By: Shannon Murtagh
In 2021, deep in the midst of COVID, we surveyed Chief Innovation Officers (CIOs) working in public school districts across the country about the skills, core work, and mindsets that were most important to innovate for equity. These CIOs identified research and development (R&D) as the most important skill and the missing piece in driving innovation in their district. This reality–that those tasked with systems innovation are not sufficiently equipped with the skills to innovate and scale new solutions–must be addressed to improve public education at scale.
In the intervening three years, R&D has emerged as a priority in public education circles. Conferences, webinars, and think pieces are all buzzing with mentions of R&D–particularly in the context of artificial intelligence (AI) within schools. Well-designed R&D–rooted in clear needs with equal clarity about the intended and actual outcomes–manages risk, acknowledging not all things will work. It provides safeguards for students and families while creating space for innovation. It ensures that students, teachers, and communities are involved not just as “end users” but as part of the design and testing process.
What does this look like in practice? While involving the community in R&D may seem intimidating, systems actually have multiple ways to do so. Practitioners are accustomed to learning by doing, and there is an opportunity for district innovation leaders to build their R&D skills through deep, authentic community collaboration in three key areas:
Equitable design processes
Empathy-driven solution testing
Scenario planning.
Solutions do matter but how you get to a solution matters just as much if not more. R&D is the way in which school districts can and should be developing innovative solutions so that positive, equity-driven, change can be achieved for students at scale.
So what do these three components look like in practice? Let’s explore a scenario.
A Scenario: Franklin Public Schools
Imagine a district, we’ll call them Franklin Public Schools (FPS), where the district leadership failed to employ any of these skills as they spent their Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) COVID funding. FPS, like all public districts nationally, received a significant one-time infusion of additional funding to help recover from the impact of the pandemic. The district leadership announced, to great fanfare, that they would be spending the funding to expand the world languages program in the school district to begin at Kindergarten rather than in middle school. To the district’s surprise, the plan was met with outrage.
Parents could not understand how world language expansion was the spending decision being made. They argued that students needed more social-emotional support, more tutoring, and other targeted interventions to ensure students made up ground lost during the pandemic, and that the plan to expand world languages would cause a future funding challenge. The FPS administration downplayed these concerns. They explained that in Franklin, a fairly well-off suburban district, the students were overall fine and the schools were already resourced to provide extra support. Money was needed to launch an expanded world language program, but the administration was confident that after the ESSER funding expired, continued funding would not be a problem.
Teachers were also against expanding the world language program. To make time for language classes in the elementary schedule the district would be eliminating ½ day Thursdays that had been a long-standing feature of the calendar and provided weekly teacher prep and in-service time. Teachers did not want to lose this ½-day worth of planning and development time and could not believe that the administration had announced a plan that involved a major calendar change without consulting the teachers’ union.
Ultimately, due to overwhelming pushback, the plan was scrapped. The language program, and school calendar, stayed as they were. And what (or if) the ESSER funding was spent on is unclear to the school community. If the funding was not spent, it was returned to the federal government and never used to enhance the learning experience of students in the district. And if it was spent on students, it was done so quietly without building community and educator support. The teachers ended up in a protracted contract battle with the school district, in part due to anger over possibly losing the ½-day without being consulted. FPS did not just fail to expand the language program–the attempt and failure to launch a language program left sustaining negative impacts. Most notably, eroding trust in the district at a time when public education was already experiencing a trust crisis from parents and communities.
It is easy, in retrospect, to see all the ways the administration went wrong. But a more valuable exercise is to think about how the administration could have done right. Imagine a scenario where the administration used a rigorous R&D process rooted in community collaboration to reach a better outcome for students, families, the community, teachers, and the district. Below we explore how each of the four components introduced previously could have been used by FPS to spend ESSER funding in a better way.
Equitable Design Processes
Equitable design processes use empathy exercises and inclusive practices to identify and center end-users, interrogate problems in community with others, acknowledge how historic inequities play into the problem and potential solutions, and create new solutions in collaboration with those proximate to the problem. In school districts, the community, families, and students that have been most underserved must be engaged in the design process to make sure that new solutions do not simply maintain the status quo or even widen the equity gap. To come up with new, innovative, equity-focused solutions the design process must include those voices.
An Example: FPS brought a fully formed plan to the community. They allowed community voting around the languages that would be taught in elementary school, but the idea to spend ESSER funds on expanding the world language program was brought to the community pre-decided. This lack of problem exploration, identification, and definition with the most impacted stakeholders led to multiple breakdowns. First, at least externally facing, they started with a solution without identifying all of the needs of students, families, and educators. Second, once a solution was decided by the district, the lack of meaningful, inclusive engagement and shared decision-making resulted in significant pushback and ultimately caused the idea to fail.
