Thomas Hatch

NOTE: This interview I did with Cynthia Robinson Rivers originally appeared in internationaledews.com

The first part of this 3-part post draws on an interview with Cynthia Robinson-Rivers, the founding principal of the Whole Child Model at Van Ness Elementary School in Washington D.C. Robinson-Rivers recently joined Transcend, where she works with schools in Texas, Tennessee and Washington D.C. who are adopting the Whole Child Model. The interview was conducted by Thomas Hatch and students from his School Change class at Teachers College, Columbia University in the fall of 2023. Part 1 focuses on the initial development of the Whole Child Model and some of the supports for teachers. This post builds on an a 2-part interview last year with Transcend’s Keptah St. Julien who talked about the key elements of the Whole Child Model (See part 1; part 2).

Establishing the key components of the Whole Child Model at Van Ness Elementary School

Thomas Hatch (TH): Can you tell us about the Whole Child Model and how it originated at Van Ness?

Cynthia Robinson-Rivers (CRR): As we were developing what would later become the Whole Child Model, we talked with teachers, students, parents, and community members and asked: “If we’re successful during our students’ elementary school years – pre-kindergarten through fifth grade – what will our students be like as adolescents and adults?” This generated a long list of words, including, most prominently, “compassionate,” but also words like “critical thinkers.” Those became our graduate aims, and they were for the students to be creative, compassionate, critical thinkers, curious, constant learners and students able to build community across lines of cultural and racial difference. These were the characteristics and dispositions we hoped to cultivate in students during their time with us. From those aims, we then worked together to develop the actions we would need to take in order to be able to develop those traits in our students.

In our second year, we partnered with Transcend and they helped us to codify the things we were doing as a school model that could be shared with others. That work led us to establish three key components:

• Student well-being,
• Student as a maker
• Student ownership for learning

Student well-being is the most developed, as it was the component we started with, and it’s the most foundational to the model.

The work on student well-being also has 3 parts:

1. CARE is the set of universal “tier 1” practices every student receives. It’s effective in supporting kids, helping them to be successful with their school day for 90 to 95 percent of students.
2. BOOST is the set of additional “tier 2” and “tier 3” supports that we give to that 5 to 10% of students who need additional support to be successful participating in the routines of school.
3. FAMILY CIRCLE is our approach to family engagement, and it includes practices that aim to place families as equal partners in education and leverage that support for the student’s development.

Zooming in on CARE, which stands for Compassion, Assertiveness, Routines, and Environment, something as straightforward as the language teachers use and the tone of voice they use when they speak with students is considered a tier 1 support for everyone that walks into the school building.

We start with the physical environment, with the classroom as the “third teacher” and as a hugely important part of the students’ experience. We want them to enter a room that is comfortable, personal, accessible, and a reflection of the students’ backgrounds and cultures.

“We think about the physical environment of the classroom as the third teacher and as a hugely important part of the students’ experience. We want them to enter a room that is comfortable, personal, accessible, and reflective of the students’ backgrounds and cultures.“

There are many ways in which our approach to the classroom environment helps to meet a child’s needs. Most importantly, we want the room to be accessible, meaning students know how to access materials independently and where to find needed items that are in organized bins and are clearly labeled. Ideally, we have lamps and natural light as an alternative to overhead fluorescent lights and access to nature through keeping plants in the room. We have framed pictures of students and their families to not only acknowledge the importance of families and make them visible in the classroom, but also to help calm students when they are upset. We aim for our classroom environments to be trauma-informed, welcoming, predictable and consistent.  When kids don’t know what’s coming, they’re much more likely to be dysregulated and to be quicker to get upset than when they know exactly what to expect, and the classroom can help to establish that kind of predictable and supportive environment. Another important part of the classroom is the centering space, a physical space in every room that kids know they can go to if they feel upset and has the visuals and the physical materials that can aid them in doing so.

In addition to the physical environment, we have the Strong Start morning routine, inspired by a socio-emotional learning program that Van Ness utilized in its beginning years, which includes support from students beginning with a greeting at the door when they start the instructional day. The aim is to enable kids to be successful, especially if they have come to school with challenges that day or the evening before.

