The pandemic forced the greatest beta test in education history—billions of students pushed home and online. And while there were obvious devastating effects with which we are still coming to terms, there were also plenty of innovations that sprung from the experience. Many of those ideas and techniques are reflected in this year’s crop of finalists for the Milken-Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition (EBPC) according to John Gamba, Penn GSE’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence. 

Catalyst @ Penn GSE—a global center for education innovation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE)—and the Michael and Lori Milken Family Foundation announced the selections this week. The finalists’ ventures are focused on some of the biggest challenges in education, including college access and persistence, social-emotional learning, literacy, adaptive learning, and more. 

Considered the most prestigious and well-funded competition of its kind, the EBPC attracts innovative education ventures from around the world. To date, the EBPC has awarded over $1.8 million dollars in cash and prizes. Winners and finalists have gone on to secure more than $180 million in funding.

The 2023 EBPC finalists were selected through a democratized judging process that includes practitioners, investors, entrepreneurs, researchers, and more. The finals will take place Wednesday, October 4, and are open to EDTECH WEEK 2023 participants with free live streaming also available (registration required).

The following ventures are the 2023 EBPC finalists:

• College Guidance Network is a unique content platform with live programming plus on-demand resources designed to support school counselors, helping students and families navigate high school to post-secondary.
• EdVisorly, Inc. is building a nationwide community college-to-university transfer platform, empowering aspiring community college students to connect with universities to boost enrollment success.
• Skizaa Education helps education leaders make real-time data-driven decisions by collecting and analyzing data from last-mile schools, saving more than 90 days.
• Story Shares is a mission-driven publisher focused on building a relevant, culturally inclusive, reflective, engaging, and inspirational global library filled with choices that transform striving readers into avid ones.
• Taleemabad is an all-day learning ecosystem that improves student learning outcomes, upskills teachers through digital training, increases admissions for low-cost private schools, and standardizes classroom experience through structured pedagogy.
• ThinkHumanTV is a social and emotional learning platform that leverages streaming media on sites such as Netflix and Disney+ to teach young people the science of emotions.
• Unlocked Labs empowers and employs justice-impacted individuals to design and build technology that promotes human flourishing and enables decarceration.

The finals will take place Wednesday, October 4, and are open to EDTECH WEEK 2023 participants with free live streaming also available (registration required).Find more on educationcompetition.org or follow the conversation on Twitter: @CatalystPennGSE and #MilkenPennGSE.

5 Sessions to Bookmark

Innovating Education with Esports: A Forum for Sharing Ideas

Sunday, June 25, 9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.

Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Franklin 1/2

Join leaders from the Pennsylvania Scholastic Esports League and Garden State Esports for discussion, collaboration, and networking for all those involved in scholastics esports. Discussion will range from beginner level topics to deep dives into the impact esports is having on social emotional learning and career and technical education.

Building the Future of 5G Innovation for K-12 Education

Monday, June 26, 8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.

Pennsylvania Convention Center, 201C

Top education leaders from suburban, urban and rural school districts will share their thoughts on immersive technology solutions harnessing the power of 5G to enhance the K-12 learning experience. Attendees will hear how education leaders across the country are creating access to future workforce opportunities for underrepresented student populations.

CTO Forum

Tuesday, June 27, 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Liberty Ballroom

Join CoSN, ATLIS and ISTE to convene the CTO Forum at ISTELive23. This session is designed for school and district leaders to explore essential abilities for successful leadership. This interactive session will allow participants to share best practices and also learn from colleagues through rich discussion. If you are a CTO, superintendent, head of curriculum, technology, finance or a building leader, this is where you need to be during ISTE.

The new normal for post-pandemic classrooms continues to be a mixed bag. There was a ton of learning loss and missed experiences, especially when it came to hands-on lab time. At the same time, there was a surge of teacher innovation, student agency, and new remote tools and processes to compensate. 

For the past 13 years, Ann Woo, Head of Corporate Citizenship at Samsung, has been paving the way for students at US public middle and high schools to embark on solving real-world problems with STEM-based solutions through Samsung’s Solve for Tomorrow national STEM competition. This year’s contests concluded with three national winners who created inspiring STEM solutions tackling their community issues of pollinator collapse, veterans’ PTSD and heat stroke in sports. Their projects should be an inspiration for any STEM educator. Click through for the whole conversation. Below are some edited highlights:

ESN: How has the topic and mission of STEM changed post-pandemic?

AW: During COVID, it was really challenging for students to deeply engage in STEM classes—there was no lab period or any hands-on engagement quite in the same way. Virtual lab time and real lab time, hands-on learning was a very different paradigm for them. And so teachers have really had to make up for that time in different ways. 

[Editor’s note: Welcome to our new series, The New Librarian. In this series, we will be profiling innovative and award-winning library media specialists who will share their favorite tools, lessons, and advice. If you are or know a librarian we should write about, send a note to eullman@eschoolmedia.com.]  

As innovation coordinator for instructional technology, information & library media at Parkway School District in St. Louis, Missouri, Bill Bass has long demonstrated his commitment to 21st-century learning. He believes that the only way to deliver a dynamic student learning experience is by empowering his librarians to be leaders in everything they do.

Bass has earned numerous awards, including being named an NSBA “20 to Watch” and an ISTE Making IT Happen award. He was recently elected ISTE president for 2019.

Bass says one of the biggest things he offers his librarians is that of a constant voice advocating for them as leaders when it comes to literacy, instruction, and technology. He urges administrators to think differently about the way libraries are used and the role of the librarian in the digital age.

Here are some ways he advocates for his librarians.

Listen to empower.
“As a district administrator, my role is to set priorities and vision for our program while helping to navigate new challenges,” he says. “Since this means different things in different buildings, I must constantly listen to and intentionally garner feedback from each piece of the greater community to be effective.”

To him, listening means creating multiple opportunities for professional learning for librarians so they can stay in front of trends and be able to provide answers when students, teachers, and parents come to them for help and support.

From the moment Bass stepped into his current role, he started asking his librarians, “What does it mean to be a librarian in the digital age?” While it may not be a question with a single answer, Bass believes every librarian should readily have his or her own answer.

(Next page: More ways to empower your librarians)

As an elementary educator for most of my career, I’ve had the privilege of working with a variety of learners—from inner-city students in North Carolina to university-level students in Chicago—but I found my true calling as the librarian at Hubbard Woods Elementary in Winnetka, Illinois. I’ve been called the “Willy Wonka of school librarians” because I transformed our traditional library into what I call an IDEA (Innovation, Design, Engineering, and Art) Lab complete with flexible furniture, robotics, engineering tools, iPads, laptops, and sewing machines.

