What’s and Why’s:

• discover how insights and connections from the study validate our own experiences, beliefs, and understandings and push us forward (for personal and professional growth),

• make connections between the study and educator stories of building equitable collaboration within their schools (to assess the relevance of the study findings and recommendations),

• identify practices and models represented within and by Remake Learning Days events that relate to the Study (to identify local resources, experts, and opportunities for further learning of specific aspects of the Study),

• make connections and form relationships with like-minded people in other regions (to increase the likelihood that regions will get the maximum benefit of participating in Remake Learning Days Across America),

• interact with hosts of specific events from each region and with national study partners, reviewers, and advisors to participate during the same web chats (to connect conversations happening within each Remake Learning Days region to conversations at the national level),

• be invited to participate in a coordinated set of Conference-Based Public Learning Opportunities that we are proposing to several well-respected and specifically chosen education conferences in the Pittsburgh region as a lead-up to the Pittsburgh Summit on Equitable Collaboration in 2020 (to extend the influence of our work).  

 

Draft Structure (60 min)

• 10 min -- Why are we here and why does equitable collaboration matter?

• 10 min - What insights and connections from Collaboration Nation validate aspects of this conversation and push us forward?

• 10 min -- How does Remake Learning Days (RLD) in your region provide evidence of the growth of equitable culture? Are there specific initiatives in your region where these conversations are already happening?

• 10 min -- We are excited to hear from local educators who are doing the hard work with our learners.  How are you trying to build equitable collaboration and what lessons have you learned about why?

• 10- min - Are there specific initiatives and conversations that are happening at the national level or in your network that connects to the stories?

• 10 min - Closing reflection, request for feedback, and an invite to other events leading up to The Pittsburgh Summit on Equitable Collaboration in 2020

 

2) Conference-Based Public Learning Opportunities:

 

As a build-up to the Pittsburgh Summit on Equitable Collaboration in 2020, the Collaboration Nation Study will be running a series of coordinated public learning opportunities over the next 18 months that will connect the themes of specific conferences to the Collaboration Nation Study and the learning models and practices that exist within the learning ecosystem of schools.  Duquesne Elementary School and the Penn Hills Charter School of Entrepreneurship are helping to ground these conversations with real examples and several of our national study partners, reviewers, and advisors have agreed to participate.​

 

Goals:

• To publicly question and make visible the assumptions about learners and learning that are built into the models that are currently operating within our schools in order to assess how these models may be working WITH each other or AGAINST each other with respect to creating equitable collaboration.  

• To identify and deepen understandings and uncover assumptions about creating conditions for equitable collaboration in schools.

• To identify the Goals, “Active Ingredients”, and assumptions about learners and learning.   

• To map current learning models operating in schools to identify contradictory and complementary assumptions and approaches.

​

Targets for the Conference-Based Public Learning Opportunities:

• SW PA Personalized Learning Conference (Spring 2019)

• THRIVAL (summer 2019)

• TRETC (October 2019)

• ABC Create (Fall Convening)

• The PA Principals Association  (Fall, 2019)

• Pascd

• MCL Consortium (October 2019)

• Grantmakers for Education's 23rd annual conference; “Supporting Students in Overcoming Adversity: Agency, Justice, Equity”

• SAS (December 2019)

 

Draft structure (3 hrs)

• 20 min - Collaboration Nation findings and recommendations

• 30 min - World Cafe Style discussions about assumptions (start with district teams):

  • Round 1: What do you assume about learners and learning regarding what it takes to establish equitable participation? What is equitable participation in collaborative learning?  (switch groups)

  • Round 2: What conditions need to be in place for this level of equity within a school system? How do you know when you see it?  

• 10 min - Share out

• 30 min - Connections to Conference theme: Ignite talks from 1 keynote and 3 local presenters

• 30 min -- Deep-Dive (interest-driven jigsaw groups): unpack models and assumptions, “Active Ingredients” of approaches, and assumptions about learning and learners and represent the ideas on chart paper

• 30 min - District teams work and share out - generate a question about their district/systems to help them understand how these play out in their schools and what changes to culture are needed to create equitable collaboration?

• 15 min - share out

• 15 min - Debrief

 

3) The Pittsburgh Summit on Equitable Collaboration

 

The Pittsburgh Summit on Equitable Collaboration is being carefully crafted to provide participants with a unique public learning experience that will both validate the perspective that they come to the summit with, and challenge them to create new understandings, together.

 

The conversation will be seeded with important findings from the Collaboration Nation reports and the diverse examples of practice that we are seeking during the review period. Like the PGH Project Zero institutes or the NGLC Spring Convening in 2018, the event is focused around a central question and the learning activities are designed to make our thinking and processing visible. Critical stakeholders will be invited for lightning talks to provide their perspectives around the Study Themes.

 

We will bring together distinct perspectives on equitable collaboration to share their goals, theory, and approach:

• Social Justice

• School Culture and Climate

• Protocols from NSRF

• Social, emotional and cognitive development

• Human-Centered Design Thinking from Luna Institute

• Thinking Routines from Project Zero

• The TeamBuilders Group's Model of Equitable Collaborative Learning

• Maker Ed Practices aka the MakeShop

• Professional Collaborative Inquiry

• Discipline policies, PBIS, and behavior management

• NGSS-style practices and epistemologies

 

 

In school districts within our regional Remake Learning Network and beyond, the implementation of reputable initiatives in specific frameworks (as we mentioned many of them), offer more successful and comprehensive results when anchored with a parallel deepening of school culture-building for equitable collaboration. There is a comprehensive aspect that is required — everyone needs to be involved but it can start small everywhere.

 

Over the duration of these public learning events we will ask participants to describe their portraits of a graduate (vision for their graduates); unpack assumptions underlying approaches and models in their learning ecosystem, in order to walk away with a deeper understanding of what it takes to create equitable collaboration and why (as well as the types of learning models and conditions that have to be in place).