Measuring What Matters in Colorado
There is statewide support for Deeper Learning in Colorado, and Envision Learning Partners is playing a key role.
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Checkout our most recent Resource Corner!
We're excited to share the culmination of a two-year research project, Pursuing Equity for Black & Latine Students with Learning Differences, which documents and illustrates the systems, practices, cultures, and supports that are associated with the well being and success of Black and Latine students with learning differences – students with disabilities and multilingual students with disabilities.
Envision Education is excited to share the culmination of its two-year research project, Pursuing Equity for Black & Latine Students with Learning Differences, which
documents and illustrates the systems, practices, cultures, and supports that are associated with the well being and success of Black and Latine students with learning differences – students with disabilities and multilingual students with disabilities.
In 2023, Envision Learning Partners (ELP) and Social Policy Research Associates (SPR) embarked on a research study to identify and learn from schools that demonstrated positive outcomes for Black and Latine students with learning differences (including students with disabilities and multilingual learners). After a review of data from secondary schools across the country, the study team identified two schools for a more in-depth study, which was conducted during the 2023–2024 school year.
The results of the research are shared through case studies of the two schools that were the focus of the research: 1) Crosstown High: Building a Culture of Inclusion; 2) Capital City: An Inclusive School Community Committed to Whole-Child Learning and Well Being; and 3) An Executive Summary/Synthesis of Findings.
In addition, we have authored four practice briefs based on the findings of the research that provide practical steps that schools can take to create more inclusive environments that support the success of Black and Latine students with learning differences.
- Co-teaching: A Means to Creating Inclusive and Equitable General Education Classrooms
- UDL: Universal Design for Learning in a Culturally Responsive Context
- Culturally Responsive Practices: An Inclusive, Culturally Responsive School Culture That Fosters Relationships
- Competency-Based Learning and Assessment: Assessment and Grading Practices That Support an Inclusive Learning Culture
This research was made possible through the generous support of New Profit, a venture philanthropic organization, and the Oak Foundation.
Resource Corner: Pursuing Equity for Black and Latine Students with Learning Differences Case Studies & Practice Briefs
Envision Education is excited to share the culmination of its two-year research project, Pursuing Equity for Black & Latine Students with Learning Differences, which documents and illustrates the systems, practices, cultures, and supports that are associated with the well being and success of Black and Latine students with learning differences – students with disabilities and multilingual students with disabilities.
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Measuring what Matters, Learning by Doing, and Piloting with Purpose
There is statewide support for Deeper Learning in Colorado, and Envision Learning Partners is playing a key role.
In 2007, the state of Colorado asked districts to choose the ways their students will demonstrate college and career readiness, and therefore readiness to graduate from high school.
This Graduation Guidelines menu lists the options. In the mix of more traditional tests, two options provide a clear pathway for students to graduate by demonstrating their skills through an individualized product or presentation: Capstone Projects and Collaboratively Developed Standards-Based Performance Assessment.
Coaching Deeper Learning in Colorado
Since April 2018, Envision Learning Partners has been honored and energized to work in an accelerated way with educators at every level of the Colorado educational system, to design meaningful and sustainable assessment systems worthy of and accessible to every student in Colorado, strongly aligned to the demands of a wide variety of 21st century college and career options.
This June marks the close of two incredible first-year partnerships between ELP and the Colorado Department of Education, as well as the Colorado Education Initiative; both projects involve educators from every corner of the state to transform education statewide.
Transitions and Opportunities for Envision Learning Partners
Dear ELP Community:
I am writing with news about a transition for Envision Learning Partners. This past year has been eventful for us (as I am sure it has been for you). We onboarded a new Executive Director and a new Assessment Design Partner. We completed strategic plan processes for both Envision Learning Partners and Envision Education org-wide. We are about to finish a 3-month study of our impact and ways to expand it. Now, as we wrap up the school year, we consider the future and make decisions about how to navigate education’s changing times and shifting landscapes.
Royce Conner, ELP’s Executive Director, will be transitioning from his role on June 30th. We are grateful to Royce for the important contributions he has made and projects he has led during his tenure, and we deeply support him as he moves into the next chapter of his distinguished career as an educator. Feel free to connect with Royce on LinkedIn.
Royce’s responsibilities will be distributed across Envision Education as part of a comprehensive org-wide strategy to deepen the integration between our schools (our local impact) and our consulting service (our nationwide impact). Out in the field, our remarkable team of coaches and operations professionals will continue to help school districts build high-quality performance assessment systems. In my role as Chief Program Officer, I am excited for the opportunity and the commitment to make the sum of “One Envision” to be greater than its already powerful parts.
As we head into the summer, when educators often feel a welcome shift in pace, I invite you to reach out to me with questions or wonders. ELP remains your steadfast partner in our movement to bring high-quality performance assessment to all students.
In community,
Justin Wells, Chief Program Officer
In a recent conversation with fellow advocates of performance assessment, a colleague made the point that our job as educators is not to teach standards but to teach students.
Of course, standards play an important role in guiding teachers’ work. But given the structures and incentives of our system, it’s easy for standards to slip into the position of ends rather than means. Tragically, covering standards—“I taught it; some got it.”—feeds inequities that plague education. When we truly reorient to “teaching students,” we stay focused on those whole human beings in our classrooms. What do our students need to achieve, how will we know they have achieved it, and how do we support their getting there? This is performance assessment system design.
The graduate profile movement is a boon, pushing students into the focal point of our energies. Social-emotional learning (SEL) is trending, reminding us to attend to the whole child. But none of these ideas will translate into lived learning experiences until students are regularly tackling rigorous and real-world challenges that elicit the skills they need to practice and master. Our kids need high-quality performance assessments.
Join us on twitter for more conversation about the importance of teaching students over standards, using the hashtag #TeachStudentsNotStandards
Sincerely,
Justin Wells, ELP Executive Director
During his keynote at last fall’s EdLeader21 Conference, educational thought leader, Tony Wagner, did not mince words. “A graduate portrait without an assessment,” he said, “is useless.”
The audience members—mainly district leaders from around the country—audibly shifted in their seats. Although it’s hard to disagree, it’s also hard to pull off. How can school districts assess skills that are as complex as the ones we see on a typical graduate profile?
Tony followed up his challenge with two recommendations:
- “Every student should have a digital portfolio.”
- “Every student should present or defend their learning.”
He’s right. Portfolio assessment and presentations of learning (which come in many forms, including defenses and student-led conferences) are two effective, customizable, scalable, and actionable ways to move from “poster to practice.”
ELP cheers the graduate profile movement because of its potential to change our society’s conception of education’s purpose. But we also worry for the movement. If we don’t see graduate profiles made visible in the actual work of our students—“show don’t tell,” says this old English teacher—then we’re destined to look back on this as another edu-trend that came to nothing. That’s why Tony Wagner’s admonition is so urgent.
The challenge of assessing graduate profiles is one of the major themes of next month’s Assessment for Learning Conference. I know I will see many of you there, and I am excited for the opportunity to work on this together.
Justin Wells,
ELP Executive Director
ELP is thrilled to welcome Morgan Vien to our team of Deeper Learning Coaches. Fabulously talented and exploding with ideas, Morgan complements our team with her experience in K-8 school leadership (most recently, serving as principal at ASCEND School in Oakland) and facilitating design thinking (as a School Retool Coach for Stanford’s d.school). We, and our client partners, are going to learn so much from her. Please welcome Morgan when you see her out in the field.
In other ELP news, we recently hatched a new strategic plan, our first since joining forces with the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) over a year and a half ago. ELP’s vision—every student in America is learning within a high-quality performance assessment system—is ambitious in scale and generational in scope, so we know we need to set ourselves up for the long haul. In the coming three years, our strategic priorities are:
- to grow our service to American public school districts, the primary agent of educational delivery in this country.
- to expand the ways that we serve our client partners so that they have more pathways to success.
- to ensure that equity is not only the reason for this work but also the process of how we do this work.
- to catalyze research on the impact of high-quality performance assessment systems on student learning.
- to establish the sustainability of our business model so that we can deliver on our mission indefinitely.
As always, we welcome your thought partnership. Let us know what you think about our plan, or ask any one of us to elaborate when our paths cross in the field.
Sincerely,
Justin Wells, ELP Executive Director
The COVID crisis deepens. All of us engaged in the endeavor of learning—students and teachers—now gather ourselves for what we know will be a strange, trying, and unpredictable school year ahead.
As your learning community makes its mad design dash to the start of the school year, with all your contingency plans and spreadsheets and multiple scenarios, don’t forget to keep your graduate profile, or whatever serves as your overarching set of desired learning outcomes, close at hand. Refer often to that list, and keep asking, How are we designing ways for our students to practice these skills?
This pandemic is driving home the pre-pandemic truth that learning is not about seat time or content delivery or testing, all of which crumbled with startling quickness last spring. Learning has always been and will always be about improving one’s skills through practice, guided by coaching. Conceived as such, learning is remarkably flexible. Practice, guided by coaching, can happen at home independently, or on a video call, or in a sparsely desked classroom with children in masks. Establish practice routines for the key skills of your course. Introduce them as early as possible in the school year. Design those routines to be portable, and demonstrate that portability to your students by simulating at-home practice when you have them in your classrooms, and in-classroom practice when you have them on a video call.
I have more to say about elevating the “practice question” in a blog I recently contributed to our friends at Future Focused Education.
We can rise to this challenge, especially if we apply the principles of High-Quality Performance Assessment, and we can make school better than it was before.
In solidarity with educators everywhere,
Justin Wells, ELP Executive Director
Have you had a chance to read Jal Mehta’s piece in Ed Week, “Why Equity Has Been a Conservative Force in American Education—And How That Could Change”? If you haven’t, you should.
Mehta argues that “the effort to close achievement gaps has in practice doubled down on the century-old industrial model of schooling, leaving in place all of the essential elements of its grammar: teaching as transmission, batch processing of students, conventional assessments, tracking and leveling, and all of the rest. Anything that moves away from those assumptions—like project-based learning, problem-based learning, interdisciplinary learning, authentic assessment, or constructivist pedagogy—is seen as ‘risky;’ something that is ‘OK for the privileged kids’ but somehow distracts from the real work of closing achievement gaps on state-sponsored tests.”