To get started, I used my experience as a classroom educator to create a cross-curricular library curriculum that supports classroom teachers’ lessons, marrying the idea of books and bytes. Daily activities include robot bowling, using robots to paint pictures, and filming and producing music videos staring (you guessed it) robots!

For other districts that want to turn their libraries into IDEA labs, here are some insights into how we made it all happen.

4 steps to turning your space into a 21st-century library

1. Create a dream binder. In 2015, I received a lump sum of funding to help transform our traditional library into a flexible, collaborative makerspace. One of the conditions of the funding was that we needed to spend it in a certain amount of time, so we had four to five months to make some big decisions.

(Next page: More tips on turning your library into a makerspace)

In a rapidly changing world, educators have been forced to self-examine and come to terms with approaches that are inefficient and irrelevant–from outmoded ways of setting up classrooms to equating school success solely on standardized metrics. Innovation and transformation in schools can’t happen unless we tackle entrenched practices and mindsets in bold and specific ways.

How can we best harness the positive aspects of technology to improve student learning and the schools we work in?

As a first step, we need to disrupt the status quo that’s embedded in the education system by developing new ways of looking at things that transform the world. We create permanent change only by identifying and communicating what shifts need to occur as well as illustrating how effective these approaches are at improving education. When we apply principals of efficacy to the Pillars of Digital Leadership, we’re well on our way toward integrating technology with confidence that learning will be transformed.

The 7 pillars of digital leadership

Pillar 1: Student engagement, learning, and achievement: Enhancing essential skill sets that society demands
Schools should reflect real life, allowing and encouraging students to apply what they’ve learned through the tools they use outside of school. Communication, collaboration, creativity, media literacy, global connectedness, problem solving, and critical thinking are vital to success. Within a solid pedagogical approach, digital tools and social media allow students to create artifacts of learning that demonstrate conceptual mastery and, when framed within an structure such as The Rigor and Relevance Framework, cultivate learner autonomy.

Which technology, implemented in which specific and measurable ways, drives skill acquisition and conceptual understanding within that objective? This means aligning actual results that show improvement in terms of engagement, learning, and achievement evidenced by a Return on Instruction.

Pillar 2: Professional growth and development: Leveraging tools that allow pursuit of passions
Traditional forms of professional development (PD) such as “sit and get,” one-size-fits-all, and trainings lacking accountability have proven obsolete. Digital tools now allow for professional learning to take place anytime, anywhere, and with anyone. Personal learning networks allow educators to acquire resources, access knowledge, receive feedback, and connect with others. Digital badges are an exciting way to acknowledge both formal and informal learning.

To build efficacy in this pillar, we ask, what are clearly identified areas of needed growth and what measurable solutions will address development? And, how do we measure the impacts of PD on students and student learning?

(Next page: Re-envisioning learning spaces, improving communications, and more)

A new report from iNACOL examines five key issues that could help improve the future of U.S. K-12 education and increase competency-based education, according to the authors.

In the report, the authors describe how the traditional education system isn’t designed to generate the goals educators and policymakers have set for it.

Ten primary flaws in the current education system–including that the traditional system is time-based, is built on a fixed mindset, and uses academic grading practices that can often send misleading signals about what students know–hinder progress.

But those flaws can be corrected if the U.S. education system is redesigned around the goal of student mastery, as outlined in the report. iNACOL offers specific action steps, policy strategies, and recommendations for enabling personalized, competency-based education.

Through the report, the group aims to inspire state policymakers, including governors, state legislators, state boards of education, state school chiefs, and state policy staff with a vision for transformation.

(Next page: Five issues and corresponding policy steps to move to personalized, competency-based education)

]]> 188079 https://www.eschoolnews.com/educational-leadership/2018/01/08/not-enough-moonshots-taken-education/ Mon, 08 Jan 2018 07:00:07 +0000 https://www.eschoolnews.com/?p=187788 I am extremely lucky to work in an organization that sets enormously high standards and one that accepts disequilibrium as part of the change process. I'm also well aware that this is uncommon in most school districts. Twenty-first-century challenges need 21st-century approaches; however, school leaders are often quick to adopt minor improvements to existing systems in lieu of larger changes that would upset the status quo. What is needed in the current state of education are more moonshots. What is moonshot thinking? Moonshot thinking is going 10x bigger or better. While most organizations try to improve by 10 percent, organizations that think outside the box and strive for 10x better tend to approach problems in drastically different ways and—more times than not—achieve 10x better results. Why is moonshot thinking needed in education? Classroom teachers and school leaders are hampered by poor educational policies at all levels, cash-hungry textbook publishers, and a school system that is often slow to adopt innovations. If we are truly going to prepare students for their futures, it is time we all start thinking 10x bigger. At Garnet Valley, we have begun to do just that with several of our most recent projects. Moonshot thinking has enabled our medium-size district to achieve extraordinary results within the last few years and all without increasing our budget. Next page: How has moonshot thinking helped districts improve? Since 2015, Moonshot thinking has: ● Provided every student and staff member access to technology every second of every day with the purposeful use of that technology remaining in the hands of our teachers ● Redesigned all of our libraries, computer labs, and makerspaces to become integrated learning spaces rather than specialty-area classrooms ● Developed a robust, personalized professional-learning program that leverages blended and online opportunities for our teachers ● Replaced an outdated and unresponsive student information system with one that fully integrates our productivity suite, student databases, and learning management system ● Successfully doubled, then redoubled, our infrastructure in each of the last three years to provide our students and staff a fast, reliable, secure connection ● Developed an online and blended learning program to give our students more control and options for their learning ● Given our teachers full ownership of what they teach, as well as a chance to personalize their curriculum through the use of open education resources]]>

I am extremely lucky to work in an organization that sets enormously high standards and one that accepts disequilibrium as part of the change process. I’m also well aware that this is uncommon in most school districts. Twenty-first-century challenges need 21st-century approaches; however, school leaders are often quick to adopt minor improvements to existing systems in lieu of larger changes that would upset the status quo. What is needed in the current state of education are more moonshots.

What is moonshot thinking?

Moonshot thinking is going 10x bigger or better. While most organizations try to improve by 10 percent, organizations that think outside the box and strive for 10x better tend to approach problems in drastically different ways and—more times than not—achieve 10x better results.

