It’s indisputable that most students perform better academically when they have parents or adults to help with homework and to be advocates with teachers and principals.
But in many communities, parents who juggle multiple jobs, don’t speak much English, or have low levels of education often don’t have the time or resources to make meaningful connections to their child’s schooling experience.
That’s why some leading-edge districts have made it their job to reach out to families and create more welcoming and accessible ways for parents to be part of their children’s schooling.
In Washoe County, Nev., for example, the school district’s family-engagement work includes organizing home visits by teachers—and training those teachers to make the most of those face-to-face encounters in students’ homes.
In Federal Way, Wash., the leader of family-engagement efforts taps a diverse array of parents to serve on committees or task forces that inform major decision making in the district, including high-level hires.
Still, the specialized field of parent and family engagement has mostly been driven by ambitious leaders at the district level. And even in districts with robust programming, resources to support the work are often tight.
But new and potentially bigger forces are building around the need for schools and educators to forge deeper connections with parents and community members.
Philanthropists—in particular the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation of New York—are championing the flow of more money into family-engagement initiatives, including research to identify what efforts are effective.
And the federal budget has set aside $10 million to help fund efforts by several state education agencies and outside partners to develop strong parent and community programming.
The Every Student Succeeds Act also directs states and districts to develop plans to work with families and surrounding communities—a requirement that has spawned a multistate endeavor to create guidelines and exemplars for schools and districts to follow.
Advocates for building strong ties between schools and families say it’s a major opportunity for a proven, yet underutilized strategy to make schools better.
“There is a lot of excitement, and more of an evolution in where both policymakers and funders feel like they want to increasingly put their money,” said Vito Borrello, the executive director for the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement…
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Is it possible to test how creative someone is? There are quite a few tests on the internet that claim to do so. Of course, there are also “tests” on the internet than can tell you which Star Wars character you are. We know the people designing those tests are creative, but what about your regular American student?
This week’s Deeper Learning Digest covers a new creativity test designed for U.S. fifteen-year-olds and their international peers. It will also explain why fifteen-year-olds and other adolescents are hard-wired to adopt social media and take up extreme sports such as skateboarding and snowboarding. Finally, it will examine the common, the controversial, and why March—and not December—could be the most wonderful time of the year.
Are U.S. Students More Creative than Their International Peers?
Through the years, U.S. fifteen-year-olds have not fared well on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international test given every three years by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (See more in “How Does the United States Stack Up? International Comparisons of Academic Achievement.”)
Still, some education advocates tend to brush off poor PISA results by saying that U.S. students are much more creative than their international peers and THAT is the skill that really matters. As evidence, they point to the booming tech industry and the many successful start-ups that begin in the United States. Those examples are more anecdotal than empirical, but what if there was a test that could measure creativity?
Writing for Education Week, superstar reporter—and Alliance for Excellent Education fav—Catherine Gewertz notes that such a test is in the works:
“When teenagers all over the world take the PISA exam in 2021, they could face a new kind of test: one that aims to measure their creativity. And the maker of a major U.S. college-admissions exam—ACT—will build it,” Gewertz writes.
“A fundamental role of education is to equip students with the skills they need in the future,” said Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills and special advisor on education policy to the Secretary-General at OECD, in a September 19 ACT press release. “Creative thinking is a necessary competence for today’s young people to develop, as societies increasingly depend on innovation to address emerging challenges. PISA 2021 will take international assessments into a new phase by gathering data on young people’s creative thinking skills.”
Citing Mario Piacentini, the OECD scientist leading the project, Gewertz writes that the creativity component is not a sure thing, but that the plan is to “present the exam’s framework, and ideas for possible test questions, to the OECD countries in November, and gauge their level of interest in participating.”
If the test happens, we’ll finally know for sure whether American students are as creative as we all think they are. Or maybe we’ll just have something else to argue about.
BRYN MAWR, Pennsylvania — The Horror Writers Association (HWA) is developing a “Summer Scares” reading program that will provide libraries and schools with an annual list of recommended horror titles for adult, young adult (teen), and middle grade readers. The goal is to introduce new authors and help librarians start conversations with readers that will extend beyond the books from each list and promote reading for years to come.
HWA is partnering with United for Libraries, Book Riot, and Library Journal/School Library Journal on “Summer Scares.”
