This slide deck offers multiple templates for building your own Digital Vending Machine to give options and build engagement with your students in remote, hybrid, and simultaneous learning environments.
PDF version of Section 2: Dream Big of the Real-Time Redesign toolkit.
This article explains key ways to implement a station rotation within a hybrid setting.
As part of their pilot for Real-Time Redesign, one of the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District design team’s initial priorities was to orient students and teachers to their role as co-designers. The team designed a short training session in which they gave participants an overview of the liberatory design process and created space for interactive discussion, questions, and reflection. The design team also shared their vision and problem of practice (“How might we increase flexibility and personalization to build a sense of belonging and connection within the context of our labor and policy constraints?”) to prepare participants to create solutions that would build relationships and strengthen student belonging in the district.
This video shows students in fourth and fifth grade working with their remote buddies on a pumpkin launch design challenge at Design 39 in Poway, CA.
Monterey Peninsula Unified School District (MPUSD) sought to address a key problem in their district: “How might we increase flexibility and personalization to build a sense of belonging and connection within the context of our labor and policy constraints?”
The team decided on a solution that would engage students and teachers in a design process to design new systems for personalization, flexibility, connection, and belonging. Though Monterey Peninsula had engaged students and teachers throughout its design process (e.g., to identify the problem of practice), the design team knew that they also needed to be part of defining the solution.
This solution supports equity because it cedes decision-making authority into the hands of those closest to the problem. This solution supports resiliency because it requires the district to be positioned to respond to the solutions that teachers and students develop. It also introduces a new method: teacher- and student-involved design sessions, which the district can use in the future to address other problems.
Cedar Rapids Community School District (CRCSD) interviewed a range of teachers and students to identify opportunities to improve teaching and learning. The team heard a clear and consistent theme that stakeholders felt many students are not engaged in their learning and don’t see the purpose or how it connects to their dreams for life beyond school. After reviewing themes from the interviews, the team summarized a key problem of practice: “How might we provide relevant, standards-aligned feedback to students so that every student reaches mastery?”
This problem statement challenged the team to find solutions that help each and every student deepen their learning through opportunities for ownership and personalized feedback (including feedback relevant to the student’s goals and aspirations). This problem statement also required the team to think about more individualized and flexible systems than traditional grading structures that apply a “one-size-fits-all” approach to assessing student learning at a single point in time; such traditional systems do not always include personalized feedback or give students additional opportunity to improve their mastery.
Mastery Charter Schools has a clear commitment to equity – its vision is to be a model anti-racist school district. To live out this commitment, Mastery seeks to provide affirming, engaging, and culturally relevant learning experiences for all students. Mastery’s design team researched other districts that have implemented culturally relevant and sustaining practices. This research supplemented the work they were already doing internally to define those practices for their unique community context.
Cedar Rapids Community School District has a well-defined strategy for implementing competency-based learning. Amid implementation, however, they ran into challenges getting standards-based grading (a key part of their model) to really “stick” in the district.
Cedar Rapids researched other communities that have demonstrated success in building a system and culture for standards-based grading. From this research, the team learned new approaches to track individual students’ mastery of standards over time (versus having grades that reflect mastery at a singular, stagnant point in time); these approaches struck the team as potentially powerful ways to close persistent achievement gaps in the district – which, in turn, would be a compelling message to bring to students, families, and staff in attempt to get the work to “stick.”
This video describes the importance of allowing students to keep their cameras off at times during a lesson and then prompting students to turn their cameras back on during one-to-one meetings with the teacher and in small-group settings. These more personal settings call for visible social cues and can serve as important relationship-building time, during which it is helpful to be able to see one another.
