From Reopen to Reinvent. Michael B. Horn

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ European countries, while its students in its charter school performed in the same ballpark as that of Singapore—the second-highest-ranking country at the time—with very high engagement in the learning.¹⁸

      Kettle Moraine School District:

       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhuTgnAz6fQ

      Microschool Movement

      Many school districts looked upon the rapid growth of microschools and learning pods during the pandemic as something akin to students signing up for the Russian School of Mathematics outside of school hours. They thought it was something certain families were doing to give their children a leg up on the other students around them. They wished these new schools would disappear.

      But some districts took a different perspective.

As Eric Gordon, the CEO of the Cleveland Municipal School District, said, “Suburban communities were forming pods on their own. Why shouldn't my kids have those benefits?”¹⁹

The district leveraged new resources by working with a variety of community organizations—the Cleveland Foundation, MyCom, Say Yes Cleveland, and United Way of Cleveland—to open 24 pods during the pandemic and serve 808 of Cleveland's most vulnerable students.²⁰

Cleveland was among the 11 percent of school districts, according to a national survey by the Clayton Christensen Institute, that operated “learning hubs” in the Spring of 2021. According to the survey, 5 percent of districts intend to continue operating pods postpandemic.²¹

The Center for Reinventing Public Education worked with TNTP, a nonprofit education consultancy, to create more in-depth partnerships with six school districts that would lead to something more lasting and transformational out of the pod movement.²²

The DeKalb County School District in Georgia, for example, is using pods to reinvent alternative schools, which serve students who have dropped out or transferred from traditional schools. Given that many alternative schools have traditionally struggled, it's a place where the district thinks pods can help make a difference.

      Edgecombe County Public Schools in North Carolina launched learning hubs during the pandemic to help students connect to online classes and receive in-person support. District leaders discovered that families valued increased flexibility around where and when learning happened, so they worked with students and teachers to design a “spoke-and-hub model.” Long-term, the district hopes this model will offer a new approach to school that builds stronger connections between school and community. In this more hybrid future of schooling, students would enroll in a brick-and-mortar or virtual school for the “hub” of their experience, and then elementary and middle school students would join “spokes”—or interest-based groups—for the other time. High school students would receive tutor-like support and work at paid positions or internships.

Guildford County Public Schools, which is also in North Carolina, is looking to craft school days in which high school students learn for three hours in person and then have more flexible time out of school to engage in a variety of activities, including completing assignments, working, or receiving tutoring or other enrichment opportunities. The district envisions this as part of a greater overhaul of their high schools that weren't serving many students effectively, even before COVID.²³

      Cleveland Learning Pods:

       https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=826632394829967

      What If a District Doesn't Have Enough Internal Capacity?

      Given scarce resources, overtaxed educators, and constrained work arrangements, many districts will not have the internal capacity to do what Kettle Moraine did.

      But just because a given school or district doesn't have the time or resources itself to do this work, it doesn't mean it can't execute on these ideas—nor is it necessary to build from scratch. There are countless schools around the world that have already put in place many innovative ideas from which schools can borrow and adapt. To build the capacity to execute, schools can look to outside groups—be those unpaid community members, parents, consultants, or seasoned service providers—who can fully dedicate time to innovate.

      For starters, districts can leverage the significant infusion of federal dollars from the CARES Act. Many have expressed concerns that these dollars may be used to add roles or services that are not sustainable after the funding dries up. But using the money to temporarily stand up an autonomous team like SNHU and Toyota did in order to create a lasting innovation that can roll back into and transform traditional schools is a great use of these recovery dollars.

      Wetzler suggested that schools look to things like release time for teachers, after school and summers for intense design sprints, and the use of outside support that can do everything from facilitating design sessions, synthesizing research, or operating as a project manager.

      As his cofounder at Transcend Education, Aylon Samouha, said:

      In other industries it's worth remembering that that protected time and space for R&D is often not put on the practitioners themselves while they do their jobs. Doctors who were on the front lines of the COVID pandemic were not charged with coming up with the vaccine.

To bring capacity to the table, one approach, according to Samouha, is for an outside group to help a team from a school or district brainstorm for an hour. Even if the team doesn't have the ability to devote hours to the follow-on work, if an outside consultant can do 15 hours of work after the session, then a district starts to get the kind of capacity it needs to fully seize these design efforts as opportunities, rather than remain frozen in place by the threat of what it could otherwise represent.²⁴

      Spring Grove Public Schools, a small school district of about 370 students in southeast Minnesota in a town of about 1,200 people, has just one school for all of its K–12 students. Yet it was able to execute significant innovations during the pandemic. One key to its success has been having outside support in the form of a consulting firm, Longview Education, that was there to do everything from compiling research around different design options to helping connect strands of work across the school into something larger and more transformational.

      Similarly, microschool providers like MyTechHigh and Prenda Learning partner with districts and schooling systems to help them quickly stand up learning pods with curriculum and teacher support. Prenda Learning, for example, creates groups of five to 10 students in grades K–8. Its enrollments quadrupled during the first year of the pandemic. MyTechHigh, which partners with public schools to offer a full curriculum for K–12 learners at no cost to families, experienced similar rapid growth. As of September 2021, it served more than 18,000 students across seven states—Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Arizona, Wyoming, Indiana, and Tennessee. Some of its more robust partnerships range from the Tooele County School District in Utah to the Vilas School District in Colorado and from the Oneida СКАЧАТЬ