eSchool News | Digital Innovation Archives

Missouri Makes the Most of Student Data

Kevin Hogan — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 18:41:15 +0000

Last week, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), in partnership with SAS, launched the Missouri Data Visualization Tool (MO DVT), a web-based application that offers easy-to-use reports and analysis on academic performance, including achievement and growth data aggregated by subject, year, and grade. MO DVT was created in response to stakeholder questions about interpreting and using Missouri Growth Model data.

I was able to get into the weeds with Missouri Commissioner of Education Margie Vandeven & Dr. John White, VP of SAS Education Visualization and Analytics Solutions (EVAAS) to discuss the genesis and strategic goals of the MO DVT, the integration with Missouri’s broader educational strategies, and how quality data is improving decision-making in Missouri schools.

According to both Margie and John, the tool allows educators to access longitudinal data on student performance, track progress over time, and identify areas for improvement. It provides insights at both individual student and group levels, enabling teachers to tailor instruction to meet diverse student needs. Additionally, it supports decision-making at the policy level by analyzing academic impacts, such as the effectiveness of a four-day school week.

By actually using the wealth of available data, the emphasis is now on translating it into meaningful insights to drive improvements in teaching and learning. The goal is to foster a culture of continuous improvement and empower educators with the tools needed to support student success.

Some highlights of the conversation:

Actionable Data for Teachers: The program aims to make growth data actionable for teachers, moving beyond using it solely for accountability purposes to inform classroom instruction and support individual student needs effectively.
Privacy and Security: Measures are in place to ensure data privacy and security, with access restricted to authorized personnel and adherence to regulations like FERPA.
Longitudinal Tracking: Educators can track student progress over time, analyze historical data, and make projections for future performance, enabling targeted interventions and support.
Group-Level Insights: The tool provides insights at both individual student and group levels, allowing educators to identify trends, disparities, and best practices among different student populations.
Policy-Level Decision Making: The program supports policy-level decision-making by analyzing academic impacts, such as the effectiveness of initiatives like the four-day school week, to inform future strategies and interventions.
Promotion of Data Literacy: Educators are encouraged to engage with the data to understand student performance trends, measure growth, and identify areas for improvement, fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making in education.
Continuous Improvement: The overarching goal is to foster a culture of continuous improvement in education, leveraging data insights to drive positive outcomes for students and empower educators with the tools and knowledge needed for success.

Below is a machine-generated transcript of the recording:

Transcript

00:00:04 Speaker 1

OK, great. Thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time. I know you’re busy. Lots of news. Let’s jump right into it. Doctor, maybe you can start by just talking about the program where it began. How long has it been in process to where we’ve gotten to the point now that it’s an active tool for your users?

00:00:23 Speaker 2

So in the state of Missouri, we have a history of of using growth data to inform our accountability decisions. But what we’re doing now is moving to a step further to to not just let it inform accountability policy decision making at the state level, but really making the data actionable for our teachers in the classroom.

00:00:45 Speaker 2

And that’s really where it’s at. We know that’s that’s what helps improve and performance for our students is when we can actually take data and make it an A usable, actionable place for our teachers.

00:00:59 Speaker 1

Yeah. And John, I know you’ve been working in this field for a long time. It used to be, at least when it came to our readers and listeners over the years that sometimes data would be seen as a dirty word, a little bit of a boogeyman, especially when you would get down to the teacher level, many of whom consider themselves.

00:01:19 Speaker 1

Artists, not necessarily scientists when it comes to their kids and how to teach their kids. I think a lot of that has changed, but I think there’s still some remnants of it. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you see.

00:01:32 Speaker 1

The these tools and I think would support when when Doctor mentioned that it is for the teachers, not necessarily for the the Superintendent or the principal, right.

00:01:42 Speaker 3

Yeah, that’s right. So what this tool really allows is for people to see longitudinal data over time at the student level, track the progress of students through all the way starting from 3rd grade all the way through whatever grade they may be sitting in in that year with what, what teacher that.

00:02:02 Speaker 3

Maybe teaching them at that time?

00:02:05 Speaker 3

So allowing a teacher to have access to how much growth a student made in previous years and in the most recent year can be really helpful in trying to understand what may be best for an individual student. Now the data not only is available at the student by student level, but also aggregated.

00:02:24 Speaker 3

At the group level, maybe for schools and for Elias, so schools and Elias can reflect on trends in growth data to see if they implemented different strategies in previous years. What may have worked best to help make the most growth possible with the different groups of students.

00:02:42

Yeah.

00:02:43 Speaker 1

So and I I mentioned the cut of the data is a dirty word and sometimes seen as a boogeyman and one of the big reasons for that over the years has been the the worry about student privacy, right. And data privacy and the use of that. Maybe you could talk about how this solution is able to kind of distinguish between you’re talking about getting that at the granular level with a particular.

00:03:05 Speaker 1

Student. I’ll assume that there is protections in there in terms of that data when it comes to not only test scores, but maybe ISP’s or behavioral sort of data.

00:03:17

Yes.

00:03:17 Speaker 3

That’s absolutely right. So what the system is, is there is a public site access, but that available that data is only available in the aggregate level at the school in LA kind of aggregated level. But you have to have login credentials for any individual access to get into the system and see individual student level.

00:03:38 Speaker 3

You can.

00:03:39 Speaker 3

Then you know it would be dependent upon the school in which a an educator is at, for what individual students that they are able to access and see data for. So we certainly follow all the security standards and requirements as well as legislation like FERPA to make sure that only the.

00:03:59 Speaker 3

Appropriate individual educators have access to the appropriate student level.

00:04:05 Speaker 2

Yeah. And I’ll just, I’ll just piggyback on that. I think that’s probably the very first thing we.

00:04:09 Speaker 2

Need to assure.

00:04:10 Speaker 2

Everyone of is that this is always protected data to the highest level that we can ensure that our our parents are counting on that. We certainly make sure that all those protocols are in place.

00:04:22 Speaker 1

Yeah. Can you paint me?

00:04:24 Speaker 1

A little bit of kind of a.

00:04:25 Speaker 1

Day in the life.

00:04:26 Speaker 1

When it comes to the use of this, especially when you’re talking about maybe a teacher, I mean just kind of walk through the day is this, is this still intended to be used on a daily basis or on something maybe at the end of the quarter when they’re compiling grades? Can you give me some real world examples of of how you intend it to be?

00:04:46 Speaker 2

Well, I’ll, I’ll speak from the day in the life of of us at a policy level and then try to bring it down to the, to the teacher level. So again these the the particular model that we are currently using is is still dependent upon that end of the year State assessment data that we get that.

00:05:04 Speaker 2

Has historically been important, but sometimes falling a little flat, and here’s what I.

00:05:09 Speaker 2

Mean by that, if we.

00:05:10 Speaker 2

Focus solely on the proficient score. Like if we just look at where a child scores on the proficient level, then that becomes the target for teachers or for parents or for the students even. And what we’ve learned over I think over since the implementation, particularly of NCLB.

00:05:30 Speaker 2

Over a decade ago is, if you focus just on proficiency, you can lose sight of kids on both ends of of that spectrum there. So those kids that are really scoring.

00:05:40 Speaker 2

Well, sometimes can be that they’re going to score proficient no matter what this is. This is a value added model that says for all kids, even those highest performing, how do we make sure that we are driving improvement at every level. So all those kids get get paid very close attention to and all teachers pay attention to every kid.

00:06:01 Speaker 2

Don’t get me wrong, they certainly do. But I’m talking about from the.

00:06:04 Speaker 2

State level when?

00:06:05 Speaker 2

We used to hear a term that.

00:06:10 Speaker 2

Sometimes teachers or school districts would refer to as our bubble kids, like kids who are just about to get over one level into proficiency, and what the growth model does, it says, hey, let’s pay attention to every single child on that roster and let’s see how far whether they’re well below proficiency. And we’re going to move them towards that or whether they’re.

00:06:30 Speaker 2

Well above proficiency, and we’re going to continue to make sure that we’re pushing those highest.

00:06:36 Speaker 2

Achievers, even higher. So for us at the state level, that’s how I like to look at that data and say we are paying attention to every single child. Now how does the teacher take that data then? There, I’m going to let John speak to that a little bit more too. But as a teacher, you want to know who am I most effective with in the classroom? I really moving performance.

00:06:56 Speaker 2

For all kids? Or am I able to step back and say, gosh, I wonder what was?

00:07:00 Speaker 2

Happening with with this group of students that I that I as a teacher, didn’t have as much value. Add to that learning opportunity for those kids because we want to be successful with with all students. And then you add a few more tools to that toolbox. But I I wouldn’t say that that the initial results are a day-to-day operational piece because.

00:07:21 Speaker 2

We are still we we depend on that state state assessment that we get annually to to talk about what’s happening gives us great power at the.

00:07:33 Speaker 2

State Board of Education level or others when we can say which schools really are serving various populations of students and still showing tremendous growth and that’s that. Then you can say what are they doing because we have a like population over here who we’d like to see those kinds of results to. Can we connect those two?

00:07:53 Speaker 2

Schools can we connect those two districts to say, what’s happening at all in the spirit of of improvement and serving our kids better?

00:08:04 Speaker 3

Yeah. So, so I’ll just add a.

00:08:05 Speaker 3

Couple of thoughts here.

00:08:09 Speaker 3

As an educator goes into the system at the individual student level, they would be able to see all of the prior student testing history of that student. So as the Commissioner said, each and every year with new state assessment data, that data would be up loaded into the system and so there would be new assessments.

00:08:26 Speaker 3

Available annually in that system, but to your earlier point point Kevin about security and access throughout the year, students may move from one building to another, and so the system has to be updated to make sure that as students move around the state and move into different buildings, that the permissions and security are updated so that.

00:08:47 Speaker 3

And educator can gain access to the student level data for students sitting in their classroom at that moment. So that’s something that.

00:08:55 Speaker 3

Because get updated throughout the year now within the system, as the Commissioner was saying, so an individual educator can see all of the testing history and math and reading and and all the various subjects on the state assessment system, they can look at how much growth is being made by that student in years past.

00:09:15 Speaker 3

They can also look forward.

00:09:18 Speaker 3

More proactively to get a likelihood of success on a future assessment, so they may be seeing a student in their classroom and we may be saying something like based on all the prior testing data of that individual student and the average experience that you may see, this student has a 70%.

00:09:38 Speaker 3

Chance of being proficient, let’s say, on.

00:09:41 Speaker 3

On their next grade level assessment, they haven’t taken. So as they are administering kind of interim assessments throughout the year to gauge where that student is, they can reflect back on that projection probability to see if that student seems to be on track throughout the year.

00:09:58 Speaker 3

Also, when you aggregate this data up a level, you can see the amount of growth that students were making. Let’s say that were in the lowest achievement group or the highest achievement group. You can disaggregate the student level data into different types of student groups such as.

00:10:15 Speaker 3

Your higher poverty student groups versus lower poverty or English learners versus non-english learners, just to see if.

00:10:24 Speaker 3

An individual group or a certain subject in grade you are making more growth with certain types of students. For example, one group of teachers within fifth grade math might be doing really well with their highest achieving students, but not as well with their lowest achieving students. Or maybe vice versa, so they can reflect on those practices and see.

00:10:44 Speaker 3

You know what can we do a little bit differently with our lowest achieving students to make sure that they’re able to make as much growth and progress as we’re making with some of the other students. And then there’s a lot of comparative features too, that allow a school to see the amount of growth that another school may be making. That’s of a similar.

00:11:05 Speaker 3

On a student group, so they may have similar groups of students within their building or a similar makeup of students within their building their achievement level so they can find another school and locate them to maybe again just share best practices or try to understand a little better of what they may be doing differently that’s having more or less success.

00:11:25 Speaker 3

With their students.

00:11:27 Speaker 1

Yeah, that seems that the idea of sharing best practices is something that is is really strong and when you have the numbers to back it up, it just it makes it that much more powerful. I know that there’s been other at the state level, you know, initiatives such as the, the, the four day school week that has has gone back and forth. Can you talk a little bit about how this sort of data?

00:11:47 Speaker 1

Was able to kind of reinforce some of those ideas.

00:11:53 Speaker 2

Well, I’m going to start off with just talking about what we were trying to garner from the study itself and then I’ll let John speak to how they were able to to do that for us. And so for us in the state of Missouri, again, we have had the option of a four day school week for quite some time now for probably just over a decade that legislation.

00:12:13 Speaker 2

Changed back in a time when it was, it was really to try to address fuel, fuel charges and you know, busting issues and that sort of thing it was. Can we save money?

00:12:26 Speaker 2

And well, that really didn’t come to great fruition. We found out that it wasn’t really a great cost saving metric for it. So a lot of districts did not go to the four day school week. What what we’re seeing now is that a number of our districts are finding it to be what they see as an effective teacher recruitment and retention.

00:12:46 Speaker 2

Strategy. So we had a large number of our districts sort of what what I call the domino effect you you have one district start here and then the neighboring districts start to to follow suit because they’re trying to pull from the same pool pool of teachers.

