Scaling Student Success
Is designed as a California partnership among local educators, state agencies, support providers, policymakers, researchers, funders, and others – all focused on assuring that CA youth are prepared for success in college, career, and civic engagement. We help establish and maintain the local and state conditions to unify the field around a singular, student-centered goal that promotes equitable opportunities for CA youth and strengthens the CA economy.
Community of Practice
Our Community of Practice consists of educators and community partners from the school districts and county offices listed below. In order to meet district’s emerging needs as they work to operationalize their Graduate Profiles, we organize into strands designed to address common problems of practice. Each strand convenes regularly through the year to benefit from partner expertise, share promising practices and lessons learned, test ideas and assumptions, assure equitable implementation, push each other’s thinking, and promote continuous improvement. Each strand is co-designed and co-facilitated by our expert practice partners.
2021-22 STRANDS
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 stakeholders, 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
ACTIVE MEMBERS
Our community of practice continues to grow. These districts participate in strand convenings and other opportunities to advance their Graduate Profiles. We eagerly support their efforts, embrace their lessons learned, and build on their success.
See their respective Graduate Profiles by clicking on the district names.
ACTIVE MEMBERS
Our community of practice continues to grow. These districts participate in strand convenings and other opportunities to advance their Graduate Profiles. We eagerly support their efforts, embrace their lessons learned, and build on their success.
See their respective Graduate Profiles by clicking on the district names.
INACTIVE MEMBERS
Mostly for COVID-related reasons – i.e., limited bandwidth, shifting priorities – these districts are not participating in the community of practice this year. We hope and expect they will join us next year.
You may view their Graduate Profiles by clicking on the district name.
Testimonials
Scaling Student Success is a collaboration among organizations with varied expertise, each well-positioned to play a critical role in advancing the common agenda. We’ve started by growing our team of practice partners, expert in providing technical assistance with every aspect of creating and operationalizing a Graduate Profile. Additional partners, spanning research, policy, data, and more will be added as the partnership evolves.
Practice Partners
Expertise in all stages of operationalizing a Graduate Profile, including those with demonstrated success in building capacity of teachers and coaching leaders
ConnectED: The National Center for College and Career
Over the past decade, ConnectED has led the field by supporting dozens of school districts to create a Graduate Profile as a student-centered, outcome-based, and locally-derived definition of college and career readiness. ConnectED supports district implementation of Linked Learning to inspire and better equip students to succeed in college, career, and civic life.
Crescendo Education Group
Crescendo Education Group supports schools and districts with implementing grading and assessment practices that are more equitable–more accurate, bias-resistant, and intrinsically motivating–and that ultimately leverage educational improvements systemwide.
eKadence Learning
Working initially with Anaheim UHSD, eKadence built the first and only Learning Management Solution to marry academics with Graduate Profile outcomes. The collision of the two is where eKadence thrives. Now available to any interested district, eKadence is on a mission to help educators unlock true student potential and to empower students to find their purpose — because purpose truly is a powerful thing.
Envision Learning Partners
Envision Learning Partners is known in CA and nationally as the leader in supporting schools and districts to establish systems of performance assessment, the most popular research-based strategy for measuring student progress on essential Graduate Profile skills, like collaboration and teamwork, critical thinking and problem-solving, creativity and innovation, and communication.
GENup
GENup is a California-based, nationwide student-led social justice organization and student-activist coalition that strives to advocate for education through the power of youth voices! GENup supports many important causes, including active student engagement and student agency typically found in districts working to realize the whole child outcomes articulated in a Graduate Profile.
Inflexion
Inflexion equips principals and district administrators with the professional tools, knowledge and community they need to lead. We help create the conditions necessary for school improvement:
- A sense of shared purpose and school identity
- A common vision of student readiness
- Commitment to equity in education
Lead by Learning
By partnering with schools and districts, Lead by Learning (formerly Mills Teacher Scholars) designs professional learning cultures that are based on profound respect and trust for educator knowledge and capacity to improve their practice together. They do so by building the mindsets and practices for adult learning in service of equity, such as using data to make learners’ experience visible and practicing public learning.
