Welcome back to our new blog!

An exciting part of the MBLC project for me is listening as school leaders and staff consider:
 

What changes do we seek to make, and why? 

What will be different for learners when we succeed? 

How can we communicate powerfully and clearly about the shifts we're making? 

Our common vision: School as a place of growth, discovery, and belonging

The MBLC schools share a common vision: that every learner can experience school as a place of growth, discovery, and belonging. Each founding member school has set goals that honor their particular strengths, needs, and priorities, as they reach toward this common vision.

We are creating new models and new stories, as we chart a course toward learner-centered schools. When we put students, their learning, and their wellbeing at the center of our efforts, it means rethinking large and small systems and practices. So much of what we seek to change is entwined into our own personal histories, and we have to push past that "muscle memory" about what a day in school is like.

Making changes to serve students better involves visioning, collaboration, input from many perspectives, and daily learning and unlearning. It means inviting learners and their families to share what matters to them, and to describe their vision for education and students' experience in school. It means that "we've always done it this way" is not reason enough to keep doing it. It means coming to realize that a system, policy, or practice does not serve learners well—and working toward doing better.

Students who become expert learners

The MBLC schools have set big goals for creating welcoming and affirming schools, and reframing teaching and learning to be more clear, rigorous, and supportive. We want students to become expert learners and critical thinkers, as well as skillful and culturally competent readers, mathematicians, historians, scientists, artists, and more. 

Some of the shifts we’re planning, deepening, and systematizing:

• We're moving toward planning for more active learning, with plenty of time to practice and apply new skills—because research tells us this is how learning happens best. 

• We're building capacity with in-the-moment responsive feedback as students are working, like a sports coach would offer during a practice: Keep your eye on the basket and straighten your wrist, and your aim will improve—but for learning. 

• We're infusing lessons with chances to explore and analyze issues that connect directly to students' life experiences, with an eye toward building students' identities as change-makers. "We want to bring the outside into the school, and bring the inside out," says Sui-lan Ho'okano, Cultural Program Director leading the MBLC work at Enumclaw High School.

• We're creating systems of assessment that support rather than interrupt learning—we want to offer rich and meaningful opportunities for learners to show what they know and can do in varied contexts over time. 

• We are researching and trying out grading practices that are fair, clear, and accurate, and that motivate and honor demonstrated intellectual growth and capability, rather than competition and compliance.

As a community of schools, we are using research on learning and time-tested practices to improve our lessons, students' experience of school—and their conception of themselves as learners. I often talk about focusing less on the throw—the content we are covering, and more on the catch—students' learning. Rather than moving from topic to topic, we are focusing on how students understand, apply, reflect, build expertise, and show what they have learned. 

What makes learning "sticky"?

Zaretta Hammond offers many compelling ideas about what makes learning "sticky." Two of her big ideas on sticky learning: 

• New learning begins with making new connections to what we already know. Hammond tells us that a powerful advantage of culturally responsive teaching is using culturally familiar references that help students make connections between their own lived experience and the learning they are doing in school. 

• Actively applying new learning (rather than, say, passively and silently taking notes while listening to a lecture) builds new neural pathways.

When we start with clear and rigorous learning outcomes, when we unpack success criteria with students so they know what they are aiming for, when we use a culturally responsive-sustaining model so every student can see themselves and learn about others— we are changing the game for learners, and telling them and ourselves a new story about what is possible.

(clockwise from top left) Collaborative art piece by Vanguard students, Vanguard High School in the morning light, recently delivered Maker Space supplies