Success in today’s and tomorrow’s economy is largely dependent on having a set of skills that are critical in today’s workplace. At Michigan Future, we’ve been using a framework articulated by learning scientists Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff for these skills, which they define as: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation, and confidence (the “six Cs“). There are other frameworks around non-cognitive skills or social emotional skills that are also helpful, though we haven’t seen others that combine both these human capacities and content so clearly. Kids equipped with the six Cs are prepared to be adaptive, lifelong learners, able to rebound from challenges, and successful in both postsecondary pursuits and in their careers. Building these skills for all kids needs to be the goal of the education system.

To define these vital skills as the purpose of education, across learning environments, for all kids, does not mean erasing all common content standards. But it does mean that content is no longer the focus to the exclusion of growing other skills. Fortunately, the type of learning environments that foster six C skill development also help kids to integrate their content learning more deeply. Instead of cutting drama to fund literacy tutors, for example, schools with a focus on six Cs will recognize the other skills that drama class nourishes in kids, and may build on the ability of a drama course to shore up weaker literacy skills.

Raising the standard

To reorganize schooling around critical skill building is not a minor tweak to education. It’s a major shift, and it is a raising of the bar as to the purpose of our public education system. It’s a shift: from teacher explains, to teacher facilitates; from defining what kids should know, to how kids should learn; from increasing standardization to increasing adaptability and individuality; from a system that requires teachers to control as much as possible, to a system that asks teacher to empower kids. Most critically, it’s a shift from a filtering system to a system that provides all kids with opportunities for growth.

This shift will of course take resources, but not simply putting money into delivering the same system better or distributing today’s funds more equitably.

On the ground, this shift would entail tens of thousands of Michigan teachers adopting new teaching practices. Districts would have to mandate and support their new approaches. The greater community would need to agree on alignment in the system around skill development as the goal, and the state would need to incent innovation and transformation.

A new type of schooling: what it is

The good news is that there are models for this type of learning, even within the current system. I’ve seen many in action, and while I’d say there isn’t definitive proof that one of these approaches is the most effective or most scalable, I do believe that project-based learning (PBL), inquiry-based education, integrated/thematic instruction, and expeditionary learning seem to have the greatest promise to foster simultaneously deep learning around content and critical skill development. What the schools doing this work tend to have in common, regardless of the pedagogical approach they’ve adopted, are:

• a unity of purpose from leadership on down;
• an emphasis on students having some direction over their learning;
• a recognition that the human brain does not learn in discrete content blocks, so learning is often be more cross-disciplinary than in traditional schooling;
• the pursuit of depth over breadth in understanding;
• a move to performance tasks or assessments to evaluate student learning, rather than standardized testing;
• the presence of strategies that increase student engagement—not simply by adding pop culture to the curriculum, but by asking students to wrestle with meaningful questions about the world and their role in it or to take on projects that have potential impact for others; and
• alignment of the school’s infrastructure to support the purpose—which can involve a rethinking of schedules, classroom arrangements, and collaborative teaching; student cohorting; changes to grading policy, credit requirements, and report cards; and student placement in internships, early college, and in educational settings outside the school building; among many other changes.

In these classrooms and schools, teachers have less control over exactly what material students learn, because they don’t just deliver content through readings, lectures, and homework assignments. Instead, they set up the conditions and experiences for learning and guide students along the path.

I was extremely lucky during my time here to interview a number of the people who are doing leading this work in Michigan–like Danielle Jackson in Detroit, Lisa Bergman and Lisa Diaz in Mt. Pleasant, and Kevin Polston and Carol Lautenbach at Godfrey-Lee–and around the country, like Sarah Fine at High Tech High. If you need some inspiration, and want to know how differently they imagine school, check out these and other What Now? interviews.

What it isn’t

Because in too many education environments I have seen tablets and responsive software explained as innovation, I want to note that in my view, none of the models that foster six C learning are dependent—except in a pandemic—on the use of new technology. Technology in schools should be viewed as a tool, like a chalkboard once was, or a pencil, or a book. Used wisely, technology can help students collaborate, or serve as a vehicle for creative projects, or help students think about communicating their findings. But massive technology upgrades are not the core way we will achieve broad six C learning, which depends much more on well-designed learning experiences and an authentic relationship with an engaged adult. Let’s not be lazy in defining adaptive technology deployment as a stand-in for actually personalized instruction.

