“Reflection & Dialogue” Short Documentary


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So how do we make kind of all students, how do we make this more available for all students? I mean I do think that teachers play a hugely important role in this.


If we believe it for our kids, we have to believe it for adults too. I think if it's important to an organization, it needs to be at every single level. From the board to the CEO to the principals to the teachers.


When I start a job in a new school and I'm a teacher and I see other teachers really interested in improving their craft and continuing to learn that makes me want to improve my craft and continue to learn as well.


We have teacher leaders who provide professional development to other teachers. And we really think of them as lead learners.


That's the kind of programming we need where everybody is involved in the education of young people. And there are true community partnerships.


In improvement we do a lot of coaching and I think coaching is an essential piece of this. When somebody is in the work that they're doing everyday, sometimes it's difficult to take a step back. It's about learning how to make things better for people.


We can do more together than the best of us can ever do alone. And by building these structures, these communication channels and norms around how we work together, we can actually expand our learning more deeply, and faster than if we try to do it alone.


The leading question becomes what are you trying to learn? We don't always know exactly what's going to happen when we make change in complex systems especially in education. The key is that once we have an idea that we feel confident in that we've designed, then we have to make sure that we test. So that we're ensuring that the idea's gonna be effective by the time we get to full scale.


What you want to measure is the behavior. So, are kids, in fact, coming to class more often? Are they more likely to complete their work? And if those things change, then you can assume that you've kind of activated this why and how thing, to help that to happen.


And we have pretty good preliminary data around this, cuz we've longitudinal studies of our students for 13 years now. And we found that 100% of our students who graduated two and four year colleges have actual work in their internships that they had around their interests when they were in high school, 70% of them.


About 79, 80% of our kids are first in their family to graduate from college.


So yes, they had academic skills. Yes, they had career skills, and yes, they had critical skills.


Students will float to the mark you set them and I think that's in some ways, the way to think about academic mindset. That students who are exposed to these kinds of messages outperform on course completion, on get higher grades. So there's actually a pretty good evidence base that this does work.


When you move forward to the next scale up you're gonna be answering that question again of what adaptations do I have to make. But then you're also answering the question of what other support structures do I have to build around this idea in order to facilitate it becoming a permanent part of the way we do work?


Our hope is that with our small kind of local impact we use the visual learning partners to do a larger national scale.


We believe very strongly that problems are primarily caused by the system and not by people.


Districts change very slowly. It's built to not change. It's built to actually maintain.


We're trying to increase awareness, we're trying to impact policy. Changing society and culture is a marathon not a sprint.


With districts starting with forming a community where teachers feel like they belong. I think it's the first step.


We need to be more deliberate about developing students as motivated and effective learners. It takes leadership to make a stand and say this is important.


The model for schooling is from a long, long time ago where really educated people were the people who held the knowledge. That's just not true anymore because facts and knowledge and information is widely accessible to anybody who has Internet access. But it's still the model that we are using when we're teaching because the ideas like well me the teacher has all this knowledge I must impart to you and you have to study it and learn it and know this as well.


But actually an opportunity for key decision makers to engage in a conversation on what it takes to make some of these changes.


Whether it's whole school reform, whether it's incremental changes, whether it's though hacks, but really begin to spread the work.


Before I die, I would love to see that we've really fundamentally rethought the way we do education.


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