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Celebrating Extraordinary Educators from Africa’s Aspire Fellowship Programme

Posted on December 26, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

As we look back on 2025, we’d like to celebrate some of the extraordinary work in education we learned about this year. In this case, we’re highlighting the work of the Aspire Leadership Fellows of the Africa Leadership Academy. The Aspire Fellowship Programme is a cohort-based program that brings together leaders from across Africa who have started or are leading innovative schools and educational organizations. The Fellows work with global education leaders to expand and sustain their organizations. For those interested in learning more about this work or making a donation, we’re providing the Aspire profiles and websites of several of the Fellows who shared their work with graduate students from Teachers College, Columbia University, in Thomas Hatch’s class on School Change this fall.

Soofia International School

Highlight: Running a lean Cambridge model at a community-funded school catering to children from diverse families in rural Lesotho- some facing significant socio-economic challenges and other instabilities

Year Founded: 1990

Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary, Secondary, AS & A Level

School Vision: To deliver affordable, globally benchmarked education with a strong emphasis on equity, innovation, and holistic development.

Jayant Vijayakumar is Chief Academic Advisor at Soofia International School in Lesotho, where he leads strategic planning, academic innovation, and AI integration. Under his leadership, Soofia—serving over 1,300 students—has embraced flipped learning, launched coding and robotics programs, and pioneered student-led engagement models. Jayant’s approach blends academic rigour with emotional intelligence, technology, and values-based education, ensuring access and excellence for learners from all backgrounds. He trains educators, drives curriculum reform, and builds partnerships that extend Soofia’s impact across Lesotho and beyond. Passionate about transforming outdated education systems, Jayant’s work is driven by a belief that inclusive, holistic education can empower the next generation of thinkers, leaders, and changemakers in Africa and the world. Donation/Support link

Planning for Tomorrow Youth Organization

Highlight: Refugee-founded and refugee-led education which started with 26 students in a boardroom, and has grown to serve more than 800 students

Year founded: 2007

Grade Focus: K-12

School vision: A healthy and self-reliant community with knowledge and skills.

Daniel, also known as Khalid, is a Congolese Refugee who has resided in Uganda for the past 26 years. Leveraging the DAFI scholarship, Khalid earned an MS in Environmental Health and a Bachelor of Statistics Degree. He leads this refugee-led youth initiative dedicated to empowering vulnerable refugees and Ugandans towards becoming healthy and self-reliant. P4T Schools delivers comprehensive educational services, including improved teaching methodologies, a school feeding program, engaging children in debate, games, and sports. The overarching goal of these schools is to evolve into centers of excellence, with a focus on nurturing Innovative Leaders and Changemakers.

Kevin is an Education Coordinator and Early Childhood Development project manager at P4T. She attained a BS in Education under MasterCard Foundation Scholarship. She did teaching practice at Mandela Secondary school, taught at the North Green School and had a one-year volunteer experience as a teaching assistant at Lancaster Mennonite School in Pennsylvania, USA. Kevin uses her positive attitude to encourage others to work hard and bring about a positive impact in their communities. She is very passionate about giving back “because in one way or the other it is what made her who she is, a transformative leader.” Donation/Support link

Inmates Educational Foundation (IEF)

**MAHFUZ ALABIDUN**
Inmates Educational Foundation
Nigeria (Lagos, Oyo, Osun, Kano, Abuja, and Ebonyi states)

Highlight: Running a school system in Nigerian correctional centers to provide access to formal and informal education as a form of reformation and reintegration for inmates.

Year Founded: 2018

Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary, Secondary, National Open University

School Vision: To provide educational opportunities to inmates, empowering them to reintegrate into society and become productive citizens..

Mahfuz Alabidun is the Founder and Executive Director of Inmates Educational Foundation, a nonprofit delivering education in Nigerian correctional centers. With over 500 learners across six states, IEF offers academic, vocational, and reintegration programs that support inmates’ transformation and reintegration into society. Under his leadership, the foundation has received national recognition, including the Governor of Lagos State Social Impact Award. A TEDx speaker and education reform advocate, he is passionate about building inclusive systems that restore dignity and create second chances. Through education, Mahfuz is rewriting the narrative of incarceration in Nigeria—one learner, one center, one future at a time. Cohort 5 Year Founded: 2018 Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary, Secondary, National Open University School Vision: To to provide educational opportunities to inmates, empowering them to reintegrate into society and become productive citizens. Donation/Support link

Humanitarian Services Action (HuSA)

Highlight: Running a school model that not only educates but also heals and empowers children, especially those affected by conflict, displacement, and poverty; with focus on Protection and Integrated Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Services (MHPSS).

Year Founded: 2020

Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary

School Vision: To create a new generation of African leaders and change-makers who are self-reliant and capable of lifting others.

Sumi Hamid is a refugee leader and the Founder and Executive Director of Humanitarian Services Action Organisation (HuSA) in Kikuube, Uganda. A survivor of displacement himself, he grew up in Kyangwali Refugee Settlement and now leads community-based initiatives that provide education, mental health support, and protection services to refugee children and families. After overcoming years of interrupted education, Sumi pursued a career in social work and made the bold decision in 2023 to leave formal employment and fully commit to building HuSA. His organization now serves over 130 children with early education and supports women and youth with microgrants, GBV response, and psychosocial care. Rooted in lived experience, his work champions dignity, empowerment, and community-led change—offering vulnerable children and families the opportunity to learn, heal, and thrive. Cohort 5 Year Founded: 2020 Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary School Vision: To create a new generation of African leaders and change-makers who are self-reliant and capable of lifting others. Donation/Support link

Ajibu Community

Highlight: They produce their own play-learning resources which are used to combine play-based learning interventions with life skills development, ensuring that children not only succeed academically but also explore their innate talents and build strong social-emotional and entrepreneurial skills to reach their full potential

Year Founded: 2021

Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary, Vocational Training for mothers

School Vision: To create a model Play-Based Learning school in Eastern Uganda where education is focused on academic excellence and skills development so that there’s a clear path for every child to succeed in life.

Timothy David Wambi is the Founder of Ajibu Community Organisation (Ajco) in rural Mayuge, Uganda. Timothy leads grassroots education reform through a dual-impact model: supporting public primary schools and running a vibrant community learning center. Ajco currently educates 77 children aged 3–7 and empowers young women—many of them survivors of early marriage—to become trained educators. Timothy’s model integrates play-based, life-skills learning and develops low-cost teaching materials to improve literacy, numeracy, and STEM outcomes in under-resourced schools. Timothy works to ensure that no child is denied the right to quality education and that local solutions are part of lasting transformation in Uganda’s rural education landscape. Donation/Support link

Itinga Charity Education Foundation

Highlight: The only inclusive secondary school in Northern Uganda catering to students with diverse abilities such as the blind, low vision, cerebral palsy, intellectual disabilities, and physical challenged, studying alongside their abled peers.

Year Founded: 2024

Grade: Secondary

School Vision: To empower students to thrive, regardless of ability, and promotes a culture of acceptance and inclusion

Acen Kevin (Daniela) is the Founder and Executive Director of the Itinga Charity Education Foundation (ICEF) and Director of St. Mary Goretti Secondary School Ngetta in Northern Uganda. Holding a Bachelor’s degree in Accounting and Finance, Kevin spearheads initiatives that deliver inclusive education to students with and without disabilities, including learners who are blind or physically challenged. Under her leadership, ICEF partnered to establish the region’s first inclusive secondary school, now serving 45 students from across Uganda. She drives accessibility through scholarships, assistive technologies, and inclusive teacher training. As Board Chair of the school’s academic committee, Kevin is dedicated to upholding quality and equity in education. In 2025, she was awarded the MTN Changemaker Grant for her groundbreaking work in assistive learning. Kevin is deeply passionate about creating a future where all learners— regardless of ability—have the opportunity to thrive. Donation/Support link

Isrina School

Highlight: Spearheading the “Recycles Pay” project at Isrina School which empowers parents to offset children’s fees by generating income from recyclable materials

Year founded: 2016

Grades served: K-6

School vision: A world where every child, regardless of their economic background has equal access to quality education

Grace is a fervent champion of inclusive education, dedicating herself to this cause since the age of 15. Fueled by her personal experiences, she remains resolute in her mission to guarantee equitable access to quality education for every child, irrespective of their background. Notably, she advocates for environmental sustainability and spearheads the innovative “Recycles Pay” project, empowering parents to offset their children’s fees through the use of recyclable materials. With her certification as a Microsoft Educator, Grace actively pursues the enhancement of learning experiences and seeks to broaden educational access, aiming to disrupt the cycle of poverty through the delivery of high-quality education. Donation/Support link

Tsion Academy

Highlight: Focused on providing free, quality education to out-of-school children in underserved communities using a personal and scalable funding model called the “Big Brother or Sister where each child is matched with a “Big Brother or Sister”—an individual donor who would commit to supporting the child’s education monthly or by term.

Year Founded: 2022

Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary/Primary/Secondary

School Vision: To restore dignity, build character, and equip each child with the tools they need to thrive academically, emotionally, and socially.

Adeola Tolulope Abayomi is the Founder and Executive Director of Tsion Academy, a free school for out-of-school children in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. A trained lawyer (LLB, BL) and the visionary force behind Evolufy Africa. Tsion Academy currently serves over 140 children aged 4 to 13, delivering quality, inclusive education to underserved communities. Through Evolufy Africa’s two branches—Tsion Academy and Maendeleo Africa— Adeola advances access, equity, and youth empowerment. She is passionate about building sustainable, replicable school models that drive genuine transformation. Her work bridges grassroots action and systemic change, offering hope and opportunity to the next generation of African leaders. Donation/Support link

Smart Bilingual Academy

Highlight: Creating equitable education access to students in second cities.

Year founded: 2022

Grades served: K-6

School vision: All children reach their full-potential and are agents of change in their schools, communities and the world.

With a remarkable 15-year background in supporting social innovations, Tchanlandjou has been instrumental in mapping key actors and organizations within ecosystems for collective systemic impact. Since joining Ashoka in 2013, he has held the pivotal role of Regional Director for the Sahel region, where his strategic vision and ability to inspire and mobilize diverse partners have yielded significant accomplishments. Notably, Tchanlandjou spearheaded the creation of the Education and Youth Clusters, pivotal initiatives that have greatly enhanced Ashoka’s impact in the Sahel. In 2016, he further demonstrated his entrepreneurial spirit by founding ‘SeddoInvest,’ a start-up focused on identifying and preparing a pipeline of young social ventures and attracting investments to accelerate their development. He founded SBA after seeing first-hand the profound disparity between the quality of education available to students in Dakar, and in rural and per-urban areas in Senegal. Donation/Support link

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Posted in Africa, education reform, Educational change, Educational Leadership, Educational Policy, equity, Lesotho, Nigeria, Uganda

Tagged Africa, education, Educational change, Educational Leadership, Educational Policy, Learning, Lesotho, news, Nigeria, Teachers, Teaching, technology, Uganda

Centering Equity Through Historical Grounding and Collective Educational Change with Latrice Marianno

Posted on December 21, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

In December’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview Dr. Latrice Marianno argues that meaningful educational improvement must be historically grounded and explicitly centered on equity and justice, not treated as a side effort within school improvement. Despite current challenges, she calls for collective, systems-focused approaches that dismantle structural barriers and urges educators and scholars to continually act as if radical transformation in education is possible. The LtC series is produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?

Dr. Latrice Marianno (LM): Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s (ASHE) annual conference in Denver. During my time there, I visited the Museum for Black Girls and encountered this quote from Angela Davis above one of the exhibits: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” For me, this quote embodies the work before all of us. To heed this year’s call, I am continuing to deepen my work around equitable school improvement in a few ways.

First, I am ensuring that my work is continually grounded in the historical context that has produced and/or maintained the inequities we continually see in education. Critical policy genealogy, which focuses on understanding the origin and evolution of policies (Brewer, 2014; Meadmore et al., 2000), is something I have been drawn toward and intend to engage with more deeply. I find it critically important to understand how policies came to be and the issues those policies were intended to address as that insight can shed light on how educational policies create or maintain inequities. One example that illustrates the importance of understanding the histories of educational policies is the history of state teacher certification policies. While characterized as a policy aimed to enhance the professionalization of teachers (e.g., Hutt et al., 2018), requirements for teachers to pass exams to become certified have long reinforced inequities in access to entering the teaching profession (e.g., Carver-Thomas, 2018). Understanding the history of these policies means an awareness that these certification policies were popularized as a way to justify lower pay for Black educators and later the displacement of Black educators (e.g., Fultz, 2004; Tillman, 2004). Remembering our histories is a necessary foundation if we are to reimagine educational systems.