Why is moonshot thinking needed in education?

Classroom teachers and school leaders are hampered by poor educational policies at all levels, cash-hungry textbook publishers, and a school system that is often slow to adopt innovations. If we are truly going to prepare students for their futures, it is time we all start thinking 10x bigger. At Garnet Valley, we have begun to do just that with several of our most recent projects. Moonshot thinking has enabled our medium-size district to achieve extraordinary results within the last few years and all without increasing our budget.

Next page: How has moonshot thinking helped districts improve?

]]> 187788 https://www.eschoolnews.com/district-management/2017/11/30/trends-2018-education-industry/ Thu, 30 Nov 2017 07:00:27 +0000 https://www.eschoolnews.com/?p=187372 The education industry saw so many notable, significant changes this past year–from an increased focus on augmented reality and other visual technologies to make learning come alive, to the “Googlification” of the classroom with Chromebooks and Google education apps becoming staples–we’ve reached the point where education technology is now the norm, not a luxury. ]]>

The education industry saw so many notable, significant changes this past year–from an increased focus on augmented reality and other visual technologies to make learning come alive, to the “Googlification” of the classroom with Chromebooks and Google education apps becoming staples–we’ve reached the point where education technology is now the norm, not a luxury.

This makes looking ahead at 2018 exciting because there is so much opportunity for districts and educators to elevate their curriculum with innovation right at their fingertips. On top of that, there is promise for continued education outside of the classroom; just look at Google’s recent $1B pledge over the next five years to help train Americans for jobs in technology. Called Grow with Google, the program targets not only teachers and students, but also local business, job seekers, developers and startups to provide online training initiatives and programs to prepare for tech-focused careers.

The most hopeful potential impact of 2018’s edtech landscape is the opportunity for nurturing skills that will help students succeed in the future of work. Considering how robots could replace 38 percent of jobs in the U.S. over the next 15 years, it’s absolutely vital that we’re arming today’s students, from as early as kindergarten-age, with the ability to succeed once they enter the workforce.

Let’s examine four key trends that are expected to shape the education industry this coming year:

1. Maker spaces will gain popularity in K-12 schools in the U.S.

President Trump’s initiative allotting $2 million per year to make coding a priority in U.S. schools will give way to an increased focus on STEM and coding in schools, reinvigorating the “maker movement.” As the maker movement continues to make its way into the mainstream, a growing number of K-12 schools in the U.S. will build dedicated maker spaces in their districts–helping more students than ever to obtain hands-on experience in STEM, tinkering and technology.

This trend is already being experienced globally. In China, for example, the government is committed to building new maker spaces in schools–to the tune of more than 5,000 new maker spaces opening in schools in 2017, alone.

2. The edtech industry will move from selling physical products to selling services.

While teachers already understand the importance of branching out from the traditional textbook, regulatory roadblocks make it difficult to get approval from administrators to purchase physical edtech products to incorporate into lesson plans. Considering this, edtech companies will likely move away from developing physical products, towards selling services (think: content, curriculum ideas) that can make even the driest subjects fun and interesting.

(Next page: 2 more exciting education industry trends for 2018)

]]> 187372 https://www.eschoolnews.com/district-management/2017/10/13/6-approaches-innovation-essa/ Fri, 13 Oct 2017 07:00:05 +0000 https://www.eschoolnews.com/?p=186662 The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is a marked departure from its much-maligned predecessor, No Child Left Behind, and it puts much more power in states' hands. Now, a new guide is helping ensure states harness that power to prioritize innovation. Part of the challenge in sustaining innovation lies in the need for states to go beyond stacking new metrics on existing policies, according to The State Innovator's Toolkit: A guide to successfully managing innovation under ESSA. Instead, they will have to think differently about what innovation means in their schools and how they can reimagine processes to support such progress. But because some of NCLB's structures remain intact under ESSA, states could attempt to innovate but remain stuck in the same cycle. The brief outlines a series of frameworks to help states think about how their systems can successfully manage innovation under ESSA. Innovation brings risks, and while some education leaders embrace those risks and celebrate the lessons found in failure, other leaders are more hesitant and wish to avoid failure, thus leaving their schools in the same cycles. Next page: 4 principles and 6 approaches to innovation In the brief, authors Julia Freeland Fisher and Thomas Arnett outline 4 key prinicples to help states and education leaders manage innovation by understanding how existing organizational structures work with or against innovation. Princple 1: Pursue both sustaining and disruptive innovations Princple 2: Understand your RFP and its limitations Princple 3: Deploy tools of cooperation Princple 4: Organize the right teams to pursue innovation Fisher and Arnett also describe six approaches states should consider when they think about innovation--three focusing on disruptive innovations under ESSA and three that summarize promising paths to supporting sustaining innovations. Disruptive innovation: 1. Use Education Innovation and Research grants to address nonconsumption: This grant program is a competitive grant for funding innovative, evidence-based programs designed to improve attainment and achievement among high-need students. Many schools and districts will be tempted to pursue these grants to improve existing programs in their current system. But states and districts can also deploy funds to foster disruptive educational approaches with entirely new business models. 2. Use Direct Student Services grants to create course access programs: States could use these dollars for course access programs, in an effort to ensure that all students have access to high-quality coursework. 3. Authorize preparation academies to rethink teacher preparation models: ESSA’s teacher and school leader preparation academies provision offers another promising opening to rethink the existing business model guiding another aspect of the education system: adult learning.]]>

The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is a marked departure from its much-maligned predecessor, No Child Left Behind, and it puts much more power in states’ hands. Now, a new guide is helping ensure states harness that power to prioritize innovation.

Part of the challenge in sustaining innovation lies in the need for states to go beyond stacking new metrics on existing policies, according to The State Innovator’s Toolkit: A guide to successfully managing innovation under ESSA. Instead, they will have to think differently about what innovation means in their schools and how they can reimagine processes to support such progress.

But because some of NCLB’s structures remain intact under ESSA, states could attempt to innovate but remain stuck in the same cycle. The brief outlines a series of frameworks to help states think about how their systems can successfully manage innovation under ESSA.

Innovation brings risks, and while some education leaders embrace those risks and celebrate the lessons found in failure, other leaders are more hesitant and wish to avoid failure, thus leaving their schools in the same cycles.