Equity demands imagination

Finally, a word about innovation and equity. We know that innovation is vital to achieving educational equity, as our current system is failing to achieve equity at any scale. Yet I have seen first-hand what can happen when innovation is deployed first on poor and Black and brown children: before it has been well-tested, without adequate support (funding), or without any local, or nonwhite leadership. I have seen the utter failure of “innovative” models that were deployed first in a low-income, Black and brown neighborhood. The response by the system to the failure has been additional harm to children (blaming the kids or families and lowering the standard, or closing the school and causing immense disruption). Poor and nonwhite children can’t be guinea pigs, though they are the children who most need us to be innovative because they are the most poorly served by our current system.

While I don’t know exactly what policy changes will bring about the system I’m describing, I do know that in too many conversations, we are constrained by our inability to truly understand today’s reality, by a lack of imagination as to what school could be like, and by a shameful tolerance of the status quo, which so poorly invests in so many children. Today’s reality is marked by inequality and system failure, where harm to children is common. We lack urgency if our kids are in “good enough” schools, even though kids one town over are not. When we try to envision the future, too many of us can only go as far as imagining our favorite teacher from 7^th grade. Those excellent teachers may be inspirations, but we have to now ask how to get that kind of learning across the system, in all classrooms, for all of Michigan’s children.

Today is my last day with Michigan Future. I am offering a series of reflections on education in Michigan from my years of work understanding what the future, and the present, will demand of our children. While there have been many others, my most critical learning opportunities have been: our relationships with the school leaders that were a part of Michigan Future Schools; planning, with a series of remarkable educators, the Outsmarting the Robots event, where we tried to model the learning experiences we should be offering to kids; and each of the leaders, educators, and researchers I interviewed during the pandemic for What Now?–our video series on education. You can read my two earlier posts: What I want for Michigan’s children, and How better measures would leave no doubt about the need for school redesign.

The post The urgency of imagination for schooling redesign appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

At Michigan Future, there is a core assumption that underlies our approach to changing our state for the better, and today I want to reflect on how this assumption is relevant to our work in education. That assumption is the belief—based on countless observations—that what we measure matters. When you (whether a person, an organization, a community, a state) define a goal, you automatically begin to delineate what is inside and what is outside of the scope of your pursuit of that goal. And if its measurement is defined somewhat short of the true goal (maybe because the true goal is hard to measure, or you’ve confused one outcome with the real goal), the achievement will also fall short. In education, I think our system is designed around the wrong measures. If we realign around measures of what truly matters, we’ll see how desperately the whole system needs to be redesigned.

Measure What Matters

A quick illustration: early in our work with Michigan Future Schools, we as an organization assumed that college success (degree achievement) would naturally derive from college access. If a young person could enter college, we hoped she would succeed there. We know now that it’s far from true and the implications about how to better prepare her reach well back into that young person’s childhood. How you prepare her to succeed is a far vaster task than how you prepare her to get admitted. We weren’t the only organization to make this mistake, and fortunately, lots of organizations around the country have shifted their thinking and we’ve been learning alongside them. Because our goal was always college achievement, and our measure was always college persistence and graduation, we were able to learn why access wasn’t enough. If we’d defined our job as access only, we would never have known how far off the mark we were of achieving college degrees for students, and how differently they needed to be prepared.

So how we measure our success will guide the learning we undertake as we pursue a thorny goal. If we don’t measure something, we won’t focus on it. And if it’s hard to measure, it’s likely to end up outside of the work, even if it’s actually critically important.