Second, I will continue focusing on interrogating systems, policies, and practices in educational spaces both in my teaching and scholarship. My work focuses on examining how school improvement systems can be reimagined and redesigned to better support educational leaders to engage in meaningful and justice-centered improvement. For example, Marianno et al. (2024) focuses on state-influenced school improvement plan templates and the extent to which educational leaders are prompted to think about and address inequities. This work opens a conversation regarding how this tool (i.e., school improvement templates) might be redesigned to support educational leaders to center equity in the school improvement planning process. Currently, I teach in a principal preparation program which has allowed me to continually engage with educators and aspiring educational leaders around what this could look like in practice. My teaching allows opportunities for me to learn from and alongside my students as we collectively think about the supports, tools, and professional learning that support educational leaders to think critically about equitable school improvement and act on those commitments in sustainable ways. For example, in my course on data-driven school improvement, we use Bernhardt’s (2017) program and process evaluation tool to prompt them to think about ways school policies and practices create or maintain inequities – an activity they have found useful in prompting them to notice and reflect on inequities within their schools and districts.

Featured Exhibit at the Museum for Black Girls

Finally, I am committed to supporting and engaging in collective futuring in educational spaces. This commitment means sharing my work in practitioner-friendly formats (e.g., policy reports, and/or practitioner journals like Educational Leadership or Phi Delta Kappan), rather than solely academic journals. This commitment also means continuing to challenge assumptions about what it means to improve a school and supporting educators and educational leaders to think critically about school improvement and educational justice as intertwined endeavors. To envision beyond our current system and imagine what could be. To “act as if it were possible to radically transform the world” and “to do it all the time.”

LiC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?

LM: Recently, my work has focused on understanding school improvement planning (SIP) processes and how educational leaders think about and work toward redressing inequities through those processes (Marianno, 2024; additional work forthcoming). Through this research, I found that educational leaders viewed equity as either an implicit part of school improvement planning or absent from that process, and that school leaders were not prompted to think about equity within the SIP process. These views and approaches undermined the district’s expressed equity focus by creating a disconnect between their policy intent and implementation. In my work, I argue for the need to explicitly connect equity with school improvement and begin to identify opportunities to center equity within a process that can often be thought of as parallel to school improvement rather than an integral part of those efforts.

“I argue for the need to explicitly connect equity with school improvement.”

Ultimately, I hope my work inspires folks to be transgressive – to push against the boundaries of what is typically considered improvement within the current educational system (e.g., lack of explicit focus on redressing inequities within improvement efforts). To continually question the assumptions that undergird our collective work in improving education for all students, especially those from historically marginalized backgrounds. To believe in radical transformation and work toward it in our pursuit of educational justice. Toward this end, there are a few key lessons I hope folks can take from my work which collectively emphasizes the importance of being systems-focused, centering the knowledge and experiences of marginalized students and communities, and then leveraging that knowledge to design more just futures.

First, there can be no educational improvement without a focus on redressing inequities. Too often equity is treated or understood like a side project rather than integral to the work of educational improvement (Marianno, 2024). However, as scholars like Gloria Ladson-Billings and Michael Dumas have argued, substantively improving education requires explicitly attending to the racism and antiblackness that shape the current educational system (Dumas, 2016; Ladson-Billings, 2006).

“Too often equity is treated or understood like a side project rather than integral to the work of educational improvement.”

Second, we must focus on reimagining our systems, policies, and practices toward educational justice (Welton et al., 2018). There has been a popular illustration that people, particularly in education, have used to describe equity. This illustration shows three individuals of varying heights standing outside of a fence watching a baseball game. One individual is tall enough to see over the fence without additional support while the other two need additional and varied support. While this illustration has multiple iterations, there is often a comparison between equality and equity in which equality represents everyone getting the same number of boxes to stand on, and equity representing everyone getting what they need to, in fact, see over the fence. The version that most resonates with me includes a visual representation of liberation as the removal of the fence. For me, this representation highlights how education broadly and schools specifically have been designed with particular people in mind (in this case the individual tall enough to see without additional support) and how the removal of the fence would serve everyone. I firmly believe that to ensure marginalized students have equitable and just educational opportunities, experiences, and outcomes, it is critical that our collective work (practitioners and scholars alike) focuses on removing the fences (i.e., barriers) that marginalize students and lead to inequities. Engaging in educational improvement in this way centers the experiences of marginalized students, such that educational spaces are designed with them in mind.

Finally, we must recognize the value of collective knowledge and experiences. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford (2020) notes that we need to “intentionally harvest the collective wisdom of many” to “envision better and plot a course for how to get there” (p. 43). That is, futuring for education requires honoring and valuing the knowledge and expertise of diverse stakeholders – teachers, educational leaders, students, and caregivers. In particular, we need to view students and caregivers as valuable partners who can aid in both addressing the educational problems schools are facing and support imagining an otherwise.

LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?

LM: Honestly, I’m not sure where I see the field of educational change heading. The current climate makes that picture a bit hazy for me. We’re in such a significant period of retrenchment with attacks on academic freedom in higher education, undermining of public education through funding cuts and dismantling the Department of Education, and backlash for anything remotely equitable or inclusive. It is disheartening, though unsurprising. This moment in our history reflects longstanding patterns in American history where movements toward justice are met with resistance and retrenchment. As Decoteau Irby’s (2021) work and the Angela Davis quote shared earlier both remind us, the current moment is a reminder that systems of oppression are constantly at work. We have to act as if we can radically transform the world all the time because systems of oppression are constantly mutating and reinventing. With that in mind, I do have hopes for the field moving forward.

I hope we move toward deeper recognition that equity and justice must be central to educational improvement, not a side project or parallel effort. This is the work. There is no meaningful school improvement work divorced from a focus on educational justice. In my own work, I’ve seen how educational leaders are often unclear about how to integrate equity into improvement work or treat equity as an implied focus undergirding their improvement efforts but in ways that actually undermine those efforts (Marianno, 2024). Specifically, district leaders viewed equity as an implied focus and foundation of all of their school improvement efforts. However, this approach led school leaders in that district to believe that equity was absent from the process altogether and left them unsure of where and how to integrate equity in their improvement efforts because it was not explicitly discussed. Moving forward, I hope we regard equity and justice as non-negotiables that guide how we define problems, reorganize educational systems, and measure the success of educational improvement efforts.

I hope we move toward a more historically grounded approach to school and systems improvement. To meaningfully redress inequities, we must understand how past policies and practices created the systems we currently have. Tracing policy histories, such as the racialized roots of teacher certification requirements or gifted education (e.g., Mansfield, 2016), reveal that many present-day inequities are not accidental, and reinforces the understanding that policies are not neutral. I hope the field continues to deepen its engagement with historical analysis, recognizing that remembering the past is essential for imagining futures that depart from it.

I hope the field continues to shift toward more systemic and collective approaches to educational improvement. When working with aspiring educational leaders in my course on data-driven school improvement and building on the work of scholars like Brandi Hinnant-Crawford (2020), I find they often leave the course with a better understanding of how school systems, policies, and practices shape disparities within their schools and districts and the importance and value of collective approaches to their improvement work. This is my hope for the field – that we engage these ideas not just intellectually but as part of our praxis.

Despite the current moment we’re in, I hope that both scholars and practitioners act as if radically transforming education is possible – and that they do it all the time.

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Posted in education reform, equity, Interviews, Lead the Change

Tagged education, education equity, Educational change, equity, Lead the Change, news, Politics, Teaching, technology

Justice-Oriented Educational Change Through Community-Led Solutions: A Conversation with Edwin Nii Bonney

Posted on December 3, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

In November’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview Edwin Nii Bonney emphasizes that educational research and practice must “look back” by acknowledging colonial legacies and marginalized histories while “looking forward” by centering Indigenous, vulnerable, and community voices. His work highlights deep listening, intergenerational collaboration, and community-designed solutions as essential to dismantling deficit narratives and creating equitable educational systems. The LtC series is produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?

Edwin Nii Bonney (ENB): As someone who grew up in Ghana and went through K–12 and college there, I have come to appreciate the wisdom of my elders. That wisdom, often carried in proverbs and the principle of Sankofa, reminds us to look back and learn from the past so that we do not repeat its mistakes. In my scholarship, I wrestle with the reality that educational systems remain deeply embedded in coloniality. We are still grappling with the legacies of colonialism especially in the global South, and those legacies have not disappeared (Bonney, 2022). They persist in the languages we speak and use to instruct students, the books we read, our perceptions of ourselves, our standards of beauty, and even our justice systems (Bonney, 2023; Bonney et al., 2025a). Colonialism continues to shape much of who we are and how our societies function. It is essential that we acknowledge that the legacies of colonialism are still with us. It was not that long ago, and its effects continue to reverberate in our educational systems and beyond.

Having lived and schooled in four different countries, I have come to realize that in every society there are marginalized and vulnerable groups. The dominant discourses in any context, whether social, cultural, or educational, are often so pervasive that marginalized voices, ideas, and ways of knowing are easily erased or silenced. Indigenous wisdom, local knowledge, and community customs are frequently pushed aside. This understanding shapes how I approach my scholarship. We must continually examine how educational leadership, policies, and practices have historically and presently marginalize the ways of being, speaking, and doing of those who are not part of dominant groups. Whether in the United States, Ghana, or elsewhere, there are always minoritized voices whose perspectives are excluded from how education is designed and enacted. Because of that, I believe it is vital to ask how we center the ways of speaking, knowing, and being of Indigenous, marginalized, and vulnerable communities in education. How do we ensure that their experiences and insights shape what we study, how we study it, and how we interpret what we learn?

“We must continually examine how educational leadership, policies, and practices have historically and presently marginalize the ways of being, speaking, and doing of those who are not part of dominant groups.”

In my own scholarship and service, I see my role as coming alongside communities and families, not as an expert above them but as a partner who recognizes them as experts of their own experiences. They understand the root causes of the challenges they face and often hold the wisdom to identify meaningful solutions. In Bonney et al. (2025a) in listening to students who had not been able to obtain passing grades in Math, many of them, after retaking the exam multiple times, I learned that they struggled to understand and make sense math concepts taught in English. They felt like failures until they went against the norm as experts of their own experiences to learn in their native languages. Learning in their own native language according to these students brought them success on the first try even though the system told them it was impossible. As we think about the future of education and research, we must keep asking: whose voices are missing from the table? Whose perspectives are absent from the design process? Which families are not engaged in our schools, and how do we empower them to participate fully? We must always ask who we are not serving well and how we can do better. When we look back at history, we see that we have not always served everyone equitably. Therefore, it must remain at the forefront of our work in education to ask, whose voices are we still not hearing?

“I see my role as coming alongside communities and families, not as an expert but as a partner who recognizes them as experts of their own experiences.”

LtC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?

ENB: Much of the work I do alongside educational leaders, students, and families begin with listening. It starts with listening deeply to the experiences of different groups and how they encounter systems of oppression. This kind of listening is to not to defend or to critique but to learn from their perspectives, their realities, and their ways of knowing and being. The next principle is building relationships across generations and forming coalitions among groups who are affected by similar problems of practice or systems of oppression. When these coalitions come together around community-informed problems and community-designed solutions, we are better able to address the issues that matter most to them. In Bonney et al. (2025b), I share about a community-based organization that brings together everyone in their village from as young as seven years to as old as 80 years. The organization gathers the elders to recount stories about the history of their community in their native language. The young people record and document the oral history and then create plays in their native language, where they dramatize the stories on digital media and on stage to be a resource for local schools because there were no resources to teach their native language other than English. This community led movement was in decreasing use of their native language. Communities understand their own challenges, and when they help design the solutions, those solutions are more authentic, effective, and sustainable (Costanza-Chock, 2020). Through these relationships and through genuine listening, we can begin to challenge deficit discourses and narratives that blame individuals instead of systems for the inequities we see in education. Deficit thinking overlooks structural causes and often misplaces responsibility. But lasting change requires us to shift our attention to the systems, policies, and practices that create and sustain inequity.