(Next page: 4 principles and 6 approaches to innovation)

]]> 186662 https://www.eschoolnews.com/featured/2017/02/02/redesigning-learning-spaces/ Thu, 02 Feb 2017 07:00:35 +0000 http://www.eschoolnews.com/?p=183454 The U.S. Department of Education and the Illinois State Board of Education had already recognized our schools in Kildeer Countryside ... Read more]]>

The U.S. Department of Education and the Illinois State Board of Education had already recognized our schools in Kildeer Countryside Community Consolidated School District 96 in southern Lake County, Illinois, for academic excellence. Still, our district administrators recognized several years ago that significant changes needed to be made to our classrooms, and better technology needed to be acquired, in order to help our students develop the skills mandated by today’s educational standards including effective communication and collaboration.

To that end, we turned our attention to rethinking and redesigning our classroom learning spaces to fit the 21^st century needs of our students.

Asking the Right Questions, First

We started by asking ourselves an essential question: “What does 21^st century learning in a classroom look and sound like in a district committed to high levels of learning for all students?”

Students aren’t the only important component in the equation—we had to focus on teacher and technology needs, too. We also asked “What would teachers have to know and be able to do in order for students to think and interact in new ways?” And if we turned the tables and we were observing students in a cutting-edge learning environment, what would we see and hear?  And in what ways would technology be a catalyst or support for this type of engaged, forward-looking teaching and learning?

We knew we had obstacles to overcome: heavy furniture, the inability to collaborate with multimedia tools, students in rows led from the front of the classroom, and even more compelling, there was an obvious lack of what we called a differentiated learning atmosphere.

Taking Learning Walks

Once we acknowledged our obstacles, we really stepped into high gear.  We took teachers, administrators and school board members to other districts for learning walks. We formed a committee of these stakeholders as well as community members to evaluate our needs. We met with our technology team to plan and design multimedia infrastructure and as well as expected best practices. Then we gathered feedback from all parties and redesigned future classroom learning spaces using this compiled data.

Our data in year one showed that 1.) Teachers love lots (LOTS!) of board space; 2.) Students collaborate in a multimedia environment throughout the classrooms and 3.) Mobile furniture maximizes group flexibility and minimizes the loss of instructional time.

So now that the past has met the present, here’s what else we learned:

(Next page: 5 critical lessons learning redesigning learning spaces)

]]> 183454 https://www.eschoolnews.com/classroom-innovations/2017/01/26/effective-teaching-harvard/ Thu, 26 Jan 2017 07:00:26 +0000 http://www.eschoolnews.com/?p=183348 [Editor’s note: This post by Alan November, written exclusively for eSchool Media, is part of a series of upcoming articles by ... Read more]]>

[Editor’s note: This post by Alan November, written exclusively for eSchool Media, is part of a series of upcoming articles by this notable education thought leader. Check back soon for the next must-read post!]

Harvard professor David Malan has managed to pull off a neat trick: His Computer Science 50 course is the most popular course at both Harvard and Yale. By examining his success, we can learn some important lessons about effective teaching.

CS50 assumes no prior knowledge or skill in computer programming, yet it’s extremely demanding. Despite its rigor, CS50 regularly attracts thousands of students each year. While some aspire to become software engineers, others enroll just to experience the course.

Why is Professor Malan’s course so popular, even with students who don’t plan a career in computer science—and even though it requires a lot of work? Here are three keys to Malan’s effective teaching that I think all schools everywhere should apply, from K-12 schools to colleges and universities.

• Strengthen the social side of learning.
• Teach students to self-assess.
• Provide a public audience to inspire students to invent.

Imagine teaching a course with 800+ students at Harvard and another 400+ students at Yale with an extremely high level of rigor and creativity. The course is available for credit at either university, and anyone around the world can take a noncredit version at no cost through the open courseware platform edX.

Learn from the best innovations in education! Join education thought leader Alan November in Boston July 26-28 for his 2017 Building Learning Communities edtech conference, where hundreds of K-12 and higher-education leaders from around the globe will gather to discuss the world’s most successful innovations in education.

My son, Dan, took the course. When he first signed up for CS50, it is fair to say he was not in the habit of choosing the most demanding courses on campus. But Dr. Malan’s unique learning culture and sense of responsibility placed on the students helped Dan to discover a passion for “learning how to learn” and thinking about design—skills he can apply to manage his learning in any situation, from other courses to his professional growth. Two years later, he is still on fire—and he will graduate in May to pursue a career in computer science.

I was so intrigued by the impact CS50 had on my son that I started to explore Malan’s keys to effective teaching that we can export to any educational setting. After many conversations with Professor Malan and Dan, I have identified at least three processes that we can apply across the curriculum at all grade levels.

1. Learning is social, and students are hardwired to work together to solve problems.

One of the aspects that makes his course unique is its culture. Malan pays as much attention to his students’ social experience in the class as he does to their academic experience, so that his students feel like they are part of a learning community.

For instance, he organizes several events throughout the semester that bring students together, such as “hackathons” and weekly lunches every Friday on the Harvard campus. His teaching assistants also host “office hours” every Monday through Thursday night from 9 p.m. to midnight, where students can gather over pizza to discuss problem sets or ask questions—and these nightly events routinely draw upwards of 300 students.

“I went to office hours four nights a week,” Dan recalls. “That was the only way I could make it through the course.”

When Dan would arrive, the TAs would ask how far he had gotten in that week’s problem set and how confident he was in his work. Then, they would put him in a group with other students at his same comfort level. “There was never an issue finding a group that was at your pace,” he says.

By making the learning fun and social, while not sacrificing rigor, Malan has found that his students give their best effort.

“We hope that by creating these somewhat special and unusual experiences for students, we can expect more from them,” he explains. “If we are perceived as meeting them halfway, we hope they will meet us halfway as well and will get as much out of the course as they can.”

Making the learning a shared, social experience not only motivates students to do their best work; it also helps them learn from each other. And when students learn from their peers, they’re apt to learn more effectively.

There is a phenomenon known as the “curse of knowledge,” in which teachers who have thorough knowledge of a subject sometimes have trouble reaching students who are new to the material, because they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be in that position. Students, on the other hand, are more likely to empathize or relate to their peers who are struggling.

Dan can attest to the enormous value of the student community that Malan has crafted.  Dan found the highly social office hours especially helpful, because they gave him a chance to discuss the problem sets with his peers in the same situation—and inevitably he would see the topic in a fresh new light.

How many opportunities are there in schools to craft various social settings for students to come together outside of class to work with peers? Many schools are now converting libraries—where students traditionally cannot raise their voice—into learning commons where there are spirited debates among students as they study together.