In education, it’s become our belief that for too long, we’ve been narrowing the aperture through which we look at Michigan’s children and what education is supposed to be for them. By placing immense weight on standardized test results for the evaluation of our teachers, schools, and students, we shrink the importance of helping our children to foster absolutely critical skills through school. When success in adult life is actually about these critical skills—being able to work with others, communicate effectively, problem-solve, and adapt to new situations—we are widening the achievement gap if we focus our teaching of poor children on content that can be measured on tests, while affluent children have all sorts of opportunities to develop these more complex skills.

In their book Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools, Ira Socol, Pam Moran, and Chad Ratliff helped my brain crystallize something I’ve witnessed in our education system. They dive into the history of education in America and find that our education system was designed to filter, not to uplift. (We also discussed this in my What Now? interview with Ira and Pam.)

Filtering, Not Uplifiting

Filtering means creating barriers to find out who can overcome them, so that an ever-smaller group of people emerge at each level with the qualifications to run the show.

If you understand this, you’ll start to see it everywhere. This filtering was baked into the origins of our system, when our economy needed standardized laborers with a few standout leaders. And while the system also saw marvelous inventiveness and evolution in the mid-1900s, that inventiveness was often doled out on segregated lines. We did not achieve uplift across the entire system. Then, over the past 30 years, the system has regressed to work, overall, much like it did originally.

There’s an expression that every system is perfectly designed to get the results it’s getting.

In our system today:

• Almost four in ten Michigan families are struggling to afford basic necessities.
• Standardized tests results can be largely correlated with the income of families being tested.
• Even though the state has equalized its per pupil spending, affluent districts still spend thousands more dollars per student than poorer districts are able to do.
• At some high schools, college attendance and graduation is the norm. This is also largely correlated with parent income. (Play around with the Mi School Data to check the college progression data for the high schools you know to be wealthier or poorer, and be sure to pay attention to four-year degree attainment, which can vary tremendously.)
• At some colleges, graduation is expected. At others, fewer than 20 percent of kids get a degree.
• Middle-class and above jobs are predominantly the domain of people with four-year college degrees.
• Every aspect of this has a racial opportunity gap.

This is all despite the best efforts of the wonderful teachers and administrators that populate the system and who are driven by personal missions to support the personal development of the students they encounter.

In other words, our system keeps producing inequitable results because it is designed to get inequitable results. A single driven teacher cannot counter this system for more than a handful of kids.

We can’t be a prosperous state if opportunities for good jobs, good wages, good health, and stable lives are limited to people whose parents were successful before them.

So, even if the people in the system are good, the system has to change from top to bottom–starting by measuring what really matters.

After a number of years, I’m preparing to step away from my work at Michigan Future at the end of this month. I am offering a series of reflections on education in Michigan from my years of work understanding what the future, and the present, will demand of our children. While there have been many others, my most critical learning opportunities have been: our relationships with the school leaders that were a part of Michigan Future Schools; planning, with a series of remarkable educators, the Outsmarting the Robots event, where we tried to model the learning experiences we should be offering to kids; and each of the leaders, educators, and researchers I interviewed during the pandemic for What Now?–our video series on education.

The post How better measures would leave no doubt about the need for school redesign appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

After a number of years, I’m preparing to step away from my work at Michigan Future at the end of this month. I am offering a series of reflections on education in Michigan from my years of work understanding what the future, and the present, will demand of our children. While there have been many others, my most critical learning opportunities have been: our relationships with the school leaders that were a part of Michigan Future Schools; planning, with a series of remarkable educators, the Outsmarting the Robots event, where we tried to model the learning experiences we should be offering to kids; and each of the leaders, educators, and researchers I interviewed during the pandemic for What Now?–our video series on education.

This first reflection entry is my attempt to work upwards from what I want from school for my kids, to what the school has to be to provide that, to how the education system should be shaped to foster those types of schools. What I must say at the outset here is that what I want for my own kids, I want for all of Michigan’s children. I believe our system is providing this type of education in pockets, but is not currently designed to provide what I want for all, and our primary challenge in resolving this is one of system design. While I support more equitable school funding, I don’t think more money is enough.

What do I want from the school I send my children to?

