BELE

Building Equitable Learning Environments

Medium Post

BELE Beyond 2023

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As the BELE Network has grown and evolved over the past six years, our charge has remained the same: creating more equitable learning environments that support all students to succeed and thrive.

While we will not be continuing as a formal network in 2024, we will remain steadfast in that charge in both our individual work and partnerships. Through this time together as the BELE Network, we have built relationships that will sustain and carry on BELE’s vision and learning. Our hope is that more and more schools, school districts, and education support organizations will find innovative ways to apply the latest science of learning and development on behalf of young people everywhere.

We know through research that a student’s daily experience in school — including how they feel and think — is fundamental to not only how much they learn, but also their lifelong well-being and development. By focusing our attention on improving the day-to-day experience of students, we can catalyze meaningful change and set students up to reach their fullest potential.

Here are three key insights from our work to guide us in our journey forward:

  1. Student experience matters, is measurable, and directly contributes to the academic success and well-being of young people.
  2. When educators and leaders participate in repeated improvement cycles, they transform how students experience school and improve student outcomes.
  3. When educators, students, parents, and community members recognize each other as partners and collaborate to change policies and practices, student experience improves.

To help you put these insights into action, we’ve created Centering Student Experience: A Playbook for Improving Student Outcomes By Centering Student Experience. Regardless of role, we each have a part to play in shaping the conditions that impact student learning and improving the experiences of students. This playbook — which is a curated culmination of actionable best practices, tools, and resources created by the BELE Network — can serve as your first step or a guide to going deeper.

We are grateful for your commitment to this work and thankful for your support of the BELE Network. As we reflect back on these last few years, we are incredibly proud of the knowledge we’ve generated in partnership together, the tools we’ve tested and refined with educators and students in schools across the nation, the conversations we’ve had to advance the field forward, and so much more. While this is our final newsletter, we look forward to continuing to support all students to thrive.

With gratitude,

The BELE Learning Partners

Changing Student Narratives to End Racial Inequity

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Kingmakers of Oakland

Educational disparities between Black students and white students are glaring in our education system. “Black boys tend to be at the bottom of every positive academic indicator and at the top of every negative academic indicator,” says Chris Chatmon, Founder and CEO of Kingmakers of Oakland. And these disparities are a direct result of what Black students experience everyday and the false narratives that circulate about who they are.

“For Black boys in general, there are through-lines that are common wherever you go to school. We know how Black boys are perceived and how they aren’t, in general. We know that Black boys get referred to special education and get expelled more than anyone else. The experience of Black boys is debilitating; it cries for support, for help, for changing the reality for Black boys,” says Matin Abdel-Qawi, Kingmakers’ Chief Program Officer.

As a BELE Network partner, Kingmakers of Oakland is working to improve outcomes for Black students by improving their experiences in schools and shifting the mindsets of educators and administrators. We need them to see Black boys “as brilliant, excellent, and full of potential,” continues Abdel-Qawi. “Once you [change the narrative of Black boys]. All things are possible.”

As they work with schools and students, Kingmakers implements strategies to recognize the need for broader narrative changes and redesign schools so everyone sees the potential in Black students. Some of Kingmakers’ models include increasing collaboration, updating curriculum, and implementing student feedback.

  1. Learning Collaboratives: Kingmakers creates teams composed of senior leadership, school personnel, parents and caregivers, and students who work together to transform school systems, generate shared efforts, and foster community-level change in service of a better education experience
  2. Updating Curriculum: Kingmakers and curriculum developers work together to equip schools with new curriculum across subject areas that teaches students about cultural identity, building students up to grow into their own power.
  3. Student Feedback: Kingmakers organizes interviews with students to learn more about their experiences. Grounded in the daily lives of the students interviewed, Kingmakers engages administrators to understand and analyze barriers to student success. These conversations lead to new programming, created by Kingmakers, to provide more opportunities for students, especially Black male students.

We know that Kingmakers’ strategies like these work. A study published in 2021 showed that high school dropouts decreased by 43% because of Kingmakers programs. The study found that programs also led to school-wide improvements benefiting students who were not direct participants, reporting a decline in dropouts by 29% for Black females.

Kingmakers shows us how we can create learning environments that support and affirm students, especially Black boys. To provide educational experiences that help them thrive as learners and people, we need to keep working to build new narratives that empower Black students in classrooms, schools, districts, and communities.

Columbia Law School’s Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL) released a report highlighting four education equity bright spots in partnership with the BELE Network, including Kingmakers of Oakland. Read the report to learn more about these real-world examples where individuals, organizations, and systems are engaged with the science of learning and development, student experience, and resource equity, to build towards an equitable K-12 public education system.

