Prompt new perspectives for the year ahead using one simple sentence. 

ROBERTA LENGER KANG, Instructional Design Specialist and SHERRISH HOLLOMAN, CRSP & Adult Learning Specialist
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​Any way you look at it, the last two years have been very different from anything most of us have experienced, upending the way we teach, the way we live, and the ways in which students learn. These years have revealed vulnerabilities, punctuated inequities, and surfaced extraordinary human resourcefulness and potential. Many of the decisions made within this time will have long-term consequences for the future of education, and we are likely years away from understanding the full social-emotional impact for teachers and students.

Before going any further, we have to give a huge shoutout to all the teachers, school leaders, parents, extended family members, and friends who continue to contribute time, patience, perseverance, and ingenuity as they help children learn.

We have been navigating uncharted territory for an extended period of time, and in the face of numerous challenges, you have continued, time and again, to step up in support of students. 

Prompting new perspectives

As we come to the close of another school year, we’re at a natural checkpoint for reflection where we can consider the year’s successes and missteps, and think deeply about how our experiences this year can inform our actions in the next. 

Whether or not you have been practicing regular reflection this year, it’s never too late to start!

One of our favorite ways to check in after a meaningful experience is to use the prompt: I used to think, but now. This exercise provides an opportunity to reflect back on where you started — whether that’s at the beginning of the school year, the semester, or any marker of time that’s relevant to you — and evaluate how your thinking has changed since that time.

Your responses might look something like this:

• When it comes to building relationships with students, I used to think _____ but now _____.
• In terms of curriculum planning, I used to think _____ but now _____.

Because critical reflection is, well, critical, you can also use this sentence starter to reflect on work/life balance as you think through ways to find space for self-care, create time for outside interests, or unpack personal challenges. 

I used to think, but now is powerful because it challenges us to identify a point in our lives where we’ve changed our minds or had new learning, but haven’t yet explored or processed this transformation. By spending even just a few minutes responding to this prompt, we can make our realizations concrete and explicit — and that will help us to internalize these life lessons for the future. 

This is also a great strategy to share with other adults on teacher teams, or with students. Even young learners can follow along to reflect on what they’re learning and how their perceptions are changing throughout the year. 

Take this practice one step further by asking yourself how your shifted understandings or beliefs will impact your practice in the coming year. What will you do differently in the future? (We call this one, “I used to think, but now…and so…?”)

Reflection is an ongoing process — we continue to learn lessons each year because we are different, our students are different, and the world around us is different. Finding moments to reflect on all we’ve learned and reset our expectations for the future is crucial in order to meet ourselves and our students in the current moment. 

Tell us in the comments: how would you respond to I used to think, but now?

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CRITICAL REFLECTION

​Making a 21st century skills framework meaningful for K-12 instruction. 

ROBERTA LENGER KANG, Instructional Design Specialist and SHERRISH HOLLOMAN, CRSP & Adult Learning Specialist
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Over the past century, advanced technology has made the world smaller and smaller. This has perhaps never been truer than the past decade, in which social media has made it possible for a tweet or an Instagram post to be seen around the world in mere seconds. Consequently, we see and have many more collective experiences. This was perhaps never more evident than over the past few years with the shared experience of a global pandemic and a rapid impact on learning in most parts of the world. 

As we were thrust into new ways of thinking about teaching and learning, different mindsets, and different ways of imagining schools, we were faced with the truth that we can no longer sustain a 20th century in a 21st century world. The task before us is to educate students today for the world they’re poised to lead tomorrow.

As a founding organization of the Global Learning Alliance (GLA), we have been thinking about reimagining education and preparing educators for the future for quite some time. The GLA is the outgrowth of our groundbreaking research in five of the top PISA-ranked cities around the world on the features and practices surrounding 21st century teaching and learning, and is committed to cross-cultural research collaborations as an effort to define a pedagogy that takes into account the dynamic needs of our changing world.

Through this work, we are dedicated to understanding, defining, applying, and sharing the principles and practices of a world-class education within a wide range of educational contexts.

Essential mindsets

As part of research and collaborations with K-12 schools and university partners around the world, we have developed the Global Mindset Framework, which identifies five mindsets that have emerged as most relevant to the future success of today’s students. Each mindset includes four key skills that demonstrate the actions that can be seen when cultivating the mindset.

But just having access to a framework doesn’t mean it’s automatically linked to classroom practices — and some of these mindsets haven’t been typically taught in schools.  As a result, we always consider how we can help educators to analyze, apply, and adjust learning frameworks as they incorporate them into their everyday teaching practices.