00:13:02 Speaker 2

And so the statute does give the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education the authority to really look at what is the academic impact of that four day school week.

00:13:11 Speaker 2

And should they?

00:13:11 Speaker 2

Keep that option in place, so that was.

00:13:14 Speaker 2

Our very, very.

00:13:15 Speaker 2

First question is to look at again, going back to the sort of value add concept, does it add value to go to a four day or does the five day?

00:13:23 Speaker 2

And how do?

00:13:24 Speaker 2

We measure that. So that’s when we called upon Sass to say, could we look at the growth data to help inform that academic?

00:13:31 Speaker 2

Side I’ll let John speak to that, but just as a data person, you’ll you’ll know and understand that that only became the the first layer of the onion peel. Once we started talking about academics, then people want to know, well, did it impact attendance? Does it really successfully recruit and doesn’t help retain your teachers?

00:13:48 Speaker 2

What are the?

00:13:49 Speaker 2

How do the families feel about it? What is the social implication? Who’s feeding the kids?

00:13:53 Speaker 2

And there’s a million questions that follow. So I like to be very specific that our request to Sass was to really help us to understand academic impact. And John, I’ll toss it to you now to talk about how that study was done.

00:14:09 Speaker 3

Yeah. So all of our work with the state of Missouri has been around using longitudinal student level data.

00:14:15 Speaker 3

And so we have a lot of information over time at the student level for all of the students in the state on these statewide assessments. And So what that allowed us to do with this particular research question is follow the achievement levels of school districts over time then to.

00:14:35 Speaker 3

Identify where that school district may have made a change to a four day.

00:14:39 Speaker 3

Full week and to see if using their own prior data as kind of a control. Did they have some type of significant impact when they moved to a four day school week on their achievement information and we were able to look at that for all the school districts given they moved at maybe a different point in time to that.

00:14:59 Speaker 3

Four day school week, not only did we look at just kind of generally how high achieving.

00:15:05 Speaker 3

Were they, and how much did that change when they moved to a?

00:15:08 Speaker 3

Four day school.

00:15:08 Speaker 3

Week.

00:15:10 Speaker 3

But we also looked at their growth data, so growth data being a little bit different. You know how much growth are they making with students given all of the prior achievement levels of their students? And did the amount of growth that those school districts did that?

00:15:25 Speaker 3

Amount changed from the point prior to after them moving to that four day school week, and the answer was there was there was really no significant up or down movement in both the achievement or growth data when school districts moved over to that four day school week.

00:15:43 Speaker 3

So we have we didn’t.

00:15:45 Speaker 3

Find anything in terms of a a significant change in those academic indicators.

00:15:50 Speaker 3

As the Commissioner was mentioning.

00:15:52 Speaker 1

Interesting. Well, so now that UM, this tool is launched and is in use, what’s next I.

00:16:00 Speaker 1

Mean what are are there?

00:16:01 Speaker 1

Hopes and goals that maybe some.

00:16:05 Speaker 1

Not some surprises, but some. Some new ideas on which you guys can use this data to further improve the student experience.

00:16:16 Speaker 2

Well for me.

00:16:17 Speaker 2

For me again at the state level, I’m just really happy to hear the feedback from the school districts who are understanding and using the tool for so long.

00:16:25 Speaker 2

They’ve been giving them a score and a score without information is a score, right? Like it doesn’t really. And we understand that and recognize that it doesn’t help inform the next steps.

00:16:39 Speaker 2

Or the school district or the teacher. We think this putting this tool in the hands of our school districts allows them again to to move beyond. Just looking at a report card and saying, OK, how do I, how do I transform some of the work that needs to take place here? And again that.

00:16:59 Speaker 2

Can’t always happen on one year. You want to look at multiple trend data. You want to look at what’s happening in your school, in your environment.

00:17:05 Speaker 2

And and what the data are telling you, but that’s that’s how I see it is is again that it was coming from the the school districts who were really asking us for assistance. How do I get better? How do I how do I move the needle here. And so how you do that is by making sure we’re reaching every single child in the best way that we can.

00:17:26 Speaker 2

Right. So to me, that’s exciting. I’m. I’m excited to see what we’ll be able to do.

00:17:31 Speaker 2

And and and garner from more information we I’ll just wrap up with this statement. You’ve heard it a million times. If you’re in the data world, but it is just true when you’re data rich and information poor, that’s a challenge, right? We have a ton of data. So what are we doing with it and how do we use that information?

00:17:51 Speaker 2

For the betterment of our kids.

00:17:54 Speaker 1

Yeah. And John, any last thoughts?

00:17:56 Speaker 3

Yeah, we’re. I’m just really excited. I’m we’re. We’re really proud to be working with the state of Missouri on making this information more accessible and being able to put it into the hands of educators. I think that, you know, when they can actually see this information, they can find it very they they will find it very intuitive.

00:18:15 Speaker 3

They will be able to.

00:18:16 Speaker 3

Look at the data at the individual student level.

00:18:19 Speaker 3

You will.

00:18:20 Speaker 3

Start to help them seek and why measuring growth is so useful and valuable.

00:18:25 Speaker 3

And just we’re really excited to just help promote the usage of this and see where it goes.

00:18:30 Speaker 1

Well, congratulations on your work and know it’s going to have a huge impact for the the students in the state of Missouri and hopefully sharing these insights will help inspire some of our readers and listeners to maybe put a little pressure on their own state governments to get their their data house in order. So thanks again for your time. I really appreciate it.

00:18:49 Speaker 2

Thank you.

00:18:50 Speaker 3

Thank you so much.

5 top education innovation trends in 2023

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Each year, we share our 10 most-read stories. Not surprisingly, many of this year’s Top 10 focused on equity, edtech innovation, immersive learning, and the science of reading. This year’s 10th most-read story focuses on the top edtech innovation predictions for 2023.

2022 marked a confusing year in the world of education innovation. As a friend and school leader said to me a few months ago, “Innovation is dead, right?”

She was half joking while perfectly summing up something in the air last year in schools: a pandemic hangover mixed with ongoing, day-to-day challenges of running complex systems. Together, these made many “new” approaches to education feel too overwhelming to even entertain.

Lurking behind that, a surreal dynamic was unfolding across both K-12 and higher education: as emergency closures subsided, schools quickly regressed to their pre-pandemic approaches, despite new or worsening challenges at their doorstep. That re-entrenchment makes good sense given the resilience of traditional business models. Yet, it doesn’t match up with new realities like stark learning gaps, worsening mental health crises, significant enrollment declines, and a cooling job market. Business as usual is a rational response for a taxed and weary education system, but it’s also risky in light of all the ways the world has changed.

Given this tension, in the year ahead, I’ll be watching innovations that explicitly add new capacity and connections to the mix, at once expanding schools’ ability to innovate and also upping the relationships and resources available directly to students. Here are five on my radar:

1. Building relationships that power recovery

Arguably the top theme of this year in K-12 circles was learning recovery. I’ll be watching programs that are recruiting volunteers and staff beyond teachers to help students accelerate their learning. Significant ESSER investments are powering new tutoring programs. At the same time, the National Partnership for Student Success is calling for districts to enlist a broad array of supports, such as success coaches and mentors, to rally around students. Aligned with that vision, the Biden administration just made a major investment in the Americorps Volunteer Generation Fund. In sum, the next year will offer a powerful testbed for what it takes to build out a network of “people-powered supports” that supplement classroom teachers and school counselors.

This presents a huge learning opportunity for the field. The rightful focus on these interventions is moving the needle on learning—in particular, upping the pace of learning–for students who fell the furthest behind during the pandemic. But they also offer an opportunity to ask questions about the upsides of students having more relationships—with tutors, mentors, and coaches—at their disposal. What developmental assets are students gaining through these additional relationships? What’s motivating non-teacher adults to partake in coaching and tutoring? How are schools effectively brokering communication between teachers and other supportive adults? And which relationships tend to outlast interventions, remaining in students’ lives as part of their webs of support that can step in if new challenges arise?

Answers to questions like these could be critical to schools’ student support strategies long after the learning recovery agenda fades. They could shape how schools move beyond the one-teacher, one-classroom model (and one-counselor, hundreds-of-students model) that has dominated the last century.

2. Rebooting career services

Ironically, the notion of “learning recovery” was hardly a topic of conversation in higher education circles. That’s not surprising. Widespread, rigorous data on postsecondary students’ outcomes remain a pipedream of policy advocates.

But declining enrollment and looming doubts about the value of college are pushing some institutions to pay more attention to graduate outcomes. Core to that conversation is whether a college degree ultimately pays for itself, and for whom. Does going to college guarantee a good job? And is access to better jobs equitable across lines of race, class, and gender?

When it comes to securing jobs, many campuses leave students to their own devices. Most offer only a small, underfunded office ill-equipped to tackle opportunity gaps that underlie employment and wage gaps: career services. Average student-to-staff ratios are laughable, with an alarming 1 career services professional to 2,263 students, according to NACE.

This year I’ll continue to watch two different trends among schools overcoming the constraints of traditional career services. First, some colleges and universities are integrating “career services” more expansively across their entire enterprise. These initiatives often sit in the president’s cabinet, like work afoot at Colby College, Wake Forest, or Johns Hopkins, where leaders are putting significant resources behind ensuring all students have for-credit career preparation experiences, access to work-integrated learning and internships, high-touch mentoring, and deeper alumni access.

Promising as these holistic approaches are, they remain the exception rather than the rule, especially at lesser-resourced campuses. In light of that, the second career services trend I’m watching is the rise of more modest programs supplementing on-campus offerings, specifically geared towards expanding students’ networks and providing targeted, personalized guidance on everything from interview prep to industry norms.

These emerging models rely heavily on resources and networks beyond capacity-constrained campuses. For example, Social Capital Academy (SCA), founded by Cal State Fullerton (CSF) business professor and social capital scholar David Obstfeld, offers CSF students virtual, personalized coaching over the course of four Saturday morning sessions. SCA is powered by a cohort of volunteer professionals that Obstfeld has recruited from a variety of employers and colleagues. Another model, CareerSpring, founded by the former head of Houston’s Cristo Rey high school, Paul Posoli, offers an open network of virtual career advisors to first-generation students, as well as job placement services. While these efforts aren’t as comprehensive as college-wide initiatives, they’re poised to scale much faster. They’re also addressing the acute cost that network gaps can exact on first-generation college students’ chances of converting their hard-earned degrees into higher earnings post-graduation.

Together, these trends point to a future of career services that is more distributed and networked, either within or beyond campuses, rather than housed in small, centralized, and understaffed career offices.

3. Scaling well-resourced conversations

One of the reasons the emerging career services models noted above are worth watching is that they are built to scale students’ access to well-resourced career conversations, not just generic career information. I’m stealing the phrase “well-resourced conversations” from Rebecca Kirstein Resch, a Canadian entrepreneur running inqli—an employee engagement platform that helps employees and students alike get answers to their career questions—that came out of beta late last year.

Kirstein Resch’s phrase strikes me as a metric worth considering in the world of networking technologies and guidance more generally. There’s a tendency to assume young people are “more connected than ever,” as enterprise tools from Handshake to TikTok have rapidly gained Gen Z users. But accessing new connections is only half the battle: whether a given connection opens the door to new resources—like information, advice, support, or even job offers—is, arguably, the difference-maker for students. Understanding how young people experience conversations, what resources stick and which don’t, and unearthing best practices for seeding well-resourced conversations could unlock real value as more networked technology tools continue to emerge and scale.

This year I’ll be watching tools and models that are anchored on sparking new and more conversations with learners and workers about their future possibilities, like the models described above—and others like Mentor Spaces and Candoor—and endeavoring to better understand what users deem a helpful conversation and why.

4. Enlisting near peers for far reach

For many of the tutoring, mentoring, or career-coaching models described above, the current assumption is that someone much older and wiser ought to be delivering support and advice to students. But strong and growing research on the power of near-peer coaches and mentors challenges that assumption.

Near peers are those who are close in age and experience to students. Students certainly benefit from expert faculty and professional staff with more experience; but they are also, in some cases, more likely to trust the advice of their peers as credible messengers with whom they can relate.

Trust isn’t the only advantage near peers may have. They also offer a promising path to scale in a human capital-constrained system.

Take COOP, a nonprofit helping underemployed, low-income, first-generation college graduates break into tech jobs. COOP hires recent program alumni who have successfully secured full-time employment as part-time paid coaches. COOP’s founder Kalani Leifer summed up the insight guiding its approach: “What’s exciting is how quickly someone can go from receiving to providing social capital.”.

Leifer’s sentiment could push schools to reflect on how the skills, knowledge, and resources students are gaining could be reinvested back into their institutions. In other words, what if students were appreciated as experts in whatever content or skill they just learned or experienced? How might they be given opportunities to share that expertise back with the students that come after them?

Unlocking the power of near peers could supercharge the reach of “high-touch” efforts that seem impervious to scale. In Leifer’s estimation, unlocking that value has been a game changer: “The only reason we’re combining incredibly high-touch support with lower costs is that alumni do everything for each other,” Leifer said.

