ReSchool Colorado: The Power of a Parallel Path  

  

  

Welcome to the ReSchool Colorado Newsletter. New to the ReSchool story? You can access some background here.

  

From the beginning, Donnell-Kay has imagined a new education system that will serve students statewide and eliminate barriers between the key transition points of early childhood, K-12, post-secondary, and the workforce. The system born of ReSchool Colorado will not replace the existing Colorado educational system. Instead, it will be designed to operate in parallel with the current system, serving students from birth until their first career.   

 

As we dig deeper into our design, opportunities are beginning to emerge to partner with the current system to highlight the power of a parallel path and as a means to exchange powerful learning to inform the continued design of our future system. In this newsletter we highlight two examples of how our learning is fed by and feeds into today's system and informs the design of a new system that will expand opportunities for Colorado students.     


Lessons from Our Process of Design

We are learning quickly that how we do the work is as important as the work that we do. When thinking about designing a system that remains lean and dynamic, we've adopted processes that empower these attributes to remain of central value. Strategies such as human-centered design, scenario planning, and discovery-driven planning reflect our commitment to design from a learner's unique needs and to cultivate an organizational culture that is responsive and can change quickly.

In a previous newsletter, we highlighted efforts to learn from design work we embarked on with trusted partners, families and young learners to better understand Family, Friend and Neighbor (FFN) networks of care and learning. We shared this process and our learning with an audience of school leaders at a conference on Learner-Centric Environments hosted by the accrediting agency AdvancEd. Although human-centered design serves as a core process for ReSchool, our goal was to add to the toolbox of strategies a leader in today's system could use to engage their community and their students to inform inroads for new solutions.

Another process we use that can feed today's schools in moving towards a more responsive environment is scenario planning. In addition to leveraging human-centered design in an effort to uncover new insights, we've used scenario planning to organize the multiple paths of possibilities that emerge, many of which are dependent on other factors.

In a case study and interview through Edu-Change's Learn 1-2-3 series with Colleen Broderick, ReSchool's Chief Learning Designer, we explored how ReSchool Colorado adopted the use of scenarios to reveal, and then leverage, the dynamics of change in positive ways for learning. All organizations face a certain level of uncertainty. In most cases, people are expected to pivot in response, resulting in unanticipated shifts in strategic plans that place stress on stakeholders. This process uses the PESTLE framework. By uncovering the political, economical, social (societal/cultural), technological, legal and environmental factors, one can identify factors that apply to the core domains of their decision. We've used this strategy to frame potential young adult pathways as well as a means to consider different governance structures. We think it could be useful in our current system when schools are developing multi-year strategies, testing existing strategies, and initiating dialogue with stakeholders about possible or preferred futures specific to a single initiative.

Lessons from Strategic Partnerships: The Learner Advocate Pilot

 

Equally as powerful as sharing tools to support improvement in the current system, we are grateful for opportunities in which we can cull learning from the present structure to sharpen our design for the future. The role of learner advocates continues to surface as an essential component to the success of the new system. This network of advocates will partner with learners and their families to help navigate an expanded ecosystem of learning opportunities, to design their pathway and to cultivate relationships and resources essential to their success.

 

Through networking and research, DK has identified several individuals, community-based organizations, and educators who are supporting learners as counselors, advocates, and coaches in the current K-12 and post-secondary systems. As we've interacted with various learners and advocates, some interesting opportunities to improve those relationships and build capacity have emerged. For example, a number of advocates and/or learners operate in isolation. They are looking for an effective way to manage their goals and pathways, to document the resources they are accessing, and to facilitate relationships with and connections to the people who are supporting and encouraging them through this process. As we looked across the field to see if anyone was working on something to help with this identified need, we discovered the concept of a Learning Relationship Management (LRM) system. And, we found a partner, Fidelis Education, who has developed an LRM that we've put in front of a number of advocates in our current system. They have been intrigued by it, and we think it could be utilized by advocates and learners right now. 

 

This Spring we will launch a pilot with Fidelis and up to 12 advocates who are working with teenagers and young adults across the state. Our goal is for this pilot to be a value-add to those working and learning in the current system as well as to inform the design of the advocate's role in the future system created through ReSchool Colorado.

 

 

We will be hosting a webinar on March 24th for people working with young adults in our current K-12 and higher education system who may be interested in participating in this pilot. For more information about the webinar, contact Colleen Broderick.   

   


Sincerely,

Amy Anderson
Director, ReSchool Colorado

Colleen Broderick
Chief Learning Designer, ReSchool Colorado