workforce experiences, and other issues as captured in the word cloud.
Inspire: Educators Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic & Remote Schooling and Adverse Childhood Events during COVID-19
The NYKids team shared our forthcoming research report “Opportunities and Challenges to Adapt and Innovate: How Educators Confronted the COVID-19 Pandemic” with the Advisory Board members. The goal of this study is to discover how schools with variable education workforce experiences adapted and innovated; and how those adaptations and innovations related to contextual and organizational factors. (The case studies of the 6 positive outlier schools from this report are already available on our NYKids website, and the report will be published soon!)
The NYKids team also provided updates on another project with the City School District of Albany focusing on the remote schooling and adverse childhood events among elementary school-aged students and their caregivers. The NYKids team is working with an interdisciplinary team of researchers (Janine Jurkowski from the School of Public Health; Ashley Fox and Lucy Sorenson from the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy) for this mixed methods study. Researchers also seek to develop community-informed recommendations to address the mental and physical health needs of the most vulnerable and marginalized youth as we emerge from the pandemic.
Members of the NYKids Advisory Board provided feedback on research of high interest to their stakeholders such as the differential impacts of the pandemic on newer versus veteran teachers and promising practices for academic learning in the wake of the pandemic.
Improve: AIR-RPP & Continuous School Improvement Direct Support
The NYKids team updated the Advisory Board members on our ongoing continuous school improvement direct support through COMPASS Institutes and workshops as well as our partnership with The American Institutes for Research’s Equity in Education Initiative with Chatham High School, and Tech Valley High School. Recently the NYKids team attended the RPP convening with our partners in Chicago to develop action plans for this exciting work and is continuing to engage with them this year.
Inform: Performance Tracker Database, Publications & Communications
NYKids reported on the recent publication of two articles in peer reviewed journals: one focusing on the gendered impacts of the pandemic on educator workforce and the other on peer relationships in positive outlier schools. We also provided an update on improvements to the Performance Tracker (to be shared widely soon!) and dissemination analytics such as numbers of website visitors, newsletter readers, and social media postings.
Stay tuned for more new research results and we invite you to follow us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, for announcements.
As always, we thank you for your interest in NYKids and encourage you to reach out to nykids@albany.edu if you have any questions, feedback, or interest in continuous improvement support.
