Designing High Schools That Personalize

• In Event: Lessons Learned From the Design and Implementation of Personalized Learning in K–12 Schools

Abstract

Purpose and Framework

The Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY), through its Opportunity by Design (OBD) initiative, has funded innovative partnerships to engage districts in the design and opening of new high schools, with support from the Springpoint capacity-building organization. CCNY intends for the schools to base their design and vision on ten Design Principles that emphasize personalized learning (PL) to accelerate the learning of all students, to help students who are underprepared catch up, and to prepare all students to meet the Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards. As part of a comprehensive evaluation, we are examining how OBD schools approach PL, contextual factors that relate to PL implementation, and the role of Springpoint in supporting PL. This presentation examines five schools that opened in fall 2014 and five that will open in fall 2015.

Methods/Data

We are conducting annual, semi-structured interviews with key staff members at CCNY, Springpoint, districts, and schools, and observations of Springpoint’s capacity-building services. We use these data to develop and refine school-specific logic models over time. We are also analyzing design-related data from surveys of OBD school principals, teachers, and students, as well as principal and teacher interviews in each school.

Results

Schools adopted several design elements intended to foster PL, including personalized data trackers accessible to students, teachers and parents, scheduling that permits alternatives to traditional instruction, use of technology-based resources such as Khan Academy and Educurious, and external partnerships that foster college and career focus and that appeal to diverse student interests. Schools tended to place more emphasis on developing the competency-based learning approach than any of the other design principles, in part because they found it to be the most difficult to understand and implement.

Contextual factors at all levels of the system appeared to influence design and implementation. For example, the availability of well-functioning data systems that were visible and accessible to teachers and students, and that were consistent with mastery-based grading, were crucial for supporting PL, and expectations of parents, employers, and colleges made a shift to mastery-based grading challenging to communicate and implement. Cohesive school culture and effective leadership were also important for ensuring buy-in and for preventing teachers and students from adopting pre-existing norms about instruction and classroom management.

Springpoint developed supports to help districts design new instructional models and offered those supports through online resources and a virtual community, in-person individual and group coaching and group convenings, sharing of best practices, and identification of experts to meet specific needs. Springpoint’s design supports were well-received by districts.

Discussion

The findings will be useful to others who are engaged in the process of designing new PL models and to those who are interested in the factors that support or hinder efforts use PL to address the twin goals of acceleration and recuperation. PL is likely to benefit from innovative approaches to provision of support and technical assistance, and the OBD experience provides evidence of how such support can be provided across multiple, challenging contexts.

Authors

• Anna Rosefsky Saavedra, RAND Education

• Laura S. Hamilton, RAND Corporation

• Elizabeth Steiner, RAND Corporation