NEASC2024

Franklin High School was a pilot site for competency-based assessment twenty years ago in New Hampshire, as a precursor to NH's CBA policy. While there were pockets of implementation and innovation, it never fully caught on. Ten years later there was another push for redesign, which was short-lived with administrative changes, budget cuts, and massive teacher layoffs. In 2019, with support from the Barr Foundation, Franklin began again by engaging in a Portrait of a Franklin Graduate process. After five years, Franklin has a competency-based assessment system and through grant funding has had access to resources to put the portrait into practice, AND there still remains a looming fear that after much progress, things will go backward. Learn about our innovations and help us answer our essential question "How do we make sure great innovations stick, and how do we help our students and community leave the fear behind?"

In this interactive session, participants will explore the essential components of a meaningful and effective learning environment. Through engaging activities, attendees will collaboratively establish collective norms and develop a shared understanding of what constitutes a supportive and impactful educational setting. The session will focus on fostering perspective-taking, gaining insight, and cultivating empathy among participants.

By the end of the session, attendees will have a set of practical activities and strategies to implement in their own educational environments, promoting collaborative clarity and enhancing the overall learning experience. Join us to discover how to create an inclusive and empathetic learning community that supports all learners.

Too often, community responses to inequities see schools as the primary drivers of societal change. This presentation addresses this critical dilemma – how can educators teach inclusive content and implement equitable teaching practices without the engagement of all members of the school community – including all families? Clearly, we cannot create inclusive schools without also addressing bias and discrimination in the broader community. This presentation will focus on two main ideas. First, we'll explore how to build inclusive school environments within our increasingly diverse school populations. Discussion will include how a family's social identity influences their engagement and advocacy and why educators should expect conflict as part of the family-school relationship (and what to do with it!). Second, we'll explore how families from high income backgrounds upend education equity and ways to address this issue and move our entire school community towards education for the common good.

Too often students experience school as a series of things that happens to them over which they have little or no control. This leads to transactional mindsets and a sense that all school is for is investing in future (markers of) success: college/university acceptance, major, grad school, career, salary. This session challenges educators and leaders to think of school as an investment in who our students are now, as people developing identities, figuring out how they want to see and be seen in the world, forging world views, and determining how they want to act and interact with others. Through a spider chart activity on educational models, a discussion of ways to leverage external motivators (like grades) for intrinsic passion development, and a reflection on what constitutes true 21st century skills and capacities, participants will acquire strategies and tactics for combatting relevance resistance and for making school more human-centered.