This year, I’ll be digging in on how exactly near-peer models work: how they determine readiness and support for those near peers, how near peers are compensated, and where traditional schools and colleges might adopt near-peer models themselves. My gut is that these models are growing much faster in the postsecondary space—where near peers are a known driver of retention—than in K-12 schools where age-based cohorts tend to keep students further apart. But I’ll be testing that hypothesis while also watching how schools and colleges are using tech tools—like NearPeer, MentorCollective, and Alumni Toolkit—to better coordinate and scale near-peer connections.

5. Pairing cash and connections to drive upward mobility

More coaches, tutors, mentors, career conversations, and near-peer connections could all help schools better serve students, especially those on the wrong side of opportunity gaps. But after looking at research on economic mobility and racial wealth gaps, I’ve become increasingly convinced that efforts to increase mobility would get further faster by pairing connections with cash. (For more on why these “currencies” matter so much, check out Stephanie Malia Krauss’ great book Making it).

Investing in both relationships and resources has research in its favor. Earlier this year, Raj Chetty and his team at Opportunity Insights made headlines with a new study that revealed the significant role that cross-class connections appear to play in increasing economic mobility. The media’s blunt takeaway was effectively “befriend rich people to get ahead.” For me, however, the more powerful insight was that a well-resourced network supports mobility.

Connecting young people from low-income households to wealthy peers and mentors is one way to foster well-resourced networks. Another might be building tight-knit networks and infusing them with resources at the same time. To that end, this year I’ll be looking more closely at models like Uptogether (formerly Family Independence Initiative), Union Capital Boston, and a newer startup, Backrs, that all provide their participants with financial resources at the same time they expand access to support and career networks.

Understanding what can arise at the intersection of building cash and connections is an exciting frontier in policies and practices aimed at helping young people from low-income households move up the income distribution ladder. There are many existing connection-only interventions, such as mentoring programs, and many cash-only interventions, such as scholarships and ESAs, as well. If these models could start supplementing their approaches with cash and connections respectively, existing efforts to address opportunity gaps might make more headway.

Looking ahead to 2023, education systems could remain stuck in a vortex of capacity constraints perpetuated by ongoing COVID concerns and a looming recession. Together, these five trends offer an alternative reality: opportunities for education systems to broaden their networks, capacity, and reach—and their ability to ensure that more learners thrive this year and beyond.

Related:
Predicting innovation trajectories in K-12 education
Only out-of-the-box solutions will fix the real problems in schools
For more news on education innovation, visit eSN’s Educational Leadership page

This post originally appeared on the Christensen Institute’s blog and is reposted here with permission.

Why system transformation is likely a pipe dream

Michael B. Horn, Co-Founder and Chairman, Clayton Christensen Institute — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Key points:

Public schools are part of a complicated system

True system transformation will require disruptive replacement

I can’t count the number of times people at an education conference have approached me and said something to the effect of, “But how do we transform the education system?” or “We need to focus on system transformation” or “How do we scale system transformation?”

I get why they share these sentiments with me. Ever since I wrote Disrupting Class in 2008, I’ve been publicly in favor of transforming education, not merely reforming it (although I do work in both spheres). But when I hear calls about transforming existing systems, I recoil a bit and grow suspicious. There are many reasons for my reaction.

Foremost among them is this: Despite all the fancy models and white papers around what are all the levers to pull in order to transform a system, system transformation almost never happens by changing the fundamental tenets of the system itself. Instead, it comes from replacing the system with a brand-new system.

To start to understand why, consider the complicated system in which public schools find themselves. As Thomas Arnett explained, they are one part of a vast value network of federal, state, and local regulators, voters and taxpayers, parents and students, teachers, administrators, unions, curriculum providers, school vendors, public infrastructure, higher education institutions, and more.

A value network is the context within which an organization establishes its processes, priorities, and cost structure to respond sustainably to its stakeholders’ desires for progress.

The reason transforming an existing system is so hard is that at each of the nodes of connection, the different actors’ organizational and business models, economic incentives, interests, rhythms of innovation, technological paradigms, and more are both consistent and mutually reinforcing. New ideas, programs, or entities that don’t fit into these processes, priorities, and cost structures are simply not plug-compatible into that value network. They consequently get rejected, tossed to the fringe, or altered to meet the needs of the existing actors in the value network.

Here’s a simple example to illustrate why. When the transistor was first invented in 1947, it was disruptive relative to the vacuum tube that powered existing consumer electronic products because it couldn’t handle much power. Hence, transistors couldn’t be used to make large products—the sorts of floor-standing televisions and tabletop radios that the leading consumer electronics companies of the day, such as RCA and Zenith, made. These companies built their products with vacuum-tube technology and sold them through appliance retailers. Appliance stores made most of their money not from selling televisions and radios, but from repairing the burned-out vacuum tubes in the products they had sold.

When Sony developed the world’s first miniature transistor radio in 1955 and the portable television four years later, it tried to distribute them through appliance stores, too. But the appliance stores wouldn’t give the time of day to Sony.

Why? Because Sony’s solid-state products contained no vacuum tubes that would burn out. Luckily for Sony, however, discount retailers such as Kmart, Wal-Mart, and Target were emerging at that time, and they had not been able to sell vacuum-tube-based products because they couldn’t service them in the aftermarket.

It was a marriage made in heaven—products that needed no service sold through a channel that could offer no service.

By the mid-1960s, solid-state electronics had progressed to the point that they could handle the power large televisions needed. In the ensuing transition, it wasn’t just Sony and Panasonic that disrupted RCA and Zenith; the miniaturized solid-state component suppliers disrupted the high-power component makers; and the discount sales channel disrupted the appliance stores. An entire value network disruptively displaced an entire value network.

In other words, a system disrupted a system.

What this means is that if we’re serious about wholesale system transformation, we likely need to be focused on disruptively replacing the existing system of schooling.

This post originally appeared on the Christensen Institute’s blog.

Let’s perfect existing tech solutions before rushing into AI

Joey Nutinsky, CEO & Co-Founder, Ruvna — Mon, 08 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

ChatGPT is barely six months old, but AI is already a buzzword in K-12 education.

It grabbed the attention of decision makers immediately, earning a b an from NYC schools in January of 2023, with other large districts following. Others are embracing the technology, with voices like Sal Khan encouraging educators to teach with AI.

As school leaders rush to take sides, it’s important to remember AI is unproven and unvetted, especially for school and district-level solutions. Instead, it’s critical for leaders to realize that most schools can greatly improve how they manage critical daily functions using existing, effective, and easy-to-implement technology.

Issues extend beyond cheating

While cheating was the immediate worry, there are deeper concerns about AI in schools.

For instance, how will it affect students’ abilities to do challenging tasks? A Google search replaced a trip to the library card catalog with a few keystrokes. However, students still needed to do something with the information. What happens when typing a few words into ChatGPT is enough to shortcut entire assignments?

Some educators have flocked to ChatGPT for creating content, providing feedback, writing emails, and more. However, these tools have biases based on training data and built-in parameters. They also “hallucinate,” i.e., output false information. Are educators prepared to evaluate the fairness and accuracy of content produced by AI?

Last is the ever-present issue of student data privacy. Even if a user deletes the prompts they put into ChatGPT, the data is saved, so there’s a concerning potential for sensitive information to be stored and then later retrieved by the service.

It may sound ironic, but the speed of this innovation is a sign for leaders to slow down their adoption process. A wait and see approach may be best.

Where AI brings concerns, other tech is proven in schools

While AI is developing fast, it has few proof points, regulation, or proven use cases for large-scale implementation in education.

In contrast, existing tech like mobile technology and process automation have been safely, efficiently, and effectively implemented at many schools across the country.

Features like notification systems and GPS, paired with automation software, can help schools take massive leaps forward in daily operations. This frees up hours of time for staff and improves the quality of life for faculty and students alike.

In my work with hundreds of schools, I’ve noticed two major areas where schools can optimize their existing tech stacks using mobile technology and automation software.

Ensure student safety during drills and emergencies

Many schools still rely on teachers with a paper spreadsheet during emergencies and drills. If a student has gone missing, the teacher needs to take action while still supervising the rest of their class.

False issues arise when a student has been safely identified by another teacher, but there’s no way to share this information. Administrators often don’t get updates until a drill or situation is over, wasting precious minutes in the case of an emergency.

A better way is to leverage mobile phones for student and staff check-in. Students can easily receive automated notifications with check-in prompts, and administrators can automatically receive updated data to guide crucial decision making.

Optimize daily building attendance

Building attendance, though required every day, is under-optimized in countless schools.

Issues often begin at check-in, with long lines at a security desk or office door. Then, attendance managers spend time confirming student locations to correct their records. Calling home requires switching between tools, and there can be confusion and embarrassment when mistakes are made.

For these challenges, automation and GPS are clear solutions. In this case, automation means using software to do some or all of a process. Software automations can speed up routine tasks such as marking students late based on arrival time, or notifying staff if students are not where they are supposed to be.

Check-in can be improved through scanning in at mobile attendance kiosks and/or using GPS check-in on students’ devices. Instead of relying on manual entry, students can scan a physical or digital ID at an iPad kiosk, or even have their phone’s GPS automatically prompt them to check in when they arrive on campus.

Especially for older students, these options can greatly reduce the time spent on a task that’s required every day.

Focus on challenges, not tools

During this time of rapid technological development in AI, it’s important for school leaders to focus not on technological tools themselves, but on the problems and challenges they are trying to address in their buildings. Then, it is easier to work backwards and find the tools that specifically address these challenges.

Will AI transform education? Time will only tell.

In the meantime, there’s plenty of room for many school leaders to use more proven technology to transform their buildings by improving daily operations.

Students know best when it comes to transforming education

Michelle Mann, Director of Social Impact, NetApp — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 09:58:00 +0000

Since formalized education was in its infancy, legislators, educational leaders, and governments worked together to develop models that make education more efficient and cost effective–but they often fell short of serving the needs of students or enriching their lives. And, while people under the age of 18 comprise 25 percent of the global population, it never occurred to most people in positions of authority to ask what they need from their educational systems.

Students experienced great tumult these past few years, especially because of the global pandemic. This singular event put a spotlight on the challenges of quality and equity in education. And it is students who can help change how the world’s young people learn.

In September 2022, the UN convened the inaugural Transforming Education Summit, with the ambition to elevate education to the top of political agendas and spur action considering global school closures caused by COVID-19 to address the issues faced by students during this time. 2023 also marks the “halfway point” to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, with SDG4: Quality Education to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030.

It is against this backdrop that the Transforming Education Survey was launched by the World’s Largest Lesson, in partnership with UNICEF and UNESCO. This uniquely global research gave voice to those not usually heard and represented a diverse group of students from across the world, with 37,000 students responding from 150 countries.

The survey results were eye-opening. Regardless of whether a student respondent was from a developed or developing country, one of the most universal insights from the survey indicated that students don’t feel they are learning the practical skills they need to prepare for the “real world.” In fact, 61 percent of students said they aren’t learning enough–or learning nothing–about digital skills like programming and coding. Additionally, 59 percent called for increased financial literacy and budgeting education, and 55 percent want to learn more about how to analyze and use data.

The education-focused survey also highlighted existing inequalities between developed and developing countries, with students feeling the lack of digital access as being an acute issue. Eighty-four percent of respondents from developed countries said they had a device to learn with, while only 59 percent of respondents from developing countries said they did.

It likely comes as no surprise that mental health was also a concern, with 33 percent of students reporting that they are feeling anxious to be back at school after COVID-19 even though 77 percent of students said they were happy to be back in class. And 44 percent indicated they want to learn more about how to look after their mental health and wellbeing.

Finally, the young people surveyed indicated that they want to be more informed on key current issues such as cultural differences and climate change, with 42 percent of students reporting the desire to learn more about different cultures and 42 percent wanting to learn more about how to protect the planet.

When students were asked who they’d like to work with to make these changes in how they learn, they looked close to school. Children from developing countries would like to work with friends and other young people (63 percent) while children from developing countries would like to work with teachers (52 percent). Interestingly, only 38 percent of respondents from developing countries chose their government and politicians to work with, while only 28 percent of respondents from developed countries wanted to work with governments and politicians.

Increasing the barriers to real transformation, schools continue to see funding cuts and, as part of this, curricula that only offer the bare minimum to students. Courses like expanding financial literacy, coding, and digital skills seem impossible within existing school district budgets. The private sector helps lighten this load by supporting educational programs and even enlisting employees to volunteer their skills to students who want to learn what schools can’t fund.

When it comes to transforming education, children and young people have so much to offer and know exactly what they want to do at school. Governments and educational leaders must consult and include children in their decision-making, so that education reflects everyone it serves.

What is a predictive metaverse? The future of guided learning

Roger James Hamilton, Founder CEO, Genius Group — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

The word ‘metaverse’ has certainly been used a lot recently, specifically within conversations around the advancement of technologies and the ever-changing landscape of how we work and live. More often than not, it is usually connected to the gaming industry and does not tend to come up in conversations about education. However, the AI-powered virtual world is becoming increasingly appealing to content creators and educators as they recognize how it can be used to improve engagement and creativity and create personalized learning programs.