Strong Start includes: 

• Greetings: Students get a personal, warm greeting, with a choice of how to be greeted and a meaningful exchange back and forth – serve and return (as in tennis) – that will help kids who may not have healthy attachment to get experience connecting with a trusted adult. 
• Breakfast in the classroom: As an alternative to a noisy and impersonal cafeteria, students eat together in the more quiet and calm environment of their classroom.
• Independent activities: Students journal, conference with their teacher, or engage in partner or small group activities that can include academic interventions.
• Community Building: Teachers bring the class together as a group to foster a sense of shared community and belonging. 
• Purposeful Partnering: Teachers pair students up with at least one other child to engage in activities that create student to student connections.
• Breathe and Focus: Teachers give the students an explicit opportunity to practice ways of gaining composure if they’re upset. 
• Goal setting:  Teachers ask students to set an intention for the day. We know that when we set a goal and we tell someone about it, we’re much more likely to meet that goal.
• Reflect and Share: Students are able to process current events or recent classroom conflicts through a group conversation the teacher facilitates.

We also engage in a broader set of CARE practices – that include strong start, classroom design, intentional language, and other components –  and many people visit schools that we work with and think, “Oh, this is great!” and comment on how “warm and fuzzy” the practices seem.  So we often explain that, while the environments we create are warm and that’s important, the practices are rooted in brain science and each have a purpose.  We try to share as much as we can about what happens inside students’ bodies and brains when their development has been impacted by trauma and the importance of schools being trauma-informed.

The Whole Child Model is inspired by Dr. Bruce Perry’s neuro-sequential model. It helped us to understand that if kids come to school fearing for their physical safety, which is the case in some of our highest need schools, they first need to regulate.  That’s where practices like Breathe and Focus come in. If students are not regulated, they’re not ready to learn. We also know that if they are upset, they might be controlled by their limbic system. Their amygdala might be over reactive and they may be scanning for threats. In that state, they are also not ready to learn. Where we want them to be is in their prefrontal cortex, regulated and ready to reason and think abstractly and critically.

A typical day with the Whole Child Model

TH: The extensiveness and comprehensiveness of the support is really noteworthy and as you emphasized, it’s not just a set of features or elements but they are grounded in a particular approach and theory about children’s development and children’s behavior. Could you give us a sense of how all of this plays out in a typical day?

CRR: Students arrive, receive a greeting, and have breakfast in the classroom. As students are arriving, those already in the classroom engage in independent activities, including journaling and reading, until the teacher gathers students together for strong start group activities. While many social-emotional learning programs call for a daily or weekly block of activities, we believe that students should experience positive and supportive interactions throughout each day and should have frequent opportunities to practice their skills in authentic ways.  So, you would see this come to life in language a teacher uses when working with students, to either help them be successful because of the clarity or concision of language or help them think critically because of open-ended questioning. You would see students learning independently in all parts of the room – the maker space, the art center, the small group reading table, and other areas – in ways that promote autonomy and choice to empower students.  Social stories – visual stories that help students know what to expect – might be used to support students moving to a new activity or individually to help students who have difficulty with transitions. These are just a few examples of how a whole-child, student-centered approach would live throughout the day and not be confined to a narrow block of time.

“You would see students learning independently in all parts of the room – the maker space, the art center, the small group reading table, and other areas – in ways that promote autonomy and choice to empower students.”

Key Supports for the Model: Staffing for Socio-Emotional Development

TH: Can you talk a bit about what it takes to support the model? For example, do you need a lot of support staff to be able to make it happen? Do the teachers have any coaching?

CRR: Yes, the socio-emotional, behavioral, and mental health staff require in-depth training, but within these roles the staffing and capacity vary widely at our schools. In DC, many schools have “behavior techs” who respond if there is a child in immediate need. The behavior techs are also the people who run structured recess and restorative in school suspension.

In other regions using the Whole Child Model, staffing approaches are very different and, in some cases, have less support and capacity. Some schools have only an itinerant social worker, no behavior techs, and no positions like dean of students to coordinate behavior responses. We work with schools to determine who can own some of those systemwide approaches in lieu of the behavior techs. Typically, we are able to work with schools to figure out who on the staff would be most appropriate to take the lead and make sure interventions are running.