Leveraging Growth Mindset to Enhance Student Experience

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As schools kick-off the 2023–24 school year, the question remains — how can we design equitable schools and structures that create positive student experiences and prepare all young people to learn and thrive? Despite challenges, BELE Network partners, Mineola Public Schools (Mineola) in Nassau County, New York, have made promising inroads in achieving equity in action.

In 2019, Mineola embarked on a district-wide endeavor to deepen understanding and focus on how students’ brains have the capacity to learn and grow. The district-wide effort grounded educators’ work in a growth mindset from the start of the school year to create a classroom foundation that allows for rich student experiences to begin to take shape.

With a growth mindset, educators and students can understand how motivation and effort develop abilities and competencies, and prevent students from stagnating. Jenn Maichin, Mineola instructional lead, says:

A growth mindset is [a] belief system, and in order for a teacher to instill a growth mindset in a child, they must first recognize their own mindsets and beliefs and then acknowledge that they have the ability to create the environments that will either support a child’s growth mindset or shift their mindset from fixed to growth.

Once Mineola educators understood the growth mindset in their contexts, they equipped students with the tools and vocabulary to learn with this mindset and the knowledge necessary to find purpose in their school work:

We want students to say: I believe that this work has meaning and purpose for me. I believe that I can do this…I believe that my work and competency and my ability grows with my effort. I believe that I belong in this academic community.

This focus and approach paved the way for a creative restructure of Mineola’s alternative school program in 2022 through the launch of a new program, Synergy. Synergy transforms how students spend their days and allocates structured time for students to focus on a growth mindset. Students begin and end their day by checking in with an assigned mentor, and have designated times with them to reflect on personal goals, well-being, and experiences in school. And instead of a set schedule, students participate in seminars throughout the day and have “What I Need Now” time to decide on the areas that they want to focus on based on what they need.

By encouraging students to take charge of their learning and decide what they need to focus on to grow academically, socially, and emotionally, Mineola is creating positive student experiences. As a result of Synergy, “Students [who have] dealt with school avoidance, attendance, or struggled with anxiety… have made Synergy a second home for themselves, and are doing better in school than they have in years,” says teacher Jessica Anderson. Kuri DiFede, a computer science teacher, also sees firsthand how administering student feedback surveys can help educators understand student experiences and use student data to implement meaningful changes to teaching practices. DiFede says that now all students at Mineola, not just those who have a track record of academic success, feel and believe in their own potential.

The start of the school year is an opportunity to re-examine school structures and make necessary changes to ensure students can grow and experience school to the fullest, as Mineola Public Schools did in 2019. This glimpse into Mineola shows what building equitable learning environments that provide students with the educational experiences they need and deserve looks like.

Columbia Law School’s Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL) released a report highlighting four education equity bright spots in partnership with the BELE Network, including Mineola Public Schools. Read the report to learn more about these real-world examples where individuals, organizations, and systems are engaged with the science of learning and development, student experience, and resource equity, to build towards an equitable K-12 public education system.

The King Mural Project

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Creating a foundation of effective relationships with caregivers

By the BELE Network

CASEL’s latest brief in the BELE Learning Series, Collaborating With Communities and Caregivers: Conditions for Building Authentic Partnerships, focuses on the fourth EA: Partner with Caregivers and Communities.

A community-led racial reckoning at King Elementary began when someone noticed a problem with a mural in the front hallway of the small southeastern school.

In theory, the mural was there to showcase diversity among the student body. Except the students it featured — modeled after former students of different ethnicities — were segregated by race and placed in front of stereotypical landscapes. Is this how King Elementary wanted to represent its relationship with students of color and their communities?

Prompted by the 2020 explosion of honest conversations about race and justice, King Elementary’s staff worked with community partners to replace the mural with a new symbol of the school’s commitment to its students and community.

This work leveraged relationships that King and its CASEL partners had built with the community — particularly caregivers — through parent engagement programs and SEL workshops. Those efforts created three conditions that facilitated the mural project and, in turn, strengthened those relationships. Read about the conditions here:

Condition 1: Schools build and sustain important partnerships through authentically engaging caregivers and community members in consequential ways grounded in local knowledge and an understanding of the school’s place and role in the community.

King Elementary’s home district developed strong ties with caregivers and the community it serves over the past decade. A key part of this effort was bringing caregivers in to offer feedback and ideas when important decisions were made.

The mural project was an opportunity to deepen these relationships and expand the school staff’s understanding of their community: an area where students of color make up 97% of the student body at King. Through close collaboration, King’s staff fully integrated the community with the school to build authentic relationships with caregivers and community members amid its reckoning with race and history.

Condition 2: Schools can structurally establish opportunities for collaboration as a lever for equity and sustain it through intentional, schoolwide professional development.

School-community partnerships connect families to their students’ education learning goals. By structurally integrating support systems for students, staff, and caregivers, King staff were able to align the school’s mission and values with broader community partnerships that expand student learning.

