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This post was originally published on www.thomashatch.org.

The first problem with innovation is that it is hard to define. It is one of those, “you’ll know it when you see it” kinds of things.  As a consequence, almost any “new” practice, program, resource, or idea that departs from convention may appear “innovative” to some.  Yet for others, only the most revolutionary, transformative, or disruptive practices or materials deserve to be called “innovative.”  A shift from thinking of “innovations” as a singular category –  something is either “innovative” or it’s not – to thinking about the “symptoms” of innovation provides one way to address this definitional ambiguity.  (The philosopher Nelson Goodman, one of Noam Chomsky’s teachers, took this approach when discussing the definition of “art.”)  Symptoms of innovation include the extent to which something departs from convention as well as the extent to which it changes or transforms related activities. For example, even “smart” phones still retain some of the features of the land-lines that preceded them, but their mobility and wireless connectivity are new and make possible all kinds of activities (texting, surfing the internet, using apps etc.) that have changed the ways people behave and interact.  Other symptoms might include the extent to which something is viewed as innovative within a particular context (a region or industry) or as cutting across contexts.  From this perspective, mobile phones appear to be quite innovative as they have spread and contributed to changes in behaviors and activity across international contexts.  At the same time, technologies like whiteboards that seem commonplace in classrooms in many countries nowadays may still seem innovative in parts of the world where they are just being introduced.  In either case, the extent to which these new technologies have or might change behaviors and activities remains to be debated.

In education, many different practices, programs, and school models have been hailed as “innovative” in different times.  Nonetheless, substantial departures from conventional classroom practices and activities rarely seem to take hold across schools and contexts (as Larry Cuban continues to examine when it comes to technology and computer use in the classroom). In order to explore some of these “issues of innovation” and the challenges and possibilities for improving conventional educational practices, I am working with colleagues Deirdre Faughey, Jordan Carson, and Sarah van den Berg to look at what educators consider “innovative” both inside conventional school systems as well as outside (in alternative schools, after school programs, tutoring programs, museums, online activities etc.); and I’m looking at what’s “innovative” in both developed and developing education systems (such as those in New York City, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Johannesburg). Theoretically these different educational settings should create different opportunities for, and perhaps different kinds of, innovations. Ideally, looking at how innovative efforts evolve in different contexts will provide some clues about what it really takes to transform conventional learning opportunities so that all students, from all backgrounds can be successful.  (For a look at some initial descriptions of efforts to improve different aspects of education, see posts on Citizen Schools, New Visions, the iZone, the Millennium Villages Project in Africa, and the India School Leadership Institute.)

Over the next few months, I will be reporting on what I learned when I visited and talked with colleagues in Singapore and Malaysia about recent efforts to improve their educational systems and what might be “innovative” in education in each context. The education systems in Singapore and Malaysia are particularly interesting because they are geographic neighbors with some shared history and culture.  Education systems in both countries are quite centralized, and both have introduced a number of initiatives to change and improve their performance.  Nonetheless, their education systems are at very different stages of development. Singapore continues to be at the top or near the top on comparative tests like PISA and TIMMS, while Malaysia ranks below more than fifty other countries in reading, mathematics, and science. Furthermore, while Malaysia has substantially increased enrollment rates at every level of schooling, it is in the midst of increasing compulsory schooling from six to eleven years, and it is still working to increase enrollments in upper secondary education which stood at 82% in 2011.

Twin Towers, Kuala Lumpur

What struck me most, however, in my visits, were the differences in where efforts to produce more innovative learning opportunities are taking place.  What I found in Malaysia, for example, reminded me in some ways of what I see in New York City: the growth of alternative schools, after school programs, and other educational opportunities created by independent groups and individuals operating outside the public school system. Those I talked to about innovation in Kuala Lumpur pointed to a number of for-profit and not-for-profit efforts to create private schools and to provide workshops, camps, and other learning opportunities outside the regular school day. Among private schools, the alternatives to government-run public schools include international schools often connected to or resembling those operating in the US and elsewhere and some newer international schools established by Malaysian private universities like Taylors’ University and Sunway University. There are also new schools associated with alternative school networks in the US like Acton Academy as well as a growing homeschooling movement.  Outside the school day, organizations and collaborative like Edunation, Arus Academy, Tandemic, and EnglishJer have sprouted to address what their members see as gaps or problems with the Malaysian education system.