Before implementing intensive behavior interventions, it’s important to focus on CARE Plus, the set of interventions that happen in the classroom before a student is referred to outside supports. If the teacher has a student who could benefit from additional support, there are many CARE Plus strategies that can be used. For example, a child might get an individualized daily schedule in addition to the classroom posted schedule, because they need to know exactly when transitions take place and need to see that in a personalized way. Students may have specialized seating or they may get the additional responsibility to be the line leader because being in line is a part of the day that the student may have a hard time with. Students may get to have a movement break or use their break card to go get a break. These are all interventions within the classroom but teachers need the support of an administrator to help think through which strategies would help the child before more intensive interventions are considered.

Book Studies and Professional Learning for Teachers

TH: What about professional development for teachers? Can you talk about your book studies and how other professional development activities are integrated into the school day? 

CRR:  Yes, when I was at Van Ness, we would read one book for a school year, and we usually read a chapter or two per month and one book every summer. The summer reading was on your own, and we would debrief it during the first week of professional learning at the beginning of the school year. The year-long book study would be the focus of every monthly staff meeting, where we would talk about what we learned in that chapter and how we would apply it. Then that would line up with how we would do observation and feedback as a leadership team, giving feedback on those specific practices that teachers were learning about and implementing. We were able to use those forums because we had other opportunities for other types of professional learning.  DCPS implements LEAP, a structure that allows for weekly 60 to 90-minute content area meetings when early childhood, ELA, math, or enrichment teachers gather in a PLC to improve their practice.

“We found that when you define the times and places where you will prioritize different focus areas, it helps ensure you don’t forget about the non-cognitive aspects of a child’s development.“

In addition to monthly staff meetings and weekly LEAP sessions, there are quarterly PD days where we usually have a year-long focus area. One year was focused on racial equity and ways to mitigate against implicit bias. Another year our PD days focused around maker-centered learning, and we brought experts from Project Zero at Harvard to come do training with us. Defining the times and places for different kinds of professional learning helped us to decrease the tension that teachers often have, where they feel like they have so much to do on reading and math and raising test scores that they don’t think they have time for social-emotional learning or well-being. We found that when you define the times and places where you will prioritize different focus areas, it helps ensure you don’t forget about the non-cognitive aspects of a child’s development.

NOTE: This interview I did with Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja originally appeared in internationaledews.com

Over the next two weeks IEN looks at the first 10 years of the evolution of the Central Square Foundation (CSF) and its efforts to build the capacity for improving learning outcomes in India. The posts draw from an interview with CSF’s Co-Managing Director Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja. Part one explores the first five years of the Foundation’s initiatives (2012-2017) and how they developed their strategy for the next five years focusing on foundational learning, educational technology, and affordable private schools. Part two concentrates on the “four pillars” of their approach to foundational learning and the lessons they have learned in trying to improve learning at scale in India. For more on the 10th Anniversary of CSF’s founding see #10YearsOfCSF: Leaders at CSF on Their Vision for the Next Decade.

Central Square Foundation’s first five years: Developing a “wide-portfolio”

Thomas Hatch: Can you tell me about the background and evolution of the Central Square Foundation (CSF)?

Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja: We started in February 2012. The founder of CSF, Ashish Dhawan, has one of the largest private equity funds in India. He always had a deep desire to move to the development sector, and he started by serving on boards of other NGOs to try to gain an understanding of education. I joined CSF in July 2012, and for the first five years, we were only funded by our founder which allowed us to be very entrepreneurial in how we looked at education. The only “guardrails” he put up were that we would be a non-profit; we will look only at school education (K-12); and we would support young social entrepreneurs. As a result, venture philanthropy shaped a lot of the work that we did in the first phase of our journey.

Without external funders, we had the flexibility to look at a diverse set of issues from education technology to early childhood education to data and assessments. During this time, grant making was one big part of our work. Second, we supported research, particularly research from the perspective of how it can inform policy. Since we are neither a university, or an evaluation agency, our research was always oriented more for policymakers and for other education leaders and on how our research can help the ecosystem develop a collective voice. Third, we focused on government engagement. Even while we were doing grant making and looking for innovative solutions, we knew that for any solution to scale and be sustainable it needed government adoption. Early on, we weren’t even sure what government engagement meant, but we began by trying to come up with innovative solutions, having smart researchers lend their voice to it, and then handing it over to the government to run with it. But, as in much of the developing South, government demands typically include asking you to work in partnership with them, so we ended up setting up a number of project management units both at the central and the state level.

