When I first watched this video, I cracked up because it totally reminded me of my days as a high school principal. Every night before I would go to sleep, I would create a to-do list of all the things I simply had to accomplish the following school day. I would always start my…
We are currently working with Valley High School in Santa Ana, California, on an awareness campaign to redefine the school culture and perceptions. Leadership, students, and the community have collaborated to create values statements, rework the branding, change the look and feel of the campus, and communicate the message through a wide variety of methods…
Nā Hopena A’o (HĀ) are a set of learning outcomes derived from key elements of Native Hawai’ian culture.
Along with Drs. Joanna Smith and Heather McClure of the University of Oregon, I recently spent 10 days exploring Education City, an international higher education hub in Doha, Qatar, on the Arabian Peninsula. Qatar has begun pursuing a national vision to transition its economy by 2030, from one based on the production of natural gas…
Over the past year, the leadership, students, and community at Valley High School in Santa Ana, California, worked with us to clarify their vision and to create strategies to make them even more effective at moving their students toward success. Valley has amazing people doing incredible work, but through a series of interviews, listening sessions, surveys, and tours in and around the campus, we were able to gather a fairly clear picture of identity challenges that need to be addressed. Challenges such as: poor self perception and lack of school pride, community misconceptions and biases, lack of energizing visuals, branding inconsistencies, and lack of strategic messaging to the feeder schools.
Among my sources of inspiration are talented and insightful educators who are committed to setting up students for success – educators like those my colleague Ross Anderson and I had the opportunity to collaborate with in a recent trip to Maine. Working with the Maine Department of Education, EPIC created draft developmental frameworks for the…
As postsecondary credentials become a requirement for both access to a good job and advancement in a career, high school students want more value from their education—they want their education to provide them with more concrete evidence of learned skills. A recent Rethinking Credentials webinar, provided by the American Council on Education (ACE) on August…
Last week, PBS News Hour ran a weeklong series looking at innovations across the country that help more young people find their way through to a higher education degree or certification. As workforce demands increasingly require advanced education, low-income students are often shut out of opportunities. The reports covered key topics identified in EPIC’s Four…
Last month, I traveled to Barcelona, Spain, to conduct a unique, mixed-methods study of metacognitive skills at the International Baccalaureate (IB) World Student Conference. I surveyed global citizenship levels among IB Diploma Programme students from 19 nations who attended the weeklong, project-based learning experience. I conducted two diverse focus groups: one with students representing eight…
Check out EPIC’s August newsletter (and past issues) on our newsletter page. We discuss how community and partnerships are central to the work that EPIC does, with examples from recent projects on developing CTE course equivalent frameworks, aligning district accountability plans to college and career readiness, and using design-centered events to get teacher and administrator…