As a Partnership…
At Scaling Student Success, we are working to catalyze a statewide shift to a whole child vision that validates and builds upon the assets every young person brings so they are prepared and ready to thrive. Our goal is to ensure each and every California student is receiving an education that prepares them for success by 2035.
Supporting Bold Leaders Across the State
Scaling Student Success is dedicated to expanding the number of communities using a Graduate Profile to establish a whole child vision, and supporting them on each step of their journey. We do this through two programs:
Community of Practice
A growing cohort of about 15 California school districts and communities with Graduate Profiles, eager to learn from the pilot communities and one another about strategies for moving from “poster to practice.” The Community of Practice is organized into strands designed to address common problems of practice. Each strand convenes regularly through the year, and is co-designed and facilitated by Scaling Student Success and our expert practice partners to test ideas, share promising practices and lessons learned, challenge biases and assumptions, and promote continuous improvement.
Our 2023-2024 Strands Include:
Description
Our Graduate Profile is a vision for educating the whole child and a promise to each and every student. To honor that promise, all educators and community members must develop a shared understanding of what it takes to realize that promise and embrace their part in making it happen. This strand is premised on the acknowledgement that coherence comes through purposeful interaction among community members, identifying and consolidating what works, and making meaning over time (Fullan). Building coherence is cumulative and ongoing. In this strand, you’ll build a strategy to develop a shared (and deep) understanding of the Graduate Profile across the district and community.
Driving Questions
How can the Graduate Profile become central to our school, district, and community identity, the ways we operate, and the stories we tell about what we do and why? What would coherence look like? How do we get there? How can we simultaneously use the Graduate Profile as a powerful tool to dismantle and redesign systems of oppression and racism?
Partners
This strand is co-designed and co-facilitated by ConnectED, Partnership for Children & Youth, Prospect Studio, Sonoma COE, and YouthTruth
Description
Realizing the promise and potential of a Graduate Profile assumes teaching and learning intentionally designed to produce specific outcomes. This strand is premised on the notion that high quality instruction will enable students to produce high quality work that reflects CCSS and Graduate Profile outcomes. Using student work as a window into the learning experience, we can craft an instructional playbook to ensure that every student realizes the outcomes articulated in the Profile. Only when we have confidence that student learning fosters their production of high quality work is it fair to expect and assess progress toward demonstrating the Profile outcomes.
Driving Questions
How can we create a student experience that allows the Graduate Profile to live and breathe in every class, every day? How might enhanced student voice, choice, and agency build both confidence and competence, while simultaneously promoting equity? How can we use the quality of student work as a measure of alignment and utilization of a Graduate Profile?
Partners
This strand is co-designed and co-facilitated by Inflexion, Envision Learning Partners, PBL Works, Learner-Centered Collaborative, and potentially others
Reimagining California Schools Innovation Pilot:
Reimagining California Schools Innovation Pilot:
A select group of 4 districts and communities deeply committed to leveraging the power and potential of their Graduate Profiles to transform learning in their schools to make it more equitable, student-centered, and competency-based. The goal of the pilot is to help participating districts closely examine their practices, and engage deeply to intentionally shift systems of instruction, assessment, and accountability to bring to life the whole child competencies articulated in their Graduate Profile.
Innovation Pilot Participants:
Testimonial
Partnering with Mission-Aligned Organizations to Increase Impact
Scaling Student Success has established formal partnerships with more than a dozen organizations with demonstrated success in operationalizing Graduate Profiles. Our practice partners are mission-aligned and equity-focused, and add enormous value to our Community of Practice through ongoing expert support and technical assistance. As we grow, we have begun to add partners that strengthen our work in communications, research, policy, and data supporting whole child outcomes.
Guiding Principles
Partners and participants adhere to these principles:
By centering students who have been marginalized as we scale high-quality implementation of evidence-based practices, support it through research, and sustain it through shifts in policy, we will narrow the opportunity and achievement gap and assure that all CA young people develop the skills, competencies, and mindsets necessary for future success.
By leveraging existing efforts of CA school districts, support providers, funders, and state and national education reform initiatives, we will build on their successes in non-duplicative value-add ways, to advance a unifying vision and common agenda.
By remaining curious and inquisitive, and by actively listening and engaging, we strive to learn from related efforts in local communities, other states and countries, as well as service providers who have journeyed along a similar path.
By recognizing that all growth and learning is rooted in relational capital, we commit to building trust by being open, honest, empathetic, even vulnerable in our interactions in order to model a human-centered approach.
By acknowledging that each individual, organization, and community operates in its own unique context (history, beliefs, values, politics, relationships, etc.), we accept that each will choose to proceed in a way that honors its context.
By recognizing that Graduate Profile outcomes represent not only what we foster for students in schools, but also for ourselves as adult learners, we will promote symmetrical student and adult learning by modeling empathy, inquiry, collaboration, engagement, and reflection.
By acting as a collaborative and responsive partnership, we will attempt to coalesce and focus the field and its collective vision for equitable access and opportunity and improved student learning outcomes.
Testimonials
Partnership Aims
Over the course of the next decade, this partnership aims to…
among CA school districts and networks committed to operationalizing their Graduate Profiles as a strategy for transforming teaching and learning and holding all community stakeholders mutually accountable for a broader set of student learning outcomes
about lessons learned, progress, and success of project participants in order to inspire more school districts to follow a similar path to more holistic and equitable student outcomes
that establishes a base of evidence to support partnership efforts and outcomes, including their implications for classroom practice, school redesign, district leadership, and state policy
(local and state) that enable scaling and sustaining positive partnership outcomes
(i.e., tools, platforms, network of support providers) to facilitate continuous improvement of evidence-based educational practices in communities across the state
Partnership Aims