Change in education will come only through broad coalitions that include not only researchers and educational leaders but also students, teachers, families, community members, elders and even naysayers. Their knowledge, lived experiences, and cultural wisdom are essential for reimagining a more just and equitable educational future. As we engage in this work, it is important to keep asking which solutions are working, for whom, and under what conditions (Hinnant-Crawford, 2025). Sometimes a solution may appear successful in one area but create unintended problems in another. When that happens, we must be ready to respond quickly to stop any harm. Change is not static; it is a continuous and reflective process. At the heart of this work is a simple but powerful truth: we must be intentional about involving those most affected by the problems we aim to address. We must center community expertise, engage families and students as co-creators of change, and together expose even small variations in outcomes for students as opportunities to learn. Finally, we must continue to seek out and listen to the voices and stories of those still impacted by systems of oppression or persistent inequities. Because meaningful change in education begins with listening, building relationships and broad coalitions that endure when we work together to challenge inequitable systems and co-create a more just future. These are the foundational blocks to a justice-oriented improvement approach to undo oppressive systems in education.

“[M]eaningful change in education begins with listening, building relationships and broad coalitions that endure when we work together to challenge inequitable systems and co-create a more just future”

LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?

ENB: The nature of change is that it always comes with uncertainty. Sometimes that uncertainty can bring frustration on one hand or excitement on the other. We can never fully know what the future holds or what the field might look like. We cannot predict what new policies, reforms, or interventions will emerge, or what discourses will shape the field. What I do know is that we can always look back to learn. We can recognize that, as a society and as a field, there are things we’ve done well and others we have not. One of our core goals must be to serve all children well. That means preparing researchers, educational practitioners, students, and teachers so that we can meet the diverse needs of all types of learners. It also means continuing to prepare teachers for a field that is increasingly complex with diverse students who have diverse needs. It also means preparing educational leaders to create inclusive and collaborative environments that enable teachers and staff to do their best work to serve students equitably.

So, although there is uncertainty about the future, one thing we can hold on to is that we know what we value and how to prepare for that future, whatever it looks like. More than what gives me hope is what energizes me. In Bonney et al., (2024) we created an edited volume, to center and hear from educational practitioners on the front lines and how they work with students, teachers, parents, and community to tackle problems of practice in their local schools and districts. In times of uncertainty, the best people to hear from are those on the front lines. Working alongside with these scholars, educational leaders, and practitioners, in the trenches trying to figure out how to serve all students well makes me expectant that things will change continuously for the better. They’re asking critical questions: How do we better support our teachers? How do we solve problems of practice? How do we address discipline issues or chronic absenteeism? How do we engage families more effectively? How do we reduce the overrepresentation of Black and Brown students in special education? How do we increase their representation in gifted and Advanced Placement courses? These are the kinds of questions that inspire hope for the future. Even though the future may be uncertain, we can still prepare for said future. Personally, I am not as concerned about where the field of educational change is heading but rather about preparing my students and practitioners for today’s challenges. I believe that the same justice-oriented and community-centered approach to solving today’s problems will help us address the problems of tomorrow.

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Posted in education reform, Educational change, Educational Policy, equity, Ghana, Interviews, Lead the Change

Tagged education, equity, Ghana, Learning, Teachers, Teaching, technology

Teaching in the Age of Generative AI: Lead the Change Interview with Bernardo Feliciano

Posted on November 6, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

In October’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview Bernardo Feliciano’s discusses his work through the AITeach Co-design Lab at UMass Lowell; this work brings educators, researchers, and technologists together to co-create strategies and tools for teaching in this age of AI. The LtC series is produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.

Bernardo Feliciano (BF): Currently I am working with colleagues to build a co-design lab that brings together educators from very different contexts to develop approaches to teaching and learning in a world where generative AI is a reality. The lab is called the AITeach Co-design Lab @ UMass Lowell. (The hyperlink goes to one of many one-pagers we have been developing for partners representing different disciplines and sectors).

In the AITeach Co-design Lab, as collaborators we aim to create a structured space where we as a diverse group of educators, researchers, and technologists co-develop practical tools, strategies, and prototypes that respond to the reality of generative AI in education. The intention is not only to design usable products but also to study how to structure co-design itself to help schools navigate AI’s challenges and opportunities. In our co-design sessions, educators, researchers, and technology build spaces where we can address challenges in education and AI that are too complex for any one actor to solve (Snowden & Boone, 2007; Senge, 1990). The Lab functions as a structured environment where we can bring our problems of practice, iterate on small pilots, and use those cycles to build local capacity rather than waiting for top-down policy.

As an adjunct professor, I am also teaching a class on family and community engagement with schools. These roles constantly remind me that people bring distinct personal, professional, and institutional histories into every space. For me, futuring is less about projecting a single vision of “Education with a capital E” and more about the relational, actor-to-actor work of helping people shape their futures from the personal, professional, and institutional histories they inherit. That’s the direction my work is taking me.

The way I approach this is by convening diverse groups around developing tangible projects. The process matters as much as the specific product, whether it’s a research article, curriculum binder, a chatbot teaching/learning companion prototype, or a strategy for helping parents connect to schools. What is essential is how people can communicate their histories, connecting, adapting, negotiating, and reworking them to address problems in the present into a viable future. The varied personal and institutional histories participants bring are neither external resources to be tapped nor barriers to be overcome, but active materials in our negotiation of effective, situated teaching and learning. Innovation emerges as members work through these histories, adapting them in relation to one another to meet particular needs. I may not care whether my own work is labeled research, practice, or a mix of both, but as co-designers we must respect each other’s perspectives, even as those perspectives shift through negotiation. AI brings this into focus. At its core, AI is an immense bank or reservoir of the past, trained on and providing access to what is already known or has already been done. The future is not contained in the AI itself—nor can it be left to AI to imagine for us. The future comes from how we draw on that past to build something meaningful with and for the people in front of us. We explore generative AI as both a design partner and an object of study. Co-designers prototype tools like tutoring agents or parent communication bots, while also interrogating what it means to teach with, against, or around AI in everyday classrooms.

Of course, I have to use my own history, experience, and learning as a researcher, teacher, administrator, entrepreneur, and non-profit professional to leverage the network of histories that generative AI offers. But more than before, I can inform, contextualize, and connect the convening and teaching I do now with the work of so many more people and peoples (to some extent) who came before.

LtC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?

BF: One lesson is that teachers cannot be treated as passive implementers of someone else’s design. Too often, educational change is imagined as developing a curriculum or program in one place and distributing it everywhere. That assumes context does not matter and is peripheral rather than integral to learning and teaching. Our relationship to knowledge is always relational and always contextual.

Education has always lived in the complex space where cause and effect are only clear in hindsight (Snowden & Boone, 2007). Simon (1973) describes these as ill-structured domains existing in a state of dynamic heterogeneity in which diverse elements and relationships continually shift, preventing stable equilibrium and requiring ongoing adaptation (Pickett et al., 2017). Ill-structured problems cannot be solved by importing outside solutions but only by negotiation among those struggling with them. I do not believe that educational change—or improvement—comes from a fixed product or process delivered with fidelity. It is an ongoing process of learning through which people shape what they inherit—choosing what to keep, what to adapt, what to reject, and what to forget. It is a process I have found universally involves dynamics of local alliances, conflicts, and negotiations. The lesson I take from this is that if you want to improve schooling, you have to engage with the people who are doing the teaching and learning.

“We explore generative AI as both a design partner and an object of study . . . If you want to improve schooling, you have to engage with the people who are doing the teaching and learning.”

Working on my dissertation underscored this point. I wrote about using one-on-one meetings in a researcher-practitioner partnership to organize co-designing a computer science (CS) curriculum for middle schools. My experience brought home to me that there is no such thing as “shared understanding.” What emerges is never a single, final agreement but alignment good enough to act together, sustained through negotiation as perspectives shift. For example, teachers and researchers sometimes differed on how much detail a lesson plan should contain. Some wanted highly specified steps, others only broad outlines. Rather than force uniformity, we kept both versions and moved forward. That flexibility allowed the work to continue without pretending the difference had been resolved.

My work with different kinds of organizations has shown me how funding and infrastructure shape what is possible. This point is kind of obvious but still seems to bear repeating. Creativity and goodwill are not enough without sustainable and intentional support. For example, in the CS Pathways partnership, we shifted from MIT App Inventor to Code.org’s App Lab during remote learning. That solved one problem but created new ones around district procurement and accounts, showing how infrastructure shapes outcomes. In our recent Lab kickoff meeting, one participant noted that even when AI-enabled data tools existed, district procurement rules blocked their use — showing how funding and infrastructure filter what is possible.

At the same time, I saw that students’ and teachers’ own histories can be powerful resources for change, if we work out how to support them as they need to be supported. In one part of the CS Pathways project, students framed their app design around civic issues in their community, such as neighborhood safety and access to resources. Their lived experiences pushed the curriculum beyond abstract coding skills into work that mattered locally. This reframed computer science as a civic as well as a technical practice and shaped how we sequenced and supported instruction in those classes.

LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?

BF: In my experience, the field often moves toward building monoliths: “the system,” “the conceptual framework,” “the workforce,” “education technology.” Instead of these monoliths, we need to work with lesson plans and pacing decisions that make up “the system,” the overlapping frameworks that guide practice rather than a single “conceptual framework,” the varied teacher and student histories that constitute “the workforce,” and the specific tools and artifacts, from binders to chatbots, that become “education technology.” Monoliths can make things easier to talk about but also risk obscuring the negotiations and translations that are inseparable from those very systems. These relational dynamics are not add-ons. They are the system itself, as much as the actors are (Latour, 2005). As in the earlier example of teachers’ differing preferences for lesson plan detail, the system took shape through the negotiation itself, not through a fixed agreement imposed from outside.

“Relational dynamics are not add-ons. They are the system itself.”

I would like to see the field shift toward paying closer attention to the actor-to-actor interactions and dimensions. That is where change takes shape: when people with different histories and contexts negotiate how to carry those histories forward. I see promising work moving in this direction: Playlab.ai’s participatory approach to AI tool-building, Victor Lee’s co-design of AI curricula with teachers, Penuel and Gallagher’s (2017) and Coburn et al.’s (2021) and others’ emphasis on research–practice partnerships , and Bryk et al.’s (2015) improvement science cycles. The Cynefin co-design principles we are enacting in AITeach — probe, sense, respond — are themselves evidence of a field moving toward valuing negotiation and adaptation over fixed models (Snowden & Boone, 2007).

This is also where I find hope. In my dissertation research, I have seen how a small change in the structure of a meeting can reshape how colleagues relate to one another. Having a teacher go first in one-on-one meetings shifted the dynamic, allowing their concerns to set also frame a negotiation rather being a response to requirements. I have seen middle school students reframe ideas in ways that exceeded what I could have planned, such as attempting to build an app to help students and teachers share resources more effectively in school. Students translated apps they were familiar with into tools for their own purposes, which required reimagining instruction around their designs rather than trying to make pre-existing apps seem interesting. This approach may cause an instructional headache but least it provided an authentic motivation for learning an aspect of coding.

Some might call this the interest or work “micro-level,” but I avoid that term because it suggests hierarchies and fixed layers. I prefer to describe it as the translational dimension: the ongoing work of shaping futures from inherited histories by deciding what to keep, what to adapt, and what to let go.

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Posted in Interviews, Lead the Change

Tagged AERA, ai, artificial intelligence, education, Educational change, Educational Leadership, Lead the Change, Teaching, technology

Bringing a Tablet-Based Foundational Learning Program to all the Primary Schools in Malawi: Joe Wolf and Kira Keane on the Evolution of Imagine Worldwide (Part 1)

Posted on August 20, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

What does it take to scale a tablet-based foundational learning program to all the primary schools in Malawi? In this 3-part interview, Joe Wolf and Kira Keane describe how Imagine Worldwide has approached that challenge and share some of what they have learned in the process. The tablet-based program at the center of Imagine Worldwide’s work, developed by software partner onebillion, serves as a supplement for regular instruction, with each child in a school spending a targeted 150 minutes per week working independently on problems related to reading and mathematics. Imagine Worldwide partnered with the Government of Malawi to rollout the program in 500 primary schools in 2023-24, with the ultimate goal of expanding to all 6000 primary schools in Malawi, serving 3.8 million learners in standards [grades] 1-4 annually. Joe Wolf is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Imagine Worldwide and Kira Keane is the Director of Communications. (Photos/graphics are from Imagine Worldwide unless otherwise noted.)

TH: Can you describe for us some of the key steps or phases you went through as you developed your work to test and then to scale-up this tablet-based program in Malawi?

Joe Wolf: The first phase of our work was all research oriented. We wanted to see if these learner-centric tablet models could work – were they really effective for children? – before asking under-resourced systems to spend time, energy, and capital on them. That meant we had a prolonged research phase that included nine randomized controlled trials. That was across different contexts, different languages, different implementation models, different countries – really exhaustively trying to prove that these solutions can, in fact, add significant value.