Award-winning author Grady Hendrix and a committee of four librarians will be selecting three recommended fiction titles in each of three reading levels— Middle Grade, Teen, and Adult— for a total of nine “Summer Scares” selections. The goal of the program is to encourage a national conversation about the entire horror genre, across all age levels, at libraries all over the country and ultimately get more adults, teens, and children interested in reading. Official “Summer Scares” designated authors will also be making themselves available to appear, either virtually or in person, at public and school libraries all over the country, for free.
“Horror is one of those genres that is incredibly popular,” Grady Hendrix says. “But people look at you funny when you say you like reading horror. We want to use this opportunity to showcase the best of what’s out there today. These stories won’t just scare readers, but they’ll make them laugh, make them cry, and make them cringe. There’s more to horror than just saying ‘boo’.”
The committee’s final selections will be announced on February 14, 2019— National Library Lover’s Day. Some or all of the authors of those titles will appear on a panel to kick off “Summer Scares” at Librarian’s Day during StokerCon 2019 on May 10, 2019, in Grand Rapids, Mich.
After the Pennsylvania Department of Education identified Pittsburgh Brashear High School as a priority school for improvement, the school’s educators began to rethink their approach to instruction. Teacher leaders wanted to identify promising practices that would improve engagement for the school’s 1,230 students, most of whom are African American or come from low-income families. They also were looking for ways to increase academic rigor and promote cross-curricular instruction to enable all students to achieve academic excellence. So what did they do?
Specifically, the educators wanted guidance on how best to nurture students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills and abilities to collaborate, communicate effectively, and direct their own learning—a set of skills collectively known as deeper learning competencies. So, in 2017, the leadership team from the school’s STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) Academy contacted the Alliance for Excellent Education (All4Ed) for direct technical assistance on implementing strategies that support deeper learning.
Nationwide, there more than 6 million job openings according to the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Far too often, businesses say that there are not enough qualified applicants to fill their openings. Now, thanks to the nation’s main education law, there’s something that business can do to change that.
By requiring states and school districts to engage a variety of stakeholders, including business, as they develop plans to educate their students, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides an excellent opportunity for the business community. By working with states and school districts, the business community can help to shape policy to ensure that more students graduate from high school with the skills they need. In today’s economy, students need content knowledge, but they must also understand how to apply that knowledge across a variety of challenging tasks. They also need critical thinking, communications, collaboration, and other deeper learning competencies.
To help business leaders understand the key role they can play in helping students develop these skills, the Alliance for Excellent Education and the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives have developed a new fact sheet identifying three key areas within ESSA implementation where business can get involved.
First, business leaders can encourage states to include measures of college and career readiness as one of their indicators of school quality or student success. Examples include the percentage of students who enroll and perform in advanced coursework such as Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate or the percentage of students who enroll, persist, and complete postsecondary education. Louisiana’s ESSA plan includes a “strength of diploma” indicator that measures the quality of a student’s diploma while Tennessee uses a “ready graduate” indicator that incentivizes students to pursue postsecondary experiences while still in high school…
Download the fact sheet from Alliance for Excellent Education and Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives to learn more about these recommendations and how business leaders can get involved.
Early on a Friday morning in May, Dale Fiess and his students took to the water. For the students, it literally was a sink or swim moment. The time had come to launch the solar-powered boat the students had built and see whether it could compete against the other teams entered in the California Solar Regatta.
The race was the culmination of three months and approximately fifty hours of work by students enrolled in the green energy pathway at Skyline High School in Oakland, California. Skyline is among the more than 400 schools in California that have implemented Linked Learning, an approach to transforming high school education that combines rigorous academics, career-based learning in the classroom, work-based learning, and integrated student support services.
High schools implementing Linked Learning focus on specific industry themes, such as engineering, health care, performing arts, and others, that teachers integrate across subject areas. At Skyline, students participate in one of four Linked Learning pathways, formerly known as academies: green energy, education and community health, visual and performing arts, and computer science and technology.
“The biggest draw of our academy is the science aspect and the science teachers,” explains Fiess, co-director of Skyline’s green energy pathway. “Kids who are interested in science are drawn to the program.”
Bonnie, a tenth-grade student, joined the green energy pathway to take advantage of the multiple real-world experiences the program provides, like the solar-powered boat project. “The majority of my friends are in green academy and I heard about the great opportunities it offers—internships, field trips, and a lot of hands-on activities,” she says.
Participating in the solar regatta had been one of Fiess’s goals for the program for about five or six years, he says. But this was the first year that Skyline entered the event, which typically attracts schools from more affluent districts. Of Skyline’s 1,837 students, 77 percent qualify for free or reduced-price meals and 94 percent are students of color. Additionally, almost half of the school’s students speak a language other than English at home including Spanish, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Arabic, Filipino (Tagalog or Pilipino), Mien (Yao), Khmer (Cambodian), and Mam (Guatemalan).