TH: What’s the advantage of an organization like yours taking some of that work on in a partnership with the government?

SS: The reality is that most people in the government understand the issues and challenges that the system is facing; they’re not blind to it. but the education production function is so complex that it’s difficult to pick out one part of the problem and solve it. The government is in the business of setting up the policy, and they are doing the regulation, and they are also the service provider of education. Working with an external partner enables them to hire people with a different profile – with different backgrounds and more specific expertise about a particular issue. The external partner becomes an extension of the government but they’re also able to bring a different profile of talent and to be razor sharp on the issue that they’re working on.

“Working with an external partner enables [the government] to hire people with a different profile – with different backgrounds and more specific expertise about a particular issue. The external partner becomes an extension of the government, but they’re also able to bring a different profile of talent and to be razor sharp on the issue that they’re working on.“

For example, working on a partnership focused on school leadership was my first project at CSF. At that time, school leadership as a term was not even being used in India. But, in 2012- 13, we were able to bring a group of people together, including myself, from the US and India, with expertise in organizational leadership to create the India School Leadership Institute (ISLI) which worked with principals of “low-fee” private schools. (For an overview of the evolution of ISLI see IEN’s conversation with ISLI Founding Director, Sameer Sampat.) But then the government was able to set up a National Center for School Leadership that built on a lot of our learnings in ISLI even though “low-fee” schools aren’t even part of the government sector.

The development of India’s national online platform for teachers provides another good example. As you know, the growth of technology in India has always had the advantage of better device penetration, cheaper internet, cheaper hardware but the software solutions have been the problem. In this case, states started building their own portals for teacher education but their first version was basically just a PDF of their teacher manual that they put on their websites. So there was a huge opportunity for a platform to be built, not just a portal, but a platform on a national level that states could connect to. 

The national teacher platform called DIKSHA relied on core technology that came from the EkStep Foundation. Their own legacy is from AADHAR which is a platform enabling the Government of India to directly reach residents of the country in delivery of various subsidies, benefits, and services by using the resident’s unique 12-digit Aadhaar number only. They already had sophisticated technology at a level that no state government would have been able to develop itself. CSF then took on the project management responsibilities to integrate and adapt the technology for the state governments so that it aligned with their needs and had the look and feel of their website portals. It was a logical opportunity for CSF to start working with the government, but it was dependent on identifying a strong need where the government wanted support and where CSF had the ability to provide that support.  It’s one of my favorite examples of a government partnership, because it involved a foundation like EkStep that brought in the technical capability; we brought in the project management capability, and we also had a much deeper understanding of teacher education, having worked on that for about four years. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the most successful examples of a public good being created in partnership with CSO’s and NGO’s and different parts of the government. By 2020, the Prime Minister described DIKSHA As “one nation one platform” for the entire spectrum of education, now serving students and families as well as educators.

Shifting to phase 2: Focusing on “impact”

TH: The examples you talked about illustrate how you were operating during those first five years? 

SS: Yes, and this was the time at the end of what we call the first phase of our work that our Board put the question in front of us of “What will CSF’s work look like?” During that phase, we were an operating organization which doesn’t actually work on the ground with students and teachers and school leaders. We incubated ISLI.  

We helped to bring the leader in from the US (Sameer Sampat who went on to co-found, with Azad Oommen the first Executive Director of CSF, Global School Leaders on the ISLI model), but I was the donor on the team. I wasn’t running the organization. We were also working with states who had different interest areas. In Delhi at one point, we were working on the school-to-work transition and department restructuring. Two very distinct areas of work that are not directly related to student learning outcomes. It’s a long value chain for department restructuring: it depends on department re-structuring leading to better pedagogy and better curriculum that reach classrooms in schools and teacher education programs that then leaders to better teaching and learning.  Our board left it up to us to decide: would it be better for CSF to continue with the “wide portfolio” approach and continue to engage with state and central government, when an opportunity and interest appeared? Or should we take stock and pick a part of learning outcomes where we could have a more direct impact? And we felt that the breadth of our work allowed us a space where we could narrow down our focus and make a more meaningful impact. We essentially said:  Let’s pick out an area. Let’s be more outcome and measurement and evaluation driven in our work overall and also in how we work with our partner.” We always say for education reform to stick we need to zoom in to a district and go deep. Similarly, we decided to pick an issue within education and go deep. 

