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.

• Learn about the transformative work being done through the partnership between ELP and the Colorado Department of Education on Performance Assessment
• Learn about the transformative work being done through the partnership between ELP and the Colorado Education Initiative on Capstone Projects

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:

1. “Every student should have a digital portfolio.”
2. “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.

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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

Learn more about the full event here

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!

Learn more and register here.

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!

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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.