How Community Schools Support Adolescents' Social, Emotional, and Academic Development

• In Event: The New Science of Adolescence: Integrating Socio-Emotional and Academic Development in Research, Practice, and Policy

Abstract

Community schooling is a century old educational strategy currently experiencing a renaissance, propelled in part by the growing research base on social, emotional and academic development. As a reform, community schooling calls for the same whole-child comprehensive approach to education that learning science has found to be critical to healthy adolescent development (Daniel, Quartz & Oakes, 2019). Four pillars define the community schools strategy: integrated student supports, expanded learning time and opportunities, family and community engagement, and collaborative leadership and practices (Oakes, Maier & Daniel, 2017). By attending to these pillars, community schools are able to create structures and norms that support social, emotional and academic development, particularly for students who are traditionally marginalized by our society and educational system. This paper reports on a research-practice partnership designed to develop, study, and sustain the community school strategy in a high-poverty, urban neighborhood. A diverse team of authors, including researchers and school leaders, report on their efforts to create a strong school culture as well as instructional routines for self-assessment that support adolescents’ multicultural, college-going identities.
The context for this study is a university-assisted community school that is part of a growing national network uniting the K-12 community schools movement with higher education civic engagement reforms (Benson et al., 2017). As multidimensional problem solving ecologies, these schools provide a particularly fertile context for research-practice partnerships (Coburn, Penuel, & Geil, 2013; Quartz, et al., 2017). University Community School launched in 2007 when education researchers and other university staff joined with community, union and district leaders to design a new K-12 school for 1,000 students in a port-of-entry immigrant neighborhood. The design process involved articulating four core competencies to ensure the social, emotional, and academic development of all members of the school community: self-directed passionate learner; master of academic content and skills; bilingual, biliterate, and multicultural; and active and critical participant in society. The authors describe how these competencies are supported by organizational structures and practices (e.g., dual language program, teacher leadership, community internships) and present two forms of data to capture the strength of the school’s culture: longitudinal survey data on teacher and student school experience and findings from a set of in-depth qualitative interviews with 20 seniors who were asked to reflect on each competency as well as their journeys through middle and high school. Looking inside the classroom, the paper also describes how teachers and researchers developed robust self-assessment routines in the context of multilingual social action projects (Cerda, Garcia, Jimenez & Kim, 2019). These routines were designed to support the process of co-regulation--teachers helping students learn the skills to self-regulate and work in groups (Hadwin, Järavelä, and Miller, 2018). The authors describe this instructional process and analyze students’ experience based on their self-assessments and project performance, as measured by a rubric aligned to the four core competencies. Together, this collaborative inquiry into school culture and instructional processes provides a rich, macro-micro account of how community schools can support adolescents' social, emotional, and academic development.

Authors

• Karen Hunter Quartz, University of California - Los Angeles

• Janet Cerda, University of California - Los Angeles

• Rosa Jimenez, RFK Community Schools

• Leyda Waleska Garcia, UCLA Community School