At the same time, the government in Malaysia has continued efforts to ensure all children have access to education while also launching a variety of initiatives to increase the quality of education. Recent initiatives have focused on integrating Higher Order Thinking Skills into the curriculum, establishing a technological infrastructure in all schools (including internet connectivity, computers/computer labs, and a virtual learning environment), and programs to establish “Trust Schools” (modeled after the academies in England or what those in the US would consider charter schools).  Often, the Ministry of Education, with limited resources, finds a contractor to lead these initiatives, but then these contractors have to find and develop the means themselves to roll their work out across large numbers of teachers and schools.

Singapore

In contrast, when I asked about innovation in Singapore, those I talked to generally pointed to major initiatives launched by the government as part of continuing efforts to improve and change the education system. These include efforts to focus on the development of 21st Century skills amongst all students and to integrating technology productively into teaching (as part of Singapore’s Fourth Master Plan for technology integration). These efforts reflect what colleagues in Singapore have called a “centralized decentralized” approach to create opportunities for schools and teachers to develop innovative practices, which if effective, can then be scaled up across the system. This approach included the creation of a set of Future Schools in 2007 that experimented with different approaches to using technology and that could serve as models or prototypes that could inspire other schools to change their instructional practices. In addition, in 2011 the Ministry of Education established Edulab which now provides support for educators to develop new practices and resources and creates opportunities to share those practices and resources across teachers and schools.

There are numerous educational opportunities outside the regular school classroom in Singapore, but those generally connect to and complement the work going on in the government-run schools rather than serving as independent educational alternatives.  Educational programs established outside the public schools in Singapore include workshops and field trips organized by cultural institutions such as the Singapore Discovery Center and the National Gallery of Singapore.  These educational opportunities serve as “Learning Journeys” that schools are required to offer students as part of Singapore’s commitment to integrating National Education into the curriculum.  The opportunities for learning after school and on weekends are also dominated by tutoring offered by a host of individuals and “tuition centers”.  Despite the concerns of the Singaporean government and many educators and parents, tutoring has grown into a 1.1 billion dollar industry (almost double the $650 million spent on tutoring in 2004) with 600 different tuition centers registered with the Ministry of Education (up from 500 in 2011).  Tuition centers focus primarily on preparing students for the national exams that students in Singapore take at the end of primary  and upper secondary school and before admission to university; but some centers try to distinguish themselves with their own educational approaches and some aim to help students develop skills that go beyond those emphasized in the tests.

Singapore and Malaysia present very different contexts for developing new educational opportunities for students, but both have to contend with the challenges of figuring out which new practices and programs might work and what kinds of mechanisms will help educators and schools to build on any successes. In the next few weeks, I will be following up on these initial impressions with closer looks at the evolution of some of the programs and organizations that are working to improve the educational opportunities in each of these systems.

— Thomas Hatch

Alfie Kohn has been described by Time magazine as “perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades [and] test scores.” He is an independent scholar who has written 14 books, and scores of articles, about education, human behavior, and social theory. Among those books: Punished by Rewards (1993), Beyond Discipline (1996), The Schools Our Children Deserve (1999), and, most recently, Schooling Beyond Measure (2015). Kohn’s essays, meanwhile, have appeared in publications ranging from the Review of Educational Research to the Chronicle of Higher Education, and from The Nation to the Harvard Business Review.

In this interview, which is part of the Lead the Change Series of the American Educational Research Association Educational Change Special Interest Group, Kohn shares his thoughts on the direction of educational change:

With respect to academic outcomes…discussions about “promising results” from various policies and practices are admirably precise about what produced them but swiftly pass over the fact that those results consist of nothing more than scores on standardized tests, often norm-referenced and multiple-choice versions. Thus, the putatively successful teaching strategy—and all the impressive sounding data that support it—are worthless because there’s no evidence that it improves learning. Just test scores. So my argument has been that if we’re going to dedicate ourselves to meaningful change, we need to shift our focus from details of implementation to underlying premises, and from how to why.