We at Envision Learning Partners see deeper learning not as a risk but as a moral imperative, not only because all children deserve it, but also because it’s the right way to make change. I agree with Mehta’s notion of “liberatory design,” which “assumes that teachers and students would like to develop engaging, meaningful learning experiences, and that the problem is not them but the institutional structures and culture of schools that constrains them.” I am fortunate to witness proof of this regularly in my work when, for example, I see the excitement among students and teachers who have designed and implemented a portfolio-defense system.
The teachers and leaders who reach out to partner with ELP have drawn similar conclusions about deeper learning. We are proud to serve their schools and districts, and we are always inspired by their courage to do this work.
Sincerely,
Justin Wells, ELP Executive Director
As you work furiously and heroically to serve your students through the COVID-19 crisis, ELP offers this advice: Don’t forget about your graduate profile. Now’s the time to lean into it.
It doesn’t matter whether your performance assessment system is well established or just getting off the ground, whether you’re currently reaching your students through Zoom or printed worksheet packets. If your learning community has a graduate profile or similar set of learner outcomes, you should use that language to remind your students of their assets and to challenge them to grow. Most graduate profiles were designed to focus us on the skills students need to navigate a fast-changing world with an unpredictable future. Now we get to put them to the test.
Many graduate or learner profiles, for example, target a competency that has to do with being a “self-directed learner.” Let’s admit that it’s a concept more aspirational than operational. In most of our highly-structured learning environments, young people have very little opportunity to practice being self-directed. Guess what? Now they need it. And we need to teach it. So invoke the skill, express high expectations for students to develop the skill during this time, give them ideas for how to practice and demonstrate it, structure opportunities for them to reflect on it, and challenge them to document evidence of their growth. This goes for any skill that’s on your graduate profile.
Stay tuned. In coming weeks, ELP will continue to share suggestions for ways to leverage or advance the elements of your performance assessment system: the use of portfolios, running defenses of learning virtually, building a culture of revision and reflection. There are enormous opportunities in this crisis for students to practice and be assessed on the skills we say are important.
Sincerely,
Justin Wells, ELP Executive Director
The Practice Question
Across education, I see the development of a healthy habit, and the performance assessment movement deserves plenty of credit for it. Educators everywhere, when considering a desired learning outcome, are reflexively asking, “How would we measure that?”
This is good. Asking the measurement question holds us accountable to our goals; answering it points us to actions.
But there’s another question that is just as focusing, should be just as reflexive, and would not hurt to come first: “How will our students practice that skill?”
Answer the practice question, and the measurement answer comes easily. It’s not so easy the other way around.
As a young teacher, I too often measured things that my students didn’t get to practice. I whipped out a public speaking rubric when students presented at the front of the room. I assessed them on their volume and eye contact. But we hadn’t practiced those skills in class.
Collaboration shows up on most graduate profiles. How will our students practice that skill? Answer it honestly. Assigning some group work is not the same thing as practicing collaboration.
Another grad profile meme—critical thinking—is not any kind of thinking. It’s grappling with “How might I be wrong?” How do students practice that skill? If a student has gone through a school year without consciously changing her mind on anything, then I doubt she has really practiced critical thinking.
I applaud what I see announced on graduate profiles all over the country—really important skills that schools can help kids get better at: inquiry, citizenship, creativity, persistence, problem solving, cultural competence, and so on. But it’s not fair to measure things that students haven’t had an opportunity to practice.
A high-quality performance assessment system knows its desired outcomes and its measurements; it also takes responsibility for scheduling practice.
Please share with us one of your favorite ways to help your students practice a key skill!
Sincerely,
Justin Wells, ELP Executive Director
The “yes buts”—the common objections to performance assessment—keep dropping away.
The latest comes with the revolutionary announcement from the UC Board of Regents last week: Going forward, the SAT or ACT test is not required for admission to a UC campus. The requirement will be phased out completely by 2025.
And just like that, there goes the “yes but the SAT” counterargument to performance assessment system building. An institutional practice that had seemed entrenched is now revealed by the pandemic to be fragile.
We can add the SAT to a growing list that includes “Yes but instructional minutes,” “Yes but the end-of-year standardized tests,” and “Yes but the course grade.”
Meanwhile, the concept of a defense of learning has proven resilient in this crisis. ELP is proud to partner with the Learning Policy Institute and the Linked Learning Alliance to launch the “Defending Learning at a Distance” series, which in coming weeks presents multiple opportunities to observe students’ virtual defenses of learning and engage in conversations with the inspiring students and educators who have remained committed to performance assessment despite school closures. (For those of you wondering about ELP’s long running practice of Defense Design Studios, this series is where we are putting that energy this year.)
Watch this web page closely for upcoming dates associated with the “Defending Learning at a Distance” series. There are some events happening later this week. And more will be added as plans get solidified. Students and schools are moving fast. Don’t take it from us: Watch Envision student Dani Martin vlog about preparing for her virtual defense. I can’t wait to witness what students have to say about their learning in the next couple weeks, and to discuss the implications of this with all of you in the months to come.
Stay safe,
Justin Wells, ELP Executive Director
Here at Envision Learning Partners, we believe that every student deserves to learn within a high-quality performance assessment system. That means every student goes to a school where:
- targeted skills are announced (often in the form a graduate profile),
- rubrics are widely shared and regularly used,
- teachers are aligned on the quality of assignments and student work,
- students can explain what they are doing and how they are growing,
- and high expectations are not random or tracked; they are held for every student who attends that school.
If a school does not have these conditions in place, or isn’t actively working toward them, then I hesitate to call it a good school, no matter how high its test scores, shiny its hallways, or champion-like its teachers.
We in the performance assessment movement must clamor for focus on the quality of our students’ work—not proxies for their work, like test scores or classroom observations, but the work itself. How are you focusing on and highlighting your students’ work? Drop us a line to let us know!
I invite you to read more of my thoughts on the subject in “What Is a Good School?,” a short piece I wrote for EdWeek’s Learning Deeply blog.
Sincerely,
Justin Wells, ELP Executive Director
I am excited about the upcoming Assessment for Learning Conference and encourage everyone in the performance assessment movement to join us in San Diego this February (11–13th).
For the past three years, the educators and system leaders of the Assessment for Learning Project have been designing, learning, and innovating together to reimagine what’s possible for assessment. Having learned much from being part of this community, ELP has been hungry to see it grow. So we’re thrilled that the Assessment for Learning Project is stepping up to host its first-ever conference. The event will be populated with some of the most innovative, thoughtful, equity-minded, and visionary educators and system leaders when it comes to assessment.
ELP is proud to be a co-designer of the conference, and it’s shaping up to be a cutting-edge learning experience for attendees, who will be challenged to apply innovative assessment principles to their own 3-day learning journey. This is a conference designed for practicing, not preaching.
There are so many educators around the country who are doing incredible work to transform assessment, and this conference is a chance for us to learn with each other and build on the momentum to create an Assessment FOR Learning movement. I hope you will join us!
For more info and to register, go to www.assessmentforlearningconference.org.
Sincerely,
Justin Wells, ELP Executive Director
A high school principal recently lamented to me that many of his students’ grades are cratering during this time of distance learning. Much of the problem, he observes, is coming from classes whose grades are calculated using points.
Work is assigned, work is not received, and the work gets a zero in the grade book. After that, it’s out of the teacher’s hands. Simple math takes over. Average up the points. Out spits the failing grade.
Keeping our students engaged when we can’t serve them in person has, understandably, proven a challenge. Around the country, teachers are Zooming real hard and feeling disappointed by what they are getting back from students in return. But that problem is compounded by points-based grading systems, which the pandemic has exposed as a pervasive practice in our schools.
Where I see a course that organizes itself around points and percentages, I usually find a learning environment in which the teacher and the students do not share clear answers to simple questions of purpose: What are our learning goals? What are the skills we are focused on improving? What are the ways that students can demonstrate their progress?
Two principles of ELP’s High-Quality Performance Assessment (HQPA) framework are particularly germane here: 1) tight on criteria for success and 2) open to different learner approaches. In a course that is rooted in HQPA, students can describe what success looks like with words, not numbers. And the teacher can point out different paths to success. In such a course, there is no reason why a student cannot, in a single, convincing performance of the targeted skills, redeem a whole semester’s worth of struggle.
If there’s one educational practice that I wish this pandemic would eradicate, it is the use of points for calculating course grades. Its disappearance would be a major advance toward an educational system where assessment is for learning, not for sorting.
With respect and gratitude for the work of educators everywhere.
Sometimes it’s important, in our jargon-loving profession, to put things as plainly we can. That’s certainly true for a concept such as performance assessment.
A word that comes in handy is the word challenge. I use it for two key questions:
The first is, How are we challenging our students?
Schools and districts that are consciously building a performance assessment system tend to have crisp answers to that question: “We challenge our students to do a year-long research project.” “Our 3rd graders plan and facilitate their own conferences.” “11th graders must design and implement a statistical analysis with help from an outside expert.” “Our kids have to defend their learning every two years.”
The second question is then, How are we challenging ourselves and our system to prepare our students for their challenges?
Again, I am encouraged by crisp answers: “We look at student work and calibrate on our rubrics once per month.” “Our grade level teams meet in the summer to design two multi-disciplinary projects per year.” “The science department will be using a Next-Gen-aligned rubric for assessing inquiry projects next year.” “We’re investing in PD so that our teachers can teach public speaking across the curriculum.”
Try it. As you build your performance assessment system, keep asking, “How are we challenging our students?” and “How are we challenging ourselves?” Tighten up your answers. Then live them.
Sincerely,
Justin Wells, ELP Executive Director
One widespread way that schools have adapted to the pandemic, particularly at the secondary level, is a dramatic restructuring of the “bell schedule.” In the virtual and hybrid contexts we’re now operating in, many students are taking, and teachers are teaching, fewer classes at one time, typically made possible by shortening the length of courses or chunking them into alternating modules (which is what we are doing here at Envision Schools).
The challenges are obvious: These new schedules are born of compromise. They are harder to manage for some disciplines than others. Abrupt change is exhausting. But they do present an opportunity for advancing a key element of your performance assessment system—the culture of reflection and revision among teachers.
In a functioning performance assessment system, students’ work (their response to assignments) informs teachers’ work (their design of assignments) in a process that is collaborative and continual. With courses on faster cycles, there are more opportunities to iterate. A semester-long course, if offered twice during the year, doubles the pace of iteration.
Let’s acknowledge that making time for collaborative revision of courses is not easy. Right now, the brute logistics of delivering instruction in the midst of a pandemic are monopolizing our energies. But as we get deeper into the fall, ELP urges educators to dedicate some of your precious PD time, in whatever form it comes, to sharing assessments and analyzing student work, building your system’s muscles for reflection and revision.
