Craft Category: Artifacts

Monterey Peninsula: Co-Designing Change with Teachers and Students

Monterey Peninsula Unified School District (MPUSD) began a design process to improve teaching and learning with a team consisting of the superintendent and a diverse group of cabinet members, all strongly committed to the district’s goal to “listen to and engage with all stakeholders (family, community, staff) in order to better understand and respond to the needs of [the] community.” Initially, the team planned to regularly engage a broader set of people (students, teachers, families) to provide input. However, the team eventually decided to deepen their approach, and they invited teachers and students to more directly participate in the work – eventually hosting a teacher- and student-centered design session. This approach demonstrated the team’s deep commitment to prioritizing the voices of teachers and students; it also showed the team’s willingness to adapt its process over time as it learned more about what this work would take.

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February 3, 2021

Mastery Charter Schools: Including a Diverse Array of Voices

Mastery Charter Schools began a design process to improve teaching and learning with a team of academic executives. Important among the charter network’s mission and values is the weight they place on equity: “We disrupt systemic racism and the inequities that limit our students’ choices. We nurture a culture where all staff, students, and families are seen and valued.” As a team, they reflected on whether their composition would honor that commitment. When the group self-identified limitations to their perspectives and experiences, they took steps to include the voices of staff with vantage into the lives of students – especially those most marginalized. This approach ensured that the teachers and students closest to challenges in the district had a say in designing solutions. It also helped the team develop a design that could actually be used day-to-day, as teachers and students could provide an “on-the-ground” perspective to inform the work.

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February 3, 2021

Cedar Rapids: Engaging Students and Teachers in Design

When Cedar Rapids Community School District (CRCSD) began a design process to improve teaching and learning, they started with a set of leaders from their Teaching and Learning team; all were strongly committed to the district’s vision for equity – to “develop a system that assures all students have equity of voices, resources, opportunities, and expectations.” As team members reflected on their own identities, they realized they would need to include other voices at the table, especially given the incomplete set of perspectives represented by their predominantly white, male group of district-level administrators. This led the group to engage a much larger, more diverse set of students and teachers in the design process. This approach broadened the set of voices that helped shape important district efforts. It also helped the team more quickly understand the day-to-day realities of their current approach to teaching and learning, as the students and teachers that the team engaged live that reality every day.

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February 3, 2021

Mere Engagement: Reflections about the Connections Between Online Learning, Student Agency, and Student Engagement

School leaders mustn’t lose sight of the need for student agency and student engagement as they contend with the myriad challenges posed by COVID-19. In fact, they must reimagine what agency and engagement can look like in cases when students are learning virtually and also when they are unable to connect.

Mere Engagement: Reflections about the Connections Between Online Learning, Student Agency, and Student Engagement offers school leaders seven action steps to support students’ sense of mastery and ownership of their learning, along with promoting their sense of connection and belonging. They include:

  1. Make the implicit explicit by providing clear communications in multiple formats.
  2. Ensure anytime, anyplace learning with a mix of synchronous and asynchronous learning activities.
  3. Enable competency-based learning where students demonstrate mastery of content.
  4. Keep families in the loop.
  5. Design lessons that link student interests with the environment.
  6. Check for learning along the way.
  7. Create equitable opportunities to learn.

The authors posit that in the face of the havoc wreaked by COVID-19 and all of the issues competing for school leaders’ attention, that concerns about student agency and engagement are being “backburnered” to everyone’s detriment. “Without considering issues associated with student agency and student engagement, all our work to prepare may be in vain,” they write. And furthermore:

During a transition to remote or distance learning, students need a renewed sense of agency. They must understand what they are to learn and how to demonstrate their learning. They must know how to ask for assistance and exhibit self-direction and efficacy when working on assignments. They own their work and put forth their best efforts. When these attributes of student agency are in play, authentic engagement is occurring.

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January 5, 2021

Active Spelling

This screencast shows how one teacher engages her students in an active spelling activity. In this video, the educator explains and models the strategy in action, sharing how she guides students through physical movements (e.g., jumping jacks) to spell out words.

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December 17, 2020
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