Nurturing Change during Challenging Times: Centering Young and Adult Learners

In 2019, Gallup demonstrated that schools are facing an engagement crisis as fewer than 50% of students and only 1 out of 3 teachers report being engaged in school. With the recent pandemic, these statistics are certainly much worse. According to Gallup, when schools can engage students, learners are 4.5 times more likely to be hopeful about their futures than their unengaged peers. For teachers, their engagement results in low absenteeism and employee turnover, both key metrics in the national teacher shortage (Gallup, 2019).

This disengagement comes from a system that was not designed to be equitable and asset-based. TNTP’s 2018 Opportunity Myth reminds leaders that:

“At every level of the education sector, from classrooms to statehouses, from schools of education to nonprofit offices, adults make daily choices that perpetuate a cycle of inequity and mediocrity in our schools. Consciously or not, we choose to let many students do work that’s far below their grade level. We choose to leave teachers without the skills and support they need to give all their students access to high-quality academic experiences. We choose to act on assumptions about what students want and need out of school, without really listening to them and their families. We choose, in essence, which students are more deserving of reaching their goals.” (p. 5)

Districts and schools are increasingly looking to redesign their approaches to teaching and learning to solve these problems. However, they are encountering 3 key challenges:

1. The path from traditional school models to equitable, learner-centered, personalized or competency-based learning is of high need but unclear for school leaders who are not yet familiar with these models;

2. Each school and classroom context is unique and each teacher is at a different place in their transformation to equitable, learner-centered instructional practices, but required professional learning is usually one-size-fits-all, unevenly distributed, and/or event-oriented; and

3. School leaders need a way to measure the impact of professional learning and to see growth over time so they can manage their resources, provide feedback, and make adjustments.

Taking these challenges into consideration, the team at Learning Couture believes we will not develop clarity and co-create a more equitable education system that reflects the background and experiences of students if we fail to situate the learners at the center of the system. Unfortunately, the term “learner-centered” has become almost a trope–a belief educators know they are supposed to espouse, but not yet a way of being within the system. This is, in part, because the definition of “learner-centered” is varied (part of its beauty) and thus variable (part of its challenge).

Our definition of learner-centered is derived from the work I did with colleagues Kim Carter and Wendy Surr for the Aurora Institute publication, Teachers Making the Shift to Equitable, Learner-Centered Education: Harnessing Mental Models, Motivations, and Moves (2022). Learner-centered approaches are personalized and equitable; challenging, relevant, and applied; transparent and transferable; relationship-based; varied and flexible; and owned and driven by the learner. In this report, we as authors clarify the work ahead of us: 

“Let’s revisit the challenge of scaling learner-centered education. We are expecting teachers to operate from a whole new equity lens and learner-centered teaching and learning paradigm, becoming ‘adaptive experts’ who can apply and flexibly adapt their craft across varying conditions and contexts to ensure success for all their students. To do this, many teachers will need to adjust—or even construct a whole new awareness of—their culture and privilege, and a new theory of teaching and learning. This may mean substantially revising or even abandoning assumptions and beliefs, as well as established routines, interaction styles, and teaching practices that they may believe work well. This does seem daunting.” (p. 25)

Because these approaches are antithetical to our outdated one-size-fits-few educational system, our bold idea to support existing schools with their transformation to equitable, learner-centered systems is to provide opportunities for job-embedded professional learning for each adult learner–educators and school leaders–that is grounded in addressing relevance, receptivity, and agency as primary motivators for change. As someone who has served as a 2Rev coach and collaborator over the years, I see innumerable connections between 2Rev’s continuum of supports–Design Studios, Communities of Practice, and graduate programs–and the partnerships we form with educators leveraging our model for professional learning. Like 2Rev, we focus on equitable, learner-centered practices that are job-embedded and customizable in how they are operationalized in the learning environment. Unique to Learning Couture, we make continuous improvement possible by empowering an entire staff to design their own adult learning pathways in 3-5 rapid learning cycles across an academic year, using a combination of clear launch points with integrated, generative design.

We have developed a system that begins with an assessment process to help educators and school leaders find their “just right” fit for next steps in their professional growth, while creating coherent learner experiences designed for agency and belonging in a competency-based model (see 2Rev’s blog, Do Educator Evaluations Even Matter? to explore more about personalizing our educator growth systems). By meeting educators where they are while providing cycles of support to improve their practice across both academic and social-emotional domains, we honor adults as learners as they take step after step to honor each young learner through the development of motivation, self-efficacy, growth mindset, ownership, choice, engagement, purpose, self-direction, and perhaps most importantly, voice. 

We are excited to see learners within partner schools benefit when educators engage in iterative, job-embedded learning/doing (Define → Learn → Do → Reflect → Evolve), including:

1. facilitated support with developing educators' learner identity and agency,

2. intentional work uncovering and refining mental models about the education system, learning, equity, and learners to create a theory of action based on a problem of practice, and

3. development of targeted skills through rapid prototyping with peer observation and feedback to make habits visible and reinforce desired shifts (Surr, Carter, Stewart 2022).

Even though this comprehensive model is designed as a cohesive cycle, we acknowledge and celebrate that each school context is unique. Some partner schools begin by spending extra time within “Define” and “Learn” for their first year of implementation. In Michigan, for example, Anchor Bay Schools are focusing their adult learning experiences on getting familiar with learner-centered terminology and exploring our Learning Library to make connections between new pedagogy and their current practices. This time is well-spent because it is both affirming strong pedagogical moves they already have in place, while also expanding their mental models about the role of the educator and the role of our young learners, which is a necessary step toward enacting their Portrait of a Graduate. When they are ready to take their learning and apply it to a learning environment, they will be able to use Learning Couture’s tools to design and refine engaging lessons that integrate the targeted practices they select (adult and learner “moves” or strategies) and the learning opportunities within the platform, resulting in right-sized steps that move them from more traditional approaches to those that increasingly put learners at the center.

By supporting job-embedded professional learning experiences that build organizational and individual capacity simultaneously, Learning Couture helps make learner-driven change systemic and lasting (see 2Rev’s blog, What If?, for more about reimagining professional learning). We are partnering with districts and schools–and also learning organizations like 2Rev–so that educators can explore a range of customizable supports across a professional learning spectrum, creating connective tissue that improves the ecosystem as a whole.