What is a predictive metaverse?

A predictive metaverse is a hypothetical concept that refers to an advanced form of a virtual world that is powered by AI and machine learning algorithms. In this scenario, the metaverse would be able to predict and anticipate the actions and behaviors of its users. It is essentially taking virtual learning to the next level.

This concept of the predictive metaverse is based on the idea that as virtual worlds become more sophisticated and realistic, they will also become more intelligent and able to analyze data in real time. The predictive metaverse would use this data to understand the preferences, behaviors, and intentions of its users, and then provide personalized recommendations, predictions, and feedback based on that understanding.

For example, in a predictive metaverse, an AI algorithm could predict the behavior of users in a virtual marketplace, such as what they are likely to buy, when they are likely to buy it, and how much they are willing to pay. This information could then be used to optimize the marketplace, improving the user experience and increasing sales.

While the concept of a predictive metaverse is still largely theoretical, some experts believe it could represent the next stage of virtual worlds, offering unprecedented levels of personalization and interactivity.

So, what does this mean for education?

If the predictive metaverse can be used to predict the buying habits of shoppers, it can also provide guided learning for students in a variety of ways:

Personalized learning: AI can analyze a student’s learning style and create a personalized curriculum based on their strengths and weaknesses.

Adaptive assessments: AI can create adaptive assessments that adjust the difficulty of questions based on a student’s performance, ensuring that the student is being challenged but not overwhelmed.

Intelligent tutoring systems: AI-powered tutoring systems can provide students with immediate feedback and guidance, helping them to understand concepts and master skills more quickly.

Virtual assistants: AI-powered virtual assistants can answer students’ questions and provide support 24/7, allowing them to learn at their own pace and on their own schedule.

Language learning: AI-powered language learning tools can provide students with real-time feedback on their pronunciation and grammar, helping them to improve their language skills more quickly.

The last few years have also seen an increase in the number of children being home-schooled. In the UK, a study carried out by the Association of Directors of Children Services (ADCS) shows a 34 percent increase in the number of children that are home-schooled in the UK. The US takes the lead with this–a study carried out by the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) shows the percentage of children being home-schooled has nearly tripled since mid-2019, and since the pandemic, this figure is rising year on year.

There are many factors affecting this: Family cultures and beliefs may not align with the school’s culture and beliefs and so parents/caregivers feel their child should be taught at home. But there is another huge factor: Many parents feel their child learns better and is more engaged when learning from home. This presents an exciting opportunity for educators and other content creators to collaborate and utilize the virtual world to educate children in a much more personalized and creative way, without the confines of the school classroom and a stagnant curriculum.

Ultimately, AI can provide guided learning by leveraging its ability to process large amounts of data and adapt it to individual student needs, making learning more effective, efficient, and importantly, relevant. This, in turn, can transform the education system and provide an exciting supplement or alternative to existing school curriculums.

Due to the exponential advancements taking place within tech, I believe we are going to see huge, exciting shifts in the way knowledge is taught and consumed–an educational revolution.

A 5-point plan for post-pandemic education

Al Kingsley, CEO, NetSupport — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

It seems hard to believe, but the pandemic in the U.S. started three years ago. With all the changes COVID-19 brought to schools, perhaps the one that most people forget is how the virus altered the delivery of education.

While everyone is happy remote learning and hybrid models are pretty much over, it isn’t accurate to say education has returned to what was “normal,” pre-pandemic instruction.

The main reason school looks different is that districts bought a heap of specialized technology just to keep instruction alive during those three years. A 2022 survey by the Consortium for School Networking shows that more than 80 percent of U.S. schools now have a device for each K-12 student. That’s way up from pre-pandemic numbers, where about two of three high schools and middle schools were one-to-one and less than half of elementary schools had a device for each student. And that’s only counting student devices–not the needed network improvements, teacher training, or the other myriad purchases required to create a robust network both in schools and at students’ homes.

While this outlay for technology resets the bar of what is expected for schools, now and going forward, it also brings up some powerful questions. Can schools afford to use all the new technology they have? More importantly, however, can they afford to maintain all this equipment in the long term?

A recent McKinsey survey reports that districts still have $130 billion in unspent ESSER funds to allocate in the next three budget cycles. Slightly more than half of the 260 district officials surveyed said “they were struggling to assemble the internal strategic-planning and operational capacity to make and execute spending decisions in the face of competing priorities and ongoing disruptions.” These same officials expect IT services costs to rise between 6 percent and 8 percent over the next three years.

Because these ESSER funds have to be spent in the next three years, and we aren’t likely to see such largesse from the federal government again, it is vital that officials use these funds to not only plan for today but to ensure that their district’s technology plan works long term.

Usually, it’s easy for me to give districts advice on how to buy, use, and sustain tech programs. By drawing on my 30 years of experience in education, I typically counsel schools to plan carefully for new technology, considering factors from the cost of equipment to teachers’ training to the long-term need for upkeep and replacement – technology sustainability. In the face of ESSER funding requirements, this advice doesn’t suffice right now. Schools were in emergency mode during the pandemic and made emergency decisions without the benefit of having foresight into what the future would be. Now the challenge is different.

Consequently, school leaders today have to consider a new set of issues—how to best use the technology they have on hand, some of which was purchased without being part of a long-term plan. And while I have long been a proponent for decisions based on a stable, long-term technology plan rather than quick purchases and a fast-fix mentality, there was little choice early in the pandemic. We are at the stage now where the tenets for technology planning that occurs in a normal year need to be adjusted to get the most out of what schools already have.

Here are five guidelines to maximize the use of existing technology in this funding cycle while also planning for the future:

1. Take stock: The first step is to get an accurate picture of what is happening in your schools now. That means talking with teachers, students, and even parents to see how your technology is actually being used, rather than the way you think it’s being used. Be careful. With the delivery of education still changing, get an accurate picture of what is occurring in classrooms and schools right now, not last year or even three years ago.

2. Restate goals: Chances are your district or school already has its learning outcomes in place. Given the hardships of the past three years, revisit these goals to make sure they still meet student needs. Do you need to retrench to make sure that skills students missed then are now included in the new system? Do you have to double down on social-emotional learning – as an example?

3. Collaborate: This calls for another round of conversations with teachers, students, and parents. This isn’t something to fear; given the changed relationship between parents and schools from the last three years, consider this as a vital step to make sure your schools can not only clearly communicate their goals for students, but also hear parents’ concerns. Furthermore, if students see relevancy between their studies and what they need to succeed in college or in a job, they’ll pay better attention.

4. Adapt: Simply put, if you do steps 1-3 correctly, you should have a lot of new information to fold into your schools’ technology plans. This key step is the payoff for all the work already completed. But remember, just altering plans isn’t enough, clearly communicate these changes (and reasons) to staff, students, and the community.

5. Plan for replacement: When all this is done, consider long-term goals. Having a clear plan and knowing how your district is using the technology it has will help you know the cost to keep devices and wireless systems functioning. This helps in deciding what will need replacement and what won’t, saving your district from wasting money in the future. Remember, the unexpected extra expense of educating students during the last three years was unavoidable, but that doesn’t mean those same costs will carry over to future years. These are different times.

Related:
5 insights about post-pandemic education
Post-pandemic progress with edtech

Schools must embrace these 4 innovative focus areas to avoid failure

Laura Ascione — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 10:01:00 +0000

Following years of challenges brought on by COVID-19 and the inequities in education highlighted by the pandemic, decades- and centuries-old educational systems are finally being challenged. The school systems and dynamic leaders that embrace change will succeed and create an educational environment that is more equitable and prepares students for their futures.

A new report from The Partnership for Leaders in Education at the University of Virginia (UVA-PLE), “Exploring New Frontiers for K-12 Systems Transformation,” determined that these challenges have sparked a transformation of education systems in the United States.

“Our New Frontiers report spotlights the most successful education leaders who are courageously rising to the moment and making once-in-a-generation investments and changes to their educational systems for the benefit of their students, their staff and their communities,” said William Robinson, executive director of UVA-PLE and co-author of the New Frontiers report. “Districts that innovate and embrace change will thrive, and the districts that choose to ignore or, worse, resist transformation put themselves and their students at risk.”

In New Frontiers, UVA-PLE identifies four key areas of focus needed for change and innovation in K-12 educational systems:

Innovative Secondary Models – a commitment to changing the secondary model to enhance student pathways and ensure access to opportunities for every student, along with a district and system recognition that investments in education are investments in the future economy;
Far-Reaching Academic Acceleration – a focus on accelerating student learning post-pandemic instead of on learning recovery;
Creative Staffing – new and innovative pathways to recruit, train and invest in teachers and matching education talent pipelines with student needs;
Equitable Resource Reallocation – rethinking organizational design and resource allocated to align with priority breakthroughs, student needs, and a deep commitment to eradicating gaps and inequality.

UVA-PLE, a leading organization focused on advancing leadership capacity and insights to create transformational school systems, developed the report with research and feedback from nearly 50 education leaders and superintendents across the nation. Those districts and systems have successfully implemented changes and innovations since the pandemic started. The report also includes vignettes, case examples, and recommendations for transforming our systems to better serve students and families.

A sampling of the replicable practices highlighted in the report include,

Baltimore Public Schools: Under Superintendent Dr. Sonja Santelises’s leadership, her team in Baltimore made investments in high dosage tutoring and expanded internal summer learning which helped more than 400 additional students graduate during 2022;
Ector County (Texas): Superintendent Dr. Scott Muri and his district team championed innovative efforts to confront a near 20 percent teacher vacancy rate which raised teacher pay by more than $13,000 and raised the bar on qualifications for principal and teacher leader roles;
Dallas Independent School District: Former Superintendent Dr. Michael Hinojosa’s team’s focus on establishing career pathways, an effort which resulted in 1,100 students – nearly 12 percent of the graduating senior class – graduating in 2021-2022 from high school having already earned an associate degree; and
Laramie County School District One (Wyoming): Superintendent Margaret Crespo and her team’s efforts to make post-secondary readiness programs more flexible and more accessible to the district’s high schoolers which resulted in a 300% enrollment increase in college level and dual enrollment courses.

“There are no easy answers to complex challenges, but we can shift the paradigm and move beyond the status quo. Our areas of focus provide district leaders, policymakers, school boards and anyone else interested in education innovation with a model of promising and replicable practices,” said Leighann Lenti, Chief of Partnerships for UVA-PLE.

“Innovation should spark success. The courageous superintendents and education leaders who are driving change are providing a pathway for better student outcomes and a foundation for more equitable opportunity,” said Amy Dujon, M.Ed., Director, DA Leadership Institute. “The UVA-PLE report offers an array of replicable practices from systems and districts of all sizes. While the systems that are spotlighted vary greatly, each leader is united in their laser-like focus on student achievement.”

UVA-PLE has partnered with more than 400 schools across 100 districts in 25 states since 2003. Fifty percent of UVA-PLE’s recent partners have reported double-digit gains in math or language arts in only two years.

This press release originally appeared online.

Balancing sustainability and innovation in education

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

As recipients of public funding and taxpayer dollars, K-12 school budgets and spending expenditures are under a microscope. Relief funds stemming from the pandemic have only sharpened the focus, particularly on infrastructure and technology investments. In my role as Chief Technology Officer at one of the nation’s largest school districts, Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS), being accountable and ensuring we are making prudent financial decisions is a top priority for my team.

Striking a balance between innovation and sustainability is a challenge most school districts are facing. At HCPS, we have adopted three guiding principles that serve as the driving force and framework behind every IT decision—equity, efficiency, and excellence.

Equity

At HCPS, we are committed to delivering equitable learning opportunities to all students. From an infrastructure standpoint, that means eliminating the digital divides that exist within our own campus. Students in Building A must have access to the same level of high-quality Internet as students in Building B, regardless of a school building’s age or geographic location. If students in Building B experience frequent lag or downtime, their learning will be disrupted and result in learning loss.

To remedy this, we are building a future-ready wide area network (WAN) that can scale with user demand to deliver robust and reliable connectivity campus-wide. Additionally, we have been working with K-12 partners like ENA by Zayo to assess, design, and deploy upgraded wireless local area networks (WLAN) at several of our buildings.

Delivering Internet access beyond our buildings is also a priority. Currently, we assign mobile hotspots to students who need access outside of school. However, our long-term strategy is to research private LTE options and potentially build a sustainable and cost-effective LTE network to help address the access gaps that exist within our community.

Efficiency

Even though school districts have seen an influx of federal relief funds over the past few years, it is important for technology leaders to keep efficiency in mind as they create their technology strategies. At HCPS, sustainability is a key focus. We need to be responsible stewards and have a funding plan in place to ensure we can continue to support and fund the initiatives and technologies we are implementing to avoid wasting both time and money.

In just the past two years, we have created several efficiencies in our device management process. For example, we have switched to universal adapters to eliminate the time and expense it takes to locate and replace missing adapters for student devices. We are also seeking to become a 1.5-to-1 district in terms of student devices to eliminate delays when devices are broken. We want technology to enhance the learning experience, not impede it. If a student’s device stops working, that is disruptive. We need to reach the point where we can seamlessly address those types of issues to ensure learning continuity.

