Living the (American) Dream: College and Career Readiness in Practice

Jakub Lau • Cahn Fellow 2021

Ensuring that teachers are working from a set of coherent beliefs about how students learn best is an ongoing challenge of school leadership. By articulating a clear vision for instruction at Emerson, and providing coaching and professional development to support that vision, we have made significant strides in aligning our instructional practices to college and career readiness. As a next step in this work, September 2019 marked the beginning of a partnership between The Emerson School and Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID). AVID is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to helping schools shift to a more equitable, student-centered approach. This action research project monitored whether the organizational skills and instructional strategies teachers learn through our AVID partnership were being implemented across all classrooms and impacting student outcomes.

Our research focused on classroom observations and gathering feedback from stakeholders to determine if the AVID partnership is responsible for greater student growth and college/career readiness at Emerson. The COVID-19 pandemic drastically altered our plan for AVID expansion. Teachers attended remote AVID training, and we continued to offer two periods of AVID to our 7th grade general education classes, but scaling of AVID was delayed due to the challenges of remote and hybrid learning. 2021-22 was the first major expansion of our program since the start of our partnership. We doubled the amount of AVID periods offered and increased our AVID professional learning opportunities. This report will explore the challenges faced throughout the implementation process, the adjustments made throughout implementation, the lessons we learned, and our next steps.