Shorter courses demand even crisper answers to the questions that never go away: What do students need to learn, and how will we know they have learned it?
When teachers do have opportunities to share their work with each other, we encourage you to use ELP’s principles of High Quality Performance Assessment (HQPA) as a common language for exchanging feedback. We offer both a set of look-fors and single-point rubrics for each of the five principles. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us with questions on how to use these tools in your learning community.
with respect and gratitude for the work of educators everywhere.
This is an interactive hands-on workshop where participants will prototype a high quality performance assessment (HQPA) aligned to deeper learning competencies. Through learning stations, participants will explore the what and why of performance assessments and use quality criteria tools to analyze for rigor, learner agency, and authenticity. Participants will then prototype their ideal HQPA and brainstorm the potential implications on their school structures and pedagogies. The design experience will culminate with participants sharing their performance assessment tasks, identifying next first steps, and reflecting on their own learning and leadership.
Join us to…
- explore HQPA in relation to the design of a single task/challenge
- prototype or refine a task/challenge that aligns to HQPA and is designed so our most marginalized students can thrive
I am writing to share the news that December 30th marked my final day at Envision Learning Partners. It is impossible to put into words the depth of gratitude and appreciation I have for Envision as an organization, and for all of the amazing humans whom I have met over the past fifteen years(!!!!) – inside and outside of the org. Having spent the last decade and a half learning how to be an educator committed to deeper learning, and learning how to engage in transformative systems change work, there is no way that I can capture the role that Envision has played in my professional and personal evolution.
What did you most enjoy about being a coach with ELP?
I had no idea the profound impact that ELP would have on my life when I said yes to the opportunity to help found the organization and dream up what we wanted to do and be back in 2010. As I look back now, over a decade later, it is… of course… the people who have taught me the most, and whom I hold in my heart as I make my way through the world. Courageous and visionary school leaders from Hawaii to Maine who have invited me in to their most sacred place – their schools. Boundlessly passionate educators who have pushed their own practice with open hearts and open minds in order better support their most sacred people – their students. Brilliant partners who are doing the work in organizations across the country, confronting a complex and entrenched system that we all know can and needs to be better. And the ELP team… oh, the humans who are ELP… I have been held, challenged, taught, supported, encouraged, questioned, and loved by these humans in the most foundational of ways. So it feels quite impossible to describe what I have enjoyed the most about being a coach with ELP because it has been my identity for so long. The enjoyment is just one dimension of all that ELP has added to my life. Mostly, it has been all of you… so, thank you.
Why am I leaving and what am I doing next
It has been a deeply moving decision to say goodbye to these people and this place, and say yes to the unknown. But I feel called to set out on a new challenge, and to see where it takes me. As 2020 unfolded and the world was newly turned upside down because of covid, the persistent and inexcusable murders of unarmed Black men and women, forest fires raging around us, and clear threats to our democracy, I found myself heavy with so many questions of what am I doing? and what can I do? While I don’t feel that I have any definitive answers to those questions at this point, the process has led me to some new lenses of purpose and focus.
I am excited to announce that I have started my own consulting business called Core Shifts (website coming soon). I believe deeply in the power of performance assessment, and will continue to partner with schools and districts to support the work of building systems organized around the skills that young people need in order to go out into the world and create the lives in which they will thrive. I am excited to continue to partner with ELP in this work so that all students can experience the power of owning their own story of learning and growth. Simultaneously, I feel compelled to continue to confront and grapple with the ways in which my identity as a white woman within education has contributed, and still contributes to the oppression of marginalized students and adults. I am committed to doing the ongoing mirror work myself so that I can better explicitly name, analyze, and be an effective co-conspirator in working to reduce and ultimately dismantle the hold that white supremacy culture has on public education. (One way I have been practicing this internal work is through the co-design and co-facilitation of an anti-racist learning experience for white folks in affinity space with another former Envisioner. It is called What is at Your Core and you can learn more about that on the website. Our next course starts this month, if you know of anyone who might be interested).
It is at the explicit intersection of system redesign and anti-racist work that I hope to build Core Shifts. I have a lot to learn, and I am ready to lean into the challenge.
There are no words to capture how much of who I am now is because of my time at Envision Education, and Envision Learning Partners. I continue to be deeply inspired by the passion, the commitment, the vulnerability, and the care with which this organization and all of the incredible clients and partners with whom we work take on the unthinkably complex job of holding our young people at the center of all that we do… especially this year. Please know how grateful I am to have learned with you.
You can find me at abby@core-shifts.com.
Events
ELP continues to have a strong presence at conferences all over the US in 19-20:
- EdLeader21 conference last month in Houston, Texas. Our Executive Director, Justin Wells, facilitated a breakout session (with a district team from Springfield, MO) called Portrait to Performance with Portfolios.
- iNACOL, also last month, in Palm Springs, California. Our Deeper Learning Coach, Abby Benedetto, delivered the latest version of ELP’s Grad Profile 101 workshop.
Upcoming conferences:
- Assessment for Learning (February 2020) in San Diego, California, mentioned in this newsletter’s ED message. For the past three years, the educators and system leaders of the Assessment for Learning Project have been designing, learning, and innovating together to reimagine what’s possible for assessment. ELP will be hosting workshops throughout the conference focused on Student Exhibitions & Defense of Learning.
Announcements
NEW ELP PARTNERS FOR 19-20
Each school year, ELP welcomes new education partners from across the country. Please join us in welcoming:
- East Palo Alto Academy: ELP will be working with EPAA to synthesize a clear vision for their graduates and build teacher capacity to integrate projects with rigorous assessments of content standards and transferable skills.
- Cleveland Metro Schools: ELP will be partnering with John Adams College & Career Academy to design a system of performance assessments that are aligned with their vision of a graduate and lead the graduating class of 2022 through Portfolio Defenses.
- Davis Joint Unified School District: ELP will be prototyping “defense of learning” systems aligned to the Davis USD Graduate Profile and accelerating the implementation of these systems among a cohort of piloting schools in the district.
- Fairfax County Public Schools: ELP will be assisting this innovative district with their student presentations of learning, providing feedback and an outside perspective.
- Purdue Polytechnic High School: ELP will build on the strengths at Purdue to align a cohesive performance assessment system, culminating in a capstone portfolio and defense.
- IL State Board of Ed: ELP worked with ISBE to identify and implement a project around needed resources, guidance, and support for Illinois to best understand how to provide competency-based education, performance-based assessment, and establish a shared culture of innovation to promote equity for all students. (This represents an opportunity for Illinois-based school districts, so please reach out to learn more.)
GATES FOUNDATION PROFESSIONAL LEARNING PARTNERSHIP GRANT
We are delighted to share that ConnectED and Envision Learning Partners are partnering with the San Diego Unified School District to enhance the integrated sequence of the Illustrative Mathematics high school curriculum. This work is funded by a grant from the Gates Foundation. In collaboration with our partners, we will leverage existing curriculum-embedded instructional resources and parent engagement approaches, elevating strategies that close achievement gaps for English Learners.
The Assessment for Learning Conference 2021
ELP is pleased to partner again with the Center for Innovation in Education and Next Generation Learning Challenges on the 2021 Assessment for Learning Conference!
The guiding question for AFL 2021 is: How will the assessment for learning movement lead us through the crises of the moment to a more just, equitable and student-centered future of learning?
AFL 2021 blurs the line between conference and community of practice. Think of it as a series of missions to escape the gravitational pull of our assumptions and to-do lists, so that we can find space for sharing, reflecting, connecting and imagining.
Get a head start on AFL 2021 right now! Join one of the free 75-minute virtual sessions to cut through the space junk, surface challenges and opportunities, share resources, and help us set the priorities for AFL 2021!
The National Geographic Society
ELP had the pleasure of leading the National Geographic Society and members of their global community through a Design Sprint. In facilitating a Liberatory Design Process, the team was able to develop a set of design principles that will be the foundation for future work and a lens with which to understand and refine past work.
DLLF: Where are they now?
We’re highlighting some of the DLLF alumni who are making moves- achieving goals, serving their communities, and impacting the future of education. Click here to read more about some of their achievements.
ELP has worked with 58 educational leaders from all over the United States since 2016 and we’re excited to open applications for our fifth cohort early next year!
Join us TOMORROW in the ELP Lounge!
The ELP Lounge will offer time to share stories, thought partnership with peers, or just the chance to throw up your hands and say, am I the only one experiencing this??? Plan to stop in and slow down to connect, share, learn, & heal. We can’t wait to see you.
Thursday, November 18th, 4:00-5:00pm PT (7:00-8:00pm ET)
Click here to grab your free ticket!
Deeper Learning Conference 2022
Share space with change-makers like you who are in search of a collective experience to highlight current triumphs and challenges, leverage student voice, and move from aspiration to action.Happening in-person and virtually, March 29th-31st, 2021. Get your tickets here.
More details about ELP’s sessions to come!
Envision Learning Partners is delighted and honored to introduce 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 Alliance’s Graduate Profile (shown below). In 2019-20, we have been engaged with the Alliance team to develop a vertical articulation of the graduate profile.
Fifteen years ago a group of Los Angeles educators, civil rights activists, and community leaders believed in great public schools. They believed all kids could learn, regardless of zip code or background. They believed they could make a difference––and they did. Together, they founded Alliance College-Ready Public Schools to challenge the status quo for public education.
Today, 95% of Alliance seniors graduate high school and are accepted to college; 73% to a four-year college or university. In comparison, when Alliance opened its first public charter school in 2004 at the corner of Western and Martin Luther King Boulevard, the high school graduation rate in Los Angeles was 49%––many Los Angeles high schools were known as drop-out factories.
Eva Luc is the Director of Strategic Initiatives and College Success at Alliance and has shared her thoughts on our work together below.
Alliance Design Team working at a Vertical Alignment Workshop
What have you learnt during this process?
It’s critical to authentically engage the communities we serve and the staff on the ground, because they are ultimately the ones impacted by and carrying out the work, and they deserve to be front and center in the process. Otherwise, you risk creating for and not with folks. We are proud that school leaders, teachers, counselors, parent specialists, families, and scholars past and present co-created the Alliance Graduate Profile, and are also part of the vertical articulation and design teams.
Based on our scholars’ experiences, research and best practices, we know that academic strength is just part of what makes a successful Alliance graduate in whatever their chosen path beyond high school might be. The Graduate Profile provides a north star of the full set of skills (beyond just the academics) that we, as a network, should be focusing on. It allows us to have a cohesive vision of scholar success that we work towards collectively.