Additionally, like many other districts, we’ve experienced staffing shortage challenges. Partnering with vendors and using their engineering expertise to fill in the gaps has enabled our HCPS staff to focus on other time-sensitive matters and be more efficient with their time.

Excellence

Finally, all the work we are doing at HCPS is being measured and judged by a standard of excellence. We are working together to build a future-ready digital learning environment that can support our students and staff—both inside and outside the classroom. That work entails eliminating a piecemeal approach to our infrastructure and implementing streamlined industry standards and rulesets. We have also created a training center for our employees to ensure they have the professional development resources they need to be successful in their careers.

By aligning our IT goals and strategies with the principles of equity, efficiency, and excellence we are ensuring that we are implementing sustainable and transformative changes that meet our district’s vision of preparing students for life.

5 education innovation trends worth watching in 2023

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 10:00:00 +0000

2022 marked a confusing year in the world of education innovation. As a friend and school leader said to me a few months ago, “Innovation is dead, right?”

1. Building relationships that power recovery

2. Rebooting career services

3. Scaling well-resourced conversations

4. Enlisting near peers for far reach

Trust isn’t the only advantage near peers may have. They also offer a promising path to scale in a human capital-constrained system.

5. Pairing cash and connections to drive upward mobility

This post originally appeared on the Christensen Institute’s blog and is reposted here with permission.

Is 2023 the year of the microschool?

Thomas Arnett, Senior Research Fellow, Clayton Christensen Institute — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 10:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Christensen Institute’s blog and is reposted here with permission.

With all the surprises sprung on the world over the last few years, it can be both exciting and frightening to imagine what 2023 might hold. Will this be a year defined by amazing breakthroughs for humanity—like cracking the formula for nuclear fusion and clearing a path to abundant clean energy? Or will it be a year loaded with new challenges—such as a global recession or escalating tensions between powerful nations?

Amidst the tectonic shifts that may be on the global horizon, there’s a comparatively smaller phenomenon brewing in US K-12 education. While barely a blimp on the global scale, it could impact learning trajectories for millions of American students and have a significant impact on the conventional model of schooling. What warrants this attention? Microschools.

What are microschools?

The concept of microschooling gained traction throughout the 2010s, then saw a huge uptick in both interest and new examples during the pandemic. EdChoice estimates that as many as 2.2 million children could be in microschools full time. But what are they? Defining the term can be tricky because they come in so many variations and run with somewhat synonymous terms like learning pods, learning hubs, and some versions of hybrid homeschooling.

Barnett Barry, a research professor at the University of South Carolina, offers a good description of microschools in an article he wrote for The Conversation. “As their name suggests, microschools, which serve K-12 students, are very small schools that typically serve 10 to 15 students, but sometimes as many as 150. They can have very different purposes but tend to share common characteristics, such as more personalized and project-based learning. They also tend to have closer adult-child relationships in which teachers serve as facilitators of student-led learning, not just deliverers of content.”

Some of the better-known examples of microschools include national name brands like the Acton Academy schools, Wildflower Schools, Prenda microschools and the Khan Lab School. But most microschools today, especially those that have sprung up since the pandemic, tend to be local learning communities, often serving students of mixed ages, created by entrepreneurial parents or educators. In the last year, organizations such as the National Microschooling Center and KaiPod Catalyst have launched to support the people and communities creating microschools.

What characteristics make them potentially disruptive?

Microschools have definitely made a mark in the K–12 landscape. But whether they will follow a disruptive trajectory and grow to become mainstream alternatives to conventional schools is an open question.

When people think of disruptive innovations, they tend to focus on new technologies: personal computers, online video streaming, rideshare apps, etc. But the real transformative impact of a disruptive innovation comes not just from technology, but from the new organizational models that technologies enable.

Consider the example of steel minimills as recounted in The Innovator’s Solution. Prior to the 1960s, most of the world’s steel came from massive integrated mills that did everything from reacting raw ore in blast furnaces to rolling finished products at the other end. Minimills, in contrast, melt scrap steel in small electric arc furnaces. Because they could produce molten steel cost-effectively in a small chamber, minimills didn’t need the massive-scale rolling and finishing operations that are required to handle the output of efficient blast furnaces—which is why they are called minimills. In short, minimills used a new technology (electric arc furnaces) to enable a new organizational model. That model used different resources and processes to produce steel products with a different cost structure.

In a similar fashion, many new microschools are experimenting with innovations to the organizational model of schooling.

To be clear, small schools that serve students of various ages aren’t a new idea. They harken back to the one-room schoolhouses of the late 1800s. But the one-room schoolhouse had a few inherent challenges. First, how does one teacher effectively instruct children at different levels of learning and development all in the same room, at the same time? Second, how can one teacher effectively teach a wide array of specialized academic disciplines at higher levels? These two challenges are at the heart of why one-room schoolhouses were replaced by age-graded elementary schools and subject-specialist secondary schools.

In contrast, many microschools today include mixed age classes but take advantage of new learning technologies to make the small school model more feasible. Online instructional materials have come a long way from the McGuffey Readers of the late 1800s. Their media-rich content presentations engage more than just the “bookish” children in a class; and they beat static textbooks hands down at providing students with basic feedback and adapting learning pathways based on their needs. Additionally, the Internet offers students endless pathways of research, exploration, and creativity—far beyond the confines of the best classroom library or set of art supplies. Microschools can also take advantage of online course providers like VLACS, FLVS or Outschool to access specialist teachers without needing to hire those teachers as full-time staff.

These technology resources then enable some fundamental shifts in core processes of the organizational model: the roles of students and teachers. Students can explore and master content through paths and at paces more suited to their needs. They can also take more ownership for their learning as their success no longer hinges on compliance with teachers’ whole-class instructions. Meanwhile, microschool educators can shift their focus from controlling classrooms and covering content to mentoring students and guiding them on personalized learning journeys tightly aligned to their mastery of content and their interests.

These innovations are not only valuable for changing the nature of the learning experience, and as a result, some of the core value propositions of the schooling model. They can also change the fundamental cost structure of schooling. The fact that microschools don’t need teachers for each grade level and subject area allows them to work at a small scale, while still serving a diverse array of students. Their ability to operate at a small scale, in turn, reduces the start-up barriers for microschools. They don’t need to build, buy, or rent large school facilities, but can instead operate using spaces available at libraries, community centers, churches, retail spaces, parks, or homes. Low startup and facilities costs are especially important for the microschools that operate without public funding: allowing them to create a new tier in the private school market for families that can’t afford conventional private schools.

But will microschools prove disruptive?

Although early minimills changed the resources, processes, and cost structure of steel production, their disruption of the industry didn’t happen overnight. Early minimills couldn’t produce the imperfection-free steel required for automobiles and soup cans. Instead, they began by serving the least-demanding tier of the market: rough rebar for reinforcing concrete. It took decades for minimills to improve their processes and produce higher-quality steel at lower costs.

Similarly, although microschools represent a potentially disruptive organizational model for schooling, most current iterations fall short when it comes to meeting the needs and expectations of most K–12 students and families. Some require more parent involvement than what most working parents can offer. Many don’t yet offer great support for families that rely on schools for transportation and food services. They often aren’t well-suited to serve students with particular special education or social and emotional needs. And their small scale doesn’t allow them to offer large-scale programs like sports, band, and theater, or the complete suite of electives and extracurriculars available at larger conventional schools.

Additionally, most microschools operate without public funding. Even with their lower cost structure, it’s hard to compete for families on a cost basis with free public education. Thus, their disruptive potential will also depend on state policy changes that provide them with public funding or shifts in district policies and practices to make them a district-supported offering.

Just as minimills had to refine their processes over time to produce higher-quality steel products, microschools will need to climb up their own improvement trajectories to become compelling mainstream alternatives for most families.

But this isn’t just a “time will tell” story. My upcoming posts will explore two additional trends to watch in 2023 that could hold promise for the future of microschools: learning ecosystems and potential shifts in district and state policy, both of which will likely determine whether microschools make a significant dent in the K-12 landscape.

How learning science informs edtech product development

Kayla Sheldon, Senior Learning Scientist, GoGuardian — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 09:21:00 +0000

It’s no secret that the pandemic shift to remote learning resulted in boom times for edtech. Market intelligence firm HolonIQ expects global edtech spend to reach $300 billion in 2022 and up to $404 billion in 2025. The growth is fueling investment, too, as last year venture capital tripled over pre-pandemic levels.

But is all that money well spent on learning products with proven efficacy in the classroom, or are those billions going toward technology for technology’s sake?

With the boom in edtech and so many shiny, new product offerings on the market, it’s essential for educators to select tools they can trust will have a long-term impact on learning. More often than not, these are the tools that have prioritized learning science in their product design, to guide product vision and focus.

Learning science is an interdisciplinary field that combines research from multiple topics, data, and practice with the goal of furthering our understanding of how we learn and improving instructional practices and processes. Incorporating learning science results in thoughtful products that have clear paths for impact on student learning and allow for a targeted and thoughtful experimentation and product iteration throughout the product development lifecycle.

As educational technology companies look to place learning science at the core of their products, there are three key steps to success: aligning their teams around education outcomes, building a feedback loop, and evaluating and validating your results.

Aligning your Development Team

Aligning your team around key educational outcomes is the first step towards integrating learning science into the product development process. The product development team and involved learning science experts have to determine, and ultimately rally around, selected educational outcomes in order to establish a product vision. This may mean a specific learning outcome for students, an overall goal for classrooms and teachers, or a rate of adoption increase in a certain subject. It could also appear through improved student confidence in learning, equitable instruction and lesson content, and the potential to equip students with skills for their futures.

Regardless of the vision and goal, it has to serve as a consistent roadmap for both teams as they move through the development process. Having agreed upon educational outcomes can act as a North Star against which teams can measure progress of a product or its new features. This could accelerate the ability to align, build, and iterate upon a product. Without such an alignment, teams may be driving towards different and less impactful outcomes, ultimately slowing down development and innovation.

Building a Feedback Loop

Once aligned around a common goal, the collaboration is only kicking off. The product team must build in opportunities for learning science consultation and feedback elicitation at key parts of the development process. During the discovery and exploratory phases of product development, consulting with learning science experts can aid in clarifying the product vision and providing focus. During the design phase, consistent communication with learning scientists can aid in improving the intentionality behind design choices, and ultimately keep the team aligned with the desired learning outcome and impact. And finally, during validation and testing phases, learning science may work closely with efficacy research teams to align on key metrics of interest and to pinpoint what aspects of the product could be changed or iterated upon based on the results of a study.

As education companies, we can demonstrate our commitment to learning by consistently being learners in our fields, receiving feedback, making changes, and constantly iterating on our products. As students’ patterns change, we have to meet those changes with new products and features that match their needs. We’re learning companies – we need to be receptive to constantly changing and learning.

Determining Efficacy

Finally, the product team needs to establish a system for validating learning science-informed features. Once a product or feature has been built with the intention of impacting specific outcomes or principles, teams need to participate in experimentation and product iteration over an extended time, validating the tool’s efficacy and capabilities. Companies need the flexibility to include teachers and end-users in the iterative process, using research and long-term studies to determine (and prove) that a tool is effective. Be prepared to receive feedback from your customers, and recognize their expertise as field scientists, partnering with you to ensure your product meets the needs of their learners.

The efficacy of educational technology plays a critical role in the current challenge teachers face in helping students recover lost learning at the hands of the pandemic. By testing the impacts of learning science product integrations on intended outcomes using efficacy research, organizations can build a powerful system of rapid testing and iteration. In turn, teams can accelerate their ability to measure and improve their tools, in a field (and time) where small adjustments can make a huge difference for learners.

Ensuring Outcomes

As teachers and administrators look to technology to help them improve efficacy in their classrooms, they should be looking for focused, well-researched products based in learning science. And as organizations look to build successful, impactful tools, they need to invest in their product development with a cycle of testing and iteration that puts learning at the center.

Top Techniques for District Management

Kevin Hogan — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 10:00:00 +0000

In this episode of Innovations in Education, hosted by Kevin Hogan:

Predicting innovation trajectories in K-12 education

Thomas Arnett, Senior Research Fellow, Clayton Christensen Institute — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 09:27:00 +0000

There are lots of promising innovations in tiny pockets of the education system, but decades of advocacy and investment have failed to see those innovations scale. How can we better predict which innovations flourish and which founder?”

My last blog post argued that new value networks are the missing enablers for disrupting the conventional model of K–12 schooling. But the concept of value networks can do more than explain why disruptive models struggle to take root. All organizations live within value networks. And analyzing an organization’s value network makes clear whether and how it will approach potential improvements and innovations.

What are value networks?

Clayton Christensen defined value networks as “the context within which a firm identifies and responds to customers’ needs, solves problems, procures input, reacts to competitors, and strives for profit.” For a company, a value network might include its customers, suppliers, distributors, investors, and the competitive and regulatory landscapes that shape its business model. Similarly, most US public schools sit in value networks defined by government agencies, families, staff, unions, voters, vendors, and the regulatory and competitive landscapes in which they operate.