“It was an exciting project that was unique, something that students could feel special about participating in,” Fiess explains. “It fit well with the theme of our academy and what the students had been learning about. I know most of my students don’t have the opportunity to build things, put things together, or create things of the scale that this project allowed.”
Fiess and the team of ten students worked with a professional boat builder on the design, but the students handled most of the boat’s construction and assembly. During the project, students developed practical skills in woodworking and water safety, but also applied core content knowledge on circuitry and solar energy they acquired in their green energy classes. The project also nurtured deeper learning skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, and collaboration as students worked together to troubleshoot wiring challenges and ensure the solar panels directed enough energy to the boat’s motor.
“They used their curiosity and intellect in a real-world setting,” Fiess says of his students. “They learned how to reason through measuring angles, lengths, and depths through designing braces for the boat structure. They learned confidence in overcoming fears through operating power tools and paddling canoes on the water. They learned practical skills in tool use and electrical wiring that could be useful in the future. They learned that building things can be fun and that complex tasks can be interesting rather than daunting.”
For the students, the project offered an authentic opportunity to apply their classroom course work in real life.
“I thought it would be a good experience to build a boat,” says Kevin, an eleventh grader at Skyline. “When I found out we were using solar panels to power it I was even more excited since it really fits with the green academy concept.
The students’ hard work, commitment, and persistence paid off on the day of the boat race. The team completed two sprint races and a lap during the endurance race. Most importantly, Skyline’s team fared better than many of their competitors. “In the end, one [of the other] team[s] sank their boat, another burned out their motor, and another burned out two motors,” says Fiess. “Our boat worked, was reasonably fast, and the kids did their best.”
Skyline High School is one of three schools featured in “American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action,” an online gallery of nearly 300 original print-quality, royalty-free images of teachers and K–12 students engaged in activities that foster deeper learning. The Alliance for Excellent Education created the gallery with generous support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to demonstrate to school leaders, teachers, parents, and students that deeper learning can succeed in schools of every type with students from all backgrounds. To see more photos from the collection, visit www.deeperlearning4all.org/images.
Source: Kristen Loschert is editorial director at the Alliance for Excellent Education.
In this week’s digest, take a tour of deeper learning then and now, check out next generation learning in Colorado, see how competency-based learning will transform an Illinois school, and find out how states can use the Every Student Succeeds Act to enable deeper learning for all students.
District Administration takes a tour of deeper learning, diving in to the background of the deeper learning movement and taking stock of how it has grown. Although the movement has grown, the need still remains, since many low-income students are still not getting the deeper learning experiences they need to prepare them for success in careers and postsecondary education.
The article checks in on what’s happening at different schools across the country that are doing deeper learning, including King Middle School in Maine and Central Coast New Tech High School in California, as well as the School Retool program that works to increase project-based learning through small “hacks.”
A visit to Colorado schools enabled a contingent of education professionals to see “next generation learning” in action. Visitors saw students at several elementary schools and a middle school taking charge of their own learning and engaging in critical thinking in a personalized learning setting. Colorado was one of six Next Generation Learning Challenges grantees in the country, and received funds to support the implementation of next generation learning.
“The compelling thing about the story in Colorado is how far the schools have come – they are traditional public schools that are doing redesign work, changing the old paradigm to innovative practices, within the confines of the current system,” said Paul Beck, manager of Next Generation Learning at CEI in the Pagosa Daily Post. “Equity is at the heart of the work – students are receiving what they need when they need it, and students are in charge of directing their learning.”
Competency-Based Pilot Program in Illinois
Huntley School District in Illinois is among ten districts in the state participating in the Illinois’ Competency-Based High School Graduation Requirements Pilot Program, reports the Northwest Herald. Huntley High School, which already uses a blended learning program, will now implement a competency-based program, where students are measured on their academic mastery of skills rather than seat time.
“The goal of the program is to let students work at a personalized pace, Rowe said. Teachers will aim to guide students’ progress and offer seminar-like instruction, and students can demonstrate mastery of learning standards across subject areas rather than completing courses.”
How can states take advantage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to create a policy culture of improvement and provide more opportunities for deeper learning outcomes for all students? Adriana Martinez, interim director of operations for the Innovation Lab Network (ILN) at the Council of Chief State School Officer’s (CCSSO), shares her thoughts in Education Week’s Learning Deeply blog.