• To prioritize at all times their social-emotional well-being; to observe them fully as humans; to address them and their learning as individuals and to find ways, within reason, to let their particular learning style come to work in the classroom.
• To have a vision for the type of skills that my kids need, and how to build those skills over time, knowing that skill-building is not something that happens in one year.
• To actively welcome and affirm my children’s identities. (This is somewhat automatic in our current system for my white, middle class, non-disabled girls. But needs to be true for students of color, indigenous students, immigrant students, poor, neurodivergent, LGBTQ+, and/or trans kids.)
• To make my kids feel that they have the ability to ask interesting questions and pursue the answers.
• To allow my kids to explore some of their own interests in the classroom and as the vehicle for learning. Not all the time, necessarily, but sometimes. (Frankly I also want them to learn that once in a while, they also have to just put their head down and do something not fun because it’s a part of making the day work for everyone else.)
• To help my kids develop a feeling of responsibility to their community, and a sense of their own power to be a positive contributor to their community.
• To provide a sense that my kids have the power to learn anything they put their minds to, and that they belong and are valued, and their particular contributions appreciated in their school community.
• To help my children see their peers as valued co-learners and develop a sense that kids can learn from each other as well. Authority figures are not the only teachers, and in fact, sometimes authority figures are wrong. They need practice understanding their own perspective and how others might have different, also valuable perspectives.
• To spend the majority of time on things that are engaging and educational, a little bit of time on things that are just about relationships and fun, possibly a little time on things that aren’t engaging but we just have to do, and just enough assessment to make sure the teacher understands where they are.
• To expose my children to a wide range of disciplines and modes of thinking, including creative expression through visual arts, music, etc. and meaningful scientific and sociological exploration, to a sufficient degree that they can figure out where their own interests lie.
• To encourage them to think critically about why the world is the way it is.

What are the priorities of and attributes of the school that will build what I care about?

• Because students do as teachers model, this is critical: teachers are learners. They are respected as creative, resourceful, and adaptive professionals. They model adaptive learning for their students. Their day and the structure of the school calendar gives them time to learn and design. They are invited to bring aspects of their own interests and enthusiasms into the classroom. Teachers are interested in why the world is the way it is.
• Teachers are skilled in recognizing the attributes, curiosities, and learning styles of their kids, to see them as individuals—even though they need to make some decisions to efficiently move the entire class along.
• Teachers are skilled in assessing students from observation and review of work. Teacher feedback for students and parents is in-depth and based in these observations and the opportunities for growth that matter most to the individual child.
• Teachers have freedom to alter how they facilitate their classroom to best engage the individual students in the classroom, while balancing that engagement against adequate progress on some of the basic skills and sets of knowledge that kids need.
• At least some of the learning is project-based, allowing kids to build deep expertise—expertise that outpaces the teacher’s—in areas of interest, and building the skills that come with having to focus on a specific topic for an extended period of time (the definition of “extended” varies for different grade levels).
• Timelines for learning are flexible and generous. I am not so concerned about the how quickly or at exactly what age in elementary school my kids become readers or learn about the three branches of government. I would sacrifice speed of skill-development or content acquisition any day for depth of understanding and for keeping at bay any resentment/feelings of, “I’m not good at this; I’ll never get this.” Slow learning is OK.
• The flow of the day and the classroom is designed around how kids’ brains and bodies need to work, including movement, play, rest, and creativity. This is as true for high schoolers as kindergarteners.
• Work is interdisciplinary. Teachers knit together the subjects we think of as siloed to reflect the real world and how brains best make meaning of learning.
• There are opportunities—not necessarily on every day or in every subject—to somehow engage authentically with the world outside the classroom, whether by interviewing experts, undertaking a community service project, or advocating for new speed bumps by the school.
• The school as a whole has a unified vision or philosophy about how learning happens there and how to support and empower teachers and students in a way that builds community, builds on strengths, and creates room for individuals.

What are the attributes of a system that fosters these types of schools?