Value networks determine what an organization must prioritize to survive and thrive. Because value networks shape an organization’s priorities, they also dictate which improvements and innovations it will pursue and which it will fumble, ignore, or even resist.

A few important clarifications are worth noting.

First, an organization’s value network isn’t just another way to refer to its stakeholders. There’s overlap between these terms, but there are also important distinctions—mainly in how the terms are commonly used. The term “stakeholders” often emphasizes all the groups that a school system should pay attention to, regardless of how much influence any given group has over the decisions of the school system. In contrast, I use the term “value networks” to draw attention to which external entities actually have more or less power to shape an organization’s priorities through resource dependence, regulation, democratic governance, etc.

Second, value networks are not the same as social networks. Many schools participate in social networks—such as the CAPS network, the League of Innovative Schools, or the Digital Learning Collaborative—that facilitate sharing ideas and practices. Participating in a social network may connect an organization with funders, suppliers, partners, or other entities that become part of its value network. But whereas social networks facilitate the exchange of information, value networks provide the resources and authorization that an organization needs to survive and thrive.

Now consider a few insights that come from seeing different forms of K–12 schooling through the lens of value networks.

Competing priorities within K–12 districts

By design, a school district’s governance structure aims to give a degree of power to a wide array of stakeholders. People from different neighborhoods and groups from across the political spectrum all have a right to meet with administrators, speak up in school board meetings, and vote in elections. Local businesses, advocacy organizations, and community groups shape public opinion and influence voters. Local, state, and federal education agencies—also influenced by democratic governance—mandate processes a district must follow. Additionally, employee unions influence districts through collective bargaining.

These competing interests from different elements in a school district’s value network are what often make the status quo so calcified. A school district’s value network becomes like a system of forces with vectors all pushing in different directions. District leaders get caught up just trying to maintain equilibrium and stability as they navigate the politics of their value network. In principle, a district’s democratic governance and its mandate to serve all students in a region helps ensure that all stakeholders have some power to influence its priorities. But when an organization’s value network produces a set of divergent priorities, the organization gets stuck trying to be all things to all people, yet struggles to do anything exceptionally well.

Meanwhile, innovations that don’t align with the dominant priorities of the value network don’t last long. Strong leaders may be able to pursue them for a season. But if the innovations don’t deliver success in the way the dominant value network influences define success, those innovations will ultimately wither.

The charter school advantage

Value networks also illustrate why charter schools can often innovate more easily than district schools. For one, the general principle in much of charter school legislation has been to give charter schools greater autonomy in exchange for increased accountability. Thus, charter schools generally have less prescriptive directives from the overseeing government agencies in their value networks. But beyond their relationships with governing agencies, charter schools also have an opportunity to create greater alignment across the rest of their value networks.

Charter school founders launch their schools with a particular vision for education: In one school, that vision may be rigorous college preparation for low-income students. For others, it may be an emphasis on arts or science and engineering. With a specific vision in mind, charter school founders then recruit board members, donors, staff, and families who share their vision, and may even encourage stakeholders who don’t share their vision to go elsewhere. Thus, they assemble value networks that align with their visions. That kind of alignment just isn’t possible for a district school with more state policies to follow, a publicly elected board, a mandate to serve all students living within a given boundary, and unionized employees.

This doesn’t mean charter schools are inherently more innovative than district schools. Some charter schools are pretty similar to their district school counterparts because their value networks resemble those of districts. Meanwhile, some district schools have instructional models that diverge markedly from conventional K–12 schooling. Consider, for example, Village High School in Colorado’s Academy School District, Springs Studio in the Colorado Springs School District, or Innovations Early College High School in the Salt Lake City School District. Why do some district schools develop innovative models while others maintain the status quo? Because innovative schools have value networks that prioritize their innovations.

Toward a better theory for understanding innovation trajectories

The lens of value networks moves us toward better categories for understanding innovation trajectories in K–12 education and other fields. There’s a long history of promising innovations failing to scale across public education. To this day, approaches like competency-based learning, flexible pacing, project-based learning, and other learner-centered practices often remain confined to “bright spots” lauded for their potential, but confined to the exceptions, rather than the rule.

Instead of bemoaning a monolithic bureaucracy holding education innovation back, a theory of value networks can better predict which innovations can emerge in a given context. From there, new value networks might emerge to support a range of value propositions across communities and states. Doing so will require not just spotting and heralding innovations, but understanding the value networks from which they emerged in the first place.

Only out-of-the-box solutions will fix the real problems in schools

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 09:56:00 +0000

As members of the media have bemoaned the tragic results of students on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—also known as the nation’s report card—many have been all too willing to jump into the game of who is responsible. Yet, few have sought innovative solutions to change the fundamental underlying reality: today’s schools were not built to maximize each and every student’s learning.

Just weeks earlier, a new report titled “Out of the Box,” along with an accompanying afternoon of virtual programming, sought to introduce a way to change that reality through the use of “innovative model providers” to shift us away from the current paradigm of schooling and “support school communities in actualizing the visions they set forth.”

The solutions generally offered in the media to the challenges students face have revolved around things like tutoring, summer school, longer school hours, and more days. Although there’s nothing wrong—and some things right—with those solutions, what none of them do is upend the fact that today’s schools were not designed to optimize learning. Their time-based nature means that they were, in fact, built to embed failure for the majority.

Even worse, some of these ideas share the assumption that all students should just have more of the same type of schooling experience they’ve always had—a schooling experience that also wasn’t doing what today’s society needs it to do prior to the pandemic because of the way it was designed. Put differently, the schools we have do exactly what they were built to do—which is at odds with the society we inhabit today.

What if instead of layering tutoring on top of today’s schools, we instead took the principles of effective, high-dosage tutoring and embedded those in schools themselves?

Or, as the “Out of the Box” report says:

“Imagine, for example, elementary classes that deeply embed the science of reading, making use of phonics instruction to the degree appropriate for each student and using technology and artificial intelligence to support building the requisite vocabulary and content knowledge to access rigorous text. In middle grade math, imagine sophisticated diagnostic assessments generating a personalized learning plan that adapts daily and allows each student to drive their own progress using a variety of learning modalities. … Science and social studies classes could integrate combinations of text, virtual reality, group discussion, and interdisciplinary projects that extend beyond what an individual teacher could sustainably plan for each day.”

But the report then points out that, “Just as an engine has little value atop a horse and buggy, truly realizing new possibilities requires fundamentally reimagining elements of existing paradigms in order to transition to something new and better.”

So how do we do that?

Readers of my new book, From Reopen to Reinvent, know that I’ve pushed the importance of autonomy: arming a separate group of educators with the ability to rethink completely how school works.

The authors of “Out of the Box”—Joel Rose, Jenee Henry Wood and Jeff Wetzler—agree, but go even further in specifying what this likely means.

According to them, “The K-12 sector is not built to organically enable this type of paradigm shift. School operators generally do not have the design capacity to alone fundamentally reimagine learning particularly if that involves sophisticated uses of technology. Nor do individual teachers, who simply cannot be expected to design the classroom of tomorrow while also managing the classroom of today.”

This echoes my book, in that it argues that if there isn’t at least one person whose full-time job is to innovate, then it’s no one’s job. That’s because the day-to-day priorities of the organization will drain energy away from any efforts to create something new and different. In other words, the urgent and immediate tasks in front of someone—even if they aren’t important in the long run—will almost always drown out the important but less urgent work of long-term transformation.

Few sectors ask their practitioners on the ground to design next-gen breakthroughs. It wasn’t the doctors, for example, who created COVID vaccines, nor the railroad operators that gave us airplanes. Some of these people may be on the teams that design the new innovations, but it’s not expected that they do this as part of their day-to-day work.

This requires a new research and development effort around the creation of innovative model providers that design new learning models for different subjects and grade spans by drawing on the talents of educators, technologists, researchers, and the like.

The learning models they create, “Out of the Box” argues, won’t just include a new curriculum. They should include instructional design, of which content and assessment are a part; an aligned set of pedagogical practices; an operational design that reimagines how teachers do their work, the use of time, and a physical classroom design; and a technological design that embeds the use of tools to execute the model.

Such an effort would be new because it would bring a focus that’s missing to the country’s educational research and development efforts, but also because it would ask the country to commit to spending far more on research and development than it does today.

And by schools looking for solutions to specific problems from innovative model providers—organizations like New Classrooms, Valor Collegiate, Gradient Learning, and EL Education—they’d stimulate more demand for research and development.

Schools that seek out these innovative models will also be turning to autonomous entities that have had the freedom to rethink schooling—its purpose, its underlying experiences and use of time, and its systemic implications—to transform schooling and unleash student potential.

That would, at long last, not just deal with the tragedy of the present, but transform schools to deal with the deeper travesty: that our schools, designed long ago for a different age, weren’t built to optimize learning or serve anyone particularly well.

46 edtech innovations at ISTELive 22

Laura Ascione — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 10:00:00 +0000

It was fantastic to gather in person at ISTELive 22 in New Orleans. Here’s a sample of the newest edtech innovations, products, and solutions eSchool News learned about during the show.

3M and Discovery Education announced 31 State Merit Winners in the 2022 3M Young Scientist Challenge. As the nation’s premier middle school science competition for 15 years, the 3M Young Scientist Challenge features outstanding innovations from young scientists that utilize the power of STEM to improve the world. The 3M Young Scientist Challenge asks students in grades 5-8 to identify an everyday problem in their classroom, community, or the world and submit a one- to two-minute video communicating the science behind their solution.

Aperture was on hand to demonstrate its scalable SEL solution for K-12 that grows with students and staff, from teacher-based ratings and strategies at the elementary level, to student- and teacher-facing assessment and strategy software for high school students and staff. Research-based DESSA assessments provide partners with an SEL foundation rooted in the promotion of assets, not deficits.

ASUS announced the latest lineup of notebooks, desktops, displays, and networking solutions, featuring an array of innovative gaming and education products for students and educators in the K-12, higher education, and esports education sectors. The ASUS Chromebook CR1 is a dependable option ready for a wide range of scenarios. Available in clamshell or convertible designs, this laptop is ready for a long lifespan of classroom use with its all-round rubber bumper, spill-resistant keyboard, and ultra-tough hinge. The ROG Strix GT15 desktop gaming PC offers tournament-grade performance with its powerful 12th Gen Intel CPU, up to the Core i7-12700KF, and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 GPU.

Avantis Education, maker of ClassVr, announced the launch of Eduverse – a ground-breaking new online platform that gives students access to a K-12 metaverse. In the Eduverse, students can access immersive, educational content and amazing VR experiences. They can interact with each other as avatars, all in a secure and controlled environment, inside and outside of the classroom.

AVer Information Inc., the award-winning provider of distance learning, video collaboration and education technology solutions, announced their participation in the ISTELive 22, one of the world’s most influential education events, hosted by The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). AVer will be launching the new U70i document camera, as well as showcasing award-winning classroom solutions designed to keep students engaged in different learning environments.

Codelicious introduced attendees to its full-year computer science curriculum for K-12. Codelicious courses are delivered with everything teachers need to teach computer science, including lesson plans, assessments, and standards mapping. The curriculum is updated regularly to stay current with new technology, so teachers spend less time writing lessons and more time engaging students. By bringing Codelicious into the classroom, teachers provide their students with opportunities to learn skills in collaboration, critical thinking, and problem solving. These are all skills students need to be successful, whatever their future holds.

Schools and districts now can bring the thrill of virtual coding competitions to their classrooms and communities at any time with CoderZ Technologies LTD’s newest offering, CoderZ League in a Box. This latest version of the code-learning platform enables educators to create on-demand local tournaments in addition to participating in the international CoderZ League: the Virtual Cyber Robotics Competition. While students can gather at a school or community center for a league tournament, the gameplay occurs on CoderZ’s online coding platform. Teams of students play together in fun “missions” by programming virtual 3D robots while learning the principles of coding.

Construct 3, a game engine that allows anyone to develop their own games without having to know how to code, in partnership with STEM Fuse is launching its newest curriculum GAME:IT Advanced just in time for the fall semester. The GAME:IT Advanced course is the capstone course in the high school game design and programming pathway.

Dell’s education strategists were onsite hosting conversations spanning digital inclusion, K-12 cybersecurity, the growing esports movement, and more hot topics related to education and the role technology plays in empowering learning today. Access the full livestream of Dell’s Think Tank session on Defining What’s Possible for Reinvented Learning, which brought together a diverse group of education thought leaders to discuss their vision for the future of education and surface barriers to overcome for every student to succeed. Or, watch the full livestream of Dell’s Think Tank session on Implementing What’s Possible for Reinvented Learning, which brought together district and organization thought leaders to discuss strategies for implementing what’s possible for students including learning formats, teacher roles, grading practices, work-based learning, and more.