King Elementary saw the benefits of these partnerships during the mural-creation process. Focus group sessions were designed to understand caregivers’ thoughts and hopes about the mural project. They also helped staff envision the school’s future as a space where they feel a sense of belonging, their identities are validated, and they feel empowered to advocate for themselves and their children.

Condition 3: School leadership must build reciprocal, meaningful partnerships with caregivers that center around a vision of the school as a community school, rather than a school within a community.

The staff at King collectively viewed parents as partners in their children’s education — and themselves as key players in building that culture community involvement. When there is trust between a school’s leadership and staff, it’s possible to develop the necessary trust through sustained effort, not one-off actions by a single person. These efforts paid off. When it came time to connect with parents on the new mural, it was staff — not the principal or another high-level administrator — who reached out.

Those connections made King look like a true community school during the mural unveiling event in May of 2022 with over 100 attendees. The new mural was prominently displayed as it overlooked caregivers and their children playing and dancing on the lawn, painting with the school’s art teacher, and eating food supplied by a caregiver-owned restaurant.

Even without an explicit goal, like creating a new mural, districts that value local history and caregiver knowledge — and follow through with action — are better positioned to develop and sustain meaningful partnerships. Though the conditions highlighted in this brief are certainly not the only conditions necessary for BELE Essential Action 4: Partner With Caregivers and Communities, they are a great place to begin.

The BELE Network is dedicated to reimagining our inequitable school system that has failed too many for too long, and is committed to transforming our classrooms into learning environments that nurture the intellectual, emotional and cultural growth of all students — especially students of color. Learn more about BELE on our website, and access the BELE Resource Library to get the best and most up-to-date thinking on how to make learning environments more equitable.

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) envisions all children and adults as self-aware, caring, responsible, engaged, and lifelong learners who work together to achieve their goals and create a more inclusive, just world. CASEL has formed a community — spanning classrooms to statehouses — to make social and emotional learning (SEL) part of a high-quality and equitable education for all.

Collaborating in Community: Philanthropy’s Role in Cultivating Equitable K-12 Learning Environments

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Dr. Gisele C. Shorter speaks with The 16:1 Podcast about the BELE Network and prioritizing student experience.

Dr. Gisele C. Shorter, Director of National Education Strategy at the Raikes Foundation, was recently featured on The 16:1 Podcast, a show about education, teaching, & learning. Her conversation with hosts Katie Day and Chelsea Adams focused on what it means for educators, parents, and students to center the student experience in all aspects of education.

As public education in the United States faces challenges from all sides, Dr. Shorter emphasizes that we all each have a role to play in building a better learning experience for all students.

Below you’ll find key moments from their discussion. Listen to the full podcast here to get the full scope of Dr. Shorter’s thoughts and see how they can apply to your own work in reimagining education.

How do you define student experience? Why should we prioritize it?

Student experience is simply how students experience school. It takes teachers, parents, administrators, and entire communities to determine if those experiences are positive or negative. For example, do students feel safe in the classroom? Are they engaged in the work or disconnected from it?

A positive student experience is when students feel safe, intellectually, and socially. When they have a sense of belonging, are engaged, and connect to their learning environment and what is being taught. The latest research in brain science shows us that students are more engaged and motivated as learners when their school experiences are shaped by not only their interest, their needs, and their perspectives.

But the student experience isn’t just a one-way train. When teachers prioritize and implement classroom strategies that increase positive student experience, like creating feedback cycles and co-designing curricula with their students, they can feel closer to their students, better understand their needs, and find their work more meaningful and positive.

What does centering the student experience look like when it comes to classroom instruction; the science of learning and development; and educational funding and policy?

Ultimately, a student’s experience is created and shaped by the systems, practices, and people in place. And as people in the system, we all have a role to play in centering student experience.

We can create — together — a shared vision of what equitable teaching and learning is. A vision of education where we prioritize the wellbeing not just of students and families, but educators too. There’s no reason for there to be tension between them. And when we account for the community’s variance in desires and ambitions, we can see dramatically successful results.

To call out an example of how this all plays out together in action:, When a student at a Chicago public elementary school brought up that they felt policed everywhere they went in school — including by security and by teachers — educators set out to address it.

Using an equity lens, educators at the school, including the school’s principal, worked together to evaluate systems of discipline that were in place. “How are we creating a space where students, educators, and the community parents have their voice heard?”

This is how they co-designed a positive student experience. They wanted to reinforce that the student is not only welcome, but that they have a right to be here. The vulnerability, especially from leadership, was essential to receiving important feedback from a young person.

The benefits of this vulnerability weren’t limited to one student, either. The improvement of this student’s experience at school led to a reevaluation and subsequent positive shifts in the school’s disciplinary guidelines and grading policy.

What are the most intense challenges being faced by your educational and institutional partners in today’s school landscape?

