Stoking the Learning Fires: Agency and Equity
Equity: freedom from bias or favoritism
Agency: the capacity, condition or state of acting or of exerting power
Every major conference you attend this year will have one or both of these words emblazoned on banners and materials. The philanthropic sector has made these topics priorities, and we’re seeing a correlation with the proliferation of new organizations and initiatives focused on these topics. Agency and equity are very fashionable at the moment. Unfortunately, there is a lot of activity and fewer outcomes in a great deal of the efforts underway to increase agency or improve equity. Yet. While we applaud the increased activity, it’s important to move toward the real shift of engendering agency to realize equity and to leverage this essential kindling to stoke the learning fires.
Our nation is at a crossroads. More often than not, school happens to most kids. We live in a world that privileges and celebrates hyper-individualism. America is founded on this sense of individualism. It is baked into the core of American exceptionalism; it is at the heart of a culture that reveres the risk-taking exemplified by a new age of entrepreneurship. And yet, how is our American education system preparing the next generation of civic leaders and entrepreneurs? How are schools tackling the biggest equity issue of our time- all kids, no matter the zip code in which they are raised or mother’s level of education- need these skill sets. It isn’t about teaching “grit”.
There is the need to build an understanding in students of what it means to own their learning and ultimately, build the skills necessary for students to truly drive their learning. In other words: agency. This is exemplified by what education researcher Milton Chen calls “ed-you-cation”; Chen’s research has proven the most powerful form of learning begins from personal experience and personal interests (Johansen 2017), as a way to engender ownership. By unlocking agency in your adults and in your learning environments, we are concretely challenging traditional power structures within those systems and arming our learners with an essential life skill to exert their power, by owning their experience. The transferability of this more broadly is a level of empowerment that supports a deeper push toward greater equality. In this way, increased agency increases equity.
Everything we are focused at 2Revolutions (2Rev) looks at the work through the prism of increasing agency and equity. I cannot think of two more important elements that should be driving all of our work in transforming learning in K-12 education. How do we, at 2Rev, work to ensure that happens? How do we, as a capacity building provider, engender ownership in our district and higher ed partners in ways that increase the probability that agency will be a core belief and an enduring outcome, ultimately manifesting itself in the learning experience?
From our outset twelve years ago, we committed to never allow 2Rev to become a typical consulting firm. There is no “2Rev solution”, and we are not selling a specific product or presuming a specific outcome.Human-centered design is a form of empowerment, that in and of itself, engenders ownership. This is the foundation of agency - arriving not with an answer, but instead with a process to empower others to unlock their answer.
A typical conversation with a 2Rev partner illustrates the point:
2Rev: “What problem are you trying to solve?”
Partner District: “We are trying to increase student ownership of their learning.”
2Rev: “Let’s start at the beginning of the design process, with empathy. Let’s talk to a range of people - kids, families, teachers, leaders and others - to understand how they define that, what they want and need and what’s happening now in order to have enough data to move forward”.
Partner: “Can you just tell us the answer?”
Herein lies a disconnect; perhaps the disconnect. Person. Fish. Eat today. Eat forever. Ahh!
Engendering authentic ownership - our definition of agency - doesn’t come in a neatly wrapped package. Unfortunately, it also cannot be imported from elsewhere. You need to grapple with this, with your people, in your context. Building capacity and ownership to address these problems is the aim, in ways that increasingly try to model agency along the way. It also increasingly necessitates a structure that distributes more decision-making and ownership throughout your organization. At its core, agency challenges traditional hierarchies, which ultimately can disrupt those inequitable power structures. Agency and equity need to be an integrated strategy, where working on the former unlocks the latter.
Below, I share some stories from a few recent partnerships to illustrate some of our learning to date, taking the theoretical into the realm of the actual.
Act 1: Moving From Talk to Action
Change happens in unusual ways. Grappling with agency and equity in one New Hampshire district (SAU 16) of about 7500 learners means wrestling with power structures and narratives. This district is starting with itself, with the belief that unlocking agency for adults is a more effective means of doing so for kids, ultimately helping to address systemic inequity.
I stared into the room of 50 administrative leaders at a half-day design studio in August 2019 and was met with stunned silence as the district leadership team shared their problem of practice for the year: “we want to move away from top-down edicts to more intentionally supporting our building leaders to define solutions”. Put differently, this central office leadership team was trying to empower the leaders in their nine schools to truly own the work. The announcement was good; the action to follow harder. But in what has traditionally been a more hierarchical environment, it must be established not by saying "I give you permission" but by modeling so that permission can also be received and taken. The past several months have been an opportunity to try to implement the good intentions of agency, as a means to improve outcomes for all learners.
“I stared into the room of 50 administrative leaders at a half-day design studio in August 2019 and was met with stunned silence as the district leadership team shared their problem of practice for the year: ‘we want to move away from top-down edicts to more intentionally supporting our building leaders to define solutions’. Put differently, this central office leadership team was trying to empower the leaders in their nine schools to truly own the work. “
In order to move in this direction, these leaders have taken some concrete steps:
Crowd sourcing norms from all district administrative leaders (~50 people) for how district leadership and building leadership are going to work together has been a starting point for providing greater clarity around healthier collaboration. See those norms here with definitions.
Self assess district-wide strategy together, as a means to surface agreement and disagreement in the work.The exercise was to collectively define concrete examples of district-wide Competency-based Education (CBE), building-level CBE and gaps each team perceives in a system-wide approach to CBE. They used a self-assessment process to invite perspectives from all leaders in the system, rather than just district leadership. Rather than have policy and decisions happen to them, this represented an opportunity for building leadership to feel like their professional expertise mattered. Subsequently, this process has provided data to substantiate conversations on what is and should be district-wide policy versus where there are opportunities for building-level flexibility. District leadership have started a process to provide clear rationales for all district policies and ensure that those very rationales become a starting place for a discussion with building leadership, rather than a discussion about policy after it has been made.