Learner-Centered Collaborative
Recognizing the promise of learner-centered education and driven by the urgency to improve outcomes for today’s learners, education leaders and practitioners have teamed up as the Learner-Centered Collaborative (LCC), a comprehensive professional learning organization with decades of experience supporting schools, districts, and states in their shift to learner-centered models of education.
Partnership for Children and Youth
The outcomes articulated on a Graduate Profile cannot realistically be achieved in 180 days per year, from 8:00am to 3:00pm. The Partnership for Children & Youth (PCY) is an advocacy and capacity-building organization championing high-quality learning opportunities for underserved youth in California, with an emphasis on after school, summer learning, and community schools.
PBL Works (formerly Buck Instutute for Education)
Students have an opportunity to practice and demonstrate Graduate Profile outcomes (i.e., collaboration, communication, problem-solving, initiative, etc.) when they are engaged in varied forms of experiential learning. PBL Works builds teacher capacity so that all students have access to high quality Project Based Learning to deepen their learning and achieve success in college, career, and life.
Prospect Studio
Prospect Studio expertly guides districts and communities through a visioning process that results not only in a Graduate Profile for students, but also the adult/educator competencies necessary to foster the articulated outcomes in young people, and the system conditions and organizational culture that enables expected teacher and leader capacity and student progress toward Graduate Profile skills, competencies, and mindsets.
Sonoma County Office of Education
In 2019, Sonoma COE engaged regional stakeholders, including representatives from each of 40 school districts to create a countywide Portrait of a Graduate. As a partner, SCOE will support other County Offices of Education interested either in developing a countywide Graduate Profile or supporting districts in their county to create and operationalize their own Profiles.
Turnaround for Children
Turnaround for Children equips teachers to cultivate calm, engaging learning environments that foster healthy student development and academic achievement. TfC knows that educating the whole child requires positive relationships, safe environments, and integrated supports that enable the intentional development of critical skills, mindsets and habits articulated on Graduate Profiles.
YouthTruth
Through their validated survey instruments and tailored advisory services, YouthTruth partners with schools and districts to enhance learning for all students. By knowing what students are experiencing in their school and classroom, YouthTruth helps link student perceptions to academic outcomes. Surveys are a viable way to assess student progress on hard-to-measure Graduate Profile outcomes.
Advisory Board
Our Advisory Board draws approximately one-third (1/3) of its membership from each of the following three groups:
Superintendents
or cabinet-level designees from each of the Participating Districts
Executive Directors
or designees from each of our Practice Partners
At-large members
who offer unique perspectives, needed expertise, and professional relationships
Staff
Roman Stearns
FOUNDER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Roman operates from a deep conviction that each and every child deserves an education that fosters the qualities and skills that futurists, scholars, and researchers contend are needed to advance us toward a sustainable future. Yet, he knows that getting there is a humbling, collaborative process that involves dismantling structural inequities, valuing local experimentation, building trusting relationships, shifting hearts and minds, making strategic decisions, and ultimately adopting or adapting sustainable systems. Together, these create the right conditions for organizational change.
After 10 years serving as a public school teacher, Roman Stearns has spent the past 20+ years successfully directing large-scale multi-faceted projects and partnerships focused on systemic educational transformation in California, designed to make real-world learning the norm for the vast majority of students. All of the projects had policy implications and required development and management of sustained partnerships bridging K-12 education with partners across all stakeholder groups.
As a father of two mixed-race sons who have experienced the impact of a system that reinforces racist and oppressive policies coupled with implicit bias, this work is highly personal (see personal equity statement).
Professional Summary
Transform education to bolster student success
Raise the aspirations of our education system and the expectations and capacity of local communities to prepare all young people, no matter their background, for future success in college, career, and civic life.
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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.