This Lead the Change interview appears as part of a series that features experts from around the globe, highlights promising research and practice, and offers expert insight on small- and large-scale educational change. Recently Lead the Change has also published interviews with Diane Ravitch, and the contributors to Leading Educational Change: Global Issues, Challenges, and Lessons on Whole-System Reform (Teachers College Press, 2013) edited by Helen Janc Malone, have participated in a series of blogs from Education Week.

Is it possible to radically challenge education systems and alter them from inside those systems? That’s exactly what Delila López, director of community education and social inclusion for the National Council for Educational Development (CONAFE) says her organization is trying to do throughout Mexico.  Santiago Rincón-Gallardo discussed some of this work in an IEN interview  in 2014. In that interview, Rincón-Gallardo focused on the Learning Communities Project, which provides radically student-centered learning to students in rural Mexico.  This post takes a deeper look at the CONAFE organization. Drawing on an interview conducted with López and two of her colleagues, Gabriel Camara and Ernesto Ponce, we describe some of the history of CONAFE as well as their new program, Aprender con Base en la Comprension y el Dialogo (ABCD, or Learning Based on Dialogue and Understanding) that launched in July 2016.

Since 1971, the CONAFE has been dedicated to community education.  Due to its success, CONAFE has become part of Mexico’s ministry of education (called SEP), but operates semi-autonomously. Working from preschool through secondary school, they offer schools and programs for indigenous students and students who would not otherwise have access to schools throughout Mexico. In the process, CONAFE fits into Mexico’s overall education system by offering access to school in communities that SEP does not have the capacity to reach. Yet, CONAFE is more than a simple extension of SEP that provides access to schools in rural areas.

CONAFE’s central mission is to create community schools run by communities. To do so, they have developed a specific approach and recognizable model for schooling. Using this approach and model, CONAFE has reached hundreds of communities and created 9000 schools throughout Mexico, including 35 telesecundarias (distance learning schools). While CONAFE is now present throughout Mexico, Camara describes the push for this model of education as something that has developed little by little over the course of decades.

The CONAFE model is a loose structure of schools based on community engagement. In addition to starting new schools in indigenous communities, these schools reflect a pedagogical model deeply linked to the community in which the school exists. The CONAFE offers curricular materials and support such as Spanish language textbooks, but the organization’s design is to build schools that the community ultimately owns and directs. Furthermore, curriculum emerges based on students’ interests in subjects and themes.

This model may appear simple but it is also radically different than the dominant education model in Mexico. Given its intention to create schools that are spaces run by local communities, CONAFE takes steps to ensure that local cultural practices and beliefs drive the school’s structure. For instance, teachers must be able to teach in students’ first language, which is often an indigenous language. Deeply influenced by the work of Paulo Freire (in fact, Camara was a student of Freire), curriculum emerges through dialogue, problem-posing, investigation, and research. CONAFE schools may use some materials provided by SEP, but CONAFE schools have not traditionally used a set curriculum package. Instead, students and teachers are encouraged to use their interests to create and pursue learning experiences. In this way, CONAFE schools share much with approaches such as Colombia’s Escuela Nueva, but deviate from these initiatives in the individualizing approach of each school and each student’s experience.

While guided by these principles, CONAFE is not exclusively a cultural learning experience for students and community members. CONAFE presents specific organizational objectives of improving education levels and commitments to schooling from children and families in each community in which it works. A World Bank study found that the CONAFE improves outcomes in “traditional” measures such as primary school math schools and secondary school Spanish language scores on standardized tests. Furthermore, the organization aims to create conditions that allow students to undertake rigorous academic projects (or “journeys” to use Dr. López’s words) based on everyday problems they notice in their communities and schools. While we spoke of many ways in which CONAFE pursues these objectives, one particularly compelling example is its teacher education scholarship and program.