DisplayNote, a collaboration technology company, announced all-new data on U.S. educators’ technology usage. This insight arrives as the education landscape continues to evolve due to changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Screen sharing is a core component of daily lessons – almost 70 percent of users use the DisplayNote app daily. Web-based screen sharing is king – 53 percent of users shared their screen via their Chromium browser.

Edsby introduced a system for helping learning organizations and governments eliminate silos between education data to ensure the right data about learners is always available to optimize their learning journeys. Edsby’s Unison education data platform and managed service is designed to ensure better education data quality and actionability across states, provinces and countries securely. Unison aggregates and standardizes current and past educational data and makes it interoperable while carefully managing the security critical with education data.

Epson showcased its latest projection and printing solutions designed for enhanced collaboration, immersive learning and increased productivity. With partners Lü Interactive and Eduscape, Epson demonstrated how to better engage students, create fun and challenging learning environments and promote laser-focused learning across campuses.

High-impact tutoring can play a pivotal role in addressing the needs of students most impacted by loss of instruction during the pandemic. In a new white paper, FEV Tutor illustrates how K-12 districts can accelerate students’ growth by utilizing their existing benchmark assessment data in conjunction with evidence-based, high-impact tutoring. The paper, “How FEV Tutor Integrates with Leading Assessments for Accelerated Learning,” is available for free to educators.

Follett School Solutions, which has been partnering with K-12 school districts to manage their assets for more than 15 years, introduced attendees to the new features and capabilities within its resource management platform Follett Destiny Resource Manager. The enhancements will meet up-to-the-minute user needs, especially in response to the significant increase in 1:1 device users.

Get More Math, a tool designed to break the math forgetting cycle, introduced Student Standards Reports, providing administrators, curriculum coordinators, coaches, and teachers with real-time insights into every student’s mastery of important state math standards. Based on data gathered from daily spiral review, the Student Standards Reports help educators assess mastery based on every student interaction over time. While other tools rely on point-in-time mass diagnostic exams, the Student Standards Reports provide up-to-the-moment precision for understanding each student’s progress—without taking any valuable class time.

GoGuardian, an education technology company helping create more effective and safer learning environments, announced the completion of its acquisition of TutorMe, an online tutoring solution creating access and opportunity for all students. With the addition of TutorMe to GoGuardian’s family of education solutions, nearly 25 million public K-12 students — one in two — now benefit from GoGuardian technology as part of their learning journey.

Hāpara unveiled two new products. Hāpara Filter provides students with unparalleled protection while using the internet, with an optional Wellness Module that alerts school staff when students are in crisis. Student Dashboard Digital Backpack provides learners with a space on any device for everything they need for digital learning including organizational tools, communication with teachers, access to Google Drive files and digital resources optimized for K-12 readers.

Kahoot! connected attendees with its new marketplace, which allows Verified creators and publishers to monetize their high-quality content directly on the Kahoot! platform. All users can buy content offered for sale on the marketplace and choose from a comprehensive library of high-quality courses on a wide range of topics from general trivia to history to mathematics. Educators also learned about DragonBox, an award-winning game studio that’s on a mission to empower children to explore and make learning math awesome.

Kiddom announced a new partnership with Open Up Resources to bring top-rated EL Education K-8 English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum to Charleston County School District (CCSD) in support of the district’s blended learning efforts. CenterPoint Education Solutions’ announced that its Illustrative Math (IM) certified and EL Education aligned interim assessments will be available for the 2022-2023 school year on Kiddom. Plus, Kiddom features a new integration of real-time Lesson Launch capabilities into its platform, which saves teachers significant time by allowing them to create lesson plans, present lessons, deliver assignments and activities to students, and then engage with and monitor student work in real-time, all from the same Kiddom platform on which they’re managing curriculum, assigning work, and communicating with students.

KinderLab Robotics showcased KIBO, the hands-on coding robot that teaches computer science, engineering, and computational thinking to young children (PreK-5^th grade). The curriculum is standards-aligned in computer science and engineering, and supports deep cross-curricular connections to science, ELA, math, and social studies. With KIBO, children build, program, decorate, and bring their own robot to life. KIBO is entirely screen-free, as children program their robots with “tangible code” made of wooden blocks. This approach takes advantage of years of research into providing physical manipulatives to allow young children to engage with abstract concepts like coding. KIBO is designed to be extended with craft and other building materials, providing a platform for imagination play, sturdy building, and the engineering design process.

Labster wdemonstrated its comprehensive edtech solution for high schools and universities. Labster simulations can be played on a variety of devices — from computers to tablets to Chromebooks — and integrated with existing tools including Google Classroom.

LEGO Education highlighted ways to bring joy back into the classroom. Redlands Unified School District discussed how they successfully adopted the LEGO Learning System in order to reimagine the way children learn computer science, starting as early as kindergarten. Educators also learned how to get involved in Build to Launch, a digital STEAM learning series created by LEGO Education and NASA, which has introduced thousands of teachers and students to exciting STEAM careers involved in successful space missions.

Lexia Learning was on hand to showcase its All for Literacy lineup of products, including Lexia Core5 Reading, Lexia English, Lexia PowerUp Literacy, and Lexia LETRS suite of professional learning courses.

MakerBot, a Stratasys company, announced its ongoing commitment to making 3D printing accessible to more students with the donations of the MakerBot SKETCH®, MakerBot METHOD® X, and MakerBot Replicator®+ 3D printers and 3D printing materials to several organizations that support underserved and low-income communities across the United States.

Moozoom demonstrated its interactive, innovative “choose your own path” SEL platform where students get to improve their mental wellbeing through modeling videos based on real life scenarios.

MySmartCoach, a new adaptive learning solution from engage2learn (e2L) providing personalized and on-demand coaching support for educators of all levels, launched at ISTE. The platform offers: technology-enabled delivery of scaffolded support for educators at every level; a variety of coaching styles for teachers based on their needs and learning preferences; a range of just-right support options for new and veteran teachers alike; and district-wide coaching & growth analytics that don’t require more work for educators.

ParentSquare focused on managing parent engagement and ensuring great pathways for communication. COVID illustrated the need for family engagement and prompted more parents and caregivers to become engaged in the school community. ParentSquare’s single platform functions for everything from a district’s mass notifications and mobile app to conference sign ups and permission slips.

PowerSchool announced that it will provide schools and districts this coming school year with two new products: Unified Insights MTSS and Unified Classroom® Curriculum and Instruction. Unified Insights MTSS helps educators support the needs of the whole child by providing a single solution to analyze, collaborate, and act on critical student data. Unified Classroom® Curriculum and Instruction will better connect curriculum mapping and instructional delivery, which gives more time to focus on teaching and learning. In addition, PowerSchool announced today five updates to current products that support data accessibility, the needs of younger learners, and tools that increase teacher effectiveness.

Promethean, a global education technology company, announced the all-new ActivPanel with ActivSync that delivers the most robust, seamless, and secure user experience yet. With the new interactive panel, Promethean meets the needs of teachers and IT administrators with intuitive, cutting-edge technology that enables a seamless classroom experience. With its easy, secure sign-in options, streamlined connection to content, flexible lesson delivery software, and personalized user experience, ActivPanel 9 offers the tools needed to transform how teachers use technology.

Reading Horizons highlighted the expansion of its flagship solution, Reading Horizons Discovery, with the addition of Sound City. This expansion aligns with the science that informs reading development and empowers teachers to help K–2 students connect speech to print and decode and spell words with greater proficiency. Sound City provides skill assessments, review activities, and games to ensure student mastery, retention, and engagement.

Ripple Effects, a provider of digital social emotional learning (SEL), mental health and behavior supports, announced the appointment of John Ray-Keil as its new CEO. Ray-Keil succeeds co-founder, Alice Ray, who will become chair of the board. Ripple Effects’ suite of PreK-12 digital programs provide a differentiated, multi-tiered system of support that empowers both students and educators to develop the social and life skills necessary to thrive in an academic setting.

Robotical demonstrated Marty the Robot, a humanoid robot. The unique walking mechanism means Marty can walk, turn, dance, kick a ball and so much more. And, because each limb is controlled by specific motors, Marty is also more stable and robust than other walking robots.

The Safeguarding Company, a provider of software and training to systemically protect students’ well-being, introduced ‘Safeguarding’ to U.S. schools and districts. An educational practice established in the U.K. following the tragic death of a young elementary student due to neglect, Safeguarding addresses non-academic barriers to learning, such as an unstable home life, bullying, harassment, mental health and other well-being needs.

Samsung Electronics America, Inc. showcased the future of education at ISTELive 2022 in New Orleans with its new interactive display—the 2022 Samsung Flip Pro (Model Name: WMB). Available in two large 75- and 85-inch models, the Flip Pro enables teachers to deliver dynamic lessons, spark active learning and inspire better learning outcomes for all students.

Savvas Learning Company, provider of PreK-12 learning solutions, is rolling out major enhancements to its Savvas Realize learning management system (LMS). Through a collaborative effort with educators and designed with them in mind, Savvas is revamping the Realize platform user experience to include a more streamlined interface with faster grading workflows, improved classroom management tools, and, new for the coming school year, seamless LTI-A integration with Schoology. Savvas demonstrated for ISTE attendees how it empowers educators and engages students with innovative, interactive, and personalized PreK-12 learning solutions on its newly enhanced Savvas Realize platform.

SMART Technologies demonstrated its new wellbeing and SEL integrations in Lumio, its digital learning platform. With the woes of the pandemic and the tragedy of recent events, developing and supporting the mental health of students and teachers has become a frontline issue of education, but a challenge in edtech advancements so far.

SoapBox Labs announced a new partnership with Learning Without Tears, the veteran early childhood learning company, to bring speech recognition technology to its K-3 supplemental phonics program Phonics, Reading, and Me in order to give educators a more seamless and reliable way to assess students’ reading progress.

Sourcewell announced its acquisition of FilterED, a cloud-based platform for schools that collects, measures and analyzes school technology information via self-assessment surveys, or by surveying multiple stakeholders. FilterED contains three products known as modules that use surveys or inventories to give school leaders a full view of how their district uses technology so they can prioritize initiatives, track growth, and quickly and easily provide updates to their school board and community at large. Northland Learning Center is implementing student data insights platform Proliftic in 10 school districts for the 2022-2023 school year. This implementation will support educators as they seek to address the whole child and provide interventions for students of all backgrounds.

In the Sphero booth, attendees got an exclusive first look at RVR+ (available in the U.S. in fall 2022) and its improvements for an enhanced classroom experience, as well as live demonstrations of Sphero’s award-winning robot for early learners, Sphero indi. Presentations on Sphero BOLT with Computer Science Foundations curriculum, creative inventions with littleBits, and more info on registration for the third year of the annual Sphero Global Challenge, the ultimate robotics competition for kids in early elementary, upper elementary, and middle school, will also be available.

ST Math demonstrated how its patented approach – manipulating objects in space and time – is unique in the market. The program starts by teaching the foundational concepts visually, then connects the ideas to the symbols, language, and robust discourse. With visual learning, students are better equipped to tackle unfamiliar math problems, recognize patterns, and build conceptual understanding. Without language barriers, the problem is accessible to all students, regardless of skill level or language background. ST Math is mastery based, which means students must pass each level with a score of 100% (all puzzles correctly solved) before the next level in a sequence becomes available to them. Each student has their own personalized journey and takes as long as they need to achieve mastery. This ensures that students are building and demonstrating a strong conceptual foundation.

ThinkWrite Technologies demonstrated the TW300 REVO headphone, designed to provide unique solutions to equally unique listeners, altering the perception and experience of what an over-ear headphone can offer. Featuring a sophisticated silhouette, sonic superiority, unparalleled comfortability, and the literal and metaphorical flexibility to fit you and your lifestyle needs, the TW300 REVO combines state of the art technology with audio excellence to create an ideally affordable headphone that will satisfy the most discerning of listeners. The 250XG Victory Gaming Headset provides gamers of all ages newly enhanced levels of audio quality and an immersive experience previously unattainable at this price point. Full spectrum sound and unmatched voice connectivity – with both teammates and opponents – are all housed in a winning, over-ear style headset.

Turnitin, a leading provider of academic integrity, assessment, and writing solutions, announced that its Turnitin Draft Coach feature is now available on Microsoft Word for the web.

UWorld demonstrated how its online test preparation courses for the SAT, ACT, PSAT/NMSQT, and AP exams are just like the real thing — so that the real thing feels as easy as practice. Practice questions are carefully created by expert teachers and tutors to match the exam experience and reduce anxiety.

VEX Robotics, provider of educational and competitive robotics products to schools, universities, and robotics teams around the world, told attendees how teaching the fundamentals of STEM and CS learning at an early age is pivotal. Especially when done through fun, hands-on activities that help young students perceive coding and engineering in a positive way.

Wacom displayed its intuitive, easy-to-use digital pen technology, which is helping schools and universities keep up with the pace of change. Wacom’s products boost collaboration and interaction, creating a classroom feel – even when students aren’t physically in one. Designed to work seamlessly with your IT infrastructure, they’re proven performers in any learning scenario.