(Next page: 2 other processes to apply across curriculum)

]]> 183348 https://www.eschoolnews.com/district-management/2016/12/30/1-questions-new-teacher-answer/ Fri, 30 Dec 2016 07:00:25 +0000 http://www.eschoolnews.com/?p=183099 Teaching for the 21st century looks a lot different. Here's what admins -- and teachers -- need to know for job interviews and beyond.]]>

[Editor’s note: This story, originally published on June 13th of this year, was our #1 most popular story of the year. Happy holidays, and thank you for tuning into our 2016 countdown!]

Not long ago, the leadership team of a school district I was working with asked me: “If you were going to hire a new teacher, what would you ask in the interview?” They were concerned that hiring teachers with the right skills now can save a district a lot of money in staff development later. Moreover, they wanted to hire teachers who would be open minded about changes to come. The problem is to balance the reality of today’s pressure for test scores and required teacher evaluation with the changes that can be anticipated during the next two decades.

As I wrote in my last column, the traditional skill we valued in teachers when paper was the dominant media—the ability to transfer knowledge of a subject—is becoming less important. Increasingly, a teacher’s knowledge can be found online and in various learning styles. As the internet drives down the value of a teacher’s knowledge, their ability to personalize learning with resources from around the world will increase. We will have more data generated about our students as we build out our online communities. We will need teachers who understand how to make meaning of this data to personalize learning for every student from a vast digital library of learning resources. Also of increasing value is their ability to teach students to be self-disciplined about how “to learn to learn.” Rather than losing overall value, teachers will be more important than ever.

The big change is not adding technology to the current design of the classroom, but changing the culture of teaching and learning and fundamentally changing the job descriptions of teachers and learners.

I offer seven questions we typically ask of teachers in the interview process, along with corresponding questions I think are geared to align with how the internet will force the redefinition of a teacher’s added value:

Current question: What do you know about your subject?

New question: How do you manage your own professional growth?

We typically hire teachers for what they already know, subject knowledge. But what may become more important is to hire teachers who have a great capacity for continuous learning. How do you find resources around the world that you can share with your students? How do you continuously learn?

I would hope that candidates would be able to demonstrate how they follow critical hashtags on Twitter and how they participate in professional communities online, sharing with other teachers from around the world. Or maybe they’ve taken online courses on their own, from sources such as EDX.org or Coursera.org

Current question: How do you share what you already know with students?

New question: How do you teach students to learn what you don’t know?

A common interview question is to demonstrate a lesson you’ve created. But at a time when knowledge transfer is less important than learning how to learn, we may need to reframe this question to: How can you teach students how you learn?

Increasingly, teachers are going to be in positions where their students will have jumped ahead in the curriculum as they explore YouTube and iTunes U for content in the subject. Increasingly, curious students will come to class asking questions about the subject and the teacher may not know the answer. Teachers can either encourage this spark of curiosity and “awe and wonder,” or not.

(Next page: Current question: How do you teach students to solve problems?)

]]> 183099 https://www.eschoolnews.com/featured/2016/12/22/7-successful-genius-hour/ Thu, 22 Dec 2016 07:00:11 +0000 http://www.eschoolnews.com/?p=183065 Genius Hour projects may be open ended, but there are still some ground rules. Here are some tips for making Genius Hour work in your school.]]>

[Editor’s note: This story, originally published on January 26th of this year, was our #7 most popular story of the year. The countdown continues tomorrow with #6, so be sure to check back!]

What are you passionate about? What do you want to do more than anything in the world? Well I hope you said what you are doing right now. This is not always the case. Some people hate what they are doing. They may hate it because it pays too little, but being a teacher doesn’t make me very wealthy and I love what I’m doing. More importantly, people may hate their job because they would rather be doing something else. This is where I think we can do better in education.

As educators, we can help our students find and explore their passions. Once they discover what they’re truly passionate about, the learning and engagement will never stop. The best way for students to explore their passions is through Genius Hour.

Genius Hour isn’t new concept. Many teachers and businesses have been doing this for a while. Companies like HP and Google started “20 Time” so their staff could pursue passions projects and make their organizations stronger. Similarly, teachers have allowed students to read any book and present a book report in any format for a while now, giving them a chance to indulge their interests while learning. Of course, the true concept of Genius Hour is more open than a book report. It recognizes the need for students to have the freedom to explore their passions and not be restricted.

However, even with all this freedom, we still need some rules. The way I see it, the four rules to Genius Hour are: propose, research, create, and present. As long as your students are following this basic structure, they should have a successful Genius Hour experience. Here some tips for making those rules work in your classroom.

Let students explore their passions – First things first: make sure kids have enough time to explore what makes them passionate in the first place. After all, they need to know what their interests are in order to be able to explore them in depth. I use Thrively as a starter. The kids use the site to take an assessment that will show them their strengths. They can then use this strength assessment to watch videos, choose a Genius Hour project, or look at events happening around them. Letting students explore their passions is an essential part of Genius Hour. Another way to help students explore themselves is to create a Wonder wall or a Problem-Solvers Wall. This is simply a space for students to put sticky notes with questions or problems the want to solve. These walls aren’t just impactful for the students. The teachers can learn a lot about their students by looking at their “wonders” and “problems”. Once the students have asked those questions and explored themselves they can now decide what they want their focus to be. I also use a worksheet so students can get their ideas out about who they are and what their interests are. The next step is for each student to make a Project Proposal.

(Next page: 3 more tips for a Genius Hour)

]]> 183065 https://www.eschoolnews.com/classroom-innovations/2016/12/12/education-innovation-alive-school/ Mon, 12 Dec 2016 07:00:05 +0000 http://www.eschoolnews.com/?p=182864 One of the core ideas of the Christensen Institute’s research on innovation is that technologies improve over time to better meet the needs of the people they serve. For example, early smartphones supported only basic apps such as email and web browsing; but, over time, these devices have added functionality to support a huge variety of apps that have dramatically changed how people communicate, work, travel, and seek entertainment.]]>

[Editor’s note: This piece was originally published here on the Clayton Christensen Institute’s blog.]

One of the core ideas of the Christensen Institute’s research on innovation is that technologies improve over time to better meet the needs of the people they serve. For example, early smartphones supported only basic apps such as email and web browsing; but, over time, these devices have added functionality to support a huge variety of apps that have dramatically changed how people communicate, work, travel, and seek entertainment.