• It articulates the goals as the development of critical skills or human capacities.
• The system incentivizes leaders who want to undertake a district transformation, and rewards districts whose schools have developed a unified strategic approach that includes skill development.
• The system articulates a streamlined set of content knowledge and/or standards that is required across the system, but provides flexibility about when those sets of knowledge must be the centerpiece of learning.
• It funds schools adequately to fund quality teachers and makes investments in ongoing learning and collaboration.
• It pays teachers a family-supporting wage that increases with expertise.
• It creates objective, research-based rubrics for districts who are embracing skills-based approaches to allow them to share meaningfully across districts and to provide evidence for what’s working, or not working.
• It takes advantage of some economies of scale to subsidize the expense of curricular pivots.
• The system overall assesses and shares what schools are doing and how well these strategies are working to contribute to the overall body of knowledge of how learning happens. (Through qualitative as well as quantitative measurement.)
• The system avoids adding requirements that are not essential to meeting the goals.
• It adds a layer of statewide “double checking” to ensure students and schools aren’t slipping through the cracks, with an emphasis on hidden inequities in opportunity.
• It helps align the teacher development system around the facilitation, observation, and lesson design skills that are described in the previous section.
• It provides support for the districts to care for student needs outside of the classroom, especially in higher-need districts or for higher-need kids.

The post What I want for Michigan’s children appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

Michigan Future is always trying to understand the reality of today’s economy and labor market. Our mission is to catalyze a future for Michigan where all families can thrive, which means that all families have the chance to earn a decent income that allows them to afford the necessities, save for emergencies, and help prepare for the future–retirement or education. Our new report, The Relationship Between Education and Income: Separating Fact from Myth to Inform State Strategy, is based on our desire to ground conversations about how to help Michigan families with an understanding of the labor market they actually live in. We want to make sure those conversations aren’t based in an image of Michigan’s workforce and booming middle class that we might carry with us from an earlier decade.

Don Grimes of the University of Michigan performed the data analysis in this report, which uses Bureau of Labor Statistics data about the 4.3 million jobs in Michigan, the median wage of their occupations, and the education those occupations require.

It’s important to note that this report uses data from 2019, which most people considered to be a strong economy. Yet, it was an economy where almost two in five Michigan households couldn’t afford basic necessities. We try to explain the disconnect.

Our basic findings are:

1. The majority of jobs in Michigan are in low-wage occupations. This preponderance of low-wage work is a structural characteristic of today’s economy.
2. More than half of Michigan payroll jobs are in occupations that don’t require any education beyond a high school diploma. This part of the labor market largely overlaps with those low-wage occupations.
3. Almost 80 percent of jobs in the higher-wage occupations require a B.A. or more. There are no guarantees to a good income, but a B.A. is the surest way to be prosperous. 
4. The highest-wage category is dominated by professional and managerial work that requires a B.A., not by STEM jobs exclusively or by blue collar jobs.
5. And lastly, while there is still a segment of the job market that requires a non-B.A., post-secondary credential and also pays in the middle wages, it’s a smaller segment than the popular imagination holds.

To see the details behind the data and the analysis, click here for the full report.

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We want to take a quick moment to re-introduce an effort that Michigan Future coordinated last year. Along with 23 leaders in economic and community development—from around the state and across the political spectrum—we called state leaders to action around the need to measure what really matters to Michigan families—rising incomes. We released the Rising Income for All website, where you can find data, stories, and maps to understand the true extent of struggle that is faced by so many Michigan families.

We’ve recently updated that website with fresh data from the recent report (the data is from 2019–meaning it represents our pre-pandemic economy). The overall picture hasn’t changed much. 38 percent of Michigan families still struggle to pay for basic necessities. And in all but four counties, the rate of families that struggle is more than 30 percent. In some counties, more than half of families can’t meet their needs with their income. It’s not a rural problem or an urban problem, or a problem “over there.” It’s a problem in all of our backyards, across our state.

So we encourage you to check out the site, look for the map of your region, investigate some of the root causes of this issue, review the call to action statement, and even read some stories about real people who work—often, they work a lot—and still struggle.

In addition, the Michigan Association of United Ways has create a great new web tool for people who want to really dig into the data. For any county in Michigan, you can explore how cost of living, demographics, families with children, workforce features, and access to digital technology—along with a range of other data points—impact or are affected by the percent of families who are struggling. This can help you get a fuller sense of the story in your own community.