Is there one story you can share that illustrates how this work is benefitting your school and your students?
So far, the Graduate Profile has already impacted Alliance scholars in a positive way. Our Graduate Profile emphasized social and emotional learning so much so that Alliance created a new team – Scholar, Family and Community Services – this year to develop a framework for Social Emotional Learning and align resources to support that framework.
Read more about our partnership with Alliance in our January Guest Blog, written by Deeper Learning Coach, Morgan Vien.
Describe what you do at ELP?
I serve as the Director of Research and Innovation. My main role is to document the impact that designing and implementing high quality performance assessment systems has on outcomes for K-12 students, the learning environments that student experience, and systems and cultures that support student success. The “innovation” part of my work has to do with developing new tools, frameworks, and methodologies for the work we do with the latest evidence from research and practice. What that really means is that I support our coaches as a thought partner as they develop new products with their district and school partners, and codify tools, products, and practices into a unique ELP-branded suite of resources. I also spend a lot of time writing, reviewing, and explaining rubrics!
What experiences brought you to ELP?
That’s a long story, but I’ll give it a try! I started my career in 1997 as a history teacher in New York City, at a Queens high school that was part of the small schools movement in the city, and regularly assigned projects and performance assessments to my students, even before I knew what PBL and performance assessments were. During my graduate studies at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, I studied the impact of a teaching performance assessment (Performance Assessment for California Teachers) on the learning of preservice teachers, having been inspired by teachers reporting that the NBPTS portfolio assessment had a tremendously positive impact on their professional learning. During my graduate studies, I also began supporting the work of the School Redesign Network at Stanford which was supporting the Bay Area Performance Assessment Consortium (BayPAC), and that’s how I met Bob Lenz, one of the founders of Envision Schools and my current colleagues, Justin, Alcine, Rachel, and Abby, among other founding teachers. Bob requested technical support from the School Redesign Network team. That’s how I ended up facilitating teams of Envision Schools educators as they developed their suite of disciplinary performance outcomes, rubrics, and the portfolio defense, and as teachers got calibrated on the portfolio rubrics. When Envision had its first graduating classes, I conducted a couple of small studies to evaluate the impact of the portfolio and defense on students’ learning experiences and then a follow-up study to learn how graduates who had been out of high school for one or two years were doing. Later, I also participated in collecting data for another set of studies that included Impact Academy and City Arts & Tech HS called the Study of Student Centered Schools (completed by the Stanford SCOPE Center). Between 2008 and 2020, I worked as the Director of Assessment Research and Development at SCALE – the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity, which evolved from the School Redesign Network. SCALE’s primary mission is to support districts, states, and higher ed institutions as they develop and implement balanced, credible, and reliable assessment systems that include performance assessments. I started working at ELP part-time in January 2018, when SCALE staff merged with ELP. I started working full-time at ELP in January of 2020. In many ways, it felt like coming back home, to a school organization with an assessment system that I was part of building. I am so proud of what Envision Schools have become and that we are a national and international leader in the performance assessment movement.
What do you enjoy most about working for ELP?
I love working at ELP because I feel so much at home here. I truly feel that my colleagues are like-minded people with the “same heart.” At ELP, I know my colleagues hold very similar beliefs about the potential of all students and a similar drive to do work that makes a difference in students’ lives. We rejoice and celebrate the same small victories, and we mourn and weep for the same systemic sources of injustice in our world. We geek out over backwards planning and all believe in the power of student work as a key lever for teacher learning. We support and care for each other, and know that even when we push back on one another, it is out of love. That’s what makes it feel like home.
What do you like to do when you’re not working?
I wish I had more time for all my non-work interests – but these days, when I’m able to come up for air, I enjoy making a delicious meal for my family, going for long walks, tinkering on my mandolin, piano, or violin (not all at once!), and shelter-in-place Karaoke nights with my family. Also, I enjoy cuddling with our long-haired Chihuahua-Papillon mixed pup and our aging tabby cat while catching up on the latest sci-fi or historical fiction drama on Netflix.
I began working at ELP in January 2018 as the Director of Research and Innovation. Since then, I’ve been working on the nationwide team providing direct service and technical consulting to client partners and creating assessment products, as well as directing ELP’s research projects.
I’m excited to share that in July 2025, I stepped into a new role: Senior Director of Assessment for Envision Education. This role encompasses responsibilities for the whole organization – Envision Schools and Envision Learning Partners. Envision Schools runs four charter schools in the Bay Area (in San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward). My new responsibilities include overseeing the design and implementation of a comprehensive assessment system for the schools, ensuring the use of rigorous, standards-aligned assessment practices that demonstrate student achievement of core academic skills. At the same time, our system aims to provide regular opportunities for students to demonstrate ambitious learning outcomes aligned to Envision’s graduate profile competencies in real-world-relevant, meaningful, and culturally sustaining contexts. We seek to more systematically integrate authentic and high-quality project-based learning and student-led conferences at all grades 6-12, and portfolios + defenses at grades 8, 10, and 12. We want to develop our schools as models of a balanced and comprehensive assessment system that supports student achievement of both foundational academic skills and ambitious, authentic demonstrations of learning. This new assessment system is described more fully in our new Envision Way documents.
In my new role, I also continue to work with my ELP colleagues, supporting the learning and effectiveness of our national team of Assessment Design Partners, and developing new services aligned to the Envision Way as we seek to meet the evolving needs of both external district partners and our own schools. Our long-term strategy is to strengthen our own schools so they are clear models of the quality assessment systems that we are also seeking to strengthen in partnership with districts. We call this the “flywheel” because of the reciprocal nature of our learning and development work as we pilot new practices, collect data, and evaluate their effectiveness in our schools and in partnership with external districts.
I continue to also be involved in exploring ways for Envision Education to gather evidence of its effectiveness through systematic collection of evidence in our own schools (in partnership with John Ericson, our Director of Data & Assessments), and by initiating research projects to collect evidence of the impact of ELP’s work with districts. I am also continuing to coordinate the research project “Pursuing Equity for Black & Latine Students with Learning Differences”. We wrapped up two years of school case study work in July, and are preparing to launch a two-year professional-development pilot and evaluation phase of the project with a large school district. More news to come!
What do you enjoy most about working for Envision?
It’s definitely always been the people. I truly enjoy working alongside colleagues with a similar commitment to our most marginalized students and who are striving so hard to create supportive, inclusive learning environments that lead to equitable learning outcomes. I am learning so much from my ADP colleagues as well as my Academic Programs Team colleagues. They are all so incisive and brilliant and I have so much to learn from them. I truly feel blessed and lucky to have them as colleagues!
I’m also proud to be working in an organization with a commitment to its pro-Black, anti-racist stance, engaging us all in developing a self-awareness of our individual and collective contributions to our cultural norms, and providing the space to engage in productive struggle to begin changing those norms.
Last, I love that Envision honors hard work while also honoring our need for joy, self-care, and rest! The yoga and art breaks, retreats, sound baths, line dancing, karaoke nights, breaking bread together, and other opportunities to take mind breaks are all helpful reminders that we are whole people who also need laughter, rest, and nourishment to thrive. My family always gets a kick out of hearing about the latest fun things I get to do with my work friends!
I am ELP: Ruth Chung Wei, Senior Director of Assessment
I began working at ELP in January 2018 as the Director of Research and Innovation. Since then, I’ve been working on the nationwide team providing direct service and technical consulting to client partners and creating assessment products, as well as directing ELP’s research projects.
Read More
What experiences brought you to ELP?
Performance assessments have always played a big role in my educational journey, even when I was unable to name it. As a Bilingual teacher in Chicago, I centered my teaching on performing and bringing the content to life. The traditional assessment measures were invalid and were unable to capture the pure brilliance of my students and their community. In the past three years, I’ve focused on partnering with school districts in New England to develop high quality performance assessments that promote joy and equity. Now, as an Assessment Design Partner at ELP, I’m excited to engage in deeper ways with assessment systems and Graduate Profiles.
What are you hoping to learn while you’re at ELP?
I’m hoping to deepen my understanding of graduate profiles and how they can serve as a lever for equity for school districts. Most importantly, I’m looking forward to collaborating with the wonderful ELP team to design learning experiences that promote antiracism.
What are you most excited about starting at ELP?
I’m most excited to work with the wonderful team at ELP and their school partners. It is energizing to work with a team that is unafraid to think outside-the-box with antiracism at the center of the work.
What do you like to do when you’re not working?
There are many things that bring me joy and restore my spirit. One of my top priorities is exercise- I like early morning runs or group workouts followed by an iced coffee and a relaxed afternoon by the beach. I also appreciate time with my family and friends-especially after living on the East Coast for several years. In fact, one of my favorite activities with my mom is to visit TJMaxx and browse the clothes and home decor section. It’s the little things that count.
A picture with me and my beautiful family and a picture of me and my birthday piñata (Selena)!
Soraya’s Bio:
Soraya is joining the Envision team as an Assessment Design Partner. With nearly a decade of experience in education, Soraya has worked to promote and support anti-racist teaching and learning practices through her roles as a teacher and as an assessment designer. Before joining Envision, Soraya served as a Senior Associate at the Center for Collaborative Education (CCE). There she worked in partnership with schools and districts in New England and nationally to design high quality assessments and systems that promote equity and engagement. In addition to professional learning and coaching, she led a consortium of districts in Massachusetts in their pursuit of designing an alternative assessment and accountability system. Soraya believes that lasting assessment systems need to be in alignment with a community’s vision and coherent to a district and school’s priorities. Soraya holds an Ed.M. in Education Policy and Management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.A. in Chicana/o Studies and Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Describe what you do at ELP.
I am the Director of STEM Learning at ELP. I get to work with colleagues in many different roles — teachers, coaches, administrators, curriculum developers, assessment developers, and professional learning providers — to design learning experiences and assessment tools that help students become better problem-solvers, and better communicators about their problem-solving strategies. A big part of my work is figuring out how to set students up to use their own everyday language and the disciplinary language of mathematics and science to express and clarify their own ideas, and to build on each other’s ideas (for example, the Math Language Routines). Another big part of my work is developing tools to help educators sharpen their lens for analyzing student work to get better at identifying and describing evidence of learning, and to get better at planning instruction and assessment based on that evidence (for example, Collaborative Analysis of Student Work Protocol). I also get to collaborate on tools for observing classrooms, and for using observation data to plan instruction (for example Observation + Planning Tool); developing and adapting tools like these for distance learning contexts has kept me very busy this year. I am always on the lookout for projects in which the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and the Next Generation Science Standards are used to optimize student curiosity and student agency.