In education, however, we often don’t see this kind of steady progress. Rick Hess has described how education reform efforts often come and go in cycles without fundamentally changing the fabric of education or producing substantial improvement. And when it comes to technology-focused efforts, Larry Cuban has documented how, over the last century, schools embraced new technologies with great fanfare, only to discover later that the technologies did not deliver on their promised improvements.

Blended learning provides a fresh opportunity for education to break past these cycles of change without progress. But if it isn’t managed properly, then blended learning could fall into the same trap as other ideas that have gone before it. Recently, my colleagues Julia Freeland Fisher and Michael Horn wrote a paper that describes how education research needs to change in order to unlock advances in the field.

In line with their insights, below are a few noteworthy efforts to ensure that blended learning and other innovations in education continue to make progress in producing improved student outcomes.

1. TLA’s measurement agenda
At iNACOL’s recent Symposium, I participated in a session on measurement where Saro Mohammad laid out The Learning Accelerator’s vision for improving research on blended learning. Recognizing that there are still many gaps in the body of research on blended learning, TLA is working to improve measurement tools, develop more research, and disseminate those findings and developments to the field. The recent report, Measurement Agenda for Blended Learning, details TLA’s efforts to do this and describes the roles that researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and others can play to improve the collective understanding of effective blended-learning implementation. The research agenda that TLA lays out is critical for ensuring that blended learning improves to fulfill its potential. Without research to test and verify what works, blended and personalized learning are just persuasive educational philosophies.

(Next page: Education innovation longevity efforts 2-3)

]]> 182864 https://www.eschoolnews.com/district-management/2016/11/08/finding-right-parent-teacher-communication-app-class/ Tue, 08 Nov 2016 07:00:52 +0000 http://www.eschoolnews.com/?p=182506 With a smartphone glued to 90 percent of the parent population’s hands, how is it that schools still depend on ... Read more]]>

With a smartphone glued to 90 percent of the parent population’s hands, how is it that schools still depend on old methods such as sending notes home, newsletters, and emails to communicate with parents? A recent study by Gallup found only 1 in 5 parents are fully engaged with their child’s school, meaning 80 percent of parents are either indifferent to or actively disengaged from their kids’ school. It’s clear there is a disconnect between the way teachers are communicating and the way most of the world is getting its information.

As a trailblazer in classroom technology, it seems like I’ve tried every form of communication out there: printed newsletters, emails, texting, blogging, a YouTube channel, even Facebook. But along with grading, lesson-planning, and everything else a teacher is asked to balance, it all got to be too much.

I wanted the communication process to be easy and streamlined for my parents and me. Finally I asked my parents, “What’s the best way for me to communicate with you?” Essentially, all of them said “email” or “texting,” implying that their smartphone is their lifeline to the outside world. That’s when my hunt for the perfect communication app began.

There’s an app for that — but which one?

Just as social media apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat take you into the lives of friends, celebrities, and idols, I wanted to find the perfect app to give parents a glimpse of their child’s life at school. I started with a quick Google search to find the top parent-teacher communication apps in the market. As you can imagine, that search was a bit overwhelming. I used my personal Facebook page to ask fellow teachers what communication apps they were using, and I got dozens of responses. To narrow my scope of what exactly I wanted in a communication app, I created a list of non-negotiables. The right app would:

1. Allow me to share photos, links, and messages.
2. Allow parents to respond to messages.
3. Allow me to message/share with a few select or all parents.
4. Allow me to schedule events and notify parents of the events.
5. Sync scheduled events to my Google Classroom calendar.
6. Allow me to schedule parent/teacher conferences.
7. Share volunteer and wish list opportunities.
8. Work on web-based and smartphone platforms.
9. Cost nothing for parents and teachers.
10. Have a variety of comprehensive supports for teachers.

The enormous list of potential apps slimmed down to seven free communication apps that would potentially fit the bill: Remind, Class Messenger, Livingtree, SimplyCircle, Seesaw, Class Dojo, and Bloomz. I signed up for accounts, started playing with each app’s interface, devoured the support/ help resources I found on their websites, and contacted the app developers.

As an avid teacher/blogger, I created a working spreadsheet on Google Docs to break down the features of each app, including security and privacy, coordination tools, community-building tools, and more. My goal was to create a resource to help teachers who were also searching for communication apps. After I posted the spreadsheet on my blog, comments immediately started rolling in. Teachers offered their recommendations, shared their personal stories of success, and thanked me for all the time and effort I put into my research.

Next page: Finding an app that worked for me

]]> 182506 https://www.eschoolnews.com/uncategorized/2016/11/03/small-school-turned-every-district-music-composer/ Thu, 03 Nov 2016 07:00:45 +0000 http://www.eschoolnews.com/?p=182424 There are moments in my life when the world slows down long enough for me to have incredibly emotional experiences ... Read more]]>

There are moments in my life when the world slows down long enough for me to have incredibly emotional experiences linked to music. Those moments are pure joy. My goal as a music educator is to facilitate opportunities for my students to connect in that very same way.  I’m a music teacher for Montana’s Big Sky School District, so it’s thrilling when my students embrace powerful moments tied to music that really reach deep, and then find a way to lock into them for the rest of their lives.

One of the purest ways to imbue students with these amazing experiences is through music composition. Spending seven years as music teacher in Big Sky’s rural community, I encounter daily the educational benefits that a small school district offers students, particularly in its abilities to offer more intimate backdrops for learning.

Sadly, though, our less-populated rural areas lack resources—human and otherwise—and this deficit positions our school music programs in circumstances that are less than ideal. Rural communities don’t necessarily have a symphony or a spectacular venue that help our kids discover the “moment” that hooks all musicians. Without exposure to the important outside influences that help shape musical futures, we rural districts are essentially making music by ourselves, operating in a bit of a vacuum, which can prevent students and educators from accessing beauty through music.

Reaching the rural contingent

An email from Yarrow Kraner in September 2015 dramatically changed the musical trajectory of our little school district. Yarrow is an internationally acclaimed director, producer, entrepreneur, philanthropist and founder of the HATCH Experience. HATCH is an annual four-day summit held in Big Sky that brings together the world’s most innovative thought leaders to find ways to connect people through creative projects. Yarrow wrote to me during last year’s conference to ask if we were interested in having some of the musicians visit my music class. You’re kidding, right? Who would say no to this unique proposition?