Some students in secondary CONAFE schools are eligible to become instructors in their or other CONAFE schools. Once they complete their secondary school, these teachers receive scholarships to go to a community to live and learn with that community while also learning how to teach. The scholarships typically cover 1 to 2 years of living in a community while training to teach. Dr. López points out that beyond the direct impact on these communities, the program also creates a way for students to continue their education after finishing secondary school. This program closely aligns with the CONAFE’s notion of reciprocal learning, where students, teachers, and communities in general all learn from and teach each other.

In addition to this type of initiative, CONAFE has just launched a new initiative for their schools. This approach extends CONAFE’s work by introducing a more explicit pedagogical model and approach to evaluation that aims to directly impact student learning outcomes. Learning Based in Understanding and Dialogue (Aprender con Base en la Comprension y el Dialogo, or ABCD, in Spanish) encourages children to be autonomous participants that develop their community and understand the broader, global community. ABCD stays true to CONAFE’s focus on increasing school access to those who might not otherwise have access to schools. The model also maintains CONAFE’s community-based approach, where those in the community own and direct the school’s structure and identity. Where ABCD extends previous work is in an explicit focus on building quality learning experiences that lead to more evident student learning outcomes. López provides an example of how ABCD intends to function. When a student demonstrates knowledge or understanding of a theme, a teacher acting as a facilitator asks this student to share their learning and process with other students. Through students developing interests in learning themes and teaching each other through dialogue and collaboration, López suggests that the school’s culture positively develops as well.

As the organization continues to grow with more schools and new programs, the CONAFE has expanded its presence throughout Mexico. With projects like ABCD program, they are also strengthening the work they do in existing schools. The CONAFE program of working within the existing education system might appear daunting. Yet, with thousands of schools, teachers, and students visibly engaged in problem-posing education and community-based education, it is difficult to deny the impact of the CONAFE approach.

This week we are sharing two articles focusing on issues related to educational change and testing.

First, we share Melanie Ehren’s latest IOE Blog post, “As ‘Show Your Working’ test replaces mental maths at 11, what kind of learning are we valuing?”  In this post, Ehren describes recent changes to math exams. The new exams, which were ushered in along with a new National Curriculum, require students to show their math work on paper. While students had been assessed on their ability to do math “in their heads,” the new exam poses more difficult questions to students and requires that they show their calculations on paper. As Ehren explains,

The change in types of arithmetic questions, which clearly favour traditional methods to carry out complex calculations more quickly, begs the question of the kind of mathematics we want our children to master and how appropriate these complex context-free calculations are for children in Year 6 of primary school.

The new exams are emblematic of a “more ambitious” curriculum that raises the bar for children’s learning, particularly in the areas of “maths, English, computing and science.” However, recent articles point out that with the higher standards comes a period of lower outcomes, which many have expressed concern about. Additional concerns have been raised about the quality of these assessments. Further concerns have been raised about new UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan to raise standards and introduce more grammar schools, which accept only the strongest academic students. The concern, expressed by Andreas Schleicher of the OECD, is that schools need to improve the quality of education for all students, not only the select few. As Schleicher argues, “The fact that too many students fall through the cracks in too many schools is a far bigger problem than not having enough schools which are selective. The issue lies within schools, not between schools.”

The latest Lead the Change interview with Wiel Veugelers, professor of education at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands, serves as an interesting read in juxtaposition to the Ehren post. Veugelers, a long time scholar of education change issues around the world, argues that we need to pay attention to the socializing function of education and the role education plays in the development of citizens. Veugelers explains, “I think a socially just global world needs to develop a strong unyielding bond between autonomy and social concern. The Western world should become more social, many other parts of the world more autonomous. Therefore, it is important that we pay attention to the purpose of educational change.”  Towards the end of the interview, Veugeler shares what excites him about educational change:

…educational change is, in actual fact, thinking about what kind of world we want and how we can contribute to making it happen…it is also important to make our research really international; to make our knowledge multipolar, to paraphrase Chantal Mouffe. This means that we recognize different ideas and practices and give more credits to other visions.