What experiences brought you to ELP?
My journey to ELP was a happy and unplanned confluence of opportunities and relationships. I joined ELP in early 2018 as part of a team of colleagues from Stanford (Understanding Language/Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning & Equity), and one of the primary magnets that drew us to ELP was a clear commitment to both equity in education and anti-racism broadly. In that merging of people and projects, ELP gained STEM content expertise and I gained a bit more freedom to pursue projects that align with my interests in making school a place where students not only grow their competence in solving problems, but are recognized for their competence. Prior to joining ELP, I was the Director of Math Learning at UL/SCALE, and before that worked for many years with Ann Shannon and Associates, using the Shell Center Formative Assessment Lessons, which transformed my understanding of the importance of attending closely to the variety of ways students generate evidence their learning. I’ve had many opportunities to integrate my training as a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer into my work in math education, but often only secretly; ELP is a place where I get to be my whole self.
Part of the ELP team prototyping at a 2019 retreat.
What do you enjoy most about working for ELP?
Colleagues. The people. (ELP has the best people). The deep expertise and wisdom about working with schools and districts to shift mindsets, to re-align educational systems for equity and learning that matters, and to build tools collaboratively that make these shifts and re-alignments sustainable. Being able to draw on what ELP colleagues are doing at the scale of systems, and in relation to other content areas, provides a much more holistic perspective than is possible in professional settings narrowly bounded by content area.
I also enjoy all of the opportunities to collaborate with the incredible staff at Envision Schools. Partnering with STEM leaders at Envision Schools has been an ongoing source of energy and an actively experimental space for professional learning design and assessment design.
What do you like to do when you’re not working?
Anything that does not involve a screen: being and moving outside (walking, running, hiking, biking, kayaking); touching and reading printed pages; playing cards, Pentago, chess, Codenames, Just One, and other games with my 14 year old daughter and 11 year old son; playing with our accidental pet, Philmore the fabulous rat. And — when all goes well — living car-free until our summer cross-country road trip to Carrboro, NC, visiting family and friends along the way.
A Note from the Designers: Just so you know- we hear you and we are answering your call!
Path Pace Tool
“Yes – we want to lean in and invite students to tell the journey of their learning in a Virtual Defense… but where do we start?”
We are thrilled that you are digging deeper into the Virtual Defense Toolkit! Each part of this Toolkit is being built with our own main design principle in mind: Tight on criteria, loose on path. Thus the Path Pace is intended to be a guide as you look at where you are currently, and how you might move as a system toward virtual student defenses and beyond.This tool includes suggested tasks and timelines for each of the primary stakeholder groups – students, advisors/mentors, and Admin. We then break down those tasks into week-long chunks. We invite you to explore this tool and then reflect on your context, your capacity, and what feels right for your community. Adopt what resonates, adapt what you want to modify, and hopefully this gives you a place to start. We will be offering resources for several of these tasks as the days go on, and are excited to continue to build what you may need as you take this on.
Student Planning Tool
“This is awesome… but how do we support students to hold parts of this process?”
Yes! We are so glad you asked. Any student-centered assessment supports students to be co- designers of the experience and invites them to activate their agency in the process. This planning tool is built to help them set goals, track key information, manage workload and consider important factors as they prepare to defend their learning.In this new landscape, we know that circumstances and home learning contexts are unique to each student. As you engage in building towards a culminating event with your students, we invite you to question assumptions and let students lead where possible. They are the experts in their home contexts and can make choices about how and when to complete work, the best space in their home environments for hosting the event and of course- how to best be their authentic selves in this process.As always, these tools are an offering and we are excited to see how you use them and what other needs emerge. We are actively designing and releasing this package as needs become clear.Onward!We held a couple of sessions to answer questions and dream with you all. We were excited to learn more about the complexities you’re working through and to imagine how we can support.
Virtual Portfolio Defense Webinar: Tuesday, April 14th
- This webinar was recorded and is available using this link.
Virtual Defense: Ask Me Anything Session: Thursday, April 16th
- Stay tuned for details from the session!
Join the conversation on Twitter by tagging us @EnvisionSchools and using the hashtag #ELPVirtualDefense.
Stay Well,
Morgan Vien & Abby Benedetto, ELP Deeper Learning Coaches
Welcome the Fourth Cohort of the Deeper Learning Leadership Forum!
We are delighted to announce the education leaders that have been selected to join the newest cohort of our Deeper Learning Leadership Forum. The Deeper Learning Leadership Forum (DLLF) is a cohort-based leadership experience that aims to develop, strengthen, and support a group of educational leaders to work at the intersection of equity and design thinking. As DLLF members cultivate relationships and learn across their diverse contexts, they will become more adept and strategic at leading reform efforts in their local systems, thus producing more equitable deeper learning outcomes across the country.
Meet our fourth cohort leaders here. Click the link and scroll down to Cohort 4!
Envision Education is hiring!
Envision Education is seeking a dynamic, experienced educator and leader to build on the successes of our three high schools and two middle schools and establish Envision Schools as exemplar schools of equity and excellence for our students and for Envision Learning Partners. The Chief Academic Officer (CAO) will do this by providing vision, management experience, educational expertise, and operational oversight. Click here for the official position description.
Questions? Contact David Edwards, Director of Talent and Human Resources – dedwards@envisionschools.org – 510.451.2415 x 107
IL-EMPOWER
ELP has been selected as an approved learning partner by IL-EMPOWER for Illinois schools. IL-EMPOWER is the statewide system of support that empowers schools with greater choice in determining their path to improved student outcomes. Schools are informed through a continuous school improvement process which includes analysis of academic and school quality indicators, a system needs assessment, and selecting an approved learning partner like ELP.
To learn more about our partnership, click here.
How ELP Delivers Internal Professional Development!
ELP spends much of its time delivering PD to our partners from coast to coast. Many partners don’t realize that we also turn our PD chops inwards to refine our practices, learn from each other’s work in the field and have some fun along the way! At our last retreat, we focused our efforts on refining our definition of High Quality Performance Assessments. We believe a High Quality Performance Assessment…
- elicits evidence of skills and knowledge that matter
- is tight on quality criteria while open to different approaches
- is authentic
- is a learning experience in and of itself
We’ll expand on this suite of definitions in the coming weeks – stay tuned!
Happy Holidays from the ELP team!
UPCOMING CONFERENCES
The Assessment for Learning Conference is next month! Below is a sneak peak at the ELP-lead sessions!
- Let Us Count the Ways: Creatively Tackling the Logistics of Exhibition – Suzanne Malek – Wednesday, February 12 • 9:15am – 10:15am
- It’s Elementary, My Dear!: Exhibition at the Elementary Level – Morgan Vien & Jeff Embleton – Wednesday, February 12 • 10:40am – 12:10pm
- Creating Culminating Assessments Where ALL Students Thrive – Abby Benedetto & Alcine Mumby – Wednesday, February 12 • 1:30pm – 3:00pm
- Show Don’t Tell: How to Design Capstone Experiences that Embody Your Learning Outcomes – Justin Wells – Wednesday, February 12 • 1:30pm – 3:00pm
- Taking a Defense Process from Good to Great using Quality Criteria – Abby Benedetto – Thursday, February 13 • 9:30am – 11:00am
Join ELP for the following sessions at the Deeper Learning Conference on March 25-27, 2020 in San Diego, CA!
- “Deeper Assessment: Designing Equitable Performance Assessment Systems” Deep Dive – Alcine Mumby & Abby Benedetto
- “A Catalyzing Experience: Working In Alliance Across Difference” Den – Alcine Mumby, Morgan Vien, Rachel Maida, & Courtney Katen
- “We are Change-makers: Working at the intersection of Equity and Design” Den – the Deeper Learning Leadership Forum, Cohort 3
- “Preparing Students to Build their Future: Developing and Measuring Design Thinking Mindsets” Deep Dive – Ruth Chung Wei & the Design Tech High School
- “Hacking + Holonomy = Hardware” Deep Dive – Morgan Vien & Jeff Embleton from ASCEND
DEFENSE DESIGN STUDIOS
Observe an entire Portfolio Defense, learn how the model works, and reflect on how you can apply the concepts in your own context.The Portfolio Defense is the capstone activity of a whole-school performance assessment system. It is the culmination of a student’s 4-year journey. Similar to a masters defense, students stand before a panel of peers, educators, and mentors to demonstrate — to the panel and to themselves — that they are ready to graduate and ready for a successful future.A Defense Design Studio consists of two parts:
- Observe a live student defense: watch a student defend their learning in front of a panel.
- Debrief – Talk with an Envision Learning Partners coach and fellow educators about how to translate this nationally-recognized assessment model to your own educational context.
Join ELP at our partner school’s DDS:
- Bryan Adams High School – Dallas, TX – March 26 & 27, 2020
- LAUSD – Linked Learning – Los Angeles, CA
- March 20 – School for the Visual Arts and Humanities
- April 21 – Los Angeles High School of the Arts
- June 1 – Nightingale Middle School
Bay Area Envision Education DDS dates TBD.
Grad Profile Workshop Series: Jan 28, Feb 5 & Feb 10 (Sold out but more dates to come!)
In this three-part workshop series, led by Deeper Learning Coach, Abby Benedetto, participants will explore the value of having a Graduate Profile, develop and define a draft, and then learn how to implement and measure it once they take it back to their school, district, etc.
Given the surprisingly high demand for this workshop, we have sold out! We are currently scheduling another set of dates, as soon as late February. Please use this Google Form to join the interest list and be the first to know as soon as new dates/times have been confirmed.
Session A: Intro to the Graduate Profile
- January 28th, 2021⋅9:30 – 11:30am PT
This workshop is designed for folks who are learning about the concept of a Graduate Profile (aka Vision of a Graduate, Portrait of a Graduate). We will explore what a Graduate Profile is and why it is an important shift for schools, districts, systems, etc., as well as what it means to situate the Graduate Profile as your organizing principle. Participants will brainstorm the skills they believe would be ideal for their graduates, then have an opportunity to check that brainstorm against quality criteria, ideate and revise again. Participants will leave with a draft prototype of a graduate profile as well as a plan to engage stakeholders in a vital input/feedback process in order to move toward a more finalized draft.
