Shift, Share, and Design: Building Capacity to Improve Student Learning Environments in New York City

Abstract

Action/Research Question: Serving as a School Design Fellow with the Expanded Success Initiative School Design Fellowship within the New York City Department of Education, I have been working with a team of educators to develop and launch a breakthrough high school model that will dramatically increase college and career readiness for students of color in New York City, the nation’s largest school district. We will launch three schools in Brooklyn and Queens this fall. This capstone will focus on a central question: How might we transform the interaction between schools and communities in order to positively influence the learning environments for children? A related subsidiary question is: How might schools create enabling conditions for students while we transform the learning model in schools? For purposes of this capstone, learning environments are defined broadly as community-based partnerships, advocacy and activism connected to improvement of neighborhood resources, family engagement strategies, support services and operations within the school and beyond, and finally the built environment of the school itself. The implication here is that all of these factors impact learning in profound ways. Research for Action: I start with a foundational base that briefly establishes what has already been well-established: the contextual reality of students’ lives impacts their learning deeply. I note the limitations of current educational policy to address these contextual concerns while spending a little time articulating exactly how these contextual challenges (poverty, unemployment, lacking healthcare, etc.) impact student learning and child development. I then strive to create a “bridge” between conventional education policy—which tends not to address such concerns—and promising practices currently underway in the field. I then delve into the research around these promising practices that strive to improve learning environments for students. Strategic Project: My strategic project involved working with the team to engage in prospective thought and initial action to begin improving student learning environments as part of our design work. Such attention to learning environments was not implicit in the initial design of the fellowship, which focused heavily on changing instructional and staffing practices. Implications: The implications of this work emphasize both the promise of what schools can do to improve surrounding learning environments as enabling conditions as well as the limitations of this work at the school site level. An overarching finding is the degree to which the work of creating strong enabling conditions for learning must be integrated across sectors even if thought leadership and work initiation begins in schools based on students’ needs.