Incredibly excited that conversation #47 highlights a truly inspirational Executive Director who is absolutely beloved by her students, families, and school community. Watching Jessica Waters move through the hallways of Nowell Academy is powerful - seeing student faces light up as she greets each by name.

"Nowell was founded in 2013 to provide pregnant and parenting youth a pathway to earn a high school degree. After many years of navigating Rhode Island charter regulations, we petitioned the RI state legislature to become a state sanctioned LEA and won! Our continued existence is now ensured, allowing us to specifically serve our pregnant and parenting youth without charter school lottery constraints that previously caused mission drift.

Regarding professional learning, we are reframing our message, encouraging teachers to allow for moments of productive failure, understanding that struggle is integral to learning. Our instructional vision emphasizes students taking on more of the cognitive lift and ownership of learning. Our Primary Person model (what we call advisory) is a cornerstone where students actively set and monitor their goals, increasingly leading these sessions themselves.

Our next phase will address teacher over-scaffolding. The impulse to over-scaffold often stems from a desire to shield students, but recognizing failure as a learning opportunity is crucial. We aim to integrate professional learning inspired by a College Unbound course called 'Reframing Failure'.

Our professional learning benefits from ongoing support from Barr Foundation and our partnership with Springpoint. For instance, our Primary Person model has been consistently led by an individual who received external coaching from Springpoint and in turn now trains internal staff, ensuring the model's stickiness. Coaching includes peer learning in a cohort with other schools addressing similar challenges. Our distributed leadership model allows leaders to attend cohort sessions independently, taking ownership while I remain connected to ensure effective integration. Staff have also pursued TESOL certification and participated in programs like Cambiar Education.

Our robust internal coaching model is led by Dawn Manchester and two teacher leaders, utilizing a similar coaching framework guided by an annual professional learning scope & sequence. We prioritize depth over breadth in our initiatives, maximizing our time effectively. A key area of development is peer-to-peer observation, which can be challenging in a small school setting due to staffing constraints.

On the AI front, I anticipate it will exacerbate existing equity gaps. While I personally use AI daily for efficiency, I worry about a disparity where under-resourced schools serving mostly marginalized students may view it as cheating and limit access, while more affluent students gain a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, our capacity to address AI proactively is currently limited by the demands of existing school and state priorities."