Session A TLDR: You have heard about this thing called a Graduate Profile and want to take your first leap into learning more.
Session B: Defining Your Graduate Profile
- February 5th, 2021⋅9:30 – 11:30am PT
Once participants have a draft of a Graduate Profile (aka Vision of a Graduate, Portrait of a Graduate) that includes larger skill categories, the next step is to define what you actually mean by those categories in the form of Performance Outcomes. During this session, we will clarify what Performance Outcomes are, determine the scope of the Outcomes that you are drafting (individual school, district-wide, etc.), and practice creating high quality Performance Outcomes for your Graduate Profile. This language will then be used to design shared assessment tools and much, much more. Participants will leave with a more fully defined set of skills for their Graduate Profile, as well as a plan to engage stakeholders in a vital input/feedback process in order to move toward a more finalized draft.
Session B TLDR: You have a list of amazing skills/competencies that you want for your graduates, and you are ready to get more specific about what that really means.
Session C: Select & Design Your Culminating Performance Assessment
- February 10th, 2021⋅10:30am – 12:30pm PT
Once you have your Graduate Profile designed and defined, you need to create a system that actually measures it. If you don’t, it remains a pretty poster on the wall. One component of that measurement system is a culminating assessment that gives you and your students concrete evidence of how they are able to demonstrate the skills of your Graduate Profile. In various groups, participants will explore different types of exhibitions (student-led conferences, capstones, portfolio defenses, etc.) and design a prototype of a culminating exhibition that provides evidence of student learning/thinking of essential competencies.
Session C TLDR: You want to design a culminating performance assessment that will measure your Graduate Profile.
Assessment for Learning Conference- Winter Launch: February 3rd
ELP is pleased to partner for a second year with the Center for Innovation in Education and Next Generation Learning Challenges on the Assessment for Learning Conference!
Assessment for Learning is a continuing process based in learner goals, relationships, complex tasks, reflection and exhibitions of learning. The Winter Launch is about setting goals and building relationships before the spring conference on May 6th & 7th, 2021.
The focus of the Winter Launch is on connection and inquiry, and we won’t be introducing new content through traditional conference sessions like panels and presentations at this event.
You’ll spend most of your time during the Winter Launch in small group conversations on big questions about assessment. We’ll use a new guided reflection process to help make sense of this moment and envision a more just and student-centered future.
You’ll finish the event with learning intentions for the rest of this year, new ways to connect with AFL peers, and the charge to invite more people into this community.
This is an event for people who are passionate about building the movement to make assessment for learning the norm in our education systems. We expect that most participants will be people who support assessment in schools, districts and networks; people who implement and advocate for assessment-related policies; and teacher leaders.
What kind of assignments?
Like many educators not currently teaching, I’ve had multiple opportunities through this pandemic to be back in the classroom, serving as a substitute teacher. It’s helped me see how stressful things have been for teachers, students, and school leaders.
In the midst of another chaotic year, the idea of performance assessment system building might seem luxurious. Most schools are struggling to staff campus tomorrow. Those big plans for rolling out the district’s new graduate profile or developing your school’s performance outcomes? Maybe next year.
Still, when I’ve been subbing, looking over the shoulders of students communicating with their teachers on Google Classroom, I am reminded that the essence of teaching and learning remains: Students learn content and skills by working through the challenges that their teachers assign and guide them through.
What’s the student work? What kind of assignments? Such questions are always relevant, and whenever we raise and discuss them in dialogue with colleagues, we are engaged in the work of performance assessment system building, even in a year like this. Every assignment that a teacher sets up to advance student learning is an opportunity to apply the principles of High Quality Performance Assessment (HQPA).
ELP’s newest virtual workshop, debuting in February, is called “Building a Great Performance Assessment.” Designed for classroom teachers, it’s a place to revise or create a standards-aligned task that is ready to embed in instruction. It’s hands-on, small-scale, and, we hope, won’t require a sub.
Justin Wells, ELP Executive Director
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Building a Great Performance Assessment Workshop Series
The best assessments not only capture our students’ brilliance but also enable them to see and feel their progress. In this three-part workshop, you will learn the principles of high-quality performance assessment (HQPA) and apply them to the design of a task that aligns to your outcomes and provides evidence of your students’ learning. You’ll come out of the workshop with an assessment that is ready to implement in your classroom.
This workshop series is facilitated by ELP Assessment Design Partner, Soraya Ramos and ELP Executive Director, Justin Wells.
Session #1: Wednesday, February 16th, 1:00pm-3:00pm PT (4:00-6:00pm ET)
Session #2: Wednesday, February 23rd, 1:00pm-3:00pm PT (4:00-6:00pm ET)
Session #3: Wednesday, March 2nd, 1:00pm-3:00pm PT (4:00-6:00pm ET)
Mark your calendars for the next ELP Lounge!
The ELP Lounge will offer time to share stories, thought partnership with peers, or just the chance to throw up your hands and say, am I the only one experiencing this??? Plan to stop in and slow down to connect, share, learn, & heal. We can’t wait to see you.
Thursday, February 17th, 4:00-5:00pm PT (7:00-8:00pm ET)
Click here to grab your free ticket!
Deeper Learning Conference 2022
Share space with change-makers like you who are in search of a collective experience to highlight current triumphs and challenges, leverage student voice, and move from aspiration to action.
ELP will be facilitating sessions both, in-person and virtually! Keep an eye out for more details.
Happening March 29th-31st, 2022. Learn more about the event and register here.
TEAM UPDATES
The ELP team had a full and exciting year in 2018-19:
- Two of our team members (Alcine and Aragon) joined the inaugural Nexus Fellowship to further develop ELP’s equity stance through equityXdesign – a practice that merges the consciousness of racial equity work with the methodology of design thinking.
- ELP’s launched our first Summer Accelerator (designed and led by Abby): an intensive, immersive experience during which inclusive school design teams consisting of adults and students learn, imagine, and plan for how we might redesign school models to better serve all students.
- ELP recognized the need to spend more time together to refine our programs and learn from each other’s practice – Learning Days was launched in May, led by Abby, bringing our coaches together monthly from across the country.
- We added two members to our talented team: Aragon Burlingham joined at the beginning of the year as Director of Partnerships, and Morgan Vien joined at the end of the year as a Deeper Learning coach.
- Finally, ELP focused its talented coaches (Jim and Vinci) inwards to help our own Envision Schools develop deeper content learning in mathematics.
GEOGRAPHIC REACH
ELP added 20 cities to it’s operational reach this fiscal year, totaling 56 cities in the US and one in Beijing. ELP also quadrupled its support of State Departments, working with Virginia last year, and serving Ohio, Kentucky, and Colorado this year.
BLOG RELAUNCH
ELP is relaunching our blog – keep up with past newsletter content, including more in-depth articles and shared resources! Click on any of the section titles in the newsletter for a quick link to that blog post.
ELP IN THE NEWS
ELP was recently highlighted in an EdWeek article, thanks to a partnership between two of our team members, Ruth Chung Wei & Vinci Daro, and a charter school in Washington DC. Two Rivers Public Charter School started offering a 12-month program for teachers focused on better defining, teaching, and assessing critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Ruth and Vinci provided feedback to the cohort members on their assessment task designs.
Where in the World is ELP?
ELP was in 44 cities across the country last year, take a look at the updated map on our new website homepage to see where we’ve been.
Virtual Portfolio Defenses
At the beginning of the current health crisis, ELP developed some resources for those pursuing virtual portfolio defenses. Now, we have an entire webpage dedicated to those tools, examples, and more.
ELP was proud to partner with the Learning Policy Institute and the Linked Learning Alliance to launch the “Defending Learning at a Distance” series, which presented opportunities to observe students’ virtual defenses of learning and engage in conversations with the inspiring students and educators who have remained committed to performance assessment despite school closures. There is still time to share your students’ stories, click here to find out more.
Did your school pilot virtual defenses this year? If so, we’d love to hear from you! Click here to let us know how it went and what you would do differently next time.
Continued Support for the Deeper Learning Leadership Forum
ELP is proud to announce that we have received funding for three more years, which allows for two more cohorts of the Deeper Learning Leadership Forum! This generous grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation will allow ELP to continue addressing issues of inequity in our school systems by bringing together leaders to define and unpack these challenges. For more information about the program and to meet our cohort members, click here.
Saying Goodbye
It is with heavy hearts that we say goodbye to two ELPers, Director of Partnerships, Aragon Burlingham, and Alternative Assessments Coordinator and Coach, Theresa Morris.
- Aragon, as ELP’s Director of Partnerships, was responsible for developing and growing our nationwide network of partners committed to Deeper Learning through our High Quality Performance Assessment. He focused on ELP’s growth, systems, and dedication to equity. Aragon will be joining CuriOdyssey, a science museum featuring exhibits, educational experiences, and wildlife, as Interim Executive Director. Click here to read CuriOdyssey’s press release.
- Theresa has transitioned to independent consulting, and will continue her great work building capacity at the district level and state level to build performance assessment systems. We plan to partner with her where our work intersects, and will be cheering her on with her ongoing work in Texas, Ohio, and California (Antelope Valley, Los Angeles, Riverside, and beyond).
Introducing the 5th cohort of the Deeper Learning Leadership Forum!
Click here to learn more about each of these amazing leaders.
Summer Graduate Profile Workshop Series
Educators across the country are beginning this school year with incredible opportunities to continue to push on what school looks like/sounds like/feels like for all students. We know that teachers, school & district leaders, students, and parents worked tirelessly last year to meet the needs of young people in a constantly shifting set of conditions. Innovation was happening each day in zoom rooms from Maine to Hawaii. Resisting the all too-easy slide back into the way things were is hard, as the inertia of public education in the US is an incredibly powerful force. But we believe in the power of centering students, and in the possibility of designing school systems around the sets of skills that our young people need so they can go out into the world and create the lives they dream of.
Send a team of folks from your school or district to this workshop series so they can come back with inspiration and with practical tools and processes to share with your community. Choose this school year to design and begin implementing a graduate profile – there is no better time to start!
August 25, 26 & 27th, 2021 ‣ 9am-12pm PT/12-3pm ET
Participants will explore the value of having a Graduate Profile, develop and define a draft, and then learn how to implement and measure it once they take it back to their school, district, etc. These workshops will be led by ELP Assessment Design Partner, Abby Benedetto.
Click here a 9-minute glimpse into Session A.
COMING SOON!