The second phase was what we call “learning to scale:” What are the processes that need to be done repeatedly well to scale within these contexts? We purposely spread our work out across seven countries, with different implementation models, different implementation partners, different types of structures to really test what needs to be done repeatedly well so that these systems can adopt the work at scale. Then, only in the last three years, we’ve put the pedal down and said, “Okay, I think we’re ready to really think about scaling.” And we were only able to act on scaling thanks to the leadership of the government of Malawi, who saw the learning gains of our pilot programs and saw how this edtech intervention could support their national goals of improving foundational skills. At that point in 2022, we served around 6000 children, but we increased it to about 700,000 children by the beginning of 2025. That’s a 100x increase in the last two years, which I think is a testament to the scalability of the model, the execution of the team, and the leadership of our government partners.

A map of africa with a yellow circle

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

TH: What’s the third phase? Implementation?

JW: I would say it’s scale plus continuous improvement. Now, our research is less efficacy oriented and more implementation oriented. How do we make it better and better and better? To address that, we have four levers we focus on:

Access: How do we serve more and more children and make the solutions easier and easier to implement?
Cost-effectiveness: How do we bring down the recurring costs to be as low as possible? We’ve brought costs down around 75% in the last five years, and we think there’s still room to go. Our key inputs are all highly deflationary, so we’re getting better economies of scale as we grow. Right now, we’re at about seven dollars (USD) per child per year. We think we can get that under five dollars (USD) as we get better economies of scale.
Advocacy: How do we use data to improve the implementation model in the software so that the efficacy of the program continues to go up and up and up? It’s one of the beauties of technology that it can iterate and improve. You’re not building a building and putting in books and then five years later it’s deteriorated. We actually have the ability to use data to continuously improve through this flywheel of innovation.

“It’s one of the beauties of technology that it can iterate and improve. You’re not building a building and putting in books and then five years later it’s deteriorated. We actually have the ability to use data to continuously improve through this flywheel of innovation.“

Sustainability. How do we work with our government partners to build operational and financial sustainability? And how do we do it starting day one, where we’re building the “muscles” within the existing education system, as opposed to the classic approach of starting off outside the system and then trying to hand it off to the system. Too often, if you haven’t done a good job of building that internal muscle, and then things fall apart. So we’ve really taken the system strengthening approach, acknowledging that there are capacity and infrastructure gaps within the countries where we work and that there are key functions that need to be built that don’t currently exist within some of these systems. We’ve tried to give it time so that, by the end of the implementation phase, the system has already been doing the work for an extended period of time. That way, you don’t have this fall off as you try to hand-off everything to the system itself.

Kira Keane: I just want to underscore a couple of points that Joe made. For Imagine, this notion of the continuous improvement loop, it’s not like we did things, something went wrong and we’re like, “Oh, we have to fix this.” This was an intentional design element from the very beginning: How do we get continuous feedback to improve both the software itself and the implementation model? And the other point is that our key question is “How do we serve as many children as possible?” The need is so immense and the population growth will be so intense over the next 10-15 years so we really need to be focused on scale. That means working with our government partners to aim for generational impact, really looking at country-wide scale, and focusing on how we design for that.

“The need is so immense and the population growth will be so intense over the next 10-15, years so we really need to be focused on scale. That means working with our government partners to aim for generational impact, really looking at country-wide scale, and focusing on how we design for that.”

JW: I’ll add two more things to what Kira said. The ecosystem is exhausted by pilots – by small things that don’t scale, that don’t have evidence, that take a lot of time and resources. Scale from day one very much aligns with where the governments are. They have a big problem with the lack of foundational learning among their students, and they need big solutions. Little, tiny things are just distracting and take too much time and energy. The second thing is that we have positioned our organization to be temporary in nature, so our job is to put ourselves out of business as quickly as we possibly can. We don’t see these as “Imagine Worldwide” programs in Malawi or “Imagine Worldwide” in Sierra Leone. These are programs of the government in Malawi and of the government in Sierra Leone that we are helping to support. We’re helping to build capacity and infrastructure to build muscle within the systems. But as soon as the government is ready to maintain this on its own, we are more than pleased to step out of the way and to move on to the next challenge. I think that positioning is really important for the governments. It’s really important for the funders. It’s really important for us and our team. Too many times, an NGO establishes itself and 50 years later, the NGO is still there, doing the work. We need this work to be sustainable within existing systems. Part of that is a commitment for us to get out of the way. We have to believe in sovereignty and the power of governments to run themselves, while also acknowledging that the use of technology in a place like Malawi is new, and so there is going to be a period of time where we have to build some functions that do not currently exist.

TH: That certainly resonates with my experiences in the US where we’ve seen multiple improvement efforts collide in schools in ways that can actually undermine their capacity for improvement. What made Malawi a good context for you to work on scale-up?

JW: The work in Malawi actually predates the partnership with Imagine. There was a program called “Unlocking Talent,” with the software developer onebillion that became our partner. The onebillion CEO went to Malawi, I think, 15 years ago, fell in love with the country, and developed the product. The first product they developed was in Chichewa, in Malawi. In other words, this was not developed in the West and then adapted to the context. This actually was developed within the Malawian context. We became a research partner to look at impact and to help do the RCT work. That has now evolved into a much more scalable model that we call the BeFIT Program. It’s serving standards [grades] one through four, whereas the first program was only standard two.

A person holding a tablet

AI-generated content may be incorrect. — Key elements of the BeFIT program in Malawi

There have been a whole bunch of iterations along the way to develop our general approach, but it basically evolved by thinking about what it would take to actually scale the program much more cost effectively to many more students in more systems. If you look at the other places that we worked, you’ll see that we started with finding local partners, mostly local NGOs, some local social-oriented businesses, and then turned over a lot of the functions to those local partners to see what worked in different contexts. From that, we have built a series of centralized functions that we’re now drawing on in our country partnerships, as opposed to having it be completely decentralized. We learned a lot from the initial more decentralized exploration, but we’re now in the process of creating more standardization. Part of scaling depends on acknowledging that you can’t have fifty different bespoke operations. You need to have systems and standards and data systems. When you have 6000 children in Malawi, using a total of 1000 devices, you can do some things by hand; but now we’re trying to serve millions of children in Malawi, with hundreds of thousands of tablets. We now need data driven systems in order to be able to manage that equipment in the field.

TH: Let’s follow the arc of that evolution in Malawi. What are some of the steps that were crucial to your learning and to the development of the model?

JW: In Malawi, we took seven or eight years to do the research and to get the right level of government buy-in to understand what was working. That included learning things like what’s the infrastructure for the typical school in Malawi? Just to give you the context, that means more than 100 children per teacher and inadequate levels of teacher training. There’s very rarely basic infrastructure in place, so no electricity and certainly no internet connectivity. That’s the reality of the average class in Malawi. So as you think about the components of our model that have emerged the first was what you would call the infrastructure component. We put solar power into all of our schools, addressing questions like:

Where do solar panels go?
How does the solar electricity feed a bank of lithium batteries?
How do the tablets get stored and secured overnight so that they’re charged and they’re safe?
How does all that equipment get distributed to children in a really efficient manner, so that you’re getting as much asset utilization as possible and as much learning time as possible?

In the end, our research consistently shows that the number of minutes each student uses the content is directly correlated to the level of learning. So we’re addressing these 101 things that need to be done in terms of the infrastructure and operations to maximize that time on task. And that has to take into account that the school day and the school periods are very short in Malawi and you have a lot of children in the classroom. So even just getting kids in and out of a classroom is a lot harder than in many other contexts.

A group of children raising their hands

AI-generated content may be incorrect. — A classroom in Malawi

TH: You just described those complexities really effectively, but for those of us who aren’t familiar with the context, can you go into it even more deeply? What does it really take to get a program like this up and running at scale?

JW: I think that in addition to a foundational learning organization, we are, in a lot of ways, also a supply chain logistics company. Learning gains are still our north star, but the reality is you’re talking about a phase one of BeFIT that involved launching the program in five hundred schools in five months across half of the country of Malawi, including very rural districts. So we have to deal with the logistics of getting five hundred secure storage cabinets into those schools. We have to deal with the logistics of getting 100,000 tablets distributed across those 500 schools and of getting the solar equipment put into 500 schools. That’s a significant operational lift, and you have to approach that with a level of rigor in terms of those key functions, if you’re going to be able to scale, and you’re going to be able to do that on time. And we had to do that on budget in the middle of a huge macro-economic meltdown in terms of currency and raw materials. In the grand scheme of things, once the equipment is in place, kids can get learning very, very quickly. There’s not a huge lift in terms of adult training. There’s not a huge lift in terms of the role of the adult in the model itself; the content has been built to be autonomous, meaning the child can be self-directed. The tablets themselves have been built to be very robust. A lot of enhancements have been made to make the tablet durable. There’s a long battery life so it can be used throughout the day. Every part of the tablet has been built with screws so that a component can be swapped out if something breaks. So every part of the context has been taken into account in order to get that equipment into the field and utilized. This is one of the big learnings: you have to start with the context in mind, and you have to start with the learning objectives in mind. You then make a series of software decisions, and then you make a series of hardware decisions. Too often in education, it goes the other direction, where people buy stuff, but then they haven’t really thought about what’s going to go on the stuff? What’s the training required? What are the charging and security components of it? What is our learning objective at the end of the day? You have to start with learning, move into the context, and think about all the infrastructure decisions that need to be made in order to make that learning possible in that context.

“You have to start with learning, move into the context, and think about all the infrastructure decisions that need to be made in order to make that learning possible in that context.”

KK: I think it’s also important to flag that in working on the logistics we included the government from day one. That means things like using the delivery trucks the government already had. Trying to manage that coordination may have been a little slower or less efficient in some ways, but too often people design an implementation model, put a bow on it, and then hand it to the government without including them from inception.

Next Week: Building the Capacity to Improve and Sustain Foundational Learning Through Government and Local Partnerships in Malawi: Joe Wolf and Kira Keane on the Evolution of Imagine Worldwide (Part 2)

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Posted in early childhood education, education reform, Educational change, educational technology, Interviews, Malawi

Tagged Africa, education, education reform, Educational change, educational technology, Malawi, technology, travel

How Do You Build a Learning Ecosystem? Gregg Behr on the Evolution and Expansion of Remake Learning and Remake Learning Days (Part 2)

Posted on May 21, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

What does it take to expand support for learning in and across communities? In the second part of this 2-part interview, Gregg Behr talks about the development of the first Remake Learning Days in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and how they spread to community-wide efforts in 15 different regions in 4 countries. In 2007, Behr, the executive director of The Grable Foundation, founded Remake Learning as a network of educators, scientists, artists, and makers supporting future-driven opportunities for children and youth in Pittsburgh. Celebrating its 10^th edition this month. Remake Learning Days began in 2016 as a local learning festival with hands-on learning events for children of all ages at libraries, schools, parks, museums, and other community spaces. Behr is also the author with Ryan Rydzewski of When You Wonder, You’re Learning, sharing the science behind the work and words of Fred Rogers and Mister Rogers Neighborhood, a well-known television show that ran for over thirty years. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

TH: Let’s turn to one of the activities that I think has become a signature of your work – Remake Learning Days. What were some of the critical “aha’s” in their development?

GB: The first “aha” happened in one of the human centered design sessions. In Pittsburgh, we had a firm called Maya Design, and they had a retreat room surrounded by whiteboards where they would facilitate these amazing sessions. In 2015, we convened about 30 people, including folks who came from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. We were asking these big questions about how far Remake Learning had come and where we might go – asking, essentially, how do you build out a learning ecosystem? What would that look like? It was during that session that it became clear that the network was serving professionals like teachers and afterschool directors, librarians, and designers really well, but that we weren’t really designed to serve parents, families and caregivers. There was a clear “aha” that if we didn’t seriously engage with these members of our community, we’d risk being incredibly faddish, and we started wrestling with what we could do to engage this group. There wasn’t an obvious way to just plug parents and families into our different programs and activities, but through this user design process two things came to light. One was that someone talked about how open houses were one of the singular moments when parents, families and caregivers really come to schools and engage with educators, as surface level as it might be. Then totally separately, someone talked about how, at least in Pittsburgh, we have lots of neighborhood festivals like the Pickle Festival, the Perogie Festival, etc. I can’t even remember who it was, but someone said “Hey, what if we put these two ideas together? This idea of neighborhood festivals with the idea of an open house?” And so we started to talk about having a kind of festival of open houses of all of these places for kids and learning that had been built over the past couple of years. At that point, we had dozens, if not hundreds of makerspaces. We had STEM labs. We began to wonder what might happen if there was a chance for parents, families and caregivers together with their kids to get into all of these spaces and to get beyond their schools and to go into into the Carnegie Museum of Art or whatever it might be. That was the germ of the idea of what became Remake Learning Days, but I can’t even recall what it was called initially.

