Morgan Vien writes about ELP’s work with Alliance College-Ready Public Schools
ELP and Alliance kicked off our partnership in the 2018-19 school year. In our first year we worked together to deeply engage around building a graduate profile. In 2019-20, we have been engaged with the Alliance team to develop a vertical articulation of the graduate profile with the intention of using that vertical articulation as a tool for a few things:
Make the graduate profile accessible across all grade levels and contexts for instruction and whole student support, and to be able to align their model, too.
Use it as a way to continue to engage their stakeholders and to scale their graduate profile work.
What are some of the enabling conditions that allow Alliance to be great partners with ELP?
Alliance leadership has had conversations about the power of a graduate profile and that it was born based on this movement to not only get kids into college but to ensure kids have the soft and hard skills to get through college as well. Because of that, there’s an established value set within the leadership, home office, principals and micro-communities of these hard and soft skills and desire to codify measures for all of those.
Alliance’s leadership in the Home Office have a deep sense of equity, high expectations for students, a clear expectation of that change management looks like on the leadership level, a deep respect for school leadership, and a real want to do it well and to get real buy-in. Finally, a real understanding that this work is complex, that it takes a human to hold the work and to orchestrate that and that they can truly have design teams doing the work and have teachers being the faces of this work.
Thoughtful, intentional choices around how to roll out the work, who does it and a clear value in the resources behind the movement for their graduate profile.
The Alliance team is really committed to what they do, and are also coachable – tight on criteria and loose on pathway.
Alliance has a dedicated person directly holding the work, tight attention to process and product, and collective ownership of the work.
Alliance has a strong culture for quality of engagement and quality of work leading to a commitment to being timely, thorough and intentional with what they are doing.
ELP Executive Director, Justin Wells, with the Alliance team.
ELP looks forward to our continued partnership with Alliance!
For more information about Alliance, click here to see their Partner Profile.