“Would it be better for CSF to continue with the “wide portfolio” approach and continue to engage with state and central government, when an opportunity and interest appeared? Or should we take stock and pick a part of learning outcomes where we could have a more direct impact?“

This was around 2017 and about the time that the Gates Foundation began looking at doing work in education in India.  Our first validation came when they chose CSF as an “in-country” partner. We were still a relative rookie in the education space when they saw potential in us. 

As we moved into this second part of the CSF journey, we shifted from the portfolio approach to three focus areas: 

• Foundational learning
• Technology in education
• Private school sector

Landing on the need for foundation learning was very evident for us. There is a rural household survey called ASER which has been going on in India for 20 years, and it shows that the problems with basic skills are quite deep.

The second area, building on some of our earlier work, was education technology. The widespread availability and use of mobile devices and data put India in a unique position relative to many other countries. There was also a lot of for-profit entrepreneurial activity happening in India, so we saw an opportunity for solutions to be created and designed locally. We also had a unique advantage because CSF had already been playing an evangelizing role for how tech can be leveraged for education within the government system. 

The third issue area is private schooling.  We are very unique as a country where over 40% of children do not take advantage of the free education provided by the public education system. Education in India, like it is worldwide, is aspirational. The moment a family can afford to pull their child out of the free government school, they would rather send their child to a private school with fees beginning at roughly $10 a month. For the most part, the government has looked at the private school system mostly from the perspective of regulation, and there hasn’t been a strong focus on quality. But in the first phase of our work, because a lot of us, including our founder Ashish, came from the management and the corporate side of the world, many people assumed “Oh you guys must be pro-private schools,” and it took us a while to clarify that whether it’s a government school or low fee private school the school is accountable to deliver quality education. 

Our approach to these three areas has been similar to what I described for our first phase: 

• Working with the government and creating a reform agenda with a collective voice of other education leaders
• Evidence building and supply shaping comes from the work we do with our partners, with other NGOs in the ecosystem with a sharp focus on the public good – making sure that whatever we are creating is available to others in the education ecosystem – and an emphasis on research
• Deepening our government engagement efforts by shifting from working across multiple issues in multiple geographies to focusing our work in certain states on the issue of foundational literacy and numeracy

Getting to scalable and sustainable solutions in these areas became an extension of our approach in phase two. Across focus areas like education technology, we are trying to be more sharply focused on early learning, including at home, and in our work in private schools, we are trying to raise the bar for quality at the primary level. From a measurement perspective, we are targeting the learning poverty index the World Bank has highlighted (measuring the percentage of children who can read and understand a simple text by age 10), asking “how can we contribute to bringing down learning poverty in India?” with an ambitious target of bringing it down from 55% to 15% over the next five or six years. We’ve found this is both a directional goal– requiring us to articulate how our work contributes to it – and an aspirational and inspiring goal that connects our work with others. 

TH: Given how hard it is to achieve these goals, have you also established some benchmarks to see if you’re headed in the right direction?

SS: Unfortunately, because of COVID, the plan to get a baseline is still on paper. The whole principle of system reform is that you’re doing it – not just with the approval of the government – but in partnership with the government. However, with the situation worldwide with COVID, that’s been impossible. We actually adapted a tool that USAID uses, the Early Grades Reading Assessment and the Early Grades Math Assessment. We’ve partnered with an assessment agency, and we’ve piloted it in English and in Gujarati so the tool is ready, but quite honestly haven’t even asked the government for permission yet because it’s just unfair. We’re also acutely conscious that whenever we get an opportunity to do the baseline, it will actually be lower than it would have been before COVID first hit. But, in a way, it will also capture a more picture from ground right now. 

As schools in the US and other parts of the world make difficult decisions about how to reopen this fall, I look at some of the concrete steps that, over time, could make schools healthier places and transform the basic parameters of schooling. This post expands on comments I made at the Education Disrupted/Education Reimagined convening sponsored by WISE and the Salzburg Global Seminar in April  and summarized in a volume sharing the conference proceedings.