Designed to Thrive Workshop Series
Keep an eye out for this NEW three-part workshop series asks, “What kind of performance assessment experiences would we create to ensure that learners, especially those farthest from opportunity, thrive when we operationalize our current vision/profile of a graduate?”
Participants will explore the different features of high quality performance assessment (HQPA) and design a prototype of a performance assessment experience that provides evidence of student learning/thinking of essential competencies. The series concludes with participants iterating on that prototype after centering the lived experience of a marginalized student your system may serve, and reflecting on the changes needed to ensure that ALL students thrive in their performance assessment system.
Summer Reflections
Summer, while certainly not a vacation for most educators, can make possible more time for reflection and goal-setting. ELP is appreciative of two recent opportunities to reflect on the bigger picture of our work and to share those reflections with you.
Add to your podcast queue my recent discussion with Dr. Greg Goins on his excellent Reimagine Schools podcast. Mixing educational history and philosophy, Dr. Goins and I reflect on how performance assessment is situated within the larger movement known as deeper learning.
For the many of you actively working to broaden the adoption of good ideas, I recommend A Pragmatic Playbook for Impact, published by Bellwether Education Partners, which includes a case study on Envision Education and an upcoming August webinar that features ELP’s story. See below for more on this.
After another very challenging year for educators, we hope that summer has afforded you some time to look up to the horizons of your work. Please reach out to ELP for support as you consider your next move in the project of building a performance assessment system. Our talented team stands ready to help you train your teachers in HQPA, design a portfolio-defense system, or make your graduate profile a reality.
In community,
Justin Wells, ELP Executive Director
ELP is excited to share our Den Talk for this year’s Deeper Learning Conference- Listening to Black Women: What Conditions Enable Black Women Deeper Learning Leaders to Thrive?
Deeper Learning Coach, Alcine Mumby, will be hosting and spotlighting the wisdom of 3 Black women leaders: LaShawnna Harris, Sabrina Moore, and Kai Mathews. All three are alumni of ELP’s Deeper Learning Leadership Forum.
This will be a Kiva panel where Black women systems leaders from various levels of the deeper learning movement with embodied knowledge and expertise will share their wisdom on creating conditions for Black women and Black learners to thrive in this community. Participants will take notes as they listen deeply, scribing exact words and phrases that resonate with them, then reflect on the shifts and new learning created when they listened to understand to Black women. This promises to be a transformative den experience for participants as they seek to practice the foundational equity skill of listening to disrupt/dismantle their own beliefs about deeper learning, leadership, and equity for liberation.
Kai Mathews
Dr. Kai Mathews is the MTSS (Multi-tiered System of Support) Director at UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools. In this position, she co-leads a statewide pilot aimed at improving school climate and conditions. Dr. Kai (as her students call her) has dedicated her life to creating innovative and equitable learning environments for underrepresented populations. She is an educator, researcher, and creative strategist who is passionate about innovative reforms and practices in K-12 and higher education. With over 10 years of practical work and research experience with students, teachers, and administrators in various school districts around the country, her areas of expertise and passions include educational equity; culturally responsive, inclusive, sustaining education; Project-Based Learning (PBL); Universal Design for Learning (UDL); Blended Learning (BL); and Design Thinking.
As a former 8th grade teacher at High Tech Middle, Chula Vista, Dr. Kai prides herself in creating immersive, project-based learning environments that push, uplift, and teach the whole child and allows students to engage in critical inquiry, social advocacy, and divergent dialogue.
She has a Ph.D. in Leadership Studies with a specialization in K-12 education from the University of San Diego, an M.A. in Communication from Ellis University, and a B.A. in English with a minor in Creative Writing from Spelman College.
Sabrina Moore
Sabrina “Bri” Moore, is an Oakland native. She has been a student, teacher, and is now an administrator in service of students and families in Oakland.
Sabrina “Bri” came to education as a career changer. She remembers the day she made the decision to leave a 15 year career with AT&T Telecommunications for teaching. She was in the midst of obtaining a masters degree and remembered her high school teacher telling her “if you get a masters degree you can be a teacher.” She quit a few months later to do just that and has been pushing for Oakland students ever since.
Her orientation towards school leadership began during her time with Teach Tomorrow in Oakland as a facilitator of professional development and providing mentoring and coaching support to new teachers. “I was encouraged as a new teacher to take risks, to try new approaches and to share my successes and failures with my colleagues,” recalls Moore. “If offered an opportunity to learn something new as a teacher, or as a teacher leader, I never said no- I took all opportunities offered to me to continue to learn and grow.” The same has been true of her in administration. Seeking every opportunity to learn, grow and improve for kids.
She is currently pursuing a doctorate of education in social justice from California State University East Bay in hopes to become the future superintendent of Oakland Unified School district.
When asked to describe her leadership style, Bri says she sees herself as “an anti-racist liberatory leader who is unapologetically Black, Proud and pushing for kids that look like me, come from where I come from and deserve way more than we get”, she is also dedicated to speaking truth to racism so we can see a change to systems, practices and policies that stay perpetuating hate and marginalizing folk.
Bri currently serves as the principal at MPA Primary, facilitates diversity, equity and inclusion professional learning for several organizations, provides adjunct professional learning for new principals and is a new principal mentor for OUSD. She works from one core value, “Kids First” and believes everything else is secondary. She loves what she does so much, even on the worst day she’s SMILING!
Sabrina believes that teaching and leading changes lives and with the best team possible strives for excellence in education. She is driven by the dream of seeing, “kids like me be whatever they want – no excuses and every opportunity to Live their best Lives.”
LaShawnna Harris
LaShawnna Harris is the Founder and President of Creative Station LLC a NYC based education consulting firm. She received a B.S. in Management from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, M.S. in teaching from the Fordham University and a M.S. in school building leadership from Mercy College.
LaShawnna previously worked as an elementary school teacher, math staff developer, assistant principal, founding principal, new principal coach and most recently as the Senior Director of School Improvement for the New York City Department of Education.
As the founding principal of PS 330Q, it was her vision that all students would learn in a supportive environment that focused on their academic and social-emotional development, so they could pursue and achieve their dreams. LaShawnna was noted in the Huffington Post article, “Why School Culture Matters, and How to Improve it” by Michael Haberman that showcased her work with Morrison Healthcare through the school’s PENCIL partnership to improve school culture.
She has a passion and commitment to supporting school leaders with school improvement. Her strengths are facilitating small group professional learning community sessions on managing complex change, strategic planning, collaborative problem solving and improved systems and Operations.
Register for the session using this link: https://sched.co/i5i4
For more information about the Deeper Learning Conference and to register, click here.
Learn more about Deeper Learning Coach, Alcine Mumby, in her “I am ELP” highlight.
Reflections on the Assessment for Learning Conference by Morgan Vien, Contributing Conference Designer
The AfL Conference was a powerful experience for me in many ways. A huge part of my job is curating learning experiences that shake up “business as usual.” In a conference design role, it was interesting to design an experience for 400 people that felt personal, reflective and inclusive. That being said, I think we did that. I am stoked to continue to build out this muscle and imagine what is possible for this gathering. One shift I would make for the future is to support presenters to design even more hands on learning experiences for participants. As leaders who believe in learner-centered processes, we have to practice what we preach and this conference experience is a great place to prototype that work across contexts.
Stay tuned for AfL Conference 2021, as well as resources from this year’s conference!
Cancellation of Deeper Learning Conference 2020
In light of the current health climate, the difficult decision to cancel Deeper Learning 2020 was made. The event will not be rescheduled to later on this year, instead all efforts will be put toward making DL2021 an epic event, set for March 23-25, 2021! The Envision Learning Partners look forward to connecting with everyone in San Diego next year!
Registration will open in September. For more information, click here.
April Graduate Profile Workshop Series
Join us for the next round of our three-part workshop series, led by Deeper Learning Coach, Abby Benedetto. Participants will explore the value of having a Graduate Profile, develop and define a draft, and then learn how to implement and measure it once they take it back to their school, district, etc.
Session A: Intro to the Graduate Profile
Tuesday, April 6th, 2021⋅9-12pm PT / 12-3pm ET
You have heard about this thing called a Graduate Profile and want to take your first leap into learning more.
Session B: Defining Your Graduate Profile
Tuesday, April 13th, 2021⋅9-12pm PT / 12-3pm ET
You have a list of amazing skills/competencies that you want for your graduates, and you are ready to get more specific about what that really means.
Session C: Select & Design Your Culminating Performance Assessment
Tuesday, April 20th, 2021⋅9-12pm PT / 12-3pm ET
You want to design a culminating performance assessment that will measure your Graduate Profile.
For a description of the sessions, FAQs, and to register- click here.
Assessment for Learning Spring Conference: May 6-7, 2021
The 2021 Assessment for Learning Conference is a two-day virtual learning experience. Sessions will be ‘flipped’ so that we can spend our live time together in smaller group discussions of content, questions of practice, and design. The Conference will be a chance to build the collective knowledge and shared vision of the Assessment for Learning community.
The AFL2021 Call for Submissions is open and stipends are available! Propose a session today to share your work with a community of educators and policymakers who are committed to fundamentally #RethinkAssessment. How has assessment for learning helped us navigate the crises of the past year? And what must we learn from from this in order to build a more just and student-centered future of public education? Proposals are due March 29th.
Visit the AFL2021 website to learn more!
Deeper Learning Conference #reEngage 2021
ELP is excited to share our Den Talk at this year’s conference: Listening to Black Women: What Conditions Enable Black Women Deeper Learning Leaders to Thrive?
Deeper Learning Coach, Alcine Mumby, will be hosting and spotlighting the wisdom of 3 Black women leaders: LaShawnna Harris, Sabrina Moore, and Kai Mathews.
Click here for more details about this session and bios of the three women being highlighted.
Applications are open for Cohort 5 of the Deeper Learning Leadership Forum!
ELP is pleased to announce that applications and nominations for the 5th cohort of The Deeper Learning Leadership Forum (DLLF) are now open!
The DLLF is a cohort-based leadership experience that aims to develop, strengthen, and support a group of educational leaders to work at the intersection of equity and design thinking.
We are seeking diverse applicants and nominees for our fifth Cohort who are interested in working with other education leaders to address the single biggest challenge facing public education today: inequity.
Click here for more details, links to apply or nominate someone, and a list of FAQs.
Applications due Monday, March 29th.