“ESSA provides different opportunities to create an environment that is more closely aligned to deeper learning–from including indicators of school quality and/or student success in accountability metrics to piloting innovative assessment models,” Martinez writes. “One of the key paradigm shifts focuses on bringing together accountability systems with school improvement efforts, many of which are modeled by the schools and educators who attend the deeper learning conference.”
Twitter can be a great place to see what’s actually happening to promote deeper learning outcomes in (and out!) of classrooms across the country. Here are a few examples. Be sure to follow @DeeperLearning and check out #DeeperLearning for more!
Understanding the student experience in school is critical to adults who are working in education, writes Devon Young, community lead at the K12 Lab Network in the Stanford University d.school. One way to accomplish this goal is to shadow a student, a “hack” or small experiment that can lead to big change. Born out of School Retool, the Shadow a Student Challenge is a hack to help school leaders understand the student experience.
Last year, over 1,500 school leaders and educators took off their administrator or teacher hats to truly immerse themselves in the student perspective. “This Challenge builds on this deep empathy practice and provides permission, agency, tools and resources to help understand not just how to shadow, but how to turn their insights into actions,” writes Young. Learn more about this event and the experiences of participating school leaders in this Getting Smart blog post.
Career Readiness
Adriana Martinez, a senior program associate with the Innovation Lab Network at the Council of Chief State School Officers discusses the “other C” in college and career readiness in Education Week’s Learning Deeply blog. For Martinez, this other, often neglected “C” is career.
“Too many students graduate without the skills they need to build successful careers that afford them a quality of life,” writes Martinez. “In my opinion, too many young people get funneled into low-skill, low-paying jobs, or worse, remain unemployed, while our industries continue to create high-skill, high-wage jobs that they can’t fill.”
She discusses the need to close the persisting skills gap by making education more relevant for students and to help them meet the expectations of the workforce, and deeper learning is an answer. To help provide more deeper learning opportunities for all students, Martinez shares the work of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO)’s Career Readiness Initiative. Learn more.
Making Assessment Meaningful
Assessments like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), ask students to apply their knowledge to real-world problems, measuring not only academic performance but their deeper learning skills. While PISA is an international assessment that provides important country-level information about the performance of fifteen-year-olds, the OECD’s Test for Schools is a school-level, PISA-based assessment that provides actionable data for superintendents, principals, and teachers to develop strategies for improving student learning outcomes.
University Academy in Kansas City, Missouri, one of many schools that have participated in the OECD Test for Schools, was featured in a new case study developed by the Alliance and the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy (the Institute) to examine how schools are using this test to monitor student academic outcomes and inform teaching practice to meet student learning needs.
“The beauty of the OECD Test [for Schools] is that it models for teachers what questions written to elicit higher-order thinking should look like,” said Dr. Clem Ukaoma, upper school principal at University Academy in a webinar about the case study. “We want to teach our students to think critically and solve complex problems, rather than give them easy cram-and-recall questions that are often popular with textbook publishers and with some teachers.”
Deeper Learning 2017, the fifth annual gathering of educators focused on creating deeper learning opportunities is coming up next month, March 29-31 in San Diego, California. Program, registration, and more information is available at http://www.deeper-learning.org/dl2017/.
Deeper Learning in Action
Twitter can be a great place to see what’s actually happening to promote deeper learning outcomes in (and out!) of classrooms across the country. Here are a few examples. Be sure to follow @DeeperLearning and check out #DeeperLearning for more!
The ‘Deeper Learning Digest’ is a bi-weekly roundup of articles, blog posts, and other content around deeper learning. Be sure to follow @deeperlearning on Twitter and like Deeper Learning on Facebook to stay up to date on all deeper learning news.
The Deeper Learning movement is thinking about how to involve more and more educators in the national, state, local, and dinner table conversations centered on teaching and learning, writes Monica Alatorre in Education Week’s Learning Deeply blog. She reminds everyone to be sure student voices are part of the conversation, and specifically asking “What do students think about education, and about how to best reach them, engage them, and motivate them?”
Alatorre shares the thoughts of two high school students on why education is important to them and specifically how their education is preparing them for the future. The highlights? Students want to learn and improve. Students also understand the connection between academic skills and future success.
Miles, an eleventh grade student from Oakland exemplifies this and the importance of deeper learning skills, saying:
“My school has taught me about leadership, and about the importance of collaborating productively, communicating powerfully, and thinking critically. Because I am learning these skills early in life, by the time I am ready to work, I will have had practice in these skills and will be prepared.
