Category: CoP Past Facilitator

Centering Student Voice: Co-Designing Whole Child Formative Assessment Tools Alongside Black and Latin Learners

Assessment for Good will develop asset-based formative assessment tools to eradicate the persistent gap in opportunity experienced by Black and Latinx learners, aged 8-13, in classrooms across the US.

Through achieving transformational improvements in how we understand and support wellbeing, AFG seeks to reduce negative and segregated learning experiences, improve educator decision-making, and improve learner outcomes across academic, emotional, and social domains.

Developing Cultures of Belonging in Intentionally Diverse Classrooms

One of the most fundamental aspects of having an intentionally diverse school is to create classrooms where children are honored and seen for who they are.  This doesn’t happen by accident but instead by intentional planning, action and reflection around 4 core elements of culture building with an anti-bias lens.  In this CoP, participants will:

gain a shared understanding and deepened mindset around developing cultures of belonging for students; 
dive deep into 4 elements of culture building: norm setting, community building approaches, identity work, and inclusion through examples, reflection, questions, and shared experiences, and; 
put aspects of culture into practice and record findings, barriers, and capture best practices.

Our time together will conclude with a toolkit of best practices highlighting the 4 elements of culture building and artifacts that show those elements in practice.  Additionally, there will be space for ongoing personal reflection and assessment and identification of response to barriers. 

Level Up Your Facilitation Practice: Facilitating for Equity

In this Facilitating for Equity community of practice, you will develop 5 competencies that distill the essence of our best facilitation practices: 1) Developing a Critical Consciousness, 2) Engaging in Collaborative Co-Conspiratorship, 3) Cultivating Brave Learning Spaces, 4) Practicing Equitable Communication and 5) Embodying Compassionate Accountability

Promote the Promise: Becoming Advocacy-Ready

In the next 18 months, are you looking to activate your school’s community to secure support or influence? Join your fellow schools and national leaders as you access tools, training, and community that will strengthen your advocacy efforts. Together we will set you on a path to be action-ready and an active advocate for your school, students, and community.

Join this CoP if your school is

-preparing for renewal or other authorizer activities or

-engaging with public institutions or leaders or

-part of a larger coalition pursuing DCSC policy issues like open enrollment, weighted lotteries, and school-based transportation funding.

This CoP will prepare you and support you in developing a power orientation for your community, identifying an important opportunity for advocacy, clarifying your outcomes and targets, and building and beginning to implement an advocacy action campaign. It’s time you and your community leverage your assets to influence public institutions and their decisions and resources.

Beyond the Basics: Transforming Literacy Instruction

Beyond the Basics: Transforming Literacy Instruction for English Language Learners and Students of Color is a groundbreaking professional development series designed to empower educators to create more inclusive and equitable learning environments for diverse student populations. By exploring strategies and best practices tailored for English Language Learners and students of color, this series aims to drive transformative change in literacy instruction in Title 1 schools.

Level Up Your Facilitation Practice: Facilitating for Equity

In this Facilitating for Equity community of practice, you will develop 5 competencies that distill the essence of our best facilitation practices: 1) Developing a Critical Consciousness, 2) Engaging in Collaborative Co-Conspiratorship, 3) Cultivating Brave Learning Spaces, 4) Practicing Equitable Communication and 5) Embodying Compassionate Accountability

Advocating for Your School, Students, and a Diverse and Brighter Future

Leaders will learn about the basic tenets of advocacy, identify an upcoming opportunity for advocacy that impacts their school, e.g., renewal, identify and map their own assets and resources that they can be uses in their own advocacy efforts, and development a tangible advocacy strategy that schools implement within their own community.

Disrupting General Education to Improve Special Education – Designing Schoolwide Systems that Work for ALL

When leaders design systems with learner variability at the center, all students benefit. This CoP is designed to ensure leaders can name the criteria for inclusive school-wide systems, specifically as it relates to learner variability, and evaluate their existing vision and systems through this lens. Leaders will walk away with a framework for inclusive schools and an analysis of their own systems and a set of concrete action steps needed to improve their systems.

Pass the Baton: Growing New Leaders

Whether you will need to find and train a new leader in a key role in the next year – or you are a new leader in the seat right now – how can you avoid dropping the baton in the handoff? This CoP, led by two seasoned school leaders and trusted advisors, will create space for participants to take a more equitable approach to identifying new leaders or successors, open lines of communication in transition, set leaders up for success with a strong entry plan, create communities of care to affirm wellness as you learn a new role, and most importantly – avoid the glass cliff, where women and leaders of color are placed in roles, but set up to fail.

Leveraging Data for Equity in Collaborative Wraparound Teams

The use of data in education is often utilized in silos and decontextualized within our school community. In our Community of Practice, we aim to bring participants together to assess our personal relation to data and how we leverage data within our communities to achieve equity. In our CoP, we will discuss ways to bring key stakeholders together in ‘collaborative teams’ to hold racial equity-centered results-based accountability’ conversations to drive equitable data practices that lead to action within each school community. Participants will have opportunities to learn structured protocols and identify ways to implement ‘team’ structures at their own school. Through collaboration, we aim to find ways that school leaders can improve equity of student outcomes within their school communities. See more about our work at here.