We hope these tools help you think about how you can understand and advocate for changes in our communities and state that will help all Michigan families thrive.

The post Continuing to call for rising incomes for all appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

So today I’m delighted that we are releasing a conversation with Dale Robertson, the president and CEO of the Grand Rapids Public Museum, as our 11th and final What Now? video (Dale is also a board member here at Michigan Future). In addition to prioritizing accessible, curiosity-driven education at the museum, Dale was involved in the founding of the Public Museum School, a partnership between the museum, Grand Rapids Public Schools, the Kendall College of Art and Design, and the ed school at Grand Valley. This unique partnership brings a number of disciplines and ways of thinking and learning into GRPS, and was acknowledged as one of ten winners around the nation of the XQ: The Super Schools Project for “reimagining education” in 2016.

The museum’s approach to learning is driven by some of the natural values and mindsets of curators. And there are two that I think are so crucial for us to understand and design into all learning environments.

The first mindset is one that expects the learning to be driven by the sincere curiosity of the learner, and not by the performance of the educator. A physical interaction with an object drives questioning, which drives exploration, which drives learning. The educators at the museum may not all be experts in every single artifact in the museum’s collection. And so they embrace a type of facilitation and guiding that is open to broader learning, rather than a proscribed set of facts and figures. We believe this is the type of engaging learning that builds skills as well as knowledge in young people.

Second, the learning is contextual and tends to be cross-disciplinary. An item in a museum has stories to tell in science, history, society, and often, math and language arts. Human brains don’t think in discrete subject matters and research tells us that learning that creates room for more integrated understanding is “stickier.” We learn more deeply and retain more.

This interview is a part of our What Now? video interview series on education.

What Now? asks: how should we navigate through this pandemic, and ensure a more prosperous Michigan in our recovery? Click the icon for other videos in this series.

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The majority of jobs in Michigan don’t pay a middle class wage

In the first chart, you can see that Michigan’s job market is not dominated by good jobs with middle class wages. Instead, 59 percent of Michigan jobs in the strong economy of 2019 do not pay enough to put a family of three in the lower middle class, or $47,026. (The middle class standards we adopted were calculated by the Research Seminar at Quantitative Economics at U of M, based on a methodology adopted by the Pew Research Center and cost-of-living adjusted for Michigan. These measures represent income thresholds for a family of three.) Only 20 percent of jobs pay between $47,026 and $70,539. And 21 percent of jobs pay enough, $70,539, to support a family of three in the upper middle class or above.

Most jobs that pay middle class wages require a B.A.

We overlaid the same data with information from the Michigan Bureau of Labor Market Information and Strategic Initiatives from 2018, about the share of jobs in each occupation that require a bachelor’s degree.

The second chart lists major occupations in increasing order by share of jobs in that occupation that require a B.A. (the blue dot). For each occupation, we also show the share of jobs that pay over $47,026 (orange dot) and the share of jobs that pay over $70,539 (yellow dot)–in other words, the share of jobs that would pay for a family of three to enter the lower middle class, or to live in the upper middle class or above. For example, in food preparation and service jobs, zero jobs require a B.A., nine percent pay over $47,026, and only two percent pay over $70,539.

This chart shows starkly what we’ve been calling our “two-tier economy.” The difference between the tiers? The possession of a B.A. On the left, you can see 12 occupation categories where very few jobs require a B.A. (in each occupation, less than five percent require a B.A., with many at or near zero). Then, between the categories of “sales and related” and “legal,” there’s a huge jump. From 4.3 percent of jobs requiring a B.A. to 65.4 percent. And you see a similar jump in earnings.

This shows very clearly that the fact that almost two in five Michigan families can’t afford basic necessities isn’t because two in five Michigan adults is irresponsible, lazy, or doesn’t value work. The people earning lower wages are earning lower wages because a preponderance of jobs in our economy simply do not pay well.