Have the wide-spread school closures changed schools forever? The history of school reform efforts shows that schools are much more likely to change slowly and incrementally than they are to suddenly transform, even in the face of a deadly virus. Yet we can take advantage of what we know about how students learn and how schools change to address a critical problem with the design of conventional schools:  Schools are a better medium for spreading disease than they are for supporting meaningful learning.

Learning depends on healthy, safe conditions for students, educators, and all those who work in schools; but schools cram too many people into too little space, and the typical lay-out of age-graded classrooms along labyrinthian hallways limits collaboration, exploration, and engagement with the world. We’ve made things worse in the US by leaving buildings in disrepair, and failing to provide adequate ventilation, air conditioning or heating, particularly in low-income communities. Add on a draconian schedule with little time for exercise, lunch, or other healthy activities; and then ramp up stress levels with high stakes tests where students have to sit in rows in silence for hours facing a ticking clock.

But things can change. We can make schools safer for students and staff as schools reopen, and we can create a foundation for much healthier and more powerful educational opportunities in the future.  

We can make schools safer for students and staff as schools reopen, and we can create a foundation for much healthier and more powerful educational opportunities in the future.  

Focus on learning that matters

The school closures and the inequities of access to online learning immediately launched a spate of proposals for dealing with “learning loss.” Many of these proposals rely on intensifying work on academic subjects, yet these proposals ignore the mile-wide and inch deep curriculum and age-graded pacing that make it almost impossible for those left behind to catch-up. Addressing academic learning loss begins by concentrating on a small set of key skills and concepts and providing educators with the tools to ensure that every student actually meets those learning goals.

Although academic needs have to be met, the challenges that students face as they return to school go far beyond academic achievement and a “less is more” approach to academics creates the efficiencies that provide time and space for supporting other critical aspects of children’s development. Back in school, learning will be enhanced by creating educational opportunities for students to reflect on their experiences during the outbreak; to develop coping strategies; to rebuild positive relationships with their peers and teachers; and to get engaged in meaningful and constructive work in areas they care about. When that happens, educators can shift their focus from covering the entire curriculum to addressing the critical needs of every child.

Addressing academic learning loss begins by concentrating on a small set of key skills and concepts and providing educators with the tools to ensure that every student actually meets those learning goals.

Break down the barriers between learning “inside” and “outside” schools

As we remake schools to help stop the spread of the virus, we can stagger schedules to fit students’ sleep patterns and development as they get older. We can make sure that students have regular chances to take the breaks and get the exercise that we know benefits learning and productivity. As we limit the number of people using school facilities at any given time, we can rotate students in and out of schools and expand support for students’ learning far beyond school walls. In addition to online learning, we can take advantage of possibilities for education outside on playgrounds, in the natural world, and in the neighborhood in gyms, museums, libraries, community organizations, and businesses. In the process, we can shift the focus from getting children into schools to enabling them to explore the world.

Expand the power of the education workforce

         To increase the reach and power of teachers who have been limited largely to working with students in classrooms, we can engage a host of people who have the time and the capacity to play a positive role in learning inside and outside schools. Organizations like City Year and Citizen Schools already demonstrate how to mobilize volunteers young and old who can provide targeted academic support as tutors, act as mentors, or guide students’ in projects, apprenticeships, and community service. Numerous proposals could help meet the demand, whether it’s through the kind of education “Marshall Plan” discussed by Robert Slavin or by expanding National Service and Americorps as outlined by David Brooks, John Bridgeland and Alan Khazei, or bills  being developed in the Senate.

Condense schooling and increase learning

All of these changes are within our reach right now. They do not require new curricula, massive professional development for teachers, or new technologies. Reimagining education depends on re-orienting our priorities, making schools healthy and safe, and focusing first and foremost on students’ needs and interests, particularly those of Black, Latinx, and immigrant students, students from low-income communities and the communities hardest hit by this pandemic. But as we change our priorities and take these initial steps, a more radical possibility emerges: Condense the school day.

Instead of extending the school day and requiring students to spend even more time on basic skills, we can concentrate more efficient academic support in more limited time slots, with educators able to utilize sophisticated materials and coordinate contributions from colleagues with specialized expertise as well as volunteer tutors, mentors, and online and offline guides. In a sense, every day could be a half-day, opening up opportunities for students to have lunch, get outside, and participate in a host of school-based, community-based, or online activities; to get any counseling they need; to pursue their own education interests; and to participate in activities that foster a much wider range of developmental and educational goals. Such an approach rejects the tacit assumption that limits education to schooling and embraces the possibilities for supporting students’ learning and development wherever and whenever it occurs.

