“Tell us what to do, and we’ll do it.”
We’re hearing it from school leaders across New York.
We’re hearing it from school leaders across New York. This free whitepaper is about building the capacity to answer your district’s next questions, and act on what you learn.
You understand the aspirations behind a Portrait of a Graduate. You want to support your teachers, answer your community’s questions, and move your district forward. You need to know what to do next.
But even with state guidance and a playbook, the questions closest to your work remain:
- What needs to change in our classrooms?
- How do we make time for it?
- What should we try first?
- How will we know it’s working?
This whitepaper explores how districts build the capacity to answer those questions, and act on what they learn. Read it online, or have the PDF sent to your inbox.
You understand the aspirations behind a Portrait of a Graduate. You want to support your teachers, answer your community’s questions, and move your district forward. You need to know what to do next.
But even with state guidance and a playbook, the questions closest to your work remain:
- What needs to change in our classrooms?
- How do we make time for it?
- What should we try first?
- How will we know it’s working?
An Architecture for Sensemaking: What We’re Learning About Organizational Change in New York Schools
By Melissa Emler, Chief Learning Officer, Modern Learners
The expectation comes from the state. Making it work happens in your district.
A Portrait of a Graduate names what we want for young people. Bringing it into everyday practice requires decisions about teaching, assessment, time, and support.
Those decisions reach across your organization. A leadership team can establish a priority, but teachers still need opportunities to understand it, test approaches, examine student work, and share what they’re discovering.
Your next step is to organize how that learning will happen.
Who needs to learn together? What will they work on? When will they have time? How will what they discover inform district decisions?
These are practical leadership questions. They deserve as much attention as the plan itself.
What does that look like in practice?
Drawing on our work alongside New York districts through the PLAN Pilot and Inspired by Design, this paper examines:
Connect classroom learning to district decisions
Through linked teams and communities of practice.
Support teachers as they try new approaches
Through time, coaching, and shared reflection.
Make learning visible
Through documentation that helps people examine what happened and decide what comes next.
The paper shares patterns from the work, examples, and questions your leadership team can use to examine its own next steps.
You don’t have to wait for every answer to begin. You can start by creating the conditions for people to work through the questions together.
Modern Learners served as a Technical Assistance Center for New York’s PLAN Pilot and continues supporting districts through Inspired by Design. This paper shares what that work is teaching us about how organizations learn, and how that learning supports change.
Written from our experience in New York, it is relevant wherever school leaders are working to connect a vision for learning with daily practice.
Read it with your leadership team.
Start with the question you most need to work through.