Earlier this year, zSpace, Inc. announced the latest evolution of its evidence-based, AR/VR learning solutions – Inspire! The glasses-free AR/VR laptop allows users to interact with three-dimensional content without a headset or goggles. With high-capacity performance, eSports and model and simulation programs are supported. zSpace is ideal for STEM and CTE in K-12 and higher education.

‘Digital skills gap’ threatens innovation

Dennis Pierce — Mon, 30 May 2022 10:00:00 +0000

The skills required for success in the new economy were already changing. Now, COVID has sped up these changes dramatically.

As researchers warn of a growing “digital skills gap” that threatens to hold back innovation, experts are calling on schools to rethink instruction so that it more closely aligns with emerging workforce needs.

The global pandemic has quickened the pace of technological development around the world as services that had not been digital before moved online and others that were performed by humans became automated. This rapid digital acceleration has created a huge demand for more highly skilled workers who can develop software, program machines, and support new innovations.

“There are just not enough people with the right digital skills to enable the transformation that companies are seeking,” said Salil Gunashekar, a research leader and associate director at RAND Europe who focuses on science and technology policy.

RAND Europe, the European arm of global research firm RAND Corp., issued a report in March that describes the worldwide digital skills gap in stark detail. The report should serve as a wake-up call for education leaders in the United States and elsewhere to think about how instruction should change to meet employers’ needs more effectively.

“Employers are actively seeking employees with digital skills in order to adapt to an increasingly digitalized environment,” the report says. “While the demand for digital skills is high, supply is low — and businesses often struggle to find talent for digital roles.”

Consider these statistics:

A global survey of companies with more than 1,000 employees across a wide range of industries found that more than half (54 percent) agreed that a shortage of digital talent has led to a loss of competitive advantage and that if the digital skills gap isn’t closed soon, there will be negative impacts on product development, innovation, and customer experiences.
In European countries, the report noted, 57 percent of organizations find it hard to fill ICT specialist roles. This trend exists in other parts of the world as well; for instance, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says the demand for software developers will grow 22 percent through 2030.
The world’s major economies stand to lose up to $11.5 trillion in potential growth by 2028 if the digital skills gap isn’t addressed.

The RAND report defined a broad range of digital skills that employers require, including information and data literacy, processing, and management; communication and collaboration through digital means; digital content creation; using technology tools for problem solving and critical thinking; and more advanced skills such as developing and programming software.

Implications for schools

Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association, says K-12 leaders must recognize that the skills students need to learn now are very different than the ones schools traditionally have taught.

“We have focused on reading, writing, and arithmetic for more than a century,” Domenech says. While those skills are still essential, students also need new forms of literacy, he observes — such as the ability to solve problems collaboratively and find and evaluate information online.

Teaching and learning today should involve collaborative problem solving, Domenech says. However, this requires a cultural shift among schools.

“Traditionally, when teachers have seen two students sharing information on their phones, they have assumed this is cheating,” he explains. “But in reality, this is exactly the kind of collaboration that employers want.”

Another key takeaway from the RAND report is that computer science and coding should be more widely integrated into the K-12 curriculum, says Jesse Lozano, co-founder of pi-top. Pi-top provides a computer science lesson platform and project kits for students to learn coding and robotics through engaging, hands-on projects.

However, too few students actually have an opportunity to learn these skills before they get to college.

According to Code.org, the percentage of American high schools teach computer science is still fewer than half. Low-income students and those who live in rural areas are among the least likely to be exposed to this subject.

By integrating subjects like coding, robotics, and computer science throughout the K-12 curriculum, “schools can play a key role in helping to close the worldwide digital skills gap,” Lozano says.

How edtech discoveries during the pandemic can turn into innovations after

Kevin Hogan — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 10:00:00 +0000

In this episode of Getting There: Innovations in Education, sponsored by Adobe Sign:

Nine 2021 takeaways to improve edtech going forward
How personalized learning can help improve digital equity issues
What social-emotional learning (SEL) really means

5 notable trends in school innovation

Chelsea Waite, Research Fellow, Clayton Christensen Institute — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 09:24:12 +0000

Recently I told a group of high school students that my research investigates how schools are changing during the pandemic. One student’s unprompted reaction in the Zoom chat was so straightforward that it made me chuckle: “Oh we changed a lot.” Indeed.

The Canopy project, a collaborative effort to document school innovation across the country, endeavors to categorize and compare the nature of those changes. Starting in 2019, the project has issued calls to nominators—education non-profits, researchers, funders, and state agencies—to suggest schools on their radar that are innovating at a school-wide level. Leaders from nominated schools then participate by sharing details about their school models.

In September 2019, the project featured data on 173 schools’ innovative approaches, and in September 2020, a new interactive data portal featured 144 schools that shared their approaches during the pandemic for the first time.

This week, the project is releasing new data from January 2021. Among the 222 schools appearing in the data portal, 78 are new additions, and another 99 have shared updated information to supplement their existing Canopy profiles.

As we begin to analyze this latest batch of data, here are five takeaways that stand out:

Social-emotional learning continues to rank as the most widely cited approach.

To participate in the Canopy project, school leaders share the innovative practices underway at their schools using a set of consistent “tags,” or keywords and phrases. Seven broad domains, like project-based learning and blended learning, are represented by “general approach” tags. Dozens of additional tags describe more concrete “specific practices.”

Among the 78 school leaders that first participated in Canopy in January 2021, 86% reported implementing social-emotional learning (SEL), making it the most commonly-reported general approach.

While wide-reaching, the Canopy dataset is not fully representative of all schools with innovative designs. That makes it all the more notable that the most common general approaches among January’s cohort don’t differ dramatically from the tagging rates among last fall’s cohort of 144 schools. In both cohorts, the rates for implementing social-emotional learning were higher than the rates for other general approaches. Conversely, both cohorts also tagged culture of anti-racist action least often among the seven general approaches, though a larger proportion of schools tagged it in September 2020 compared to the January 2021 cohort.

No practice clearly dominates as central in all innovative schools.

Although some approaches appear more frequently in the Canopy dataset, frequency can be deceiving. That’s because practices that are often-reported are not necessarily most important from schools’ perspectives. Indeed, when schools describe the practices that are most important to their models, there’s wide variation.

Canopy surveys during the pandemic prompted school leaders to choose the top five practices, from 91 total tags, that are “core” to their schools’ way of doing things. With most schools reporting dozens of practices, these five attributes—which are displayed on a school’s Canopy profile—can help people unfamiliar with the school to get a sense of its most closely-held design choices.

At first glance, the most common core practices in the new Canopy schools mirror some of the trends described above: SEL appeared as the most common core practice, followed by competency-based education and designing for equity. (Among last fall’s cohort of schools, these practices also appeared among the top core attributes in schools.)

But looking only at the most commonly-cited core practices belies a far more nuanced story. Despite the common presence of practices like SEL, less than half of schools in January named it as a core practice. And no other practice clearly dominates as core: among all 91 tags in the Canopy data, 78 were selected by at least one school leader as a core practice. The Canopy data on core practices underscores the message that there’s wide variety in schools’ innovative models, and no single set of practices defines what “innovative” means in K–12 schools.

Hybrid models appeared most commonly as a learning modality during COVID.

In total, 177 schools (78 that are new additions, and 99 that had been featured before) shared COVID-related practices they are implementing in January 2021. Among them, hybrid instruction was most common, followed closely by fully remote instruction. Fourteen schools reported a fully in-person model, and 26 more offered an in-person option.

That’s a change from last fall’s cohort of schools, where fully remote learning showed up clearly as most prevalent. To verify if schools have indeed changed their models over time, we examined the 99 schools for which we have both September 2020 and January 2021 data. Among these schools, fully remote instruction was most common last fall (47 schools), and hybrid notably less common (25 schools). In January, the numbers had balanced somewhat: 41 schools reported fully remote instruction, and 36 hybrid. This suggests that the increase in hybrid models in this latest batch of data is partially due to schools changing their models over time.

Schools are piloting a range of small-scale innovations during the pandemic.

The Canopy project focuses on documenting the practices that innovative schools are implementing schoolwide (in other words, across grade levels and departments), but many schools are experimenting with smaller-scale innovations this year. Recognizing this, we included a new survey item in January that invited leaders to highlight any promising practices that have emerged in their school so far this year, even if those practices aren’t part of their whole-school model.

60% of the 177 respondents sharing COVID-related practices described emerging innovations in their schools. Several highlighted new efforts to transition to mastery-based learning. A number of leaders reported testing changes to their staffing models, such as creating community outreach positions for staff whose jobs depend on school buildings being open, or introducing team teaching and co-teaching. One leader described teachers creating safe spaces for students to have “real talk” to process current events. Many schools reported launching virtual enrichment, showcases, field days, and career days. And several leaders described new initiatives to engage and support parents.

On the other hand, the remaining 40% of leaders either declined to share any changes or noted they had not made changes. One leader noted that the school has chosen to stick with its core model rather than try too much that’s new.

All leaders’ responses about these emerging, promising practices can be found in the full downloadable Canopy dataset under the column labeled promising_practices.

Charters represent a growing proportion of schools in the Canopy project.

As we look at the composition of the Canopy dataset over time, even with an ebb and flow of participation, one school variable—charter, traditional district, or independent—jumps out as changing substantially between the first Canopy survey in 2019, and the two most recent surveys.

In 2019, the dataset we published featured nearly double the number of traditional district schools compared to charter schools, leading the project to be featured in an Education Week op-ed titled “Stop Ignoring the Innovation That Happens in Traditional Public Schools.” During COVID, however, the numbers of charter and traditional district schools participating in the project are neck-and-neck, with charters only slightly trailing traditional district schools.

This should not lead us to conclude definitively that district schools aren’t innovating, or that charters are innovating more. (A range of factors, including the unique Canopy methodology that depends on the participation of nominators and schools, contribute to producing these numbers.) Nevertheless, it may be worthwhile for researchers to investigate the relative impact that the pandemic has had on innovation in charters versus traditional district schools.

Somewhat surprisingly, the changing composition of Canopy data on charter status isn’t matched by major changes in other contextual variables. For example, the proportions of urban, suburban, and rural schools in the Canopy have remained quite stable over all three rounds of data collection so far. (Urban schools are more than twice as numerous as rural schools, and suburban schools are least common.) Demographics, too, such as the percentage of students with different racial or ethnic identities, students with disabilities, and English language learners, have not changed demonstrably over time, even as the schools featured in the data change.

These five trends only scratch the surface of a growing dataset that can reveal important patterns in the evolution of school innovation efforts. To dig in further, we invite school and district leaders, non-profit representatives, and state agency leaders to join the Canopy project co-chairs from Transcend and the Christensen Institute for a webinar hosted by the Aurora Institute on March 10.

Here’s what helps–and hinders–K-12 innovation

Laura Ascione — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 09:00:53 +0000

A personalized, learner-centered educational experience is one of the main drivers of K-12 innovation and extraordinary student outcomes, according to CoSN’s annual innovation survey.

The survey includes three categories: accelerators that pave the way for teaching and learning innovation in schools, hurdles that hinder it, and tech enablers are tools that districts can leverage to surmount hurdles and embrace accelerators.

Accelerators of K-12 innovation include:
1. Personalization: As the consumer sector has exploded with new ways to customize user experiences and products, schools are also finding ways to provide customized learning and support at the individual level.
2. Social and emotional learning: A core function of education is building skills and understanding mental, social, and emotional well-being, including empathy, grit, persistence, flexibility, and adaptability.
3. Learner autonomy: Learner autonomy is all about student agency, encompassing anything from letting students choose how they access content, to how they organize their learning, to how they exhibit their learning.

Tech enablers that support K-12 innovation include:
1. Digital collaboration environments: Digital systems, tools, technologies, connectivity, and pedagogy that enable high levels of collaboration and support online and in-person learning.
2. Untethered broadband and connectivity: Ubiquitous broadband internet and the underlying technologies that enable robust connecting learning–without requiring devices to be physically connected, such as via cables.
3. Blended learning tools: Digital tools, technologies, and pedagogy that enable learning experiences through a mix of face-to-face and online interactions.

Hurdles to realizing and expanding K-12 innovation:
1. Digital equity: This includes three interrelated components: digital foundations, conditions for learning, and meaningful learning opportunities.
2. (tie) Scaling and sustaining innovation: Whether it be practices for effective teaching and learning, organizational businesses, or technology usage, schools are challenged to engage in and effectively scale innovation.
2. (tie) Evolution of teaching and learning: The teaching and learning landscape is changing, opening up the opportunity to move toward a better balance of teacher facilitation and student learning.

CoSN explores K-12 innovation trends through its Driving K-12 Innovation initiative. The initiative relies on insight from K-12 leaders, practitioners, and changemakers as they discuss major trends and themes that drive, hinder, and enable teaching and learning innovation in schools.

“Year after year, CoSN’s Driving K-12 Innovation series offers the global edtech community a comprehensive analysis of the latest technology trends. In today’s COVID-19 era, this information is more critical than ever before, as teaching and learning evolve rapidly and tech-based solutions are the catalyst for educators and students around the world,” Keith Krueger, CoSN’s CEO, said in a statement.