Six Practices
Practices and Specific Actions of Teachers, Students, and Coaches In and Around Transformational Classrooms
Our studies of classrooms where students are growing on broader leadership outcomes (proficiencies, agency, dispositions, and awareness) reveal common practices among those teachers, students and coaches. With your help, we are mapping how those practices are reflected in specific actions for each of those roles.
View the Practices in Action
Explore the videos below to observe how the Practices materialize in classrooms around the globe.
Connect
In Wisdom Amouzou’s classroom (Colorado, United States), students view the classroom as a community that supports each other to heal and have agency.
Envision
In Pooja Chopra’s classroom (Delhi, India), developing a classroom vision is a two-way, iterative process (see 0:00-3:15); Students identify challenges in their communities and identify solutions to address them and build agency.
Hold Space
Taylor Delhagen (New York, United States) facilitates debate to develop students’ critical thinking. Taylor provides concrete strategies for students to process information and develop their own viewpoint.
Explore more resources on Holding Space.
Facilitate
Maggie MacDonnell (Saluit, Canada) creates projects, opportunities, and employment for students to contribute to a community, feel agency, and develop skills for the local workforce.
Build Expertise
Kaija Keski-Nummi (Tennant Creek, Australia) discusses what she needed to unlearn in order to be able to be an effective teacher and why.
Grow
Óliver Jabato Rodríguez’s classroom (Madrid, Spain) asks students for feedback to better understand his areas of growth and foster a deeper sense of purpose in his work in the classroom.
Exploring Applicability Beyond the Classroom
Do these practices capture the distinguishing qualities of anyone in any role seeking systemic change for education equity?
This reflection tool has grown from engagements with teachers, students, and coaches in and around classrooms. We have confidence in the power of these practices to help us reimagine teacher development and support in ways that accelerate student growth on broad student leadership outcomes.
And, there’s another way to view these findings.
The teachers who are helping students grow as leaders often describe tensions they feel as they work to challenge and change classrooms, schools, and systems that they themselves are part and products of. They sometimes tells us how a considerable amount of their mental energy goes to navigating structures, expectations, and incentives that they believe are not aligned to developing their students as leaders.
We are exploring an emerging hypothesis that the patterns (the practices, perspectives, and principles) in this Collective Leadership and Learning model do not only apply in the classroom but also describe the efforts of any person and any role working for systemic change for education equity.
Are school leaders who are working to reimagining schools while leading one also connecting, envisioning, holding space, facilitating, building expertise, and growing?
Do those practices also describe the differentiators of policymakers who are determined to foster innovative ways of thinking about student learning?
Do those practices also describe the common characteristics of social entrepreneurs who are creating and leading initiatives to challenge and change systems and structures that are inhibiting students’ growth as leaders?
Can this Collective Leadership and Learning reflection tool from the classroom be useful for anyone who is working to change a system from within it, in pursuit of education equity?
To explore this possibility, we are convening diverse groups of practitioners, program designers, experts, students, and others to look at case studies of “transformational” schools leaders, policy makers, social entrepreneurs, community leaders, and others. We will be “crowdsourcing” the exploration of that hypothesis. If you would like to join those explorations, or hear what we are learning, please let us know.