Shifting Instructional and Decision-Making Practices in Chicago Public Schools

• In Event: Transforming Students' Daily Experience of School: Using Student Experience Data to Improve Educators' Classroom Practice

Abstract

This upcoming school year Chicago Public School’s (CPS) will embrace a new Instructional Core Vision that calls for schools to center identity, community, and relationships. Leveraging student perspective and leadership in all aspects of schooling is a practice shift the district is attempting to scale in pursuit of their instructional vision. The shift in vision has been informed theoretically by culturally responsive pedagogy and specifically, Gloria Ladson Billings’ work on culturally relevant pedagogies and Critical Race Theory. CPS hopes to achieve this shift in vision by utilizing both Targeted Universalism, an approach that understands that in order to truly achieve universal goals, pedagogy and systematic reform must target the structural and cultural specificities of students’ realities, and Cynthia Coburn’s rethinking scale approach, which theorizes four interrelated dimensions of scale to be used for reform strategy and research design.
This year, CPS teachers, students, and school leaders are collecting student experience and perspective data to inform decision-making in both classroom and schoolwide improvement. The implementation of student experience and perspective data collection is threefold and will triangulate multiple sources of data: school-wide data collection utilizing University of Chicago’s Cultivate survey, teacher-designed classroom surveys informed by the district specific to content area, and student perspective data collected by school Student Voice Committees throughout the school year in partnership with their school’s administration.
In order to help us understand the successes and challenges of this approach, CPS will also conduct pre- and post-professional cohort surveys for teachers and school leaders. Additionally, CPS will administer pre and post surveys to and conduct interviews with students on Student Voice Committees and school cohort focus groups. Overall, CPS is interested in learning how student experience and perspective data collected from multiple sources can be utilized across a district to center student experiences and voice and inform teacher practice and school improvement.
In this session, CPS representatives will be able to discuss not only the findings from the implementation of student experience and perspective data collection, but also reflect on the experience of students, teachers, and administrators in the process.

Author

• Heather Van Benthuysen, Chicago Public Schools
  Presenting Author