Ed Influencers

Carrisa Moffat Miller, Ph.D., CEO of the Council of Chief State School Officers, shares her organization's key learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic, the remaining challenges ahead for state education leaders and the different ways exemplary leaders are innovating to overcome these challenges, with equity always at the forefront. Along the way, Miller shares insights into what she identifies as education’s top three post-pandemic concerns: school reopenings, learning gaps, and mental health guidance and support. She also unpacks how top leaders are building a new normal in education, and explains how the lessons learned from the pandemic may change how learning takes place moving forward. Finally, she shares her best advice for education leaders: Don’t be afraid to act even when there’s not a clear “right” answer, and get comfortable with admitting when you don’t know something.

So far in this season of EdInfluencers, we’ve focused on how schools have responded to closures and online learning. But how should we be thinking about the return to classrooms? What must be different in the future to ensure equitable learning for all students?

Mike Magee is the CEO of Chiefs for Change, a national nonprofit organization that provides guidance on policy and practice to a network of state and local leaders. His organization’s newest report, “The Return: How Should Education Leaders Prepare for Reentry and Beyond,” published in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, offers research-based recommendations in four areas that will impact student achievement and well-being. These are not recommendations that are specifically focused on keeping us physically safe. Rather, they are focused on how we might change the system to be more resilient and equitable and to better serve our students' needs. Some of them may surprise you.

The public health crisis surrounding COVID-19 has led to school closures across the country, creating a need to transition to online learning. In this special season of Ed Influencers, we will talk to experts who are actively helping schools plan for and cope with the impact of longterm closures. School closures are creating challenges for all students and families, but especially for our most vulnerable student populations. In this episode, we're going to learn from Dr. Luis Perez, Technical Assistance Specialist at the National Center on Accessible Educational Materials, about how we can ensure equitable learning during the COVID-19 global pandemic.

When the coronavirus pandemic closed schools across the country in March, transitioning to online learning was a challenge for all districts. Large, urban districts faced especially big challenges in getting devices in the hands of hundreds of thousands of students, ensuring they all had internet access and providing training to thousands of educators. In this episode of Ed Influencers, edtech leaders from two of the country’s largest districts – Los Angeles Unified and Baltimore County – talk about how they got their online learning programs off the ground.

Baltimore County, with 115,000 students, was well positioned to launch online learning because it had an established learning management system that its teachers were experienced using, said Ryan Imbriale, the district’s executive director of innovative learning. Its challenge was to implement a platform for connecting students and teachers in real time. To allow time to train teachers on the platform, the district distributed packets of paper learning materials to students.

Meanwhile, the district called on its existing e-learning department to train teachers on how to deliver distance learning. On the student side, everyone in grades 3-12 already had a device. The district worked with internet service providers to ensure internet access. Imbriale said the key to the district’s success was patience and a methodical approach.

Los Angeles Unified was faced with arranging distance learning for its 700,000 students. Sophia Mendoza, the district’s director of its instructional technology initiative, said the district’s first priority was to deliver training for teachers. It gathered its existing training programs around the ISTE Standards to give teachers a grounding in distance learning. It found that the ISTE Standards for global collaborator and digital citizen that it was already engaged in implementing gave the district some momentum as the pandemic unfolded.

The district sought to balance the urgency of the situation with a longer-term view that its teachers would keep using the skills they learned in this transition to distance learning. In a week, the district was able to deliver 12 two-hour training sessions to about 6,000 educators. The district also found that digital equity efforts that were part of its five-year-old instructional technology initiative put it in a good position to address any internet access issues. To help other districts with online learning, Los Angeles also made its professional learning catalog available to any educator.

In this episode of “Ed Influencers,” ISTE Chief Learning Officer Joseph South sits down with Frances Gipson, Ph.D., chief academic officer for the Los Angeles Unified School District, to discuss her career path in the nation’s second largest school district, student-centered learning, digital equity and technology as a learning accelerator. Along the way, she explains how LAUSD adopted and operationalized the ISTE Standards, and provided professional development to support their implementation. Gipson also shares how the district remains focused on leading with learning as it transforms its educational program with technology.