In interviews with over 240 teachers we found they’re are grappling with the social-emotional health of their students but are also finding success engaging with their students in-person to help them build these skills.
Teachers Grapple with Social-Emotional Health of Students as Pandemic Wears On
Leanlab surveyed over 240 teachers in their report titled Tell Us How You Really Feel: A Survey of Teacher Sentiment in order to better understand the main challenges and successes teachers are facing almost two years into the pandemic.
The First Draft of Educational Transformation
NAME
John Walter
ROLE
Chief Development Officer
BIO
John comes to LEANLAB Education with experience as a classroom teacher and nonprofit leader. His professional interests include educational technology, media literacy, and project based learning.
John has most recently served as the Associate Director of Collegian Media Group at Kansas State University, a 501(C)3 nonprofit organization that publishes the K-State Collegian newspaper, Royal Purple yearbook, and Manhappenin’ magazine. Prior to that, John spent five years as a high school journalism teacher and student media adviser at a national model career academy campus.
John and his students have been recognized for their award winning work at the state and national levels. John holds a B.S. in Secondary Education from Kansas State University and a M.S. in Instructional Technology from Fort Hays State University.
WHY I GRAVITATE TOWARDS THIS WORK…
I gravitate towards this work because of how important it is to elevate the voices of students and teachers in decision making processes in education.
For me, it all started during my years as a high school student and my participation on the student newspaper and debate team. Almost all of my classes were taught in a traditional model where the teachers provided direct instruction and students were expected to take in the content. My journalism and debate classes on the other hand were the only places where I felt encouraged to pursue my own interests and use my voice to create and explore. Those classes were built on project based learning experiences that had real audiences and allowed me to flex my critical thinking skills in ways that none of my other classes provided.
When I chose to begin a career in education, I did so to provide a space for students to tell their own stories, create projects for real audiences, and lead their own classroom. Most of my high school journalism students had never been in class like mine, where I was an adviser, rather than a teacher, and students got to share the responsibility of decision making in the class. As my career progressed, I moved on to work at the university level helping college students gain real world experience using their voices to produce student media that informed the greater campus community on important issues and preserve the first draft of campus history during unprecedented times.
I’ve always been interested in how new technologies can help transform education so I jumped at the opportunity to join Leanlab Education. I understand how critical it is to incorporate the voice and insights of students and teachers into the development of new educational technology products. Working with Leanlab allows me to expand the impact that I have on education in ways that I believe can truly transform education for the better. It’s an opportunity to explore bold new ideas and reimagine a better future for students and teachers..
FUN FACT
I’m a huge fan of live music and spicy food!
Research Partnerships between Companies and Schools
Grief, Pressure & Connection: A Primer on Education in a Post-Pandemic World
While private schools saw limited interruptions, some stable, public school districts have used the catalyst of the Covid-19 pandemic to progress personalized learning initiatives and implement more experimental curricula. However, increasingly more public schools are struggling with bare necessities—extreme shortages of bus drivers, food service delivery, and substitute teachers. These operational obstacles are now bleeding over to disrupt instruction.
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LEANLAB Awards $92,500 in Grants to KC Schools
Kansas City, MO – LEANLAB Education awarded $92,500 in grants to seven area schools, as part of its inaugural Pilot Research Program, a program which connects K-12 schools with emerging technology startups to conduct research on education technology.
“This program represents a turning point for LEANLAB,” said Katie Boody Adorno, LEANLAB Education founder and CEO. “The expertise of educators is in high demand among education startups that are looking to develop their products. We’ve developed a methodical approach to make sure teachers get paid for expertise and entrepreneurs get the research and data they need to create impactful products.”
During the first year of this new program, LEANLAB has accepted seven schools into its inaugural cohort. Currently, these schools are tackling the following critical issues in K-12 schools.
Citizens of the World Charter School and Guadalupe Centers Elementary partnered with Boddle Learning to find a way to make math assessments more engaging. They implemented Boddle’s 3D math app that teaches math concepts through a fun game?
Lee A. Tolbert Community Academy was seeking to improve academic achievement and partnered with LeverED Learning to implement a math curriculum that allows students to progress at their own pace.
George Melcher and Longfellow, two elementary schools in the Kansas City Public School district, wanted to increase social emotional learning among their students, and they partnered with ClassCraft to implement a platform that gamifies and reinforces positive behaviors.
Three schools in the Clinton County School District (Ellis Elementary, Clinton Middle, and Plattsburg High) along with Gordon Parks Elementary also wanted to increase social emotional learning, so they chose to work with Sown to Grow, a platform that empowers students to set their own goals and reflect on their growth.
These research projects are underway at all seven schools and they’re already seeing the initial results. “I was interested in being a part of the LEANLAB Pilot Research Program because I am always eager to find new innovative ways to meet my students' needs in the classroom,” said Justine Volkman, Kindergarten Teacher at Gordon Parks Elementary. “LEANLAB seeks to understand the pain point that a school is facing and works to find creative solutions for each unique problem. I have already seen powerful student responses to the technology that we have integrated into our classroom and I am hoping to continue to collect more data on my students socio-emotional development as a result of our research.”
