NESSC School Redesign in Action

Reflex Design Collective uses a process called Equity Design, which helps organizations generate not only creative solutions to social challenges, but also much-needed collaborative partnerships between influential stakeholders and marginalized populations. In other words, we help organizations design *with*, not for, their communities in empowering ways.

Participants will learn the basic mindsets and skills of the equity design process through a hands-on workshop about a social challenge relevant to the education community. Participants will work collaboratively through a series of equity design exercises to explore the challenge while picking up skills and insights and having fun along the way. At the end of the training, participants will present low-fidelity prototypes of their design solutions. They will walk away with new mindsets and preliminary skills that can be deepened with further learning and practice.

Through this collaborative and hands-on workshop, participants will walk away with:
-Familiarity with the equity design process,
-Understanding of applications of equity design to the education world,
-Onboarding to design tools for future applications,
-Basic skills that can be honed further through training and practice,
-Improved team cohesion, new connections.

In this interactive workshop, participants will learn about key design elements of the highly personalized,
competency-based ACE Program at Brookline High. ACE Student Leaders will lead the participants in a circle with rounds that invite them to share learning experiences in which they felt ownership and self-direction. Students and ACE staff members will share out key design elements of the program that allow students
to have voice and choice in the program, including the role of student leaders, restorative justice, community building activities, Habits of Success, internships for academic credit, dual enrollment, home-grown online classes, and the competency-based design of the 6-week classes. This will be done in a station-rotation format where participants will spend five minutes learning about each design element. The last portion of the
session will invite participants to pick a design element that resonated for them and work in small groups to consult with ACE presenters about how they might adapt it to their school.

By the end of the session, participants will take one of the design elements and outline how they might adapt it to their school or program.

In this interactive workshop, participants will learn about key design elements of the highly personalized,
competency-based ACE Program at Brookline High. ACE Student Leaders will lead the participants in a circle with rounds that invite them to share learning experiences in which they felt ownership and self-direction. Students and ACE staff members will share out key design elements of the program that allow students
to have voice and choice in the program, including the role of student leaders, restorative justice, community building activities, Habits of Success, internships for academic credit, dual enrollment, home-grown online classes, and the competency-based design of the 6-week classes. This will be done in a station-rotation format where participants will spend five minutes learning about each design element. The last portion of the
session will invite participants to pick a design element that resonated for them and work in small groups to consult with ACE presenters about how they might adapt it to their school.

By the end of the session, participants will take one of the design elements and outline how they might adapt it to their school or program.

"In order to authentically engage in meaningful school and community change, it is essential to understand the historical and social context of a community to identify entry points. In this session, participants will learn about the journey of New Bedford Public Schools (NBPS), an urban school district in Massachusetts, as they worked to cultivate an approach to family engagement centered around developing authentic opportunities for building relationships and opportunities for educators, families, and students. Participants will leave with an understanding of key strategies and practices used to engage, educate, and empower all stakeholders.

Participants, in this session, will explore NBPS family engagement framework and learn strategies that can enable families to become more engaged, educated, and empowered. Community resources and supports to engage, educate, and empower families, students, and community members will be identified as well as strategies that effectively engage families in improving school climate and student outcomes. "

"The Sharon Academy team will begin by describing a specific element of our shift to a proficiency-based paradigm: seeking out and responding to feedback from colleges and universities around a truly proficiency-based transcript. We will explain how we engaged with all constituencies—especially with parents—around the conclusions and decisions we came to as a result of that research. Participants will have a chance to talk to each other in small groups about what authentic community engagement looks like (or could look like) at their schools, and some strategies for effectively engaging a school community around a transformational change.

Participants will learn how one school sought information from colleges to get a clear sense of receptivity to proficiency-based transcripts and the value they found in gathering and honoring feedback on school transformation initiatives with parents and other constituencies to help the community get on board."

In this session participants will learn how to use research-based NEASC CPS Standards which define best practices as a tool for self-reflection and peer review. Through a process of self-reflection based on evidence and in collaboration with stakeholders, schools can develop a vision for learning with specific and measurable goals for success. Participants will use collaborative practices to explore the NEASC CPS Standards for Accreditation, focusing on student learning. We will do a crosswalk with the Global Best Practices to see how to align school improvement efforts. Participants will experience elements of the self-reflection process including the review of student work, classroom observations, document review, survey data, stakeholder interviews, and peer review. With the Standards in mind and the understanding of the essential components of self-reflection, participants will develop an outline for a process to improve learning, achievement, and well-being for students.

Although we have operated in a competency-based world for over a decade and there is strong evidence that student-centered instruction and competency-based education are mutually reinforcing, convincing teachers, administrators, parents, and students to move away from the instructional status quo can be difficult. Mathematics classrooms are notorious for being less student-centered than other subjects. For change to occur, we believe that not only teachers but also administrators and the educational community at large need to recognize what effective student-centered instruction looks like.

In this hands-on session, activities designed to stimulate mathematical thinking, reasoning, and discourse will be shared. The instructional approaches support the 8 mathematical teaching practices and will be presented in the context of a mathematics classroom but are appropriate for all subjects. The strategies may also be effectively implemented regardless of where a district, school, or teacher is regarding implementation of competency-based education.

Participants will leave the session with a better understanding of what teachers do, what students do, and the characteristics of quality tasks in a student-centered math classroom. Techniques will be modeled that facilitate meaningful discourse and advance students’ ability to make sense of important mathematical ideas and relationships.