Just days later, acclaimed cellist, producer, and composer Philip Sheppard, and Russell Spurlock, who is a wildly successful TV and film composer, were in my classroom convincing students that composing is easy. Their initial visit grew into the HATCH Ostinato Project, an experimental music program that helps students in underserved music classrooms collaborate on music production, regardless of their abilities.

A class full of composers

Kids want immediate gratification. They are also married to technology. Philip and Russell showed them how to create a piece really fast using simple technology, and we could see their brains were churning. The students were hooked. They knew they were doing something that they once thought was a skill reserved exclusively for people who attended high-end conservatories. They engaged so well that Philip, Russell, and I decided to dream up a collaborative composition project right then and there: We called it the Ostinato Project. We told the kids it’s OK to think big and have great ideas, and Philip reinforced this belief by explaining that he “never met a kid who can’t compose.”

Each week, the students wrote an idea that I would send off in a video via Dropbox to both Philip and Russell, who would then write the track. But we realized a few weeks in that the kids needed to see and understand the process. That’s when I began exploring different digital options with our school’s technology director. We rejected traditional programs like GarageBand, Pro Tools, Logic, Finale and others that involve the cumbersome exporting of files. I wanted something collaborative and social, and the tech director found this really cool online tool called Soundtrap. It fit our needs perfectly.

Musical forum in the cloud

Soundtrap is a cloud-based online recording studio that lets students make music or audio recordings within an invited and secured group, and it works across every device and operating system—iOS, Android, Chromebook, Mac, and Windows. This feature is very important, given the variety of personal devices in our homes and classrooms. It also offered an easy forum for the students to add to or tweak the music themselves, and then send back the results. They loved the interface because they were already comfortable interacting on social media. In fact, Russell told me his 11-year-old nephew is now “blowing up his inbox” with music sessions.

Because the musical pieces weren’t initially composed in Soundtrap, we uploaded the stems of each track, then took one giant MP3 or .WAV file and broke it into pieces so the students could see the different layers of each piece. This allowed them to move past a simple,“Oh, I like it,” to such probing considerations as, “Why does that note not sound right?”

We communicated through journal entries in Google Classroom, and once a month Philip and Russell jumped on Skype and talked to the students from London and Los Angeles. It’s amazing to see young musicians in a tiny rural district feel like they’re connected to the world. Parents wrote to me saying, “My kids can’t stop talking about this.” The students understood they were in the presence of something beautiful. It’s like a kid who loves cars, who suddenly sees a Ferrari for the first time and realizes, “Wow, this is a really amazing thing right here in front of me.”

HATCH Ostinato

Through the HATCH Ostinato Project, we produced 12 tracks in 10 weeks—which are now for sale on Google Play Music and via iTunes. All proceeds from the album sales are being reinvested back into the Ostinato Project for arts programs, like the one at Big Sky School District.  When you’re working with excited kids, the results can be meteoric.

]]> 182424 https://www.eschoolnews.com/resources-article/2016/10/31/teachers-share-formative-assessment-strategies-that-work/ Mon, 31 Oct 2016 07:00:53 +0000 http://www.eschoolnews.com/?p=182382 Ed. note: Today’s students have too many tests to take—but today’s teachers still need insight into their classes’ knowledge and ... Read more]]>

Ed. note: Today’s students have too many tests to take—but today’s teachers still need insight into their classes’ knowledge and skills. Adding new tests every time students need to prove mastery rarely seems like the right answer. For some classrooms, the solution lies in formative assessments, which gauge their students’ understanding and personalize their lessons in real time. Here, two educators share how formative assessments are transforming their students’ learning across the board.

Dawn Nelson, school library media specialist

“Formative assessment is an essential part of teaching because it helps guide instruction. Checking for understanding of important concepts helps the teacher decide to move on or to continue instruction to ensure that crucial information is not lacking.  It can be something as simple as a thumbs up/thumbs down, exit tickets when students leave the classroom, use of digital tools, or actual quizzes. Because it does inform instruction, formative assessment should be incorporated on a regular, if not daily, basis.

The most helpful methods of formative assessment are those that are easy to implement but still provide the information a teacher needs about whether their students have met their learning targets. Verbal questions that require simple student responses are easy but may not provide enough information, especially about students who may not understand but are reluctant to respond.

Digital tools such as Plickers, Kahoot, or Socrative provide that information but require teacher time to be created and implemented well. With a tool like pivotEd, the quality questions are designed to provide the answers the teacher needs, and because they are built right into the instruction, they are easy to implement. It’s especially helpful to provide different ways for students to respond, which can draw out reluctant or hesitant students.

When I monitor student engagement in real-time, I can provide instant feedback for students so they know what they need to do to gain more understanding. Several of the activities in pivotEd let students see their responses along with their classmates in a non-competitive way that can lead to class interaction on the topics. It also gives a platform for those students who may not say anything in class but who will add their voice to this non-threatening platform.

Seeing the students’ interaction with the material and each other in real time, I can change instruction almost immediately as I identify what concepts need additional clarification or what topics we can move through—and as students themselves identify where they may need additional support. Assessment for learning can be ongoing and become an integrated part of instruction.

Here’s an example: I was recently teaching a unit that began with a question asking the students to put words into a word cloud. It became obvious that several of the students really didn’t understand a specific word in the question. Instead of moving on with the lesson, I chose to stop and review what the word meant. During the class discussion I saw responses in the word cloud change as students gained understanding. The discussion was robust and relevant, and I saw the results of that activity as the students responded differently to the material with a better grasp of the concept. It changed the entire lesson for the better.”

]]> 182382 https://www.eschoolnews.com/district-management/2016/10/14/are-students-buying-what-schools-are-selling/ Fri, 14 Oct 2016 07:00:29 +0000 http://www.eschoolnews.com/?p=182091 A new book offers a compelling new theory about how educators can rethink student motivation. Are you really meeting students' needs?]]>

Calls for innovation in education seem to get louder by the day. “Innovation” has become the catchall term for the urge to make up for what our current system lacks; a system that, on balance, is neither delivering an equally high-quality education to all students, nor designed to reliably prepare young people for the modern workforce.

From there, of course, opinions about what sorts of innovations we ought to invest in, and to what end, vary politically and philosophically. At the Christensen Institute, we’ve always divvied up these wide-ranging ideas into two main categories, which Clay Christensen first identified in the 1980s: sustaining and disruptive innovations. Those categories are helpful in identifying the dimensions along which organizations are improving and how new business models can displace existing ones. But disruptive innovation theory has little to tell us about whether a particular innovation will be successful.