Through this program, LEANLAB is aiming to give schools a better way to find and evaluate education technology.
“Educators were stretched for capacity before the pandemic and now we’re asking even more of them. When it’s done right, edtech platforms work with educators to take some weight off their shoulders.” said Stephanie Campbell, Vice President of Communications & Operations. “We want to help schools find, trial, and adopt the best technologies and give them a voice in the development of those products.”
LEANLAB’s research team guides schools through an innovation process that starts with a deep-dive to uncover the root causes behind the school’s biggest challenges. LEANLAB then presents the school with a list of aligned solutions working to solve the problem. After the school chooses a solution, they partner with that company to design and implement a research study.
Though this is the first year of the program, LEANLAB is already busy recruiting schools and companies for the next school year.
“We’re excited to launch such a unique program here in Kansas City,” said Katie Boody Adorno. “We’ve coordinated an unparalleled network of innovative schools across the Kansas City region and plan to expand that network in the coming years across Missouri, creating a hub for education technology and innovation like no other in the country.”
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A Year To Recommit to Racial Equity
After George Floyd’s murder, we took a step back as an organization.
Our first move was to bear witness. There was so much frustration. People were tired. They kept seeing the same things happen and no real change occurred.
The broken record kept on spinning.
We started to see more unity among different community organizations. Latinx Education Collaborative and Brothers Liberating Our Communities created a space for men of color to process what was happening and make plans for how to move forward together.
Jorge Holguin
These were new, and necessary, touchpoints with the community. A space to have real talk about what’s going on. Folks from all over came together. It was something to see and be a part of.
But most of all, people were channeling their frustrations in healthy ways and educating themselves.
As an organization, I’m proud that LEANLAB stepped up the plate. We leaned into the idea that everyone has power. We deepened our practice of echoing the voices of different individuals to ensure real issues were brought to the various tables and addressed.
This work is personal for me. I grew up here—in the Northeast. A place with lots of stigma unfortunately attached to it, but lots of bright spots too.
I think about my daughter. I want her to have positive learning experiences. I want her to feel welcomed in the community. I do not want her to feel like she needs to move to have opportunities to grow.
That puts me shoulder-to-shoulder with the families we serve through LEANLAB.
I’m hopeful that we’ll use this moment of resistance to injustice to start reframing weaknesses as strengths, especially the powerful stories of resilience in our communities. But I also worry that we’ll romanticize those stories and reach for tokenistic representation.
I think about my daughter. I want her to have positive learning experiences. I want her to feel welcomed in the community. I do not want her to feel like she needs to move to have opportunities to grow.
I know we can do better than that. I’ve seen the best of us during this summer’s racial reckoning. And I’ll keep pushing along with my colleagues and community members to make it happen.
In Solidarity,
Jorge Holguin
Manager of Community Organizing
2021: An Imperative to Innovate
In education, we’ve been standing at a crossroads for the last 10 months. The decisions we make now will dramatically shift the education sector--perhaps permanently. I know you know this. Like me, you’ve been ruminating on this intuition. For those of us working day-to-day in this sector, the weight of these decisions is real. Palpable. The tenuous footing we stood on a year ago has become even more unsteady; our entire sector is undeniably in flux. Is this what disruption feels like?
I’ve felt this with my five-year-old nephew and my sister-in-law. He’s a kindergartner at a Kansas City charter school and she’s a working mom. He accesses the only public school he’s ever known through a screen, from a dining room chair with his Abuela’s steady support.
Our family dinner conversations have shifted. We talk about learning management systems instead of playground gossip. Everyone wants to know, “why is it so hard to get all these apps and platforms to play nice together? My sister-in-law talks excitedly about her ideas for product modifications to her son’s learning management system. She has no background in technology development, but still she envisions improvements. She longs for more streamlined integrations, more information about how to customize and advance her son’s love for math, and guidance on how to nurture the areas where he needs more support (reading).
My conversations with teachers have shifted. During one-off Saturday mornings or stolen lunch breaks, teachers tell me earnestly, that for some children, the virtual environment is working better! Working remotely, teachers have better systems to differentiate instruction and provide more personalized support. However, they also have students who are struggling; students who have fallen off the radar, are rarely logging on, or have challenging home learning environments.
”I find that I’m actually a more successful educator this year. I’m more focused, can give more targeted attention,” one teacher says, while also noting, “but if we do go back to business as usual, and the status quo... I’m not sure that I can.”
I make time to listen to teachers first-hand experiences, but I also observe their actions. Teacher unions are understandably advocating for delayed returns to school until they’re satisfied their environments are safe. They want fully-executed vaccination and testing plans, resources for proper social distancing and sanitization measures, revised distance learning plans, and enough substitutes on hand for support (CTU reopening demands).