A screenshot of a website

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Within a year, we had the first Remake Learning Days in 2016 because all sorts of organizations said they wanted to participate. There were more 250 events over the course of about nine days. 25,000 people came out in that very first year! That was the second aha – seeing all of those people come out and realizing “Oh, there’s something here!” The other big realization was that there were 250 events that were self-organized: they did it and they weren’t paid to do it. Clearly something had traction, in 2025 in Pittsburgh, we’ll celebrate 10th edition of Remake Learning Days.

TH: That’s an incredible story. In 2019, other cities in the US and in other countries started hosting their own Remake Learning Days: How did they start to spread?

GB: The same people from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy challenged Remake Learning to document its work in what became the Playbook. In fact, someone from that Office left the White House to work with the Sprout Fund in designing the Playbook. The basic idea behind the Playbook was to create something that would be as helpful to people and organizations in Pittsburgh as it would be to Flint, Michigan or Oklahoma City. After seeing how the Remake Learning Days had taken hold in Pittsburgh, we started looking for financial support to develop the Playbook. We got some funding primarily from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and created what we initially called a toolkit that communities could use to host their own Remake Learning Days. At the time, Remake Learning was deeply involved with other national organizations and associations that were involved with STEM, the maker movement, and other things like that. We just put the toolkit out there to say, “Who else might want to host Remake Learning Days?” And that’s how they began to spread.

A close-up of hands working on a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect. — *Remake Learning Playbook*

TH: As I understand it, you’ve tried to let these Remake Learning Days grow and spread more or less on their own? Are there any particular lessons you’ve learned, either any lessons you’ve learned, either vicariously or from your interactions with those in other communities?

GB: In terms of letting them spread, yes and no. We’ve tried to provide just enough guardrails so that, if a Martian comes down and goes to Remake Learning Days in Pittsburgh and then Doncaster, England and then southern Wisconsin, it would seem like these things are connected. If Remake Learning Days are going to be successful, you have to have that connection, but they also have to feel contextualized in these different places.

“We’ve tried to provide just enough guardrails so that, if a Martian comes down and goes to Remake Learning Days in Pittsburgh and then Doncaster, England and then southern Wisconsin, it would seem like these things are connected.”

Along the way, the team has learned a thousand lessons. They’re going to continue to iterate as they look ahead to years 11 and 12, but like so many other community-based initiatives, you need to have that “backbone” organization; you have to have that clear champion who’s going to lead the work. In one instance, there was an amazing woman who made Remake Learning Days happen where she lived. But after she left, it hasn’t been the same thing. It was so tied to one person and one organization that it just didn’t stick; so we’ve learned that lesson. We’ve also learned the lesson that sometimes things have beginnings and ends. Chattanooga and Chicago hosted phenomenal Remake Learning Days, and they met the needs of the Public Education Foundation in Chattanooga and the Chicago Learning Exchange. But they plateaued in their utility, and both said, essentially, “We’ve loved this, but we’re not going to continue with this,” and we’ve learned that’s totally fine. We’ve seen places like Sarasota and Doncaster completely adopt this approach; raise lots of local money; and Remake Learning Days are now integral to their local efforts. If we were to shut down Remake Learning here in Pittsburgh, they would continue on in some of these other places. We’ve learned all sorts of lessons about leadership, about local financing, about making it local so people feel connected to it. It’s not just a franchise that someone imports; the Remake Learning team has worked hard in terms of monthly meetings and all sorts of things to make sure there’s quality control for successful festivals.

A group of people standing outside

AI-generated content may be incorrect. — Gregg Behr at a Remake Learning event (photo: Ben Filio)

TH: I didn’t realize how much work the Remake Learning team is putting into these. I thought you put the Playbook out there, and then just let people use it. But you actually have a team that coordinates with these other places, and in a sense sanctions these other events, and says, “Yes, these are Remake Learning Days. This is one of our partner events”?

GB: Again, the answer is yes and no. Everything that Remake Learning has done, maybe to its detriment, is through Creative Commons licensing, so people have used the Remake Learning Network playbook and also the Remake Learning Days toolkit to their own effect. In New Hampshire, they have used the playbook to support the development of their local learning networks but never with any formal coordination with Remake Learning— – and that’s okay. Places like Qatar have had “Doha Learning Days” and have used the Remake Learning Days playbook. I’d say it’s a loosely sanctioned process. But then there are two producers of Remake Learning Days, and they in turn work with the team in Sarasota or the team in Doncaster, or wherever it may be.

TH: How does that work? Does Sarasota have to pay the producers or are they providing pro bono services to the places that want to do it?

GB: Yes, they have a remarkable team supported by The Patterson Foundation in Sarasota; and, for Sarasota and elsewhere, Remake Learning has borne the costs for some of the regional and national marketing, because with an event like this, the most significant costs are marketing.

TH: Have you run into challenges where you wish that some place wouldn’t call their events Remake Learning Days?

GB: There have been some challenges along the way, with some places that want to call it something else like “STEM Days,” and the team has had some tough conversations with some cities, saying if we’re going to be part of this, then there are a few things you need to do. Some cities have just said, “We’re going to have our own thing.” There are also challenges around quality control and questions about what kinds of events to connect with. There are now some pop-up festivals which have been hugely successful. People have staged events in Tel Aviv and Antarctica, but sometimes these are singular events on a particular day, and they’re branded and connected to Remake Learning Days, and they’re on the website, but it’s not a multi-day festival the way it is in Sarasota or southern Wisconsin or Kansas City.

Dates are also difficult. Even with the pop-up events, Remake Learning Days have had a set date range, something like April 23rd through May 23rd. For example, the six regions in Pennsylvania that now host Remake Learning days, they all happen at the same time. That is very deliberate, and they are coordinated statewide. But in

Tennessee, they valued Remake Learning Days, but May didn’t work for them because of state testing, and it turns out that May is not a great time for Remake Learning Days in Uruguay. That raises the question: does it have to be around the same dates around the world for it to be called Remake Learning Days? The team is wrestling with a whole bunch of questions like this as they go forward. They’re trying to provide greater flexibility while maintaining quality control.

TH: Can you say anything more about the next steps or the challenges ahead for Remake Learning Days and Remake Learning?

GB: In terms of challenges, like a lot of these things, no one ever imagined there being a 10th edition. But even with that, ongoing fundraising is a challenge. Yet, for corporate funders, sponsoring an event like Remake Learning Days is a lot easier than sponsoring a network. For fundraising, it certainly helps that they have built up a body of data, including qualitative evidence – write-ups and videos – to support it. Quantitative data, too! For example, they worked with Heather Weiss, who led the Harvard Family Research Project to document their impact on parents. Their goals included helping parents understand how learning is being remade; helping parents understand how they can support their own kids if they find their kids are lit up by art and design or coding or maker-centered programs; and building up demand among parents so they might go to school board meetings, parent-teacher conferences, or their local library to ask questions about these approaches to learning that are clearly lighting up their kids. Heather’s work demonstrated that parents were gaining familiarity with STEAM and new approaches to learning and building their interest and support for those approaches.

“Ongoing fundraising is a challenge. Yet, for corporate funders, sponsoring an event like Remake Learning Days is a lot easier than sponsoring a network.”

Looking toward the future, I think we’ll see fewer sites that host Remake Learning Days, but they will be more embraced by their region, with significant regional funding. In addition to seeing that in southern Wisconsin, on the west coast of Florida, and Doncaster, the Pennsylvania Department of Education has invested significantly in Remake Learning Days and different units from the state government are also providing in-kind support. I think we may see more changes like that where public funding also helps to drive further engagement and support from local and state governments.

TH: Looking to the future, let’s return to Remake Learning in Pittsburgh. What do you think it will take to sustain and deepen this work overall? Are there particular problems that have to be addressed or changes that have been made?

GB: There are always lots of answers to a question like that! One thing we have to address is leadership. The leadership has evolved over the years. When it was time for the Sprout Fund to sunset, and they wrapped up their work, we hired what amounted to a director for Remake Learning, and there have been a number of directors since that time, each of whom has held the position for at least two or three years. But incredibly, it wasn’t until around 2014 or 2015 that we convened what we call the Remake Learning Council. This is a council of CEOs, learning scientists, leaders of cultural institutions and others who meet regularly with the director and the Remake Learning team and provide advice and support. Of course, the people in these roles change positions all the time. There are new museum directors, new superintendents and so on. We have to pay attention to that churn and make sure we have the right people and the right support, and that’s a great leadership challenge. It’s also what makes Remake Learning sustainable – it’s crucial to have a large number of leaders across the community who value this work, who are contributing to the design of it and advancing it.

Relatedly, Remake Learning, if you can believe it, has never been its own separate 501 (c) (3) [which would allow it to be a charitable organization collecting tax exempt donations]. That’s because part of the strategy in the beginning was to demonstrate that this was not going to be something that competed for funding with other charitable organizations, like museums and some of our other charitable partners. Instead, Remake Learning has been fiscally sponsored by other organizations, and I think that’s been a real benefit – so that the focus could be the work itself. Initially, Remake Learning was fiscally sponsored by the Sprout Fund; then it was fiscally sponsored by our regional association of grantmakers called Grantmakers of Western Pennsylvania. It’s currently fiscally sponsored by the Allegheny Intermediate Unit, our region’s educational service agency. But we always have to check in on our structure: Do we have the right home? Do we have the right governance? That’s an ongoing challenge for the network.

“Part of the strategy in the beginning was to demonstrate that this was not going to be something that competed for funding with other charitable organizations, like museums and some of our other charitable partners.”

Another challenge with any organization that reaches 20 years is that you’ve got people who’ve been involved for nearly 20 years, and there are people who just joined two weeks ago. We have to keep the work fresh and relevant for the newcomers as much as for the veterans. This is a programmatic challenge. It’s hard to keep things fresh for most everyone involved. As one example of “keeping things fresh,” Remake Learning started in the past few years to distribute what they call Moonshot Grants. Regionally, I think they’ve spent about three or four million dollars in grants to local organizations and schools that are really trying to push the edge of what constitutes great learning, especially as such much around us is changing. That’s one example that’s kept the work really fresh.

A group of people in a garden

AI-generated content may be incorrect. — What is a Moonshot?

Remake Learning has also really leaned into some of its national and international partnerships, which has pushed its work forward. Just last week Remake Learning announced ten national moonshot grants, which came out of the Forge Futures Summit, which brought together organizations involved in learning ecosystems from around the US, and even a few other places worldwide. This speaks to the spread and the tension: Remake Learning is committed to being a regional organization and it has to continue to do basic things brilliantly at the regional level. It’s not a national or international organization, but it sometimes has – or could have – a national and international role to play. That’s what Remake Learning Days have done, and Remake Learning is figuring out how to do that as a network while not distracting ourselves from our core mission regionally.

TH: Can you say a bit more about what Remake Learning has done internationally?

GB: Remake Learning has partnerships with a number of international organizations including HundrED in Finland, Big Change out of London, OECD, and the Global Education Leadership Partnership. Just as an example, Remake Learning got connected to Big Change pre-pandemic because they had done a report and Remake Learning ended up being one of their case studies. Now Remake Learning and Big Change are funding a loose federation of international organizations that meet almost monthly. Along with Remake Learning and Big Change, it includes Learning First out of Bermuda, People for Education in Canada, Learning Creates Australia, Innovation Unit, Zizi Afrique in Kenya, Fundacio Bonfill in Spain, Educate! in Uganda, and Dream a Dream out of India. You’ve got people who represent different geographies. In some cases, they are more metropolitan like Remake Learning, but in others are more nationwide, like Uganda Educate! The first meeting focused on Bermuda’s transforming education system. The second one was a showcase of some of the work in Australia. It’s become a global learning community.

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Posted in education reform, Educational change, educational technology, Informal Learning, Interviews, Partnerships

Tagged charity, education, Educational change, educational technology, Informal Learning, Philanthropy, photography, School and community partnerships, technology, travel

Something’s Happening Here: Gregg Behr on the Evolution and Expansion of Remake Learning and Remake Learning Days (Part 1)

Posted on May 14, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

What does it look like when an entire community supports children’s learning and development? In this 2-part interview, Gregg Behr talks about the origins of Remake Learning and how the expansion of Remake Learning Days has helped to catalyze similar community-wide efforts in several other cities and regions around the world. In 2007, Behr, the executive director of The Grable Foundation, founded Remake Learning as a network of educators, scientists, artists, and makers supporting future-driven learning opportunities for children and youth in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Remake Learning Days began in 2016 as a local learning festival with hands-on learning events for children of all ages at libraries, schools, parks, museums, and other community spaces. Celebrating its 10^th edition this month, Remake Learning Days have now expanded to 15 different regions in four countries. Behr is also the author with Ryan Rydzewski of When You Wonder, You’re Learning, sharing the science behind the work and words of Fred Rogers and Mister Rogers Neighborhood, a well-known television show that ran for over thirty years. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Thomas Hatch (TH): What were some of the key developments and “Aha” moments in your early work at the Grable Foundation and with Remake Learning?