Putting the framework into practice

The challenge with any educational framework is translating it into meaningful practice for the teachers and students it's intended to serve. We were privileged to partner with the Brunswick School to integrate 21st century practices into a wide range of courses across all grade levels. We customized our professional learning approach to maximize the time we had together so teachers could have meaningful conversations, practical applications, and space to reflect on their experiences for deeper learning. We used a blended approach to professional development that included customized, professional learning videos and synchronous 75-minute sessions to explore the meanings of each component and practical application for classroom practices.  

Metacognitive reflection
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As we worked across department teams, we wanted to model the mindsets of the framework, so with each new mindset that we studied, we created a customized video with the basic facts, and then planned for an interactive face-to-face session where teachers developed practical strategies after watching the video and discussed the impact of the framework on their classes. 

Some teachers noticed that incorporating a new mindset each month allowed them to expand their learning outcomes beyond simply “critical thinking skills” and that they were setting critical goals for collaboration through group work and discussion, as well as creativity where they used imaginative writing prompts to help students expand their thinking. This kind of integrated thinking helped the teachers test and tweak their learning strategies immediately. 

By creating heterogeneous groups in these sessions, we were also able to support cross-grade professional learning conversations that generated great ideas from different vantage points. Teachers from the upper grades were amazed at the different planning and pedagogical moves made by the teachers in the lower grades. Similarly, the teachers in the lower grades benefited from learning more about student expectations in the upper grades. These realizations created space for metacognitive reflection about their practice, and challenged some of the assumptions we all have when thinking about planning for our specific grade/content area. Like working with students, we know that placing adults in strategic and flexible groupings is a powerful lever for keeping learning fresh.  

During the culminating session about their learning, each teacher was given an opportunity to share a lesson, unit, or project they implemented or planned to implement by applying a single or multiple mindset from the framework. Their learning was evident through their sharing and evidenced in the artifacts from their student work. In one case, a teacher hoped to have students investigate COVID-19 using actual numbers and data to unpack the pandemic. After interpreting the data, they would design charts and graphs to share their findings, make predictions for the long-term impacts of COVID-19, and offer recommendations for next steps. Throughout the project, students would implicitly be asked to demonstrate the Global mindset from our framework, as they strove to solve real-world problems.

Lessons learned

​When educators consider the implications of the Global Mindset Framework within their own curriculum, we’ve seen how they cultivate their own mindsets, in addition to making direct connections to new teaching practices.

Our partners demonstrated that when we scratch the surface of 21st century skills, we see that there are not only many innovative practices, but many unanswered questions. 

Some of our big learning moments and new questions included the following: 

• Critical thinking is essential as schools imagine new ways of operating. We should be asking ourselves: what do students need to know, how will they get this information, and once they have it — how will they use it to solve a real world problem?
• Collaboration isn’t just encouraged, it is vital as we navigate uncharted territory. We should be asking ourselves: how will students collaborate with their classmates, what types of groupings will be most meaningful, and how will they reflect on their collaborative experience to internalize these new skills?
• Creativity on the part of schools, teachers, parents, and students is essential when transitioning to new ways of working and learning. We should be asking ourselves: What if …, how might we …,  and what else could we try?
• The Global mindset, particularly when solving real-world problems, is prevalent everywhere as we struggle to understand current events and support each other in our new reality. We should be asking ourselves: How will we learn from others’ experiences? What have we learned that we can share? What is necessary to solve these real-world challenges?
• The Caring mindset, as we demonstrate appreciation for communities around the world and become much more empathetic to the needs of our friends and neighbors, helps us understand how our actions impact others in our community and across the world. We should be asking ourselves: How might I feel if the roles were reversed? Where do I see similarities and differences across culture, class, or language? What can we learn from others?

In education, we often encounter frameworks — whether it’s a framework for literacy, a framework for evaluation, or a framework for instruction — that should translate into practice. This translation can be achieved through thoughtful and intentional professional development that respects the knowledge of teachers and honors the ways adults learn. By structuring these professional learning sessions in both synchronous and asynchronous engagements, and using cross-content and grade-level groupings, teachers were able to interpret this essential framework in meaningful ways.

Wondering what this work could look like in your community? Reach out to us to discuss how you can bring essential 21st century skills to your students and community. 

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21ST CENTURY SKILLS, INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN, RESOURCES 

A suggested sequence of sessions that encourages learning, application, reflection, and the sharing of promising practices.

ROBERTA LENGER KANG, Instructional Design Specialist and SHERRISH HOLLOMAN, CRSP & Adult Learning Specialist
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Effective professional development can be defined as structured professional learning that results in changes in teacher practice and improvements in student learning. Features such as strong content focus, inquiry-oriented learning approaches, collaborative participation, and coherence with school curricula and policies can be the difference between good and great professional learning experiences. 