The prolonged delays to returning full-force to the classroom may seem especially protracted, but I suspect they also speak to a deeper longing from our collective unconscious… a desire for a paradigm shift that would affect the entire industry, then ripple outward to all professions… a declaration that we’re not going back… not back to the way things were… we can’t.
Am I advocating for a shift to an edtech-driven universe, the demise of brick and mortar classrooms? No. Our research from the last year illuminates persistent inequities and early evidence suggests learning gaps have been exacerbated by this pandemic (PACE). There’s no question that children need safe, nurturing, developmentally appropriate places to socialize and learn, but now we need to grapple with what a more dynamic, customized and hybrid environment should look like for the long-term.
“We’re not going back… not back to the way things were… we can’t.”
And yet here we are--in a new calendar year, either staring down the barrel or standing on the precipice. Do we return to slow, incremental change--to structures and models that have historically done little to solve for the persistent inequities, painfully illuminated by this pandemic? Or do we acknowledge where we’ve been wrong, commit to making a change, and begin placing new bets?
What we’re musing
Can accountability be shifted away from classrooms, students and teachers, and onto systems, leaders and edtech tools?
We aren’t holding doctors and nurses single-handedly accountable for the reduction in spread of Covid-19. Instead, we are equipping them with vetted vaccines. After months of research, clinical trials and testing to ensure the vaccines were sound, we then understood under what conditions the vaccines were most effective (they have temperature requirements, expiration dates, etc). It was then that elected leaders were responsible for leading distribution.
So, I wonder, can we transfer this idea to the education sector?
What would a world look like if we had a structured system to vet and test education tools, ensuring they were based on foundational learning science and were easy to use across a variety of learning contexts (grandma’s dining room, the classroom, the community center)?
What if we had a clear, evidenced-based guide to understand what conditions these solutions achieve their intended outcomes?
Could we then provide system leaders with the information they need to buy best-fit solutions, while equipping educators with implementation roadmaps that tell them how to modify instruction toward optimal outcomes (i.e. “for best results…”)?
That’s what I want to test.
I envision a world where educators spend less time on arduous content creation. They are no longer beholden to unimaginative, unproven and clunky tools, or constrained by the heaviness of standardized tests. Instead, they are freed up to invest their time on building meaningful relationships with students and their families, developing more customized and targeted interventions and designing experiences that bring learning to life.
In this world, rather than relying on overly cumbersome and high-stakes assessments, teachers leverage assessments to inspire agile, data-driven student interventions. The accountability then, shifts. Imagine a world where we hold our state elected and appointed officials and school system leadership accountable to the expedient and equitable distribution of evidence-based, trialed solutions.
Can this be the year where we begin trying something different? We’ve loosened restrictions on standardized testing for the last year. Why not re-envision education all-together?
Conclusion
The days ahead will not be easy. I’m reminded of the Maya Angelou quote, “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.” We have arrived at this moment. We now know better.
Am I suggesting that edtech is a panacea, a one-shot vaccine? No. But I am suggesting that we are in a new age of rapidly-evolving technology. We owe it to our students and to future generations to begin developing new tools, new methods, new accountability practices and more dynamic learning environments to reach learners wherever they might be. Now, let’s do more, better.
A Year To Refocus on Community Wellbeing
When things got crazy in the early days of the pandemic, we started doing daily video calls with school leaders. While convening the education community has always been a core principle for us, we knew we needed to get in the trenches on a daily basis given the gravity of the situation that was unfolding.
The goal? To help them figure things out and plan. We pressed pause on our playbook and focused on core needs.
Over the last 8 months, we’ve listened directly to our region’s schools and families, and our nation’s education innovators. As always, we’ve held steadfast to the belief that those closest to education-- parents, students, teachers--are the experts.
True to our core values of human-centered design and boldness, we leaned in to understand their insights to provide direct support when our communities needed it most.
Even though it was a different direction for us, we prioritized basic needs and then we looked ahead at traditional school matters. While we’re not a direct service organization, we knew we had to pivot. We did it the LEANLAB way:
We used research and data.
We served as a convener for our community schools.
We looked to the greatest needs to drive our actions.
Those early calls helped us understand the dynamic needs coming up for schools. Those calls moved us toward the connectivity work for which we might not have otherwise seen the need.
We knew our community was counting on us to shift resources and reconfigure priorities so that’s what we did. It wasn’t perfect. It was messy. We didn’t get everything right.
But we listened. We responded. We took in the data and acted on it--arm-in-arm with our partners.
As a result, thousands of Kansas City kids got connected to the internet and were able to access educational services.
I’m someone whose entire career depends on the ability to connect and communicate. I know first-hand how crucial those skills are for our kids’ future success. I’m honored we could deliver on that promise this year.
Sincerely,