To that end, we share a few recent news reports on issues related to educational testing from around the world in an effort to explore however briefly how the issue of standard, testing, and access might pop up in various education reform efforts and what we might be able to learn from them.

India

Schools prepare for testing times ahead – Times of India http://buff.ly/2ddbNWY

Continuous tests an obstacle to learning? – Times of India http://buff.ly/2dCZjvg

Vietnam

Vietnam education ministry’s plan for multiple-choice math test sparks debate http://buff.ly/2ddb6xb

Australia

Pen and paper tests may stay http://buff.ly/2ddcX54

South Africa

South Africa: Western Cape Education On Writing of Systemic Tests http://buff.ly/2dQTS9L

Scotland

Classroom concerns over new national tests http://buff.ly/2dQW4Oz

—Deirdre Faughey

As part of a series of posts on the evolution of organizations in New York City, the US, and other parts of the world including India and parts of Africa, this post explores the evolution of the iZone, a unit within the New York City Department of Education dedicated to “inspiring innovation in in NYC public education.” The iZone’s goals include designing “schools around the unique strengths, interests and needs of each student.” In order gain a better understanding of the possibilities and challenges for educational innovation iZone has encountered, we recently spoke with several former and current leaders of the iZone. They talked about the development of iZone’s work and vision as well as the constantly changing conditions in which organizations like iZone have to operate and adapt. 

What if the possibilities of technology could be harnessed to solve the organizational challenges of designing schools around the interests, needs, and strengths of students? This question animates the work of the Office of Innovation (iZone) within the NYC Department of Education. From its creation in 2009, iZone set out to create conditions that would enable associated schools to develop and achieve their own visions of personalized learning.  Positioning itself as an incubator of innovative educational practices, the office was organized around three main projects: iLearnNYC, iZone360, and InnovateNYC Schools. Through these projects, iZone has evolved from an organization that primarily strove to launch and replicate new schools designed around innovative practices in personalized learning to an organization that facilitates the adoption and adaptation of a variety of technologies, tools, and applications for personalized learning across existing schools. In the process, iZone itself has experienced the possibilities and challenges for both incubating new ideas and enabling those ideas to spread and have a significant positive impact on teaching and learning throughout New York City.

iZone 1.0 — Piloting New Student-Centered School Designs

[2009-2011]

iZone was launched several years into the administration of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and School Chancellor Joel Klein.  At the time, their approach to improving schools – which they called Children First –,was characterized by increased autonomy for schools and principals in exchange for greater accountability for student performance, small schools that would better engage students, and an embrace of educational technology. Ideas for an office dedicated to personalized learning enabled by technology represented a natural progression of the theories of change underlying these reform initiatives as well as the entrepreneurial spirit of early ed-tech start-ups at the time. The NYC Department of Education was already involved in a number of efforts to spur student-centered learning and innovation. The summer of 2009 saw the pilot of School of One (profiled by IEN in 2016) which tested the idea that technology could provide appropriate and responsive curriculum to meet each students’ needs. In addition, several new small schools in NYC were pursuing their own experiments with technology and personalization. In particular, iSchool, had been experimenting with online classes, allowing students to accelerate their learning by taking offerings that might not otherwise be available to them. These projects provided proof-points for the theory that technology could create flexibility in the traditional time and space constraints of schooling by freeing-up teacher bandwidth; easing pressure to staff courses; and allowing learning to happen anytime, anywhere. This meant, as then-Deputy Chancellor of Talent, Labor, and Innovation John White put it in a report by the Center for Reinventing Public Education, reimagining schooling by treating time, space, and human capital as variables, instead of constants, in the educational equation.

iZone’s foundational project was iLearnNYC, a learning management platform which allowed students, through their schools, to access curriculum from several dozen vendors. 81 schools began using iLearnNYC in 2010-2011. Taking classes online allowed for more flexibility in when, how long, and where classes took place. Schools used iLearnNYC for credit recovery, advanced placement, and blended learning which opened up more time for project-based learning, provided opportunities for accelerated learning, or made a greater variety of courses available to students. Over the next few years, 200 schools worked with iLearn, with 80% of them continuing to use it beyond the first year of implementation.