How R&D practices help: FPS could have built a design process that enabled the community to help define the highest need and identify possible spending solutions in the wake of the pandemic. Data would be part of this design process–using state test results, formative assessments from the schools, behavioral data, and qualitative data (such as conversations with parents and teachers regarding academic and non-academic support needs to learn post-pandemic)–in order to understand and define the current barriers to learning as the district emerged from COVID. From there, FPS would likely land on a different need and design a different solution for this one-time Federal investment..
If, within this process, there was space for the district to introduce possible spending options, expansion of the world language program could have been included. At the end of the engagement process, whatever the district ended up focusing ESSER spending on would have had support from a group of community members and be responding to real needs felt by students, parents, teachers, and others. For a great example of what this might look like check out this blog by Maggie Favretti and Kyle Wagner.
Empathy-Driven Testing
As new solutions are unveiled they need to be evaluated via empathy-driven testing. This is testing that anchors itself in the experience of and feedback from the users in addition to collecting quantitative data tied to what is being tested. Empathy-driven testing enables districts to understand how solutions feel to students and families and creates space for innovation that meets the needs of students.
An Example: FPS never tested the world languages expansion, they were confident it was the right plan and should be expanded district-wide. However, they did have an existing world languages program that started in middle school with both students and teachers who could have been engaged in empathy interviews to understand the value, as well as the challenge, of successful program implementation. This invaluable context about how middle school students and educators experience world languages would be useful when considering piloting or wholescale expansion at other grades This is common in public education settings–new curriculum, classroom technology, scheduling models, and other changes are often adopted without an understanding of how they current practices are being experienced. New programs and practices are also often implemented without a plan for user testing and experiential feedback that is critical to understanding the impact of new practices. .
How R&D practices help: The world languages program, if it had been enacted, should have been put in place with clear evaluation criteria that looked at both how students were faring on traditional quantitative measures of success but also at how the expansion of languages was experienced by the families and teachers in the district. Did it feel like it was addressing needs the pandemic surfaced? Were students and families happy with the program, did it need additional changes or support to better meet the needs of families, teachers, and the community? A plan for empathy-driven testing–even if the district had gone ahead with the language program expansion–would have given the community a continued voice during implementation, made space to improve and innovate to fit needs as well as possible, and potentially developed further buy in due to the commitment to only having programs that work for students on multiple measures.
Scenario Planning
Scenario planning starts by articulating some of the ways in which policies, practices, programs, or other variables may be planned out over the future–Once scenarios are envisioned, they can be navigated to determine what the impact would be on different individuals, enabling districts to build a collective understanding of what success looks like for students. Scenario planning creates a shared future vision and creates space to design new solutions that will put the district (or other designers) on track to the future scenario they want to be a reality. It also helps set clear, equity-tethered outcomes for R&D work.
An Example: FPS planned to expand world languages without playing out what that might look like or mean. What is the profile of a graduate they aim to achieve? How does an expanded world languages program prepare a student for that future and under what circumstances? What other shifts or changes (like the known ESSER end date) impact the longer-term viability of the program expansion? Without building a collectively held definition of what success looks like for students, articulating scenarios for how the change may be executed and impacted over time, and charting a path toward the best scenario, new ideas and programs often have a short run.
How R&D practices help: FPS could have framed their ESSER spending decisions with a longer view, not just in the context of trying to recover from the pandemic but also about recovery and preparation. Together with key stakeholders, scenario building and planning could build a collective understanding of what student success (rather than simply recovery) would look like moving past the pandemic. Had they done this work they could have defined future success and then examined, with the community, how different spending options would impact the likelihood of students achieving it. This may have helped families select world language expansion over increased mental health services, high-impact tutoring, additional teacher development, or the many other things families asked for when FPS presented its spending plan.
These three suggestions are examples of just some of the ways that communities and students can be involved in education R&D to develop new solutions that meet their needs. Utilizing equitable design processes, empathy-driven solution testing, and scenario planning are straightforward ways that districts can, and should, involve the community. These actions will ensure that R&D is a process districts are using to create space to innovate in sustainable and equity-focused ways and avoid R&D just being a thing that is attached to any AI-related tool.
Shannon is the co-founder and network director at the Imagine Network. Based in Massachusetts she’s the parent of three public school students, an avid baker, and bikes everywhere.
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