Gregg Behr (GB): I joined the Grable Foundation as Executive Director 19 years ago in 2006. I followed on the heels of an exceptional executive director, Susan Brownlee, who had led this organization extraordinarily well. By all accounts, the trustees were incredibly pleased with where the foundation was and where it was going. That meant I came into a position as a leader saying, “How do you build on excellence?” To try to answer that question, I spent time out in the community just connecting with people with whom the Foundation had been working. Meeting with teachers, meeting with librarians, and meeting with others involved in the out-of-school space. I asked them, “What could we do that would be helpful to you?” I heard things like “I’m just not connecting with kids the way that I used to.” This was fall of 2006 and at the time I was 32 years old, and at first, I just thought, “Oh, this is just experienced people saying something like ‘the kids these days…”. But then I began to notice who was saying these things, and I realized I was hearing this from people in different age groups. Some had just started their work, others were 30 years into their careers, and they were all literally saying that kids are different this year than they were last year. I thought that was strange. It was if something was happening seismically in kids’ lives. Sitting here in 2024 it feels naive to say these things, but looking back, in 2006, there were massive changes underway in kids’ lives. They were consuming information differently, producing information differently, seeking affirmation differently, developing identities differently. There was, in fact, something different happening in their lives.

“[T]here were massive changes underway in kids’ lives. They were consuming information differently, producing information differently, seeking affirmation differently, developing identities differently. There was, in fact, something different happening in their lives.“

That recognition sparked something and got me asking questions like, if it’s true that something different is happening, how do we support schools and other sites of learning in different ways? Then, I had a meeting with a colleague at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, and I began to realize that there were a whole lot of other people asking questions about kids and learning but that weren’t traditional educators. They were designers, artists; they were gamers and what we now call “makers.” I started meeting with those folks and began to wonder what would happen if you brought these people together? So I organized a meeting at a breakfast place called Pamela’s. It was just a dozen people, and I was very purposeful inviting 12 individuals from 12 very different fields, including – as examples – a teacher, a gamer, and someone in museum exhibit design.

It was one of those things where I scheduled it for an hour for, and it ended up going on for 2 or 2 and a half hours. At the end, everyone said, “Oh, my gosh! I can think of 2 or 3 colleagues that ought to be part of this conversation about education locally.” Then I just started convening more of these meetings. I used an email subject line that said “Kids + Creativity,” just giving it a name. Then people started saying “Oh, that’s the Kids and Creativity meeting!” That continued for a couple of years, and it just kept growing and growing. It went from pancakes to bagels, and then we did a “Gong Show” like event in the basement of the Children’s Museum. After that, people at an organization called the Sprout Fund got involved. They were a community foundation-like organization that served as a “think-and-do” tank in our region. They had a 5 C’s model (Convene and Catalyze; Communicate; Coordinate; Champion) that we still use today that they used to organize these meetings and give some coherence to this growing network of people and organizations. They said “It will take the grant maker (me!) out of the center to see if there’s a “there there.”

A person on stage with a large screen

AI-generated content may be incorrect. — Gregg Behr presenting about Remake Learning (photo: Howard Lipan)

This story speaks to a number of aha’s. It was an aha recognizing that something different was happening in kid’s lives — that the learning sciences and evidence from neural mapping now tell us was true. It was an aha and realization that we needed to think differently about who ought to be part of the conversation. There was an aha that this 5 C’s model that was originally used to attract and retain talent could be applied to help us build this network of folks involved in education generally and learning innovation in particular. The other aha was the power in shifting from talking about education to talking about learning; a simple thing in some ways, but at the time, it was profound because education conveyed schooling, whereas learning had this much bigger open sense that kids are learning in lots of places. That speaks to the power of words as well. I didn’t come up with the phrase “Remake Learning,” someone at the Sprout Fund came up with it, but, in retrospect, I think the reason that the name Remake Learning has stuck all these years is that using “remake” suggested that we don’t have to transform everything. We don’t have to blow everything up. You don’t have to get rid of everything that you’ve done for your entire professional life or what you studied. There may be some things that are timeless and classic, but we need to remake it for who today’s kids are. That name also wasn’t wedded to any particular thing like STEM or STEAM or maker education or digital learning. It captured all of those things, and it turned out to be a good umbrella for different approaches, different pedagogies, different frameworks, different words that people were using as they thought about innovation and learning in and out of school. That was another important aha.

A close-up of a black and white website

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

[T]he reason that the name Remake Learning has stuck all these years is that using “remake” suggested that we don’t have to transform everything. We don’t have to blow everything up…. There may be some things that are timeless and classic, but we need to remake it for who today’s kids are.

TH: What were some of the challenges you encountered and some of the changes you made as things developed from there?

GB: Early on, it was important for this new intermediary – Remake Learning – to build trust and demonstrate this isn’t a zero-sum game. It’s not as if the Grable Foundation or other funders are going to now start funding this to the exclusion of other things. Then the folks at the Sprout Fund, in particular, really learned how to work well with other intermediaries in the early childhood space, the mentoring space, and the out of school time space, to see and recognize the work already going on and build on it. For example, they built on things like the Allegheny Partners for Out of School Time. It meant figuring out how something like Remake Learning builds on that work and doesn’t compete with it or replace it. We use words like “partnership” and “collaboration” pretty freely, but it’s really hard work to build trust among people and organizations.

TH: Yes, it’s really hard work! Do you have any examples, from the work with your partners, that helps to show what worked for you in building partnerships?

GB: I suppose it’s not rocket science, but for one thing, we were really deliberate and very intentional about communications. We took advantage of our position in philanthropy and convened leaders of the key organizations at least quarterly so that there was transparency in our communications. We would always meet with food and other things to build relationships and get to know each other a little better, and we tried to engage in genuine conversations to say, “Here’s what we’re doing” and “How do we really help each other?” Just being really deliberate and reaching out to the Allegheny Partners and others to say “Hey, we’re thinking about an event on September 23rd.” Lots and lots of little ordinary things that would engender trust. Then people feel like, “Oh, I’m being heard.” Being deliberate about inviting leaders of organizations to be part of review committees, to create real, community-based participatory review committees for grant making. All of those simple, ordinary things repeated and done in a rhythm helped the Remake Learning team avoid some key problems. It’s a very human, relational enterprise to build out a network.

“All of those simple, ordinary things repeated and done in a rhythm helped the Remake Learning team avoid some key problems. It’s a very human, relational enterprise to build out a network.“

TH: I think time and rhythm are really important. How do you plan for that? Did you have in your mind that this is going to take five years or ten years?

GB: It’s interesting that you ask this question because I think rhythm is often overlooked. If Doncaster, England calls us or Fremont, California, calls, I always talk about the rhythm. I think the rhythm sets expectation. Like every spring we’re going to host Remake Learning Days. Every fall, there’s a Remake Learning assembly, which is kind of like our “State of the Union.” There are four meet ups every month. You can expect communications to come out every Friday. It’s not haphazard — all of the little things create expectations and make it easier for people to connect. thing. Kids need rhythm in their schools. but it’s also important for organizations, for cities, for regions to have a rhythm. Like this is our birthday. This is when we’re going back to school. For the network, creating a rhythm and being deliberate and intentional about it builds a culture; it builds tradition; it builds relationships. It builds all of those things.

Kids need rhythm in their schools. but it’s also important for organizations, for cities, for regions to have a rhythm. Like this is our birthday. This is when we’re going back to school. For the network, creating a rhythm and being deliberate and intentional about it builds a culture; it builds tradition; it builds relationships. It builds all of those things.

There are a couple other things that I think kept Remake Learning grounded. One of them is that many times over the course of nearly 20 years, Remake Learning has hired consultants well trained in human centered design. They’ve convened members of the Remake Learning network for half-day or daylong retreats or other gatherings so that Remake Learning can ask “how are we doing? “How might we do things better?” It’s ongoing strategic management with a real sense of human-centered design in it, regularly checking-in with the broader community.

TH: So often funders and others are focused on the short-term – on generating outcomes in two or three years, but part of what I’m taking away from what you’re saying is that you weren’t focused on a specific time frame; you were focused on creating a set of activities and events that could be sustained to support activity over time, into the future.

GB: Yes, and I would add that the focus was more about a mindset, an idea. It was about a movement to think about learning across a landscape that supports young people’s passions and interests. The events, the activities, the grants, the communications are all in support of changing mindsets about learning.

[T]he focus was more about a mindset, an idea. It was about a movement to think about learning across a landscape that supports young people’s passions and interests.”

TH: But that also entails a foundation, an organization, and people that are willing to say, “We’ll support these activities into the foreseeable future” rather than to say, “We’ll give you a three-year grant.”

GB: Yes, that is true. Remake Learning’s been lucky, and my work at the Grable Foundation plays a significant role in this, but beyond the Grable Foundation, we’ve had support from lots of other funders. Along the way, there have also been many one year and three year grants and other kinds of support for Remake Learning. But because of the steadiness of the support, Remake. Learning has always been able to budget years ahead. That’s very powerful; it’s never had to budget year to year.

A collage of kids in lab coats

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

A collage of kids playing with toys

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Kids in Remake Learning activities (photos: Ben Filio)

TH: What kind of advice do you give other people about how to establish that kind of support? Especially in a context where funders may be more inclined to give a grant for a three-year project than to provide core backbone funding for as long as it’s required.

GB: I might win a Nobel Prize for philanthropy if I could answer that question! I use the phrase “make yourself lucky” occasionally, but there’s no doubt that you need some funder or, ideally, funders – whether they are individuals, corporations, philanthropies, or municipalities – to recognize that a network or an intermediary organization needs multi-year, discretionary, unrestricted support. Period. That’s the bottom line. If a funder doesn’t get that, you’re in trouble.

“[Y]ou need some funder or, ideally, funders…to recognize that a network or an intermediary organization needs multi-year, discretionary, unrestricted support. Period. That’s the bottom line. If a funder doesn’t get that, you’re in trouble.”

TH: Are there things you’ve done – generating evidence of impact or sharing information – that have helped convince funders to provide that kind of support?

GB: We use a lot of analogous and proxy examples. When we thought about Remake Learning initially, and its focus on relevant, engaging, equitable learning across our community, the easiest argument to make was to say, “look at what we’ve done collectively in philanthropy in the early childhood space over the past 20 years: we’ve built an intermediary that, in turn, supports hundreds of early learning centers. Look at what we’ve done in the out-of-school time space. Look what we’ve done in arts education space.” We really used those other examples – like the Campaign for Grade Level Reading – to say “these are the types of results we should anticipate when we create a network of schools, museums, libraries, other sites of learning committed to future facing, future driven learning.”

TH: You’ve been doing this work on Remake Learning for twenty-plus years now, but, early on, were there any developments or things you looked at that told you were headed in the right direction or that helped you convince other people to get on board?

GB: Yes, and I wish we had more, but for one thing, we looked at data from individual organizations. I’ll give you two examples. The Elizabeth Forward School District was deeply involved in Remake Learning early on. They began rethinking how they approach professional development and learning. They sent their administrative teams to go see what was happening at some innovative places here in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon; they went to visit the Quest School in New York City, and to see a media space in Chicago. Then they started reimagining how to use their own spaces. They built a classroom that mimicked the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) and they were at the forefront of reimagining what school libraries could look like. In pretty short order they started to see some improvements in traditional measures, including math scores and reading scores. Their dropouts went from about 28 or 29 kids a year to 0 or 1. They saw the number of families choosing charter school drop by two thirds. They also suddenly found there was a new energy; there was an agency. People wanted to be in the school, and students were performing at higher levels. At the same time, the Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh, like the public libraries in Chicago were at the forefront of imagining what teen spaces might look like. They brought in filmmakers and hip-hop artists alongside librarians, and they filled the shelves not only with books, but also with games and hardware and software. In pretty short order, they saw a two-fold increase of teens coming to the library. There was a massive increase of kids coming back to the library because, in that Mimi Ito way, they wanted to hang out and they wanted to mess around. Then, lo and behold, in the short term, there was something like an 18% increase in book circulation among those kids. Again, traditional measures. So clearly, things were happening, and we could point to those two and lots of other examples.