iSchool, School of One, and iLearnNYC inspired ambitious plans for whole-school change. This became the work of iZone360: a community of schools committed to “reorganizing all aspects of their school, including budgets, staff, space, instruction, scheduling, and technology, around meeting the needs of individual students.” The Office of Innovation would offer technical, financial, and professional support to help schools innovate toward their uniquely defined visions of personalized learning. iZone also served as an advocate for the pilot schools by addressing policies that hindered student-centered design and developing resources and tools that could help foster their work.  For example, iZone appealed to the NYS Board of Regents to amend seat-time requirements to allow credit for online or blended coursework.

Consistent with the emphasis on autonomy under the Children First reforms, iZone’s initial plan was to recruit pilot schools by finding school leaders who were passionate about personalized learning. Each pilot school had the freedom to define what personalized learning meant to them and to set their vision for the next three to five years.  Successful pilot schools would then serve as models that could be scaled-up across the city. Ideally, the pilot schools would be embedded in networks of affiliated schools that would partner with and observe the work of the pilot school in the first year, adopt practices in the next year, and then continue to deepen their work through the sharing of best practices. In 2010, iZone presented its vision and plan to schools, recruiting applications. In 2011-2012, it launched 25 pilot schools, selected for their demonstrated interest and readiness to experiment with personalized learning practices.

These pilot efforts served as the foundation for what iZone’s leaders hoped would be more system-wide changes. But as then-Chief of Innovation Arthur VanderVeen explained, such “lateral diffusion” from a small number of pilots to a large number of partner schools is particularly hard to achieve in such a big district with shifting politics and priorities. While a pilot of 81 schools may be a large initiative in most districts, it reflects only a small fraction of the more than 1,700 schools in NYC. Furthermore, several national and state initiatives, including the development of new teacher evaluation policies and the rollout of the Common Core, made sustaining focus on innovative student-centered school models even more difficult. As VanderVeen explained, “getting the early success and recognition and building momentum around a vision for personalization so other school would want to take it on, was always challenging.” An additional challenge came when Joel Klein resigned in the middle of the 2010-2011 school year. According to VanderVeen, iZone’s theory of change relied on continued commitment and strong leadership—the ability to “encourage, drive, and support schools to move” toward this vision of personalized learning—at the system, network, and school levels. Without Klein, a strong proponent of technology and personalized learning, the future of iZone seemed to be in doubt. Under these conditions, White left in the middle of the year 2010-2011 school year, and VanderVeen left a few months later during the summer of 2011.

iZone 2.0 – Encouraging New Student-Centered Learning Solutions

[2012-2014]

New leadership, including Andrea Coleman and Steven Hodas, who joined Megan Roberts as Executive Directors of iZone, came in with strong backgrounds in technology, design and entrepreneurship, which influenced the direction of the office. While it continued to support and foster the development of innovative school designs, iZone also sought to change the conditions for the development of innovative products and services. This second phase of iZone saw a shift from implementing a vision of personalized-learning through school support services from traditional venues to working closely with users to identify key problems and develop scalable solutions by drawing on principles of design-thinking, rapid-prototyping, and market disruption.

In 2012-2013, iZone360 recruited an additional 25 schools, and iLearnNYC launched the Blended Learning Institute, a two-year certificate program in collaboration with Pace University that provided professional development in instruction and classroom management unique to personalized learning. Both branches of iZone continued to develop new means of supporting schools. In 2013, iLearnNYC worked with code.org to add a computer science track to the Blended Learning Institute. iZone360 worked to empower educators with design-thinking process and low-tech solutions, through initiatives such as the Personalized Pathways Challenge for solving problems related to student-centered learning, Essential Allies Challenge for solving problems related to family engagement and iCamp, a 3-day conference that brings educators together to problem-solve and engage in competitions for pitching the next iZone Challenge topic.

