Find yourself asking what makes ReSchool Colorado different?

  

  

As Jason Weeby from Bellwether Education Partners pointed out, "everything you know about teaching, schools, governance, funding, accountability, advocacy, and credentialing" is now under examination. And ReSchool Colorado is one of the first to focus the microscope. The project, birthed through a belief that we cannot dramatically improve the current system through incremental changes or added mandates, is well under way for starting a new statewide system from scratch.


In this drive to create a new system it's easy to backslide to the usual strategies of educational reform. Below are three things we are doing differently to stay focused on creating a system that holds the learner and their needs firmly in the center.  

  

1- Engaging the Learner in the Design

    

Experience and expertise can only take you so far when you're trying to go beyond the current paradigm. Our early work with The Clayton Christensen Institute highlighted potential areas to launch this new system and helped us identify some of our first partners in shaping the design: families and young learners leveraging a Family, Friend and Neighbor (FFN) network of care and learning. In collaboration with Greater Good Studio and Boulder Housing Partners, we spent a week shadowing families and their caregivers focusing on the child as our center point.  The experiences, challenges, and assets of this community have inspired insights around the role a new system might serve in supporting their learning.  It has also taught us a lot about how to effectively engage people in design in ways that we hope to utilize again with others down the road. We are in the process of finishing this engagement and design work this month and will have more to share on the results in upcoming newsletters. (Read more about our experience with families)   

  

2- Maintaining a Growth-Mindset with an Eye Towards a Long-Term Vision

 

The ultimate goal of ReSchool Colorado is to create a new, parallel education system. So, much of our work continues to focus on the longer-term vision, system and policy components required to make it a reality, such as partnering with researchers at the Buechner Institute at the University of Colorado to design financing models for a new system, which we plan to share with you in early 2015.

   

When we set out to tackle the topic of governance for ReSchool, we brought together a diverse group of thinkers from education, health, political and business backgrounds to help us reimagine governance of a new system. Interestingly, we found that it was much more difficult than we had anticipated to come up with radically different models of governance. (Read more to see what we discovered)  

  

3- Seeking Inspiration from Entrepreneurs who are Jumping-In to Create New Solutions

  

What do Badge Alliance, SkillStore and Fidelis Education have in common?  They are run by entrepreneurs who have identified unique footholds in education and are getting after them with a refreshing sense of urgency and authenticity. These three organizations are informing our strategy in such areas as: launching and growing a new start-up; interoperability in an expanded ecosystem of providers and learners; management of a competency-based system of learning; and the cultivation of advocates to manage relationships and supports for learners through an integrated high touch and high tech approach. (Read More to learn about what makes these three voices relevant to our work) 

  

Coming Up Next Month

 

  • We will release our report sharing our research with Greater Good Studios and Boulder Housing Partners and some of the emerging ideas we may prototype with various user groups in 2016.
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  • For our January Hot Lunch we will host Gunnar Counselman, CEO and Co-Founder of Fidelis Education--an opportunity to hear for yourself about the impact of Fidelis' Learning Relationship Management tool on student learning and success.
 
        
 

As always, thank you for your interest in ReSchool Colorado

 


Sincerely,

Amy Anderson
Director, ReSchool Colorado

Colleen Broderick
Chief Learning Designer, ReSchool Colorado