Next week: How do you Build a Learning Ecosystem? Gregg Behr on the evolution and expansion of Remake Learning and Remake Learning Days (Part 2)

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Posted in educational technology, Informal Learning, innovation, Interviews

Tagged edtech, education, Educational change, educational technology, Informal Learning, Interview, Teachers, Teaching, technology

Teachers, Teaching and Educational Change in Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Israel, Malaysia, Scotland, South Korea, Switzerland, and the US: Lead the Change Interviews (Part 7)

Posted on April 24, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

Teacher led learning circles, teacher collaboration, and tacit and unspoken logics of educational change take center stage in the last post with excerpts of Lead the Change interviews with presenters from the Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association this week. These excerpts are from three symposia sponsored by the Educational Special Interest Group. For previous posts featuring presentations at this year’s AERA conference see Part 1 “Leveraging Partnerships, Networks and Teacher Collaboration for Educational Change,” Part 2 “Leaders, Leadership Practices, and Educational Change in the US, Korea, and Hong Kong: Lead the Change Interviews (Part 2),” Part 3 “Educational Transformation in Schools and Colleges in the US and South Africa: Lead the Change Interviews (Part 3),” Part 4 Teacher Education, Teacher Certification, and Teacher Meetings in Israel, Korea, Switzerland and the US: Lead the Change Interviews (Part 4), Part 5 “Anti-discrimination policies in Massachusetts and socioeconomic education reform in Türkiye,” and Part 6 “Critical Consciousness, Digital Equity, and Critical Unschooling in the United States: Lead the Change Interviews.” The Lead the Change interviews are produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from AERA’s Educational Change Special Interest Group. The full interviews can be found on the LtC website.

Sustaining Productive Teacher Collaborations: Infrastructures Across International Contexts – Bryant Jensen (BJ), Brigham Young University, Amanda Datnow (AD), University of California, San Diego, Sarah Woulfin (SW), University of Texas at Austin

Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at American Education Research Association (AERA) can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?

BJ, AD, & SW: We hope the session audience will take at least three ideas from our session. First, that instructional infrastructures matter a great deal in realizing and sustaining productive collaborations among teachers. They include, for example:

● A regular time and place for small teams of teachers to plan and study their practice (Borko, 2004; Gallimore et al., 2009);

● Common pacing and instructional aims (Garet et al., 2001; Supovitz, 2002);

● Peer facilitation of team meetings (Andrews-Larson et al., 2017); and

● Protocols to guide teacher inquiry (Little and Curry, 2009; Segal, 2018).

“Instructional infrastructures matter a great deal in realizing and sustaining productive teacher collaboration.”

Chapman et al. show how conditions across Dundee schools shaped the collective agency of teachers and school leaders alike. They provided opportunities for building trust among collaborating teachers and shared beliefs in themselves and in their schools which can influence the sustainability of equitable practice. Drawing on Sarason’s (1972) idea of “settings,” Jensen et al. illustrate the nested nature of instructional infrastructure to sustain improvement. In their ten-year case study, teacher teams in a middle school were led by peer teacher leaders; teacher leaders met monthly to debrief, plan, and prepare their team meetings; and settings for teacher leaders were organized by school administrators who also maintained a monthly setting. This system of settings sustained instructional change from the bottom up and top down; student academic performance gains on state tests over a ten-year period demonstrate sustainability.

Second, sustaining and scaling productive collaborations for equity in teaching and learning are related but distinct. In previous research, Tappel et al. (2022) showed how sustainability concerns the continuity, integration, and adaptability of change, whereas scale is about expansion and replication of change–to reach more teachers and students. In our session, Lefstein’s paper—an account of expanding a teacher collaboration program in Israel from 11 teams in 4 schools in the first year to 458 teams in 158 schools in the fifth year—illustrates tensions between sustainability and scale. He shows how smaller-scale change in Israel was more feasible because external resources enabled the infrastructure teachers needed whereas large-scale change was much less effective at sustaining change because existing infrastructures were poorly equipped to support the collaborative learning processes that researchers and designers sought to cultivate.

Third, sustainability should consider the perspectives and experiences of teachers. In their paper, Datnow and colleagues show that teachers change their routine ways of interacting and talking together as they change in the ways they think—about students, about teaching, and about collaborating. Infrastructures to sustain productive collaboration, they argue, should acknowledge how teachers’ thinking and practice develop and change over the course of reform. In their qualitative analysis of teacher and administrator data from four schools across four years, the authors identify institutional impediments or threats to teachers becoming more collaborative: accountability pressures, complex team dynamics, and the conclusion of capacity-building support provided by their research project.

Resilient pathways: Toward political theories of action for achieving educational equity – Aireale J. Rodgers (AR), University of Wisconsin-Madison, Heather N. McCambly (HM), University of Pittsburgh, Román Liera (RL), Montclair State University

AR, HM, & RL: Given the precarity of this sociopolitical moment and people’s varied sensemaking around it, we understand and appreciate the urge toward action. So often, educational change work focuses on doing something differently. Indeed, now is a moment where bold action is required. Yet, lessons from radical organizer-educators like Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba (2023) teach us that a move to action without critical reflection and collective organizing won’t free us. At worst, moving too quickly to action can rebirth the same system in a different form.

“A move to action without critical reflection won’t free us.”

So rather than move directly to action, our intention with this symposium is to provide AERA members with an opportunity to explore where we should persist and where we might break from common theories of change toward equity and liberation in higher education. Through empirical cases focused on ethnic based community organizations (Hailu, 2025), Boards of Trustees (Rall, 2025), faculty cluster hiring (McCambly et al., 2025), and scholarly papers exploring the permanence of racism (Tichavakunda, 2025) and the fallacy of white supremacy (Davis III et al., 2025) in postsecondary institutions, we offer a generative pause to consider the often tacit and unspoken logics that guide our actions in an attempt to better name and collectively restrategize for future change efforts.

Teacher-Led Learning Circles: Professional Learning for Teachers’ Use of Formative Assessment to Improve Students’ Learning – Carol Campbell (CC), University of Edinburgh, Chris DeLuca (CD), Nathan Rickey (NR) & Danielle LaPointe-McEwan (DL), Queen’s University, Martin Henry (MH), Education International

CC, CD, NR, DL, MH: The research and practices connected to the Teacher-Led Learning Circles project offer hope for the powerful combination of effective professional learning for teacher leadership and the use of formative assessment to benefit students’ learning. It has long been established that teacher quality and teaching quality are central to educational change (Barber & Mourshed, 2007; Darling-Hammond et al., 2017; Education International and UNESCO, 2019; OECD, 2021; Thompson, 2021). Similarly, the potential of formative assessment and feedback has been integral to educational change, for example, in developments stemming from the seminal review by Black and Wiliam (1998) with the Assessment Reform Group, establishing foundational principles for assessment for learning (AfL).
Through the experiences and evidence from seven countries participating across four continents in the Teacher-Led Learning Circles project, overarching lessons identified in our final report (Campbell et al., 2024a, 2024b) include:

While sustained education renewal would require comprehensive educational change at the systems level, we found that professional learning can contribute to successful change efforts at the local level when:

● Supporting teachers in identifying and focusing on goals linked to their students’ needs and for teachers’ own professional learning needs. These twin goals can enhance both student agency and teacher leadership.

● Differentiating for teachers’ professional contexts and experiences and for their goals and approaches to formative assessment, including further differentiation with changing experiences over time.

● Offering quality content. However, quality of content needs to be balanced with quantity and differentiated to be relevant and practical.

● Providing active and collaborative professional learning opportunities. Supports for collaboration across geographical contexts is necessary and requires attention to both availability of online and in-person activities.

● Ensuring adequate resources such as funding to support access to expert resources, including facilitators, and time for professional development.

● Combined with system leadership, including teacher unions. Growth in teachers’ leadership, confidence, skills, and practices was beneficial, with impacts within and beyond their schools. It is also essential to engage and educate formal school leaders.

Moreover, we found that for change efforts were more likely to successfully reach the classroom through the use of formative assessment that:

● Involves a suite of highly interconnected practices that are all aimed at supporting student learning. The heart of the formative assessment process—i.e., teachers and students interpreting and using evidence of student learning to guide and promote learning—can be accessed and encouraged in multiple ways.

● Are adapted for local contexts and assessment systems. Formative assessment can operate within a variety of assessment cultures, even if specific practices are operationalized differently within these contexts.

● Occur across a range of teaching contexts, regardless of access to technology. When students had consistent access to devices and reliable internet connections, this could support formative assessment. Yet similar formative assessment practices were reported by teachers whose classes had limited or no access to devices or the internet.

● Is intentionally integrated into teachers’ pedagogical practices in their classrooms. In some cases, teachers’ strategies did not integrate or maximize the potential of formative assessment to further benefit students’ learning.

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Tagged education, Lead the Change, Learning, Teachers, Teaching, technology

Critical Consciousness, Digital Equity, and Critical Unschooling in the United States: Lead the Change Interviews (Part 6)

Posted on April 16, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

This week’s post includes excerpts from interviews with presenters discussing “Redefining leadership and equity in evolving educational spaces” at the Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association next week. For previous posts featuring presentions at this year’s AERA conference see Part 1 “Leveraging Partnerships, Networks and Teacher Collaboration for Educational Change,” Part 2 “Leaders, Leadership Practices, and Educational Change in the US, Korea, and Hong Kong: Lead the Change Interviews (Part 2),” Part 3 “Educational Transformation in Schools and Colleges in the US and South Africa: Lead the Change Interviews (Part 3),” Part 4 Teacher Education, Teacher Certification, and Teacher Meetings in Israel, Korea, Switzerland and the US: Lead the Change Interviews (Part 4), and Part 5 “Anti-discrimination policies in Massachusetts and socioeconomic education reform in Türkiye.” The Lead the Change interviews are produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from AERA’s Educational Change Special Interest Group. The full interviews can be found on the LtC website.

Action spaces to support teaching critical consciousness: Risk-taking within professional learning communities – Christina L. Dobbs, Boston University – Madora Soutter, Villanova University – Daren Graves, Simmons University – Elianny C. Edwards, College of the Holy Cross – Scott Seider, Brianna C. Diaz, Babatunde Alford, Kaila Daza, Sarah E. Fogelman, Trang U. Le, Alexandra Honeck, Hannah Choi, Yuwen Shen, & Hehua Xu, Boston College.

CD, MS, DG, EE, SS, BD, BA, KD, SF, TL, AH, HC, YS, & HX: We will present a project from the past several years called the Critical Crew Project. This project sought to teach middle grade students about critical consciousness (Freire, 1973), the ability to challenge and navigate oppressive forces, and to document how those schools used professional learning community (PLC) spaces to learn and teach critical consciousness with students during advisory meetings….We learned a great deal across this project about systems of multi-level change to build support for learning at a range of levels. Teachers needed space and support to learn about teaching critical consciousness that had structure without prescription. Our approach of having flexible tools with lots of space for specialization for contexts and particular students seemed to resonate with teachers. We found also that, as university partners, we served as conduits to research and other materials for PLCs and to use their feedback for refining the work, without being overly directive about the project. We also learned about producing a range of work products as a result of the project – academic papers, curricular materials, videos from classrooms, etc. – which has helped us push different levers, such as publishing research or presenting teacher workshops or building curriculum and participate in different conversations as a result of the work.

“Teachers needed space and support to learn about teaching critical consciousness that had structure without prescription.”

From Left to Right: Dr Christina Dobbs, Dr Scott Seider, Dr Daren Graves, Babatunde Alford

From Left to Right: Brianna Diaz, Dr Elianny Edwards, Kaila Daza

From Left to Right: Dr Trang Le, Alexandra Honeck, Hannah Choi

From Left to Right: Sarah Fogelman, Hehua Xu, and Dr Madora Soutter

Digital Equity and Inclusion: Insights into Educational Change and School Initiated Improvements – Christopher Sanderson, University of Arizona

CS: My research offers insights into the challenges and strategies facing K-12 school districts in their efforts to promote digital equity and inclusion, providing valuable lessons for practice, policy, and scholarship. My work emphasizes the importance of integrating digital tools and providing professional development for educators to address disparities effectively. For example, I highlight the need for further training to bridge digital literacy fissures. From a policy perspective, I encourage sustained district-level planning and collaboration to tackle systemic barriers, such as the expiration of temporary programs like the CARES Act and ACP (Federal Communications Commission, n.d.; US Department of Education, 2024). Digital equity must be treated as a long-term priority rather than a short-term response to crises like the COVID-19 pandemic (Petersen, 2024).