Recognizing that challenges in the procurement process and bureaucratic layers between companies and schools hindered the development of targeted technology solutions to personalized learning, iZone also sought to have a greater impact in the educational ecosystem of NYC. A third branch called Innovate NYC Schools sought to influence the development and purchasing of ed-tech by facilitating partnerships between technologists and teachers. This would lead to developers solving more directly for classroom needs with feedback from teachers. It sought to marry the “start-up” mentality of the NYC-based tech scene in the budding Silicon Alley with the work of school improvement. Innovate NYC was housed in a co-working space for start-ups in order to break down the bureaucratic barrier between the office, schools, and developers and staged competitions to spur innovation, such as the Gap App Challenge. Companies partnered with schools for five-month prototype process, in which teachers worked alongside developers to share feedback on products for classroom use. Daily feedback alongside more formal data collection in Short-Term Evaluation Cycles provided information about the effectiveness of the product and areas for improvement. Many products were favorably reviewed, and teachers and entrepreneurs developed mutually beneficial relationships with each other that could continue beyond the formal structure of the challenge. Such partnerships signaled a broader vision for shaping the educational ecosystem: “The hypothesis,” Steven Hodas told Edsurge, was “that if you put teachers and developers together collaboratively for a long period of time, each of them will change.” This model of match-making between educators and developers was repeated in challenges like Music Education Hackathon and School Choice Design Challenge. For example, the Short-Cycle Evaluation Challenge partnership between East Bronx Academy of the Future and Listenwise (formerly Listen Current, a listening comprehension program featuring engaging, relevant content), resulted in a product that better met the needs of the school’s ELL learners and struggling readers. Through these initiatives, iZone sought to reshape the educational ecosystem by creating informal channels between educators and entrepreneurs and refocusing purchasing around the needs of schools (see Hodas’s (2016) report on the lessons of Innovate NYC for more on this topic).

iZone 3.0: Supporting Student-Centered Learning and Teaching  

[2015-2016/present]

Toward the fall of 2014, iZone reached a “crossroads” as journalists at Chalkbeat put it, when a new mayor and Chancellor took office. Coleman, Hodas, and Roberts left, along with other senior staff. In addition, funding from Race To The Top (an initiative of the Obama administration) ran out (although there was still some funding from another federal initiative, i3 grants, though that funding ran out in 2015). The confluence of changes in leadership, funding, organizational structuring, and pressures of Common Core implementation shaped the evolution of the iZone, as it adapted strategies to achieve its mission under these new conditions. Although incorporated back into the NYC Department of Education’s organizational structure with a smaller staff and less funding, iZone in this third phase continues to add to its existing programs and aims to incubate ideas that, if successful, will get scaled up through other divisions in the New York City Department of Education. For example, the Mastery Collaborative, a professional community of practice around the idea of mastery-based learning, generated sufficient interest from schools that it was moved into the Office of Postsecondary Readiness, Teaching, and Learning, a professional development program that support schools in designing student-centered learning, for continued support. iZone also continues to support schools through professional development initiatives such as the Blended Learning Institute and Affinity Groups, which offer a space for small groups of educators to gather around shared problems. iZone also continues challenged-based programming, such as #SharkTankEDU, in which edtech startups pitch their ideas to and receive feedback from the education community. iZone has also begun a third cycle of Short-Cycle Evaluation Challenges teams for the 2016-2017 school year. At this point, support for schools and mediation between the tech sector and schools are key pillars of iZone’s work. As current iZone members describe it, the first two phases of iZone generated feedback and ethnographic insights that helped iZone understand what support schools needed—such as professional development, new policies, and different procurement processes.

Reflections and Implications

iZone, like many organizations in the 2000’s, originally aimed to advance personalization through the development and replication of new school models. With changes in policies, politics, and funding, iZone evolved into an organization that, as it currently describes itself, “works with schools, the edtech marketplace and policy makers to design and scale promising learning models that prepare all students for college and careers.” Throughout this evolution, iZone itself has experienced the possibilities and challenges for an organization intent on both incubating new ideas and enabling those ideas to spread and have a significant positive impact on teaching and learning. iZone’s efforts may provide particular lessons for those who seek to connect teachers and schools with entrepreneurs and developers to create the tools and resources that respond to the students’ needs.