Since the 1970s, there has been a growing body of literature about learning and the application of reflective practice, which is a way of allowing educators to step back from their professional experience, develop critical thinking skills, and improve future performance. 

When educators can learn a new idea or concept, apply this learning to their specific context/content area, reflect on the experience and share their experiences with colleagues — a cycle we call LARS — they can bring their professional learning experience to fruition. 

Using the LARS model

The LARS model is a structure for developing ongoing professional development sessions that prioritize developing community knowledge, shared practices, and deepening reflection on what works, and why. In the planning process, facilitators should conduct a needs assessment to determine the strengths and struggles across the community and strategize an area of focus.

For example, one school recently discovered student performance in reading was struggling. After conducting a series of Learning Walks, the school leadership team noticed that literacy instruction was inconsistent across classrooms. The leadership debriefed their experiences and came to the conclusion that if teachers were using similar instructional strategies for Before, During and After reading, students would have increased their comprehension and confidence. The leadership team reviewed several research-based strategies and identified two strategies for each stage of the reading process, for a total of six literacy strategies to share with the whole school. They began to use the LARS framework to structure a 12-week PD series. They knew that they needed two weeks per topic: one session to introduce the strategy and make a plan to implement it, and a second session to reflect on their implementation and make adjustments. 
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Learning

The first session in the LARS model is focused on learning a new strategy, and making a plan to integrate or apply that strategy into instruction. This workshop should communicate the essential components of the topic, provide active engagement and an exchange of ideas between participants. 

In leading the first workshop on literacy strategies using the example above, the facilitators would share more about why literacy is important across content areas, as well as the concept of Before, During and After reading strategies. They’d then provide a hands-on experience with the first literacy strategy. They may choose to model the strategy using a professional text, show a video of a teacher using the strategy in a real classroom, or create a challenge for teachers to collaborate on developing a model after learning about the strategy from a shared text.

Application

At the end of the workshop, teachers consider how they can implement what they’ve learned into their practice. This is the apply portion of the session. Participants can complete an application plan where they write ideas about how they can implement the strategy, and what artifacts they will be able to bring to the next session. When teachers choose for themselves what to implement and what they want to bring back to the group, they have increased ownership in the process. By asking all participants to bring an artifact to represent what they implemented, we are able to create reciprocal accountability within the community. Additionally, when teachers across the school begin using a shared strategy at the same time, it exponentially increases the students’ understanding of how to use that strategy, and kickstarts the impact of that strategy on their learning experiences. 

Reflection and sharing

The second session has a focus of reflection and community sharing. In Session 2, participants regroup through written reflection using either open-ended journaling practices, or by responding to a variety of prompts specific to the focus strategy. By reflecting on their experiences of implementing the strategy, teachers are able to synthesize the impact of that strategy on student learning and their own teaching practices. Their reflections become concrete texts and when shared, culminate as an archive of the professional learning that has occurred. After reflection, participants share their artifacts and experiences together in small groups, identifying similarities and differences in the samples of student work and their implementation experiences. Participants may celebrate successes, as well as take the opportunity to identify challenges and ways that their process can be extended.

After the first two sessions, the school may choose to retry the focus strategy, or to move onto the next topic, with the expectation that teachers will be adding to their instructional tool kit with each new move they learn.

Using the LARS cycle supports the most challenging aspect of professional learning: application. 

Without application, learning just floats in the air as a neat idea. Engaging in the LARS process as a school community and/or department builds in time to apply new skills and reflect on them with colleagues. The reflection aspect promotes individual thinking about what went well, and how individual teachers might tweak it to make more sense for their classroom. This can become a rigorous process where teachers in the community test and vet instructional strategies that are most effective for their unique students. The LARS model is a cycle of inquiry that lends itself to not just learning a new concept, but creates a structure that helps communities cultivate ways of working, learning and growing together to meeting the evolving needs of students.


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LEADERSHIP, RESOURCES

Principal Candace Hugee weighs in on the power of quantitative and qualitative data. 

SHERRISH HOLLOMAN
CRSP & Adult Learning Specialist

In my experiences as a classroom teacher, district level administrator, and as a professional development coach, I constantly struggle with the negative connotation often assigned to data. This is especially true in cases where educators see the term "data-driven instruction" as being synonymous with high-stakes testing. As my colleague G. Faith Little notes in Understanding Data: How Does It All Add Up?, data is not just a tool for evaluation — it’s a source of information.

