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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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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District Leadership | School Leadership | Virtual Learning
School schedules and use of time are one of the few remaining relics of the industrialized learning model. Even when most schools moved to virtual learning in March 2020, many organizations replicated the existing bell schedule and instructed teachers to move their onsite instruction online. The school leaders believed it would hold teachers and students more accountable and create more predictability to help families plan their own schedules. But pre-pandemic, some schools began to look across the systems that were set up and consider more flexible and agile options that were more in tune with designing learning that is more compelling, personalized, and appropriately challenging for their students.
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Crisis Management | District Leadership | School Leadership | Virtual Learning
From North Carolina to California to Alaska, public schools around the United States are planning to preserve a virtual school option for students after the pandemic is over. The constant drumbeat of getting all students back to school as quickly as possible does not tell the whole story of learning in the pandemic. Singing the praises of virtual learning was not something many students, educators, and families would see themselves humming along to twelve months ago. But from the early and draining days, there has been a rhythm and stability that has flourished in expected and unexpected ways.
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