Young people and their communities have experienced a global pandemic and subsequent economic crisis, an ongoing climate change crisis, and an anti-racist reckoning — all in the past three years.

It became abundantly clear that folks who have historically been least well served are also disproportionately impacted by all of that toxicity and upheaval. They also had disproportionately negative impacts on young people, and much of the responsibility for countering those impacts falls on educators and school systems.

There’s also a lot in the popular discourse about teacher shortages. What many people don’t realize is that school leaders and district personnel are actually setting aside dedicated days to act as substitute teachers. It’s not just that there’s a shortage — it’s that we don’t have the skilled workforce that can actually get into classrooms and meaningfully educate our young people. These are deep, systemic issues that we’re partnering with districts on to find solutions to.

The reality is that these compounding crises likely took us back 20 years in terms of progress. That’s signaled by lower NAEP scores, student mental health and wellbeing data, and an erosion of equity forward policy and resourcing.

But with all this, we continue to have an opportunity. It’s not the time to be a glass-half-empty industry. We have an opportunity and a strong demand from students. My job in philanthropy isn’t to set an agenda or dictate the next step — it’s to listen to these folks and deploy resources in support. Parents, educators, and policymakers need to work together to reshape how kids learn and experience school. So much recent upheaval makes this a challenging, but also opportune, time to make it happen.

Listen to the full conversation about centering student experience here, and stay connected with the BELE Network by signing up for our newsletter here.

The 16:1 Podcast is a podcast about education, teaching, and learning for educators and lifelong learners. Join hosts Katie Day and Chelsea Adams for new episodes every other week.

The BELE Network is dedicated to reimagining our inequitable school system that has failed too many for too long, and is committed to transforming our classrooms into learning environments that nurture the intellectual, emotional and cultural growth of all students — especially students of color. Learn more about BELE on our website, and access our resource library to get the best and most up-to-date thinking on how to make learning environments more equitable.

Redesigning School District Systems and Structures for Human Thriving

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District-Level Learnings from the Field

By the BELE Network

In order to create learning environments where all students can thrive academically, socially, and emotionally, school districts must design schoolwide systems and structures that center students. This is at the core of the BELE Network’s first Essential Action, making systems human-centered. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and the National Equity Project (NEP) recently published the BELE Network’s first learning brief, sharing learnings on how to put this Essential Action to practice. By intentionally centering students’ daily experiences in school, we can create learning environments that help positively shape students’ identity, perceptions, and beliefs as a person. Putting these learnings to action will allow us to help students unlock their full potential, both inside and outside of the classroom.

In beginning to redesign education systems for student success, three conditions are necessary to support educators and staff members who will make this happen:

  1. Cross-departmental collaboration within a school district serves as an accelerator for this work.
    BELE partners have found that work that centers students is more effective when school districts create a collaborative infrastructure, with organizational processes and resources in place to support equity initiatives. A district’s strategic plan to redesign systems and structures is critical, however, they also need aligned leadership and an ability to collaborate across departments. To collaborate effectively, members must regularly meet to advance their work, review existing departmental initiatives, and review previously established relationships. Leaders must also come together to continue the work that’s already happening to center the humanity of students.
  2. District leaders need to be clear about the questions “Why is this important for equity?” and “How does this work connect to the community?”
    To create their own personal definition of equity, leaders should be able to answer these questions about their work. By doing this, their work will become clearer and more efficient, reducing confusion and misconceptions about equity. Equity leaders who develop their personal definition are more grounded in the work and are better equipped to navigate challenges as they protect and sustain equity efforts.
  3. The collaborative inquiry model is needed for collaboration across departments for data-informed strategic planning and decision-making.
    The collaborative inquiry model can help educators think more critically about equity-centered environments. Using the model, district leaders set aside dedicated time for teams in different departments to work together. During this space and time, they can intentionally establish a community to learn and reflect on equitable environments, to improve and be the drivers of equity work.

District leaders and educators can play a part in building positive student experiences, where students feel safe, seen, engaged, and connected in their learning environment. By establishing these three conditions, schools can intentionally center student experiences that lead to better student outcomes and healthy, thriving students. To learn more about these three conditions to make systems human-centered, read the BELE Network’s first learning brief from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and the National Equity Project (NEP).

The BELE Network is working alongside partner members to share learning briefs to advance equity in education, which are grounded in seven Essential Actions. We encourage you to visit the BELE Resource Library, an evolving repository of resources and recommendations, to find the resources best suited to your unique needs. You can also subscribe to the BELE monthly newsletter here to get the latest learnings straight to your inbox.

The BELE Network is dedicated to reimagining our inequitable school system that has failed too many for too long, and is committed to transforming our classrooms into learning environments that nurture the intellectual, emotional and cultural growth of all students — especially students of color. Learn more about BELE on our website, and access our resource library to get the best and most up-to-date thinking on how to make learning environments more equitable.