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 spread whole child education to every student across every corner of the state 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 Partnership for Children & Youth and Community Schools Learning Exchange.
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 Defined Learning, Envision Learning Partners, Inflexion, PBL Works, and World Savvy.
Description
Many communities across the state have a history of being “high performing” — i.e., sending a large percentage of students to 4-year universities. In these communities, they often believe that these high expectations and college-going rates alone lead to student success. This strand is premised on the belief that students need more, such as emotional intelligence, healthy relationships, demonstration of 21st century skills, and the desire and mindset to become culturally-competent citizens. Before districts can realize their Graduate Profiles in a meaningful way, often there must be a mindset shift among students, parents, educators, and community members.
Driving Questions
How can we engage communities in healthy dialog to consider a more robust definition of student success beyond the narrow way in which some communities historically have viewed it? How can those community conversations lead to shifts in priorities, educational practices, and policies? How will we know if students are better adjusted and even more prepared for future success?
Partners
This strand is co-designed and co-facilitated by Inflexion, Learner-Centered Collaborative, and YouthTruth.
Description
Increasingly, small school districts and charter schools across the state are developing Graduate Profiles to more holistically and equitably define student success. These small districts face a unique set of challenges due to limited resources and capacity. This strand is premised on the notion that small districts (and charter schools) will benefit from learning with and from one another about the promising practices, lessons learned, and strategies taken on by other similarly-sized LEAs.
Driving Questions
How can small districts and charter schools draw upon their assets to drive transformative change around a whole child vision, like a Graduate Profile? How can they overcome limitations to advance whole child outcomes?
Partners
This strand is co-designed and co-facilitated by the Small School Districts Association (invited), California Collaborative for Educational Excellence – CCEE (invited), and Winters USD.
Reimagining California Schools Innovation Pilot:
Reimagining California Schools Innovation Pilot:
A select group of 5 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 pilot promotes two mutually-reinforcing goals: (1) 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; and (2) to establish proof points that demonstrate for the state the positive outcomes when districts strive to realize a whole child vision.
Innovation Pilot Participants:
Practice & Policy Briefs
The four Practice & Policy Briefs (combined with a case study of Lindsay USD published earlier this year by NGLC) are intended to tell the real-world stories of California districts participating in the innovation pilot — their journeys to realize their whole child visions, the strategies they have opted to pursue, their lessons learned and challenges faced. Please feel free to share them widely.
In publishing these briefs, our goals are to:
- Embolden school district leaders to pursue a similar vision and path
- Entice policymakers and funders to incentivize these efforts
- Encourage state educational agencies and associations to join the movement
Click on the images above to read the 2023 Practice & Policy Briefs.
Partnering 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 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.
By “leading from the middle”, we support bold and innovative efforts in CA school districts to leverage the power and potential of a whole child vision (i.e., Graduate Profile) to transform education. We build awareness about their promising practices in an effort to catalyze change both in other districts across the state and in statewide policies and structural supports to advance whole child innovations.
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
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
Transform education to bolster student success
Raise the aspirations of our education system and the expectations and capacity of local communities to prepare each and every young person for future success.
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Scaling Student Success is a project of Community Partners, a nonprofit charity exempt from Federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Service Code. Checks should be made payable to: Community Partners for Scaling Student Success. Your donation is only tax deductible if made to Community Partners, our fiscal sponsor and the tax-exempt entity.