Making Magic out of a Mandate: From Consolidation to Robust Redesign

• In Event: AER Roundtable Session Friday 1:45 pm - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Imagining a future of belonging and community-centered instruction through high school redesign

Abstract

Schools face increasing pressures to close and consolidate schools due to under-enrollment. In the state of California, for example, three-quarters of the school districts have seen declines in the past decade (Lafortune, Hill, & Prunty, 2024; Lafortune, Prunty, & Barton, 2023). Instead of shuttering a valuable community hub with no alternative–and recognizing that traditional learning environments largely do not meet students’ diverse needs–a district in the Greater Los Angeles area chose to launch a new school that serves grades 7-12 using a recently developed redesign framework (Darling-Hammond, et al., 2024).

The bulk of the planning for school redesign happened over the course of a single year, with most of the core Redesign Team tasked with simultaneously running both schools. With the understanding that this project was a pilot for future consolidations in the district, the Redesign Team received technical assistance and funding for the project, as well as professional learning including site visits to other redesigned schools. At the end of their year, they chose to implement four “Promising Practices”: Advisory structures, collaborative planning time among teachers, teaching teams with shared cohorts, and Kid Talk–a meeting structure where core content teachers, counselors, IEP coordinators, and administrators come together to discuss students’ academic, behavioral, and social emotional needs; document interventions; and plan for family outreach. They also shifted to a block schedule and started looping students so that they shared the same advisors over the course of two school years.

The purpose of this study is to understand the processes, structures, resources, and mindsets that support redesign in this district’s context. The study evolved to focus on the learning experiences, relationships, and capacity-building structures required to shift mindset among staff so that they could fully embody redesign in their new school.

To investigate the research questions, the research team used an approach grounded in narrative inquiry and case study approaches. Situating the research within the experiences of the members of the redesign team and redesigned school community allowed the research team to identify important contextual details that impacted redesign and can inform policy and practice. This study draws on multiple data sources, including:
• Interviews and focus groups with members of the redesign team, the school community, and the broader district, including follow-up interviews with educators and school leaders.
• Observations of design team meetings, design team retreats, site visits, and community engagement meetings.
• Reviews of artifacts and supporting documents, including design team meeting agendas, professional development materials, school site visit inventories, board presentations, communications materials, planning materials, synthesis documents, professional learning presentations, and other resources developed by members of the schools and district pertaining to redesign.

Educators engaging in redesign require a variety of supports to truly reimagine how to organize an innovative school. The presenter will share lessons learned through the redesign process that will be relevant for other researchers studying high school redesign, policymakers looking to facilitate school innovation, and educators embarking on redesign efforts.

Author

• Charlotte Thompson, Learning Policy Institute