Snapshots of What’s Working | Career and Technical Education
Since 2015, California policymakers have invested more than a billion dollars to support the expansion of Career and Technical Education (CTE) across the state.
Thoughts on Addressing Structural Racism
I often find myself thinking about the role structural racism plays as we aim to ensure all students are ready for college, career, and life. And more importantly, what can we do to combat structural racism with the intent of realizing readiness for all students?
All Means All at the 2017 National MTSS Professional Learning Institute
Over the past two days our executive director, Matt Coleman, joined three EPIC team members, Carmen Gelman, Brandi Kujala-Peterson, and Matt Kim, in Costa Mesa, California at the 2017 National MTSS Professional Learning Institute.
San Diego County Department of Education Equity Symposium
At EPIC, we have been doing a lot of work around equity to support educators and administrators. Partnering with schools and districts up and down the west coast, we have the opportunity to engage with schools that are generally filled with students who have historically been underserved. One of the struggles schools have with addressing…
Vote for EPIC on SXSWedu Panelpicker by September 2bd
EPIC has submitted two workshop proposals to SXSWedu, and we need your votes! We recently submitted proposals for two SXSWedu sessions at next year’s conference in Austin, TX. Selection of the proposals is partially based on votes from the public, so our team is asking for your help to vote for our sessions and share…
Unpacking the Word All
ALL: is it just the latest slogan or term that we throw around loosely in education? It sounds good: ALL students college and career ready, what is our school doing to prepare ALL students, ALL students prepared for a bright and successful future. But do we really mean ALL? Why should we unpack the word…
Essential Skills and Dispositions: Developmental Frameworks for Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, and Self-Direction
This set of developmental frameworks was created to facilitate discussion within communities of practice and to enhance a shared understanding of the dynamic nature of four essential skills—collaboration, communication, creativity, and self-direction in learning. The frameworks define components inherent to each skill and describe performance across a beginner to emerging expert progression, informed by research on the development of expertise. Unlike discipline-specific learning progressions and rubrics, the developmental progressions reflect components essential to the skill itself and describe growth dependent on many years of active exploration, experimentation, setbacks, and reflection.
Charting the Waters: Interpreting the Maine Guiding Principles Into Practice
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…
Global Citizenship: A Study in Progress
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…
Do Prisons Use Third Grade Reading Scores to Predict the Number of Prison Beds They’ll Need?
Joe Ventura discusses the connection between literacy skills and incarceration rates as well as the benefits of literacy programs within the correctional system.