Remodeling mindsets: leveraging instructional innovation toward systemwide change

• 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

School redesign feels increasingly urgent. Students a post-COVID world need personalized, relevant, and adaptive learning experiences that are authentic and purposeful (Zhao & Watterston, 2021). Meaningful, sustained school redesign requires that system leaders have both a coherent vision and that they co-design with educators, families, students, and the broader community. Developing a sustainability strategy can lead to depth and breadth of scale, and yet organic teacher-by-teacher spread of practices can be a strong lever to cement new ways of teaching and learning into a school’s culture (Coburn, 2003; Gutiérrez & Penuel, 2014; Kittelman, Strickland-Cohen, Pinkelman, & McIntosh, 2020). Whole-scale high school redesign requires considerable buy-in among staff, students, families, and the broader community to be successful. This is especially true in high school redesign that reimagines learning environments to reflect what the science of learning and development indicates that young people need: strong, supportive relationships with peers and adults; deep, engaging, and appropriately challenging learning both in the classroom and beyond; reciprocal and authentic relationships with families and the broader community; integrated student supports; and educators who have the preparation and support needed to deliver on student, family, and community needs (Darling-Hammond, et al., 2024).

In a geographically diverse district in Southern California, educators sought to redesign Career and Technical Education pathways throughout the district to provide teaching and learning experiences to students that were connected to community-based organizations and the district’s community schools initiative, more relevant to students’ post-secondary aspirations, and supported of identity-centered instruction. This resulted in a whole-district reform effort that centered students’ needs and relevant teaching and learning. In this district, technical assistance providers leveraged a graduate profile and performance-based assessments anchored in industry-themed pathways to provide learning experiences for young people that were inquiry-based, authentic, and purposeful. This effort proved effective in several schools, which eventually led the superintendent to build these initiatives throughout the district, slated for full implementation in the 2026-27 school year.

This redesign effort was documented over the course of four years, with the fifth being the forthcoming planning year, in 2025-26. In this session, a technical assistance provider will provide a focused look at how one of the most challenging schools in the district became a beacon for the work of community-connected learning, including by improving student outcomes as measured on large-scale state tests. In addition, she will share key highlights of professional learning that supported educators in shifting their mindsets toward this work and becoming champions for it, eventually scaling to the full high school district and into some eighth-grade classes. Further, she will provide a brief analysis of the policy context, including a funding measure passed by voters in the district, that supported this work. The lessons learned from policy and practice will be valuable to those considering how to reimagine future schooling systems to be increasingly anchored in relevant local context and relationship-centered, while also being driven by educators.

Author

• Josette Neal-de-Stanton, Envision Learning Partners