Big-Picture and Fine-Grained
Cautiously, things are opening up. ELP has a growing number of dates on the calendar for in-person service. We are about to attend our first conference since the pandemic began. We look forward to seeing many of you at Deeper Learning 2022 in San Diego next week. (Read below to learn about ELP’s offerings at the conference.)It’s a good moment to be reminded that performance assessment system building is both big-picture and fine-grained. It’s the highly visible work of establishing a district-wide graduate profile; it’s also the more subtle work of ensuring that science tasks are as standards aligned and culturally responsive as possible. Depending on where there is energy and opportunity, a learning community can toggle between levels and still be making progress.Whatever level of the system you are ready to work on, we’re working to ensure that relevant ELP support is right around the corner. If you don’t see it on the calendar, reach out to us anyway. It’s likely we can meet your needs on short notice.In community,
Building a Great Performance Assessment Workshop Series
Back by popular demand! Teachers know that the best assessments not only capture our students’ brilliance but also enable learners to see their progress. In this three-part workshop, you will learn the principles of high-quality assessment and apply them to the design of a task that aligns to your desired outcomes and provides evidence of your students’ learning. By the end of the workshop you will have an assessment that is ready to implement in your classroom.This workshop series is facilitated by ELP Assessment Design Partner, Soraya Ramos and ELP Executive Director, Justin Wells.
- Session #1: Wednesday, April 20th, 12:00pm-2:00pm PT (3:00-5:00pm ET)
- Session #2: Wednesday, April 27th, 12:00pm-2:00pm PT (3:00-5:00pm ET)
- Session #3: Wednesday, May 4th, 12:00pm-2:00pm PT (3:00-5:00pm ET)
Click here for more details and to get your team registered.
Join us in April’s ELP Lounge!
We’re excited to announce our first ever ELP Lounge Guest:Trevor Gardner! Trevor is an educator, consultant, author, and anELP Deeper Learning Leadership ForumAlumni.This special event will include time to connect with each other and feel free to come with wonderings about Trevor’s Guest Blog: Urgency, Patience, and the Cultivation of Hope. Plan to stop in and slow down to connect, share, learn, & heal. We can’t wait to see you.
Thursday, April 21st, 4:00-5:00pm PT (7:00-8:00pm ET)
Click here to grab your free ticket and let us know you’re coming!
Deeper Learning Conference 2022
We’re looking forward to seeing many of you virtually and in-person next week! Here is the official line up of ELP’s sessions:
Don’t Do Too Much with Josette Neal-De-Stanton: How to make culturally responsive practice and DEI authentically enhance your science assessments.
- Tuesday, March 29th ⋅ 4:30 – 6:00pm PT (in-person)
- Thursday, March 31st ⋅ 9:45 – 11:15am PT (in-person)
This workshop will dive into the importance of incorporating culturally responsive practice and DEI authentically into your classroom! Going beyond adding a trendy handshake or latest song into a presentation, we will be looking into how we use these definitions and principles to create science assessments that are engaging to all demographics, particularly targeting your most disengaged students. Far too often we overthink how to incorporate culture into science, but it is easier than you think, and doesn’t have to involve embarrassment as you fumble to remember the lyrics to a Top 20 song to make a “cultural connection.”
Designed to Thrive with Alcine Mumby & Abby Benedetto: Creating High Quality Performance Assessments That Enable Marginalized Learners to Thrive.
- Wednesday, March 30th ⋅ 1:00 PM – 6:00 PM PT (virtual)
Participants will explore the different features of high-quality performance assessment (HQPA) and design a prototype of a performance assessment experience that provides evidence of student learning/thinking in essential competencies. The session concludes with participants iterating on that prototype after centering the lived experience of a marginalized student your system may serve and reflecting on the changes needed to ensure that ALL students thrive in their performance assessment system.
Making Good On Our Promises with Justin Wells & Soraya Ramos: Designing A High Quality Performance Assessment System.
- Wednesday, March 30th ⋅ 10:30am – 4:00pm PT (in-person)
This is an interactive, hands-on workshop where participants will prototype a high-quality performance assessment (HQPA) aligned to deeper learning competencies. Learn the principles of high-quality assessment and apply them to the design of a task that aligns to your desired outcomes and provides evidence of your students’ learning.
Virtual Den Talk with Vinci Daro: A conversation about modernizing mathematics: perspectives from the classroom and beyond.
DEFENSE DESIGN STUDIO UPDATE
ELP will be moving our annual Defense Design Studio energy to sharing stories in the hopes of inspiring others to take on the powerful practice of student defenses of learning. We have partnered up with the Learning Policy Institute and the Linked Learning Alliance as part of the California Performance Assessment Collaborative to bring you an online series of virtual defenses and behind-the-scene interviews.
Take a look at the first video in the series, Envision senior, Dani Martin, who vlogs about preparing for her virtual defense.
Click here for more information, including how you can get involved!!
ELP HAS OFFICIALLY LAUNCHED OUR NEW PODCAST, ReMix-Ed!
This podcast situates where Assessment, Deeper Learning, Equity and Systems Change meet. Transforming schools is not light work. We illuminate complexities, lift up what’s working and imagine a path forward. With our equity lens we seek to learn from marginalized identities AND intentionally lift up their expertise.
Use this link to check out the first three episodes.
TWITTER CHAT: DEFENDING LEARNING IN MATH
ELP just held our second Twitter Chat earlier this month and the focus was all about students defending their learning in math. The online conversation was held by our Director of STEM, Vinci Daro and previous Deeper Learning Coach & math enthusiast, Jim Malamut.
Keep an eye out for our next Twitter Chat by following ELP on Twitter at @EnvisionSchools and using the hashtag #ELPCoachChat!
Click here to see the resources from our first chat, held in March, which focused on Developing & Measuring your Grad Profile with Deeper Learning Coaches, Abby Benedetto & Suzanne Malek.
Summer Graduate Profile Workshops
Join us for one of the consecutive 3-day workshops to build community with other educators, and to imagine the possibilities when we center systems of education around the skills that young people need in order to thrive.
Participants will explore the value of having a Graduate Profile, develop and define a draft, and then learn how to implement and measure it once they take it back to their school, district, etc. These workshops will be led by Deeper Learning Coach, Abby Benedetto.
We are also offering an additional option for a direct consultation with Abby after the session of your choice. This would be a great time to get your team’s questions answered and customized suggestions
August 24-26th, 2021 ‣ 9am-12pm PT/12-3pm ET
Designed to Thrive Workshop Series
This three-part workshop series asks, “What kind of performance assessment experiences would we create to ensure that learners, especially those farthest from opportunity, thrive when we operationalize our current vision/profile of a graduate?”
Participants will explore the different features of high quality performance assessment (HQPA) and design a prototype of a performance assessment experience that provides evidence of student learning/thinking of essential competencies. The series concludes with participants iterating on that prototype after centering the lived experience of a marginalized student your system may serve, and reflecting on the changes needed to ensure that ALL students thrive in their performance assessment system.
This workshop series is facilitated by Deeper Learning Coaches, Alcine Mumby and Abby Benedetto.
Aug 4th, 11th & 18th ‣ 9:30am-12:30pm PT / 12:30-3:30pm ET
CuriOdyssey STEMCorps
Are you a teacher interested in developing your early science teaching skills? CuriOdyssey is offering grant-funded professional development for the 2021-22 school year. This PD focuses on building comfort, competence and capacity to deliver science ed, aligned with NGSS. Learn more here.
Always a Journey.
In schools all over the country, May is a month when many students share their learning—through project exhibitions, capstone presentations, defenses of learning, and other culminating experiences. Here’s to all the students and teachers out there, even in this difficult year, who are working to culminate learning in ways that are challenging, meaningful, and memorable. Learning is always a journey. It runs deeper when it is designed to feel like one.As you look to the 22–23 school year, please reach out to ELP for thought partnership and support. How will your students be sharing their learning in May of 2023? Now is the right time to ask. And summer is the best time to design those deep learning journeys for students.Speaking of memorable journeys, we’re in the midst of an important transition for Envision Education, ELP’s parent organization. After a remarkable tenure as our CEO for most of the past 10 years, Gia Truong is moving on. Many of you know Gia as a passionate leader for equity, deeper learning, and performance assessment. Her support for ELP’s mission has been unwavering, and her legacy includes theDeeper Learning Leadership Forum. Gia—from the entire ELP team, it’s been an honor and joy to travel with you.Going forward, we are excited to be partnering with our new Envision CEO Jillian Juman. Jillian introduces herself in this newsletter’s guest blog; read on to hear from her directly.In community,Justin Wells, ELP Executive Director
Coming June 9th & 14th- TWO New STEM Workshops!
Part A: Doing Too Much: Disrupting the Transference of STEM Trauma
This workshop will explore the often problematic relationship many students and teachers have with STEM education emerging from traumatic experiences we simply never address. This workshop particularly focuses on the roots of science as it relates to white supremacy culture and science education, and how that bleeds into the way we see ourselves, or don’t, in science. We will look at ELP’s HQPA principles as a means to address healing and thriving in the design of STEM assessments that matter.
Part B: Don’t Do Too Much: Centering HQPA in STEM Assessments
This workshop will dive into the importance of incorporating culturally responsive practices and DEI authentically in order to thrive in your classrooms! Going beyond adding a trendy handshake or latest song into a presentation, we will be looking into how we use these definitions and ELP’s HQPA principles to create STEM assessments that are engaging to all demographics, particularly targeting your most disengaged students.
Join us for June’s ELP Lounge!
We’re excited to announce that in June, we’ll have incoming Envision Education CEO, Jillian Juman, as our ELP Lounge Special Guest!
Stop by to slow down. Connect, share, learn & heal. We can’t wait to see you!
Thursday, June 16th, 4:00-5:00pm PT (7:00-8:00pm ET)
Click here to grab your free ticket and let us know you’re coming!
The DLLF application deadline has been extended to May 31st!
The Deeper Learning Leadership Forum (DLLF) is a cohort-based leadership experience that aims to develop, strengthen, and support a group of educational leaders to work at the intersection of equity and design thinking. DLLF seeks to address issues of inequity in our school systems by bringing together leaders to define and unpack these challenges. On this journey, leaders will explore deeper learning practices; develop the skills to identify and disrupt oppressive ideologies, systems, and structures within education; and practice employing an equity-centered design thinking approach. Learn more about the program here.
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Envision Learning Partners (ELP) partners with education leaders to create engaging, rigorous, and equitable learning experiences. Grounded in over two decades of practice, we support schools to align instruction, assessment, and leadership for deeper learning and student success.