The meaning of data

There are several major components of data-driven instruction. Understanding not only what they are, but what they mean is important when considering data points and the intended outcome of improving instruction.

A principal's perspective
with Candace Hugee

​In Data-Driven Instruction, authors Ben Fenton and Mark Murphy note that “in this era of increased accountability, nearly every principal has begun using data to help drive instructional practices. Principals in the most rapidly improving schools almost always cite data-driven instruction as one of the most important practices contributing to their success. But what exactly does data-driven instruction mean to them, and how do they achieve it?”

I decided to take that question and others to Candage Hugee, Principal at the Urban Assembly School for Collaborative Healthcare. We have been working together for nearly three years, and I have found her experiences and application of data for her school to be most instructive.
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Current studies indicate that educators in schools with data-focused programs think using data improves their instruction significantly. Very often, these schools have a tendency to gather various forms of data, because they recognize that all forms of data are valuable information. The more information we have, the more informed our decisions can be, and the better our instruction will be for our students. 


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DATA-DRIVEN INSTRUCTION

Observe, infer, and take action on a problem of practice using three simple prompts. 

SHERRISH HOLLOMAN
CRSP & Adult Learning Specialist

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What are we noticing? So, what does it mean for teaching and learning? Now what should happen next? These are some of the questions posed by one of our favorite resources — What, So What, Now What — which leans on our core values of critical reflection and cycles of inquiry.

Developed by Gene Thompson-Grove in 2004 and revised 2012, this protocol allows you to do several things at once: gather information, analyze and interpret a problem of practice, and envision next steps for your work. This is a versatile protocol that can be modified to support teachers, leaders, and even students as they work to understand curricular content. 
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Jumpstart your reflection

What, So What, Now What can help you to evaluate a recent experience, untangle a problem of practice, or inspect quantitative or qualitative data. After observing and analyzing what you already know, you can then work toward identifying the next steps for your practice.
 
This resource works in three phases:
 
Understanding the event (What?)

• Making low-inference (non-judgmental) observations and collecting data. Generally, a statement of facts.
• Example: What are you noticing about how your students did on a test? Here, you can look at the data and note any quantitative information that stands out to you. 

 
 
Making sense of the facts and implications (So what?)

• Making meaning of the “what” through analysis and interpretation. Essentially asking yourself: What does this mean? Why is it important?
• Example: What does your students’ test data mean? Here, you can note the patterns and connections between questions students answered correctly or incorrectly. 

 
Identifying a course of action or new solutions (Now what?)

• Thinking through the implications, solutions and/or future applications. In some ways, this last step is a call to action, asking what’s next?
• Example: Start to make suggestions for how to address the data implications. How can you tweak your curricula to address the areas where students show needs? What are some lesson ideas you can try?  ​

Engage students in inquiry

From here, the class can begin to share highlights from their charts, and begin to draw conclusions about the lesson. 

What, So What, Now What is a highly adaptable tool that can promote curiosity, reflection, and accountability. Its flexibility allows for application with all members within a school community, and we encourage you to adapt it to best meet your needs. 

How are you using this resource? Let us know in the comments!


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DATA-INFORMED INSTRUCTION, INQUIRY, RESOURCES

Simple strategies for imagining an equitable education that benefits all students.

SHERRISH HOLLOMAN
CRSP & Adult Learning Specialist

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Equity in schools, or a lack thereof, was a problem long before the pandemic began. However, the challenges caused by school closures and remote learning exacerbated the lack of support for minority, special needs, and low-income students, as well as language learners. As we imagine a more holistic, equitable approach to education, we must consider a version of education that addresses students’ academic, social, and emotional needs.

Equity is crucial, especially in times of crisis. 

Promising practices for promoting equity

Too often, the terms equity and equality are used interchangeably. While equality means treating every student the same, equity means making sure every student has the support they need to be successful. Simply put, equity in education requires putting systems in place to ensure that every child has an equal chance for success. As President Obama said in his inaugural address, "We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else."

We have an opportunity and an obligation to provide equitable systems that foster success for all, not just success for some. To assist and explain the process, the University of Southern California (USC) School of Education proposes seven effective ways to promote equity in education. Let’s examine what these suggestions can look like in practice.

In addition to the strategies offered above, we can promote equity in our classrooms by recognizing that all learning is a social and emotional experience. We have all endured collective trauma over the past few years, in addition to the personal losses we’ve experienced. Many students (and teachers) are still finding their way back to their learning. 

We may not yet have all the answers for how to address students’ academic and emotional needs in an equitable way, even as we return to the familiar environment of our classrooms. But we do have the opportunity to do more, better!

EQUITY, SHERRISH HOLLOMAN