Using future oriented leadership competencies to build deeper leadership capacity to support individual and collective work across the district. Here is an example of the working competencies that 2Rev helped the district develop, which they are prototyping this year.
Taken by themselves, these steps would be good but insufficient. Taken together - especially in concert with explicit permission and support from district leadership - they are helping to move the district forward in concrete and measurable ways. We’ll be anonymously surveying all administrative leaders later in the spring to assess progress and areas for further development.
Act 2: A Work in Progress
The Manchester School District, also in New Hampshire, is a district of approximately 14,000 students and over 1,000 educators. It serves a diverse student population where 76 languages are spoken and 55% of students qualify for free and reduced lunch. There is tremendous complexity in this district, as the seventh superintendent in the past 20 years took the reins this past summer. A group of business and civic leaders came together over the past two years to cultivate a strategic planning process, which 2Rev has supported. But, rather than a traditional top-down process that emanates from the School Board or the city’s business and civic leadership, they have taken a very different approach.
Excerpt from the Manchester Proud Plan: “Over the past two years, this collaboration has prioritized listening and learning, with over 5,000 members of our community coming forward to share their opinions and hopes for the future of our students and schools. These voices heard from throughout our city have provided the foundation for our work, and together with third party research, have led us to examine community partnerships, finance, governance, organizational effectiveness and teaching and learning within our district.”
With the goal of engendering broader ownership from the community, to solicit real demand as well as political support, they have:
Selected a representative group of stakeholders to serve asa Community Planning Group made up of students, teachers, district employees, parents and business/civic leaders, who together steer the development of the plan.
Developed a community-driven success definition: a graduate profile. To date, over 3,500 community members have engaged through in-person design sessions, focus groups and online surveys.
Led a rigorous community engagement process to understand hopes, dreams and dreads with regard to the current system. Through a mix of canvassing, interviews, focus groups and surveys, thousands of professionals and residents have been meaningfully engaged to ensure that a broad range of voices and perspectives are reflected in and influence the plan.
Established a clearer picture of the districtthrough a quantitative and qualitative analysis of five categories: (1) teaching and learning, (2) governance, (3) finance, (4) community partnerships and (5) organizational effectiveness. This analysis provides a clearer picture both of what’s working and areas in need of improvement, generating data on which to base a clear set of recommendations.
Worked with the community to validate the plan. As the plan emerged, the Community Planning Group led another round of engagement with a broad set of stakeholders through multiple sessions with community members, School Board, district leadership, business leadership, school principals, etc. Over 600 people engaged in these sessions.
The Manchester Proud draft plan was presented to the school board in late January 2020 and adopted in late February 2020.
Each of these steps has supported a representative group of stakeholders to work in partnership with district central office and school board leadership to help create a locally-owned plan, increasing the likelihood of broad-based ownership, and therefore, more successful implementation. Again, the same lesson: by involving others in the process, by building agency, you build support and buy-in for the work.
Act 3: Full Ownership at Scale
We have enjoyed a longstanding and strategic relationship with Dallas Independent School District (DISD) that has consisted of supporting the design of personalized learning (PL) models, work to help build enabling conditions to support PL across the system and Implementation coaching of PL within schools. In 2014, 2Rev was selected by DISD to serve as their design partner through the Gates Foundation’s Next Generation Systems Initiative. Through this initiative, 2Rev led a cohort of eight school-based teams through a six-month design process as they developed PL models and then continued to support five schools by providing ongoing coaching support as they transitioned to implementation. 2Rev helped the district develop a personalized coaching model to better support the work in schools at scale. In this model, 2Rev designed and coached semester-long sessions of professional learning focused on priority areas each school was working to improve. Coaches then worked with individual teachers, grade level teams, internal instructional coaches and the school leadership team to support teachers in advancing their practice in a priority work area. Throughout this time, we also partnered closely with the leadership in the district office to build structures and supports to PL district level leadership in order to support them in creating clear expectations for PL in Dallas, tools and frameworks to support and monitor educator effectiveness (such as the PL Toolbox) and strategic planning to assist them in expanding the work beyond the initial cohort. This storytelling piece looks at the human impact of the work; this impact report provides an in-depth analysis of overall effectiveness.
District leadership in the PL office had a felt need. The story here is one of scaffolded agency of DISD leadership and team members whereby 2Rev led, co-led, advised and in the end, fully stepped away, as good work continued to deepen and scale across the district. This represents a successful effort to engender agency over the long haul, where the DISD team is now driving the work and has emerged as a national leader, truly owning the work after building their capacity and making it their own.
“The story here is one of scaffolded agency of DISD leadership and team members whereby 2Rev led, co-led, advised and in the end, fully stepped away, as good work continued to deepen and scale across the district. This represents a successful effort to engender agency over the long haul, where the DISD team is now driving the work and has emerged as a national leader, truly owning the work after building their capacity and making it their own.”
Takeaways
Power structures within our schools and districts more often concentrate power in the hands of a few professional staff. This inequity in power manifests itself in systems that disenfranchise educators, families and learners. This is usually unintentional, but problematic nonetheless. By deliberately engendering greater voice and ownership among district leadership, principals, teachers and community, we can accelerate the shift toward more equitable learning systems. Change is happening everywhere in our schools and districts. How do we unlock and align that change rather than suppress it? How do we recognize the limits of traditional models of leadership and management to navigate a very different world today? Over the course of the next year, we are going to be exploring ways to engender greater ownership and make explicit connections between greater ownership and equity.
