Over the past week I have been in New Orleans, attending the Aurora Institute annual symposium where I’ve had the opportunity to meet and hear from so many inspiring educators working active in roles as education innovators working to transform K-12 education.
The invitation to attend held the promise of meeting with other attendees from across the education innovation space who are pushing for learning to happen outside of traditional school walls, and to be more personalised, competency-based, and future-focused – it didn’t disappoint. Key themes and areas of focus that were explored through the various keynotes and workshops have been captured in the image at the head of this post – the image was being developed live by a local artist through the three days of the event.
I’ve attended this conference a number of times now – my first time as a keynote speaker in 2019. The opportunity it provides to rub shoulders with so many educators from innovative schools and organisations makes it so worthwhile. At last year’s event our book, Agency By Design: An Educator’s Playbook., was launched – and was one of only a handful of workshops focusing on learning agency. At this year’s event learner agency was the dominant theme across more than half of all of the workshops and keynotes – along with the ongoing focus on equity, competency-based learning and system transformation!
On day one of this year’s event I had the privilege of again working alongside my collaborators on the book, Annette Freeman, Marsha Jones and George Edwards (pictured left) to facilitate a 90-minute workshop in which we guided participants through a series of activities based on our book. The intent was to provide some practical activities to take back to their own contexts to work with staff to begin developing an agency-inspired culture in their classrooms and schools.
During the workshop we also included reference to the recent blog post we’d shared on the CompetencyWorks blog post titled “Agency By Design: A continuum of Choice“, illustrating how an agency-inspired classroom or school culture is always going to be a matter of working along a continuum of choice and activity to suit the particular need or context – more of a journey than a destination.
Those I Learned From
Among the many schools that were represented, I enjoyed hearing about the amazing work of the Lindsay Unified School District in California, where there has been a system-wide emphasis on developing a personalised, competency-based approach to learning across all schools for some years now. Transcend Education has been working alongside teachers in the district in this process, and it was inspiring to hear of the benefit of this relationship in helping the district achieve it’s goals. One of their workshops I attended was titled Igniting Agency in Learning – the information and resources on this site are worth exploring.
Transcend and Lindsay Unified School District also presented a workshop on the Power of Connection – in which they explained the use of learner feedback in a structured process where learners work in a groups of three for reflecting on and critiquing their learning. This strategy is a part of their District-wide effort to move away from standards-based assessment to a performance-based model.
A common reference in many presentations was made to the value of developing a portrait of a graduate (graduate profile) as the reference point for all learning design and assessment. Many projects illustrated how this has helped accelerate their efforts towards achieving a more learner-centred approach – including my good friend George Philhower who is superintendent of the Eastern Hancock Schools district in Indiana. I also caught up with Nathan Auck and the team from Utah State Board of Education who I worked with earlier this year. Their Portrait of a Graduate has been established for schools across the State of Utah to reference and appears to be being adopted widely there.
Of course, there were many more people I met with and learned from – these are just a few. I’ll be reflecting more as I return home and perhaps posting more once I’ve done that. It would be remiss of me not to mention, of course, the incredible work of the Aurora Institute under the leadership of CEO Virgel Hammonds who is building on the solid foundation of his predecessors. I had the opportunity to catch up with Virgel and his COO, Dr Loretta Goodwin for a number of conversations – pictured here with my book co-author Dr Marsha Jones.
Leadership Journeys
For me the Leadership Journeys event held on the Monday evening of the Symposium was a privilege to attend. Leadership Journeys is brainchild of Big Picture Learning, which they describe as… “a multi-media, DJ-fueled celebration; replacing turntables with slide decks, but without the sacrifice of soul.”
That pretty much sums it up – the hall was pumping with energy, with music, dancing and some powerfully personal stories from the three leaders being honoured there.
Through the evening Bettina Love, Rhonda Broussard and Virgel Hammonds responded to questions from Carlos Moreno and used their personal stories illustrate why it is so important for us to release the potential of every learner, regardless of their culture, social status or learning ability. Each explained with passion and insight how their personal experience has motivated and shaped what they do as leaders in the system.
A truly inspiring and highly motivating part of the conference – I’d encourage anyone to attend one of these events if you can!
The Keynote Speakers
The opening plenary featured a panel of students, facilitated by Carlos Moreno, Co-Executive Director, Big Picture Learning. The involvement of students like this has been a feature of recent Aurora conferences, and this one certainly set the scene for what was to follow over the next few days. Panelists were Sofia Ervin-Agudelo, a recent graduate of San Diego Met High School and now a student at Santa Clara University; Kam Lui-Carter, a student at Santa Monica Alternative Schoolhouse (SMASH) and Jalynn Santiago, a student at the Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School. The title of their discussion was “Nothing About Us Without Us: A Conversation With Young People on Learner-Centred Education”, and traversed a number of themes from the importance of recognising indigenous values and world-views in learning, addressing areas of inequity, recognising and valuing the assets each learner brings to their learning and designing educational experiences that happen “with” learners, and not “to” them.
The plenary to start day two was another panel of young people, facilitated by Rhonda Broussard, author, social entrepreneur, and futurist, and founder & CEO of Beloved Community. This discussion with student leaders that unpacked how young people view the investments we make in our education systems, with the title “One Good Question with Youth Leaders: Exploring Student Perspectives on How We Invest in our Future” based on the title of Rhonda’s latest book. The panel consisted of David Ramirez from the New Orleans Charter Science and Mathematics High School, Samarah Bentley from Louisiana State University and Edwin Coleman from Ben Franklin High School. This was another great panel discussion which you can access below.
The third Keynote plenary titled “From Tools to Teammates: What is Your Human Advantage in an AI World?” was presented by Dr. Sabba Quidwai, CEO, Designing Schools . Dr Sabba began as a high school teacher and evolved to Director of Innovative Learning at the University of Southern California, and later being recruited as an Education Executive at Apple. There was a great quote from her talk towards the end that resonated strongly with me; “Change is inevitable, but progress is a choice!” Dr Sabba made this assertion after having developed the link between technological development and our agency as individuals – and as a collective. There were so many great points made in this presentation I’d recommend you view it here:
The final keynote plenary to conclude the event was titled; “Awakening the Genius in Your Students Through Learning Autonomy,” presented by Erika Twani, CEO, Learning One to One. Erika is a best-selling author, TEDx speaker, social entrepreneur, and Fortune 100 corporate veteran driven by a deep passion for personalised education. Erika challenged us all with the question; “what if educators could re-awaken the genius in children that is so often squashed by our traditional, one-size-fits-all education system?” I found Erika’s 6-stage framework for thinking about how we might address this question very helpful.
This post really only scratches the surface of the depth and breadth of the people I met and heard from, and the learning I experienced at the Aurora Symposium this year – but captures at least some of the ‘flavour’ of what went on there that may be of interest to readers of this blog.
If you’re keen to explore of how to implement a culture of agency in your school our book, Agency By Design: An Educator’s Playbook is available to download for free from the Aurora website.
This book provides a framework to guide you in taking practical steps towards introducing agency-inspired approaches in your classroom and school.
If you’d like to engage with me to learn more about how you might use this resource please email me at derek@futuremakers.nz