In this week’s post, I scan of some of education predictions in the news over the past few weeks and reflects on the possibilities schools and education in the coming years.

Last week and the week before, my roundup of key issues of the past year and decade highlighted for me the difficulty of making predictions about the future.  The safest thing to do is probably to stick to ambiguous statements like “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” My recent work looking at why so many efforts to change schools fall short of their goals suggests that statement may be particularly accurate in education. That does not mean that things have not and will not change at all and scanning the predictions for the coming the year and decade (listed at the end of this post) provides a glimpse of what some commentators think might transpire. By the end of the 2020’s there will undoubtedly be many new schools, new learning experiences available outside of schools, and new technologies. Looking back at the concerns about stress, safety, data privacy, the spread of false information and other problems that emerged in the last ten years, the new developments of the 2020’s may well have some undesirable effects. But it’s possible to imagine some more positive effects as well:

• Beyond school choice? Rather than arguing over whether students should be able to choose schools, students might have more opportunities to fashion learning pathways that match their specific needs and interests. Those pathways might include learning experiences in schools, but students might be able to draw on a much wider array of learning opportunities outside of schools in their own communities but also around the world, online.
• Beyond the “usual subjects”? Rather than intensifying the focus on testing and basic skills, new developments might make it possible for more students to learn the basics more efficiently and in less time, creating opportunities for them to develop their abilities in many different ways. Those will likely include more formal and informal opportunities to participate in e-sports, to produce their own music and other art works, craft their own products and services, and participate in virtual communities where they can share those experiences and products far beyond their local schools.
• Beyond personalization? Rather than having to rely on educators to figure out how to personalize learning or differentiate instruction for every child, students and parents may be able to play a more active role in choosing the goals of their learning experiences and the nature of those experiences as well.
• More time for teaching and learning? Rather than making teachers obsolete, new technologies may tackle many of the “back-end”, administrative, and managerial aspects of schooling; in the process, those developments might create more room for teachers to work with students and other educators on teaching and learning.

Nonetheless, as it has been in education for the past 100 years, many of the most unconventional developments are likely to be confined to the margins, to alternative schools and special populations, and to the white and/or wealthy elites who are most likely to be able to take advantage of them.  At this point, I’m not sure there is any reason to revise substantially what I said when looking ahead last year:  That changes in schooling happen slowly, and incrementally and that the most significant changes will come as society as a whole changes, as the environment evolves, as new economies and technologies develop. Those changes may have the most significant impact on schools when the nature of work and family life shifts and parents no longer have to rely on schools to look after their children from 8 to 3 PM five days a week. At that point, as the nature of childhood changes, schools may change and some may be left behind entirely, allowing children to explore far beyond their own neighborhoods, develop their abilities, and express themselves in ways that might change their world.

PREDICTIONS

Grim and hopeful global trends to watch in 2020 (and fold into a zine) (NPR)

A teacher makes 10 predictions for education in 2020 — some of them rather hopeful (Answer Sheet, Washington Post)

Six education stories to watch in 2020 (Forbes)

Ten Education Stories We’ll Be Reading in 2020 (Straight Up, Education Week)

Will higher education roar in the ’20s? (Inside Higher Ed)

10 Higher Education Predictions for a New Decade (Inside Higher Ed)

5 K-12 trends to watch in 2020 (Education Drive)

2020 priorities inside America’s 15 biggest school districts: Student protests over equity, school boundary changes, abuse charges, & more (The 74 Million)

Albany primer: Here are the big NYC education issues to watch in the new legislative session (Chalkbeat, New York)

California education issues to watch in 2020 — and predictions of what will happen (EdSource, California)

New Year’s Resolutions for Leaders of Social Change (SSIR)

Philanthropy in the 2020s: 16 Predictions (Inside Philanthropy)

14 predictions for the future of classroom technology (Forbes)

From artificial intelligence to augmented reality to peer-to-peer learning, 7 ed tech trends to watch in 2020 (The 74 Million)

Four Things You Need To Know About STEM And Education For 2020 (Forbes)

Report: Climate change literacy, early childhood focus shaping STEM in 2020 (Education Drive)