As we continue to look at data on the economy, we continue to learn more about how the fundamental structure of our economy leaves so many families struggling to pay the bills. There are simply too many jobs in our labor market that don’t pay a middle-class wage.

The post A two-tier economy in pictures appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

In the conversation we’re featuring today, one of our guests, Ira Socol, who has taken a historical look at education, explains that our system and many of its features were originally designed to filter students out at every level. In other words, from an historical perspective, our system is not designed to lift all students. Its tradition is not equity. This doesn’t mean that educators haven’t been striving to upend those original intents for decades–but they are fighting against a system that still carries many of those historical elements: to filter, not to elevate all. In this context, Colin’s reminder shouldn’t be a surprise.

I interviewed Ira alongside Pam Moran. The two are co-authors (with Chad Ratliff) of Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools. Their book is a motivating read, blending research and anecdotes from their own time as the leadership of Albermarle County Public Schools (Pam as Superintendent, and Ira as the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer), for people who are tired of the filtering traditions of schooling. I found that it puts forward a thesis about what is necessary to rebel against those antiquated designs still baked into our system: to radically embrace innovation requires saying yes to innovation all the time, and inviting students to be at the center of it. This mentality is about creating a pathway for every single child. Enjoy!

This interview is a part of our What Now? video interview series on education.

What Now? asks: how should we navigate through this pandemic, and ensure a more prosperous Michigan in our recovery? Click the icon for other videos in this series.

The post A Pathway for Every Child: What Now? Ep. 10 with Pam Moran and Ira Socol appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

Furthermore–this interview with Lisa Bergman, the Executive Director, and Lisa Diaz, a board member, is a demonstration of creative, productive collaboration. Often, our best learning comes when we tackle questions as a community, push each other, ask questions, and wrestle through, knowing there’s no “right” answer. Again, when I reflect on what Lisa and Lisa demonstrate in this conversation as thought partners to each other, I think about how they are essentially modeling inquiry-based education for their students. For them, the inquiry is how to make school richer and more meaningful for their students, by allowing their students to show up in their own identity, take risks, and pursue the answers to the questions that interest them. You can imagine how exciting it might feel to be a teacher in this school, where inquiry and innovation are modeled by the leaders.

This interview isn’t just full of abstraction–but examples. For instance, the school’s wonder workshops are occasional projects where each student becomes an expert on a topic and then shares that expertise with classmates. The topics, from pokemon to horses and anything real (or imagined) in between, allow students the opportunity to shape their learning, build confidence from their growing expertise, respond to feedback, and learn more about the other students in their community.

I hope you enjoy hearing about this, alongside other tangible strategies the school has put in place to allow students to grow in wonder and in skill.

This interview is a part of our What Now? video interview series on education.

What Now? asks: how should we navigate through this pandemic, and ensure a more prosperous Michigan in our recovery? Click the icon for other videos in this series.

The post Wonder Workshops: Bringing Identity and Inquiry Into Schooling: What Now? Ep. 9 with Lisa Bergman and Lisa Diaz appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

What emerged is the Saline Area Schools Learner Profile, which takes the form of a compass. The cardinal directions are the key skills that Saline now organizes its learning around: collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity. Between these directions are the tools the district leverages, and around the outside, are the eight attributes that they’d like to build in every Saline graduate. In our interview, we discuss how the district has realigned itself to focus on skill-building in kids, what real rigor means, how they know what’s working, and how the system could make innovation easier for districts everywhere.

Eventually we turned to the hoped-for emergence from the pandemic. I found Scot’s concern about how we’re going to respond as kids return to school insightful, worrisome, and important. He wants to challenge the framing of “learning loss,” saying, “We’ve learned a lot, but it’s different learning.” He worries about the response being more seat time, more structure, diagnostics, and “beating the pandemic learning loss” with antiquated approaches that demotivate students. This section especially is a must-listen. Enjoy.

Scot’s interview is a part of our What Now? video interview series on education.

What Now? asks: how should we navigate through this pandemic, and ensure a more prosperous Michigan in our recovery? Click the icon for other videos in this series.

The post A District In Alignment: What Now? Ep. 8 with Scot Graden appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..