Pedro Noguera, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at UCLA, discussed inequities in education during a recent lecture at the University of Washington, reports the school’s newspaper, The Daily.
“In education, we have been focused on the scale,” he said. “That’s why we haven’t nearly begun to figure out how to create schools that not only make it possible for kids to come away better prepared for life as adults, but begin to address these huge gaps, these huge disparities, that correspond to race and class that are contributing to the inequities in our society.”
The article notes that in particular inequities are created in the classroom around students’ perceived abilities. “Inequity, and the fact that we dumb down the material for the kids we think are not so smart and don’t have the ability, leaves us [confusing] how well a child does on a test with how much intellectual ability they actually have,” said Noguera.
The Daily explains that Noguera presents deeper learning as a strategy to combat this inequity by enabling students to utilize high order thinking skills as well as a method to increase student engagement and improve student outcomes.
Focus 2 Achieve has developed an infographic to help visualize how deeper learning unfolds in the classroom. A key area within the image is collaborate, including prompts to share and discuss ideas, as well as receiving and using feedback. Take a look at the full graphic by clicking on the image below.
Deeper Learning in Action
Twitter can be a great place to see what’s actually happening to promote deeper learning outcomes in (and out!) of classrooms across the country. Here are a few examples. Be sure to follow @DeeperLearning and check out #DeeperLearning for more!
The ‘Deeper Learning Digest’ is a bi-weekly roundup of articles, blog posts, and other content around deeper learning. Be sure to follow @deeperlearning on Twitter and like Deeper Learning on Facebook to stay up to date on all deeper learning news.
Welcome to 2017! This week’s Digest includes a few stories of how deeper learning is working in and out the classroom.
Personalized, Social Learning
Education Week’s Learning Deeply blog explores how project-based learning (PBL) incorporates a personalized, social learning experience for students. Kristen Vogt, the knowledge management officer at Next Generation Learning Challenges, explains that even though personalized learning is focused on the needs of individual students and puts the student at the center of the learning experience, social interaction is a large part of this process. She writes that it is this logic that inspires schools to personalize learning through project-based learning.
“PBL requires students to practice social skills like collaboration and communication. It also requires students to figure out how their individual learning goals fit within and are advanced by their engagement with the world around them,” writes Vogt. “In this way, PBL helps students develop a richer, deeper, more personally-meaningful set of outcomes.” Read more: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning_deeply/2017/01/when_projects_are_personalized_learning_is_social.html
Hands-On Learning in New York
A charter school principal shares the school’s “hands-on” learning style to engage students with academics and connect them to the real world in an interview with DNAinfo. Richard Lee, head of Academy of the City Charter School in Queens, New York, explains his philosophy of how these connections are the “key to meaningful learning.”
Two ninth grade students from a Big Picture Learning school in the Highline School District share their experiences and a few takeaways from their high school internships in a blog post for Getting Smart. At Big Picture Learning schools, students complete internships in their areas of interest as part of a “place-based education” experience. Iris and Kemberly discuss the importance of communication, the value of having real world opportunities, and how exploring interests through work enhances academics. Read their post.
Library-to-Makerspace Transformation
In General McLane School District, libraries are incorporating makerspaces to enrich student learning and expand imagination and creativity, reports GoErie.com. The makerspaces allow student to “create, invent, discover – and most importantly, try something new through various tools and materials.” One of the elementary schools in the district has focused their makerspace on Science, Technology Engineering, Arts and Math (S.T.E.A.M.) learning. Read more about this transformation and how it is benefitting students: http://www.goerie.com/news/20170101/general-mclane-makerspaces-encourage-learning.
Diving into Deeper Learning Work in Six Minutes
The Student Experience Lab at the Business Innovation Factory put together a six minute and forty second presentation about their deeper learning work as part of the Hewlett Foundation’s “(un)convening” on deeper learning (more on that in the last Digest). This presentation, given in the PechaKucha style of twenty slides shown for twenty seconds each, focuses on the barriers and enablers of deeper learning in K-12 institutions. Check it out:
The ‘Deeper Learning Digest’ is a bi-weekly roundup of articles, blog posts, and other content around deeper learning. Be sure to follow @deeperlearning on Twitter and like Deeper Learning on Facebook to stay up to date on all deeper learning news.
Is it possible to test how creative someone is? There are quite a few tests on the internet that claim to do so. Of course, there are also “tests” on the internet than can tell you which Star Wars character you are. We know the people designing those tests are creative, but what about your regular American student?
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