B.Y.O.T Bring Your Own Thoughts
The latest on all student-centered models, leadership development, strategic planning, teacher retention, and all things innovation in K-12 education. We answer questions before you think to ask them.
District Leadership | School Leadership | Strategic Planning
What’s the first word that pops into your head when you hear “strategic planning”? What word did you think of? Common responses we hear are boring, painful, old-school, far-off, or even just a simple, “ugh.”
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Knowledge is Power! Measure what Matters! If our cliches are an indicator, we all know that data collection, review, analysis, and understanding is important. We all hear of data-driven decisions, and the importance of data in education and educational systems, but we are often challenged to incorporate data review and the next steps into our everyday lives. As we’ve been exploring the Essential Elements of a Data Culture, we’ve been considering how an organizational culture can shift from a culture in which data is in the periphery, pulled to the center for high stakes discussions and decisions, to one in which data is an integral part of every day, informing the small moves that reinforce the vision, clarify decisions, and advance progress. This is where our love of habits comes in…
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New School Design | School Leadership | Virtual Learning
To support the planning of opening a virtual school, leaders can be overwhelmed with the volume of questions to consider — logistics, strategy, and purpose to name a few. To guide the planning process, we offer the following table with phases of implementation with related questions. While the guide is set up sequentially, each phase may trigger a deeper articulation of previous phases to refine or reimagine the virtual school.
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District Leadership | School Leadership | Teacher Retention
A few Fridays ago I got a message from my colleague Kelly. She asked what I wanted for lunch, said she would order it, and that we would eat together during our Zoom meeting later that day (where we would begin to reimagine what summer school could look like). This simple and thoughtful act changed my mood in the moment and for the rest of that day.
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District Leadership | Equity | School Leadership
In September of 2020, Education Elements announced the first cohort of the “Systems for Education Equity Development," or SEED, Fellowship. The fellowship is an exclusive, multi-month, cohort experience for educational leaders to redesign a system within their school district that is contributing to creating inequity in the student experience. The inaugural SEED Fellowship cohort is a powerful group of educators made of leaders across 7 states including the District of Columbia, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington. Individually they are amazing, and together and through the SEED experience, the fellows will have an additional set of tools as well as a network of support to address their local, systemic challenges around equity.
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Data | District Leadership | School Leadership
For more than a century, standardized testing data have been used to measure the success of students, teachers, and schools - and even to mark our global competitiveness or lack thereof. These data have driven significant education policy and funding models at the national and state levels, and school districts devote up to 15 percent of their instructional days each school year to student assessments alone, costing an estimated $1.7 billion each year. The political and financial commitment to standardized testing was born out of good intentions. The incredibly high stakes for students, teachers, and schools that were tied to these data were intended to hold us accountable for educating all children. But the return on these investments is debatable at best. We know now that standardized testing data, when viewed in isolation, represent a limited view of student success and can even mislead us into making discriminatory decisions because of their inherent biases. We know the policies we’ve enforced and the decisions we’ve made based on these data have failed to close persistent achievement disparities across income levels and between white students and students of color, even after 50 years of trying.
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