Grounding in the Work

What are Beyond100K Moonshot CoLaboratories (CoLabs)?

Beyond100K Moonshot CoLaboratories (CoLabs) are designed to bridge the work of the last decade and set the stage for the next. 91 members representing 66 organizations spanning the nation make up seven CoLabs. While the four “foundational” CoLabs are aimed at incorporating partner perspective into specific organizational strategies like Network Growth and DEIB in the network, three “keystone” CoLabs were formed with the purpose of keeping partners invested in the focus areas of our network, namely, Teacher Work Environment and Expectations, Foundational STEM Teaching and Learning, and Equitable STEM Access. During the first decade of our collective work, these three focus areas served as launching points mobilizing partners to align their individual and organizational priorities to the work we believe is most impactful to the STEM education ecosystem. 

In order to keep these focus areas at the forefront of our work, the goals of the keystone CoLabs are to:

• Keep the momentum of our focus area work visible to the network 

• Foster connections among partners who are working on projects/initiatives related to our focus areas

• Create opportunities for partner to share and learn from one another 

• Create an output that will anchor work connected to our future keystone programming 

• Learn (on an ongoing basis) the highest priorities of our focus area communities 

As a result, members of all three keystone CoLabs have been working together since April to identify a problem within their focus area they would like to collectively explore, select a learning journey or method for further explore that topic, choose a solution path connected to their learning journey, and present the output of their work in November at our annual Summit. 

Launching our Work in San Diego

Each of the three focus area CoLabs came together in person with members of the other four CoLabs and Beyond100K staff at our April launch event in San Diego, California, to meet “IRL” (in real life), get to know one another further, get inspired, and begin exploring what they wanted to focus on as a team within their focus areas. To do this, we began by engaging with our CoLab’s “hub”, or virtual repository chronicling the work and progress of the network on the three focus areas during the first decade. You can learn more about the Foundational Math focus area here: Foundational Math Resource Hub. The hub includes everything from reports put out by Beyond100K, past project team updates and resources created, and highlights about implementation grantee’s projects. 

To deepen our CoLab’s collective understanding of the network’s progress on Foundational Math during the first decade, each CoLab member was given time to individually explore the materials in the hub, and then were guided through a “What? So What? Now What?” protocol to help us reflect on what we noticed, identify what resonated and stood out to us about the topics and challenges being addressed, and what we would like to learn more about and build upon as a CoLab. We then spent time identifying themes in what we shared, including areas of overlap or common denominators.

After receiving feedback from all participants at the Launch event on what to consider in moving forward via a whole-group gallery walk, we re-convened for a time of digging in and identifying a challenge on which they would like to collectively work to interrogate and analyze. Guided by the Problems with Problems protocol from Equity Meets Design, we worked through a series of prompts to turn their themes into a problem statement. We asked ourselves questions like, “is our problem stated as the absence of a solution we wish to implement?” and “is our problem missing specific references to people?”

Our Virtual Learning Journey

By the end of the launch day in San Diego, our Foundational Math CoLab landed on a problem statement to explore collectively: When institutional-centered outcomes are prioritized over student strengths, assets and needs, then experiences in pre-K-5 mathematics lack joy and authentic connections for many students, educators, and communities.

To determine how to explore this problem, over the next couple of virtual work sessions, we brainstormed over ten “How might we…?” statements that would capture the different ways they might explore this problem. Through consensus-building, we landed on exploring the following question: How might we cultivate strengths and create opportunities to make connections between communities and learning while making math joyful for students and teachers?

The next few sessions were then devoted to ideating specific solution criteria to be used as guidelines for their output, for example, we wanted to consider student voice versus external folx dictating what joyful math is, we wanted to consider asset-based pedagogies, and think about students who’ve been most harmed by the current way of doing things including Students of Color, students with special needs, and English language learners. Throughout the course of our discussions, we utilized the Beyond100K research scout for support to pull out the key pieces about joy from the two Beyond100K reports ("Doing the Math: Building a foundation of joyful and authentic math learning for all students” (2019) and "Reigniting Joyful, Rigorous, and Equitable Foundational Math Learning" (2021). You can find our Foundational Math/STEM CoLab’s research boost document here!

Armed with this research and information, at this point, we were ready to brainstorm possible solution pathways for our problem and “How might we…” statement. We brainstormed a list of over ten possible solutions to explore how we might create opportunities to make learning joyful for students and teachers and ultimately landed on creating this site! 

Why Focus on Joy?

“Teachers, proven to be the most important factor in a student’s in-school learning, are a critical lever to helping all kids get access to foundational math, especially in the elementary grades. They are positioned to help students connect with their natural curiosity and experience the joy of experimentation, problem-solving, and inquiry; see that puzzling, attempting, stumbling, learning, and improving are about growth, not failure; and grow into confident and emboldened drivers of their own educations and futures. However, we know that many elementary students do not experience math with joy and authenticity, nor do their teachers. Too few elementary teachers receive the training and support they need to deliver joyful and authentic instruction to their students” (Doing the Math Report, p. 6).

As a CoLab, it is our hope that the resources we have pulled together can help support more elementary school students and teachers experience the joy of mathematics!

Beyond100K's Reports on Foundational Math