I also emphasize holistic definitions of digital equity and inclusion, which include access to affordable internet, devices, and the necessary digital skills. Collaborative approaches are essential, and I focus on engaging administrators, teachers, parents, and community members in co-creating solutions to foster a shared vision of digital equity and inclusion. My research highlights the importance of addressing systemic inequities and recognizing biases in policy and practice. For instance, I noted that federal programs often exclude K-12 schools, advocating for tailored, inclusive, sustainable, district-level strategies (National Telecommunications and Information Administration, 2024).

My work offers frameworks to explore the intersections of digital inclusion, systemic inequities, and community collaboration in educational change. It contributes to the growing body of literature on digital equity by providing insights into how schools can navigate barriers to ensure every student has the tools for success. Focusing on localized, context-driven solutions and collaborative efforts, this research aims to inform and create more equitable learning environments that address both immediate needs and long-term goals. This study may support school districts in assessing their progress toward digital equity and inclusion, offering recommended actions for transformative change. Through the collection and analysis of data, districts can identify patterns and make informed decisions on future steps.

The findings from this study can serve as a catalyst for action-oriented planning beyond its conclusion. The ultimate goal is to develop actionable strategies that help school districts achieve equitable student access. While an outsider can only begin to grasp the challenges students, communities, and schools face regarding technology access, internet connectivity, and digital skills development, addressing these barriers requires strategic, locally driven planning. Schools are complex and diverse, with digital equity and inclusion needs varying from one site to another. For example, one school might require more digital literacy training for caregivers, while another may need additional internet hotspots to ensure students can access devices outside school hours.

“The ultimate goal is to develop actionable strategies that help school districts achieve equitable student access.”

Achieving Excellence Academy: Critical Unschooling and the Promise of a Humanizing Education – Dr. María del Carmen Salazar & Nadia Saldaña-Spiegle, University of Denver, Ashlea Skiles, Denver Public Schools

MS, NS, AS: One of the central contributions of this research is the expansion of the concept of critical unschooling. We, the researchers, extend this concept by conceptualizing “home-based” as one’s sense of “home” which is inclusive of home culture, community, native language, intersectional identities, history, heritage, ancestors, and ultimately, of one’s full humanity. We, the researchers, put the concept of critical unschooling on the ground and bring to live a real-world example in an educational setting with secondary students and teachers of color. This is an important contribution to the field because it extends theory into practice.

Another important contribution of this research is that student voices are centered and the concept of critical unschooling is shaped by their experiences and insights. One of the most impactful findings is how students redefine excellence as a result of the Achieving Excellence Academy (AEA). As an example, one student stated, “Excellence is not just holding onto your goals, it’s going after and representing yourself, and reflecting yourself in your goals.” Another student emphasized, “Before, I only thought about excellence athletically and academically, but after this program, I think it’s cultural too…pride in your own culture, accepting other people’s cultures, and being woke.” The AEA expanded students’ perceptions of excellence to include a focus on their well-being and cultural pride. Moreover, teachers of color extended this concept into teaching and learning by sharing how they enacted critical unschooling.

“Before, I only thought about excellence athletically and academically, but after this program, I think it’s cultural too…pride in your own culture, accepting other people’s cultures, and being woke.”

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Posted in About K-12 International Education News, educational technology, equity, Home Schooling, Lead the Change, Teachers

Tagged education, educational technology, equity, homeschooling, Lead the Change, Learning, Professional Learning Community, Teachers, Teaching, technology

Teacher Education, Teacher Certification, and Teacher Meetings in Israel, Korea, Switzerland and the US: Lead the Change Interviews (Part 4)

Posted on April 7, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

This week IEN shares Part 4 of the Lead the Change (LtC) series interviewing presenters participating in the Educational Change Special Interest Group sessions at the upcoming Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association. This post includes presenters from the session titled: “Equity-minded leaders transforming the global educational landscape.” For Part 1 see “Leveraging Partnerships, Networks and Teacher Collaboration for Educational Change,” Part 2 “Leaders, Leadership Practices, and Educational Change in the US, Korea, and Hong Kong: Lead the Change Interviews (Part 2)” and Part 3 “Educational Transformation in Schools and Colleges in the US and South Africa: Lead the Change Interviews (Part 3).” These interviews are part of the Lead the Change series produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from AERA’s Educational Change Special Interest Group. The full interviews can be found on the LtC website.

Historical changes in teacher education in Israel: An analysis of professional perceptions from 1960 to 2020 – Ayelet Becher (AB) & Izhak Berkovich (IB), The Open University of Israel

AB & IB: Our work offers valuable contributions to the practice of teacher education. Teacher education curricula should respond to the cyclical nature of educational change, preparing teachers for shifts in pedagogical trends and the potential return of seemingly outdated practices. Instead of presenting a singular “best-practice” model, teacher education programs should equip pre-service teachers with the adaptability and critical thinking skills to navigate fluctuating pedagogical paradigms. For example, this could involve teaching both content-centered and student-centered methods and conducting simulations to help teachers practice adjusting their approach based on different classroom scenarios. This also necessitates supporting prospective teachers in forming a strong professional identity and developing reflexive skills. Curricula could integrate historical analysis and context-awareness practices, enabling teachers to understand the deeper social and political forces that shape educational policy and practices in their local context. Our study’s [Historical changes in teacher education in Israel: An analysis of professional perceptions from 1960 to 2020] findings underscore the importance of teachers’ adaptive expertise in responding to changing societal conditions and emerging needs. Teacher training should equip prospective teachers with versatile knowledge and skills to adapt to various contexts and specific learners while preserving their established pedagogic creed.

The study also contributes to educational policymaking. Given the cyclical nature of educational reform, it is crucial to focus education policy on incremental, sustainable improvements rather than rapid, radical shifts that may prove unsustainable. This requires developing adaptable teacher education policies that respond to shifts in societal values and priorities without abandoning fundamental principles of educational equity and justice. A “one-size-fits-all” approach is unlikely to succeed; effective policy requires adapting to specific contexts and addressing the unique needs and challenges of national systems. The long-term perspective necessary to address cyclical patterns demands a shift from short-term policy cycles to long-term planning horizons. Policymakers must avoid pursuing quick fixes and instead focus on fostering sustained, systemic changes that can withstand shifts in ideology and priorities. This might involve establishing broader cross-sectoral collaborations that include policymakers, teacher educators, researchers, and community stakeholders.

“Policymakers must avoid pursuing quick fixes and instead focus on fostering sustained, systemic changes that can withstand shifts in ideology and priorities.”

Lastly, our work contributes to the relatively limited body of scholarship that explores the historical path dynamics of educational change (e.g., Berkovich, 2019; Hargreaves & Goodson, 2006), shedding light on the interplay between past trends and present educational challenges. Our 60-year study highlights the significance of adopting a long-term perspective to understand educational shifts. Researchers would also benefit from examining the nuanced sociopolitical circumstances that mobilize, stabilize, and destabilize educational changes within specific contexts. We encourage a comparative analysis of long-term cyclical patterns in other national contexts to determine the scope and applicability of the cyclical model in diverse settings.

Developing the Korean version of the equity scenario survey: Pilot study – Sojung Park (SP), Nicholas S. Bell (NB), Elizabeth Slusarz (ES), University at Albany, State University of New York

SP, NB, & ES: Our study [Developing the Korean version of the Equity Scenario Response Survey] highlights a critical gap between teacher candidates’ self-perceived readiness to address racism and ableism in the classroom (as seen in quantitative data) and their actual preparedness (as revealed by scenario-based responses). To examine these discrepancies, we employed the Korean-adapted Equity Scenario Response Survey (ESRS-K)—a scenario-based tool derived from the ESRS (Bell & Codding, 2021)—which we translated and culturally tailored to capture equity-related dilemmas specific to Korean classrooms.

From a policy perspective, our results offer a roadmap for educational leaders in South Korea and other societies facing similar demographic shifts. Policymakers should leverage these findings to set clearer teacher certification requirements or require mandatory equity modules in teacher education curricula. By explicitly targeting racism, ableism, and related forms of discrimination, policy reforms can foster inclusive practices throughout national teaching standards.

“Policymakers should leverage these findings to set clearer teacher certification requirements or require mandatory equity modules in teacher education curricula.“

In terms of scholarly contributions, our research applies QuantCrit [a theory that uses quantitative methods in ways consistent with the tenets of Critical Race Theory] in a novel way, both theoretically and methodologically. Adapting the ESRS for a Korean setting not only refines its cultural relevance but also expands the global discourse on equity assessment tools. This contextualized application of QuantCrit can guide teacher education in other rapidly diversifying contexts, offering a model for how researchers and practitioners might evaluate teacher readiness in settings undergoing similar demographic changes.

Taken together, our work bridges theory—Critical Race Theory (CRT) through QuantCrit—and practice in the form of teacher training and classroom realities. We invite the AERA community to critically examine how traditional self-report measures can be supplemented with tools like scenario-based assessments. These tools uncover the complexities of equity education, moving beyond surface-level self-perceptions to provide deeper insights into candidates’ readiness to enact equitable practices.

Are team meetings a place for teacher learning? An ‘in situ’ analysis of meeting practices – Enikö Zala-Mezö (EZ), Zurich University of Teacher Education, & Amanda Datnow (AD) University of California San Diego

EZ & AD: In our paper, we address the question: How does professional learning—which is similar to “collective trial and error” in Haslanger’s (2023, p. 169) wording—unfold in team meetings in schools? We describe meeting practices ‘in situ’. Driven by practice theory (Reckwitz, 2002), ‘in situ’ means we focus on daily practices in schools as the unit of analysis. We analyze detailed audio-recorded data gathered in team meetings in three Swiss schools and two different teams within each school. We attend to discourse sequences with potential for knowledge generation, where future practices or new insights are produced. We build on the definition of generative sequences from Beech et al. (2010): “engagement between two or more people that goes beyond the trivial, which changes some meanings or processes and/or creates some new knowledge” (p. 1342). In other words, we are looking for instances in which educators engage in deeper discussions that are characterized by inquiry and problem solving.

A non-generative discussion would be one in which the team does not engage issues of teaching and learning in much depth and jumps to quick solutions, such as blaming students for their underachievement.

Our analysis reveals that, in the Swiss schools we studied, educators often organize highly structured meetings with full agendas that last around an hour (with some exceptions). These meetings tend to have very short sequences discussing up to 12 topics, which limits opportunities for deeper understanding, and joint learning. The generative aspect of the discourse was found to be low in many cases, yielding few opportunities for teacher learning. Additionally, the high level of structuring activities (introducing, summarizing, coordinating the discussion), along with the dominant role of the meeting leaders (who often have the lion’s share of speech time) and full agendas, suggests an underlying bureaucratic approach to team meetings. Managing organizational tasks tends to overshadow the learning opportunities for teachers, emphasizing administrative concerns over collaborative learning or reflective discussions. This structure implies that the primary focus of the meetings is on fulfilling organizational needs rather than fostering meaningful, collaborative learning experiences for the educators involved.

We believe these findings have important implications for research and practice. Our hope is to raise the consciousness of educational leaders, teachers, and external partners about the discourse in team meetings. Teacher collaboration meetings are expected to be a vehicle of educational improvement (Vescio et al., 2008; Lefstein et al., 2020), and our analysis suggests they could be much more generative of learning than they presently are. There is of course no recipe for changing practices; rather, shifts happen through continuous inquiry, a trial-and-error process drawn on educators’ deep professional knowledge. The research community could also play a role through gathering and sharing micro-analytic data of meeting practices and conditions and partnering with educators in an inquiry process.

“Our hope is to raise the consciousness of educational leaders, teachers, and external partners about the discourse in team meetings.“

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Posted in About K-12 International Education News, Educational Policy, Interviews, Lead the Change, professional development, teacher education, Teachers

Tagged education, Educational Policy, Interview, Israel, Korea, Lead the Change, Learning, Professional Developmnat, Switzerland, teacher education, Teachers, Teaching, technology, United States

Tag Archives: technology

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Teachers, Teaching and Educational Change in Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Israel, Malaysia, Scotland, South Korea, Switzerland, and the US: Lead the Change Interviews (Part 7)

Critical Consciousness, Digital Equity, and Critical Unschooling in the United States: Lead the Change Interviews (Part 6)

Teacher Education, Teacher Certification, and Teacher Meetings in Israel, Korea, Switzerland and the US: Lead the Change Interviews (Part 4)

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