Enter Clay Christensen’s newest book, Competing Against Luck, out earlier this week. In it, Christensen and his co-authors Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David Duncan chronicle the coming of age of another theory that may prove just as, if not more, powerful than disruptive innovation: the theory of jobs to be done.

Jobs to be done hinges on the fact that consumers “hire” products and services to do a specific job in their lives, and that they are motivated to do so by particular circumstances. For example, in an early study of how to boost milkshake sales, a consulting team found that a fast food chain sold a disproportionate number of milkshakes first thing in the morning to busy commuters. These customers “hired” milkshakes to occupy them while in traffic and to keep their stomachs satisfied until lunch. To get these jobs done, realistically the commuters could have hired all sorts of products: bananas, bagels, or even the radio. To outcompete not only other fast food chains’ milkshakes, but also all of the other foods and experiences that might fulfill commuters’ jobs, the fast food chain needed to design milkshakes that nailed this particular circumstance and job experienced by the commuter. Moreover, this job differed dramatically from the job parents were hiring milkshakes to do in the afterschool rush to provide children with a fun snack. The take away? Once a business understands the range of jobs that are causing customers to hire solutions, it can redesign its products around those jobs to garner far greater, more predictable returns.

Competing Against Luck touches on a few examples in education that follow the same pattern. For example, Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) President Paul LeBlanc features heavily into the book’s discussion of a leader willing to rethink higher education admissions and learning experiences beyond the “average” 18-year-old customer that his university had traditionally targeted. Instead, LeBlanc architected online-learning experiences designed to optimize for demand among nontraditional students facing a variety of circumstances: working adults, students far beyond the boarders of New Hampshire, and late-stage career changers. By understanding the range of jobs that adults in particular circumstances might be trying to get done, SNHU incorporated new designs into its burgeoning online program: reconfiguring wait times for financial aid advice, implementing high-touch guidance models, and launching advertising campaigns that catered to adults who were considering going back to school to better themselves or make a better life for their loved ones.

At the Institute, we believe that jobs-to-be-done theory will prove a crucial tool to getting innovation right on behalf of students. We’ve spent the better half of the past year conducting in-depth research on why students “hire” college (the results of our surveys will be published next year). And over the years, we’ve also made our best guesses at some of K–12 students’ key jobs, particularly drawing on research on what motivates younger students. We’ve noted that many of those jobs—such as “make me feel successful” and “let me have fun with friends”—figure only marginally into traditional school design. It’s hardly surprising, then, that students don’t actually appear to be “hiring” school at the rates we’d hope; survey after survey show that student engagement is low and drops off precipitously in high school. If we truly want students to buy into new learning models, then we will have to optimize for the things students themselves are trying to get done. Such models will have to compete with all of the other things students are willing to hire in their lives, like the latest social networking sites, tantalizing gossip, or mobile games that can make them feel equally, if not more, successful and social than school manages to.

As Competing Against Luck’s title suggests, jobs to be done is a theory of competition. Like disruptive innovation theory, it helps us to analyze whom or what is likely to win out and why. That competitive framing can feel crude when we think about a public good like education. But the power of jobs to be done is that it can help reformers, school leaders, and education entrepreneurs alike bridge the frequently gaping chasm between need and demand in education.

Over the years, reformers have tirelessly tried to innovate to tackle chronic deficits (not just in learning experiences, but also in paltry data collection tools, teacher shortages, and limited community engagement, to name a few) with sleek, well-designed solutions. But failures to make progress against these “needs”—from the demise of promising personalized learning platforms like inBloom, to countless failed efforts to shift instructional practice, to lackluster results in parent engagement—can teach us a lesson: efforts to “fill” perceived gaps in the education ecosystem do not always result in solutions that end users—be those teachers, students, or their parents—are willing to hire.

Squaring the difference between systemic needs and stakeholder demand may be a hard but important pill for champions of education innovation to swallow. To that end, I hope—and expect—that budding entrepreneurs in education will pick up the book to think about their customers differently. But I’m also holding out hope that leaders, reformers, and advocates without any profit motives whatsoever, but who are deeply invested in changing the education system, can likewise take a page from Competing Against Luck. It offers a critical chance to consider the actual motivations of the entire constellation of actors in the education system in a new light; and in particular, what compels—or doesn’t compel—our students to buy what we’re selling.

This piece originally appeared on the Christensen Institute’s blog.

]]> 182091 https://www.eschoolnews.com/district-management/2016/10/04/19-new-districts-join-league-innovative-schools/ Tue, 04 Oct 2016 07:00:56 +0000 http://www.eschoolnews.com/?p=181913 A cohort of 19 new school districts have been accepted into the League of Innovative Schools, a national coalition of ... Read more]]>

A cohort of 19 new school districts have been accepted into the League of Innovative Schools, a national coalition of forward-thinking school districts organized by Digital Promise, an independent, bipartisan nonprofit organization authorized by Congress to accelerate innovation in education.

The League of Innovative Schools, launched in late 2011, accepts new members through an open application process once per year. Twenty-two districts were accepted last year. With the new members, the League now has a presence in 33 states, representing 3.3 million students. The full list of members can be found at digitalpromise.org/districts.

In addition to the 19 new members, several former members — Blue Valley USD 229, Bristol Township School District, Fulton County Schools, and Lexington County School District One — were re-admitted under new superintendents.

“From Rhode Island to Missouri to Arizona, and many places in between, this year’s League cohort provides high-quality, authentic learning opportunities to students,” reads a new blog post on the League’s website announcing the inductions. “For example, students with sensory impairments participate in maker learning camps offered by the Utah Schools for the Blind and the Deaf; students in Compton Unified School District (CA) are learning computer science from pre-K to senior year; and the School District of Lee County (KY) is committed to providing pathways to college for its students in rural Kentucky through robust local and national partnerships.”

The League is also kickstarting a new podcast series featuring current members, like Steve Webb, superintendent of Vancouver Public Schools in Washington (pictured).

New cohort additions include:

• Bristol Warren Regional School District
• Compton Unified School District
• Covina-Valley Unified School District
• Dysart Unified School District
• East Irondequoit Central School District
• El Segundo Unified School District
• Evergreen School District
• Fox Chapel Area School District
• Freehold Township School District
• Fullerton School District
• Kokomo School Corporation
• Lee County School District
• Lindsay Unified School District
• Montour School District
• Morris School District
• Seminole County Public Schools
• Springfield Public Schools
• Stephenville Independent School District
• Utah Schools for the Deaf and the Blind

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