Conversation #5 took place last week with Julia Bamba, of the Issaquah School District. Thank you to Superintendent, Heather Tow-Yick for making this fantastic connection.

Our conversation seems timely after reading the new report on state level research and development (R&D) from Alliance for Learning Innovation (ALI), Education Reimagined, and Transcend.

"Our district has embraced the concept of small pilots with continuous improvement cycles. All of our professional learning is iterative, connected to local context, and includes processes for shared decision-making.

We recently received a grant to take the concepts from our first personalized, real-world, mastery-based learning (MBL) school and find opportunities to scale them to other comprehensive high schools in our district. This funding has given me the opportunity to work as a principal-on-special-assignment overseeing innovation at the secondary level.

Some of the pilots I’m excited about this school year include:

1. Establishing a micro-school around physics and language arts subjects, housed within one of our larger high schools. Using Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles, our teachers consistently create 'hooks' for students back to projects and real-world learning applications. The micro-school has been a great opportunity for giving a small group of highly talented educators an opportunity for greater agency and autonomy.

2. Our mastery-based high school model was informed by the MET and Big Picture Learning with students participating in internships two days a week. We are now refining our internship models - setting up shadow days and securing funding for a 2-week internship experience for up to 50 students across all of our high schools this summer.

3. Based on the success of our social emotional learning (SEL) model within both our mastery-based high school and our micro-school, we are now designing an SEL pilot with 36 staff across our 3 comprehensive high schools. We are focusing this pilot around the need for a sense of belonging and strong relationships between teachers and students. Participants are using the Wayfinder curriculum to help integrate lessons into advisory, core classes or individual lessons. The time and capacity it takes to integrate SEL and academics seamlessly instead of living separately from academics has been a key challenge. Through this pilot we aim to learn how to best support our educators with this integration using Wayfinder as a resource, gathering feedback from students and teachers along the way, and creating a plan for the future as we continue to elevate the importance of this work.

Shifting to this type of startup mindset has required a learning curve, but I think most staff members are now feeling more confident and comfortable to share authentic feedback, especially as they see the potential to transform the learning experience for students."