We’re excited to feature Phoenix Charter Academy in a partner spotlight this month. We spoke with Liz Murray, the Chief Academic Officer at Phoenix who has helped lead a robust, student-centered design process that will continue into the Build phase. Read on to see how Phoenix mindfully cultivates student and stakeholder voice, communicates the essentials of their new model development with the community, and will build structures and systems to address insights surfaced in the Understand phase.
How has the Phoenix team approached the redesign process and the Build phase in particular?
Throughout our entire design process students are at the center of our work. We design for them and with them. In the Understand phase, we gathered student voice in surveys, interviews, and focus groups. In the Design phase, we asked students for feedback on design artifacts and ensured that every design team meeting included students. In Build we will continue to empower students as key members of the design team, proactively invite in more students, and host more “Scholar Summits,” which are mega design team meetings open to all students. This focus embeds students as part of the design process and imbues the importance of student voice into the fabric of the school.
Major demographic shifts drive our design work. For example, our ELL population rose from 15% to 60% in the last four years. They are mostly young newcomers with different needs than our students who are over 18 years of age and far from graduation. Balancing the contributions and voices of both of these groups in the design process has implications. For example, we call the design team “El Congresso” and hold meetings in multiple languages to make ELLs feel welcome and ensure they can contribute. Many of our older students have jobs—40% work 20 hours a week or more. Therefore, we are mindful of when our design team meetings and Scholar Summits take place so these students can contribute meaningfully.
Early on in our design work, we asked students to work in groups to design their ideal school. Two large themes emerged: the desire to accelerate quickly toward graduation and flexible scheduling. These core themes continue to shape our work as we go into Build.
How are you strategically thinking about the roll out of the new model?
We will not have a major roll out or a big reveal because students and stakeholders have been helping design everything along the way! At the same time, we recognize that not all students attend design team meetings or Scholar Summits. While we will keep working hard to encourage students to join these touchpoints, we’ve also devised an Advisory Series for the month of May where students can review design drafts and offer feedback. The series will help build excitement about the opportunities ahead and foster an understanding of upcoming changes.
How has the design team managed the needs and perspectives of the school community and the wider community?
We have worked to cultivate a genuine two-way dialogue with a focus on inclusiveness. It’s common for people, especially those in positions of power, to approach dialogue as a one-way delivery of information wherein they might ask for feedback (which rarely gets implemented or addressed). We have avoided this pitfall through a set of intentional strategies grounded in positive youth development and through the inclusion of staff and students in every step of the process. For example, we are working on a professional development series alongside staff members to make sure they have opportunities to weigh in and give guidance.
Our commitment to co-designing the school has presented challenges. For example, our community is so used to being involved in the process that sometimes they want details that aren’t yet figured out. We are very transparent and use those inflection points as opportunities to engage interested stakeholders. Another challenge is managing differences—in opinion, perspective, and role. This is simply part of the collaborative process that we’ve normalized in order to create room for different perspectives. Design team members know that difference and discovery are not only expected but make our school designs better.
Another priority for the Build phase is engaging the circle of adults who support our students (we call them “adult supporters”), including families, friends, peers, influencers, community organizations, etc. In creating a communications plan, we have relied on the expertise of our students since they know their adult supporters best. For example, as we think about the shift to competency-based education, the team decided to post our competencies for public comment for two weeks. Students helped us realize that we couldn’t just put the competencies online and send out a link. Rather, we must translate them—both into Spanish and into more accessible language—and proactively invite stakeholders to weigh in. We must also explain why this change is important, outlining how mastery portfolio based promotion lets students move faster toward graduation.
How have you leveraged your existing resources and what are some challenges that existing resources have presented?
We are fortunate to have an amazing staff and leadership team. They know each other and our context, and they are excited about school design. This common understanding lets us jump right into the work with many minds and hands working in concert. Since we are already an operating school, we can immediately bring ideas and practices to the community so stakeholders can try them. For example, we’re running a professional development on competency-based education right now. This means staff will have a head start going into the fall when we switch to this model.
At the same time, staff members are engaging in and leading work they have never done before, which can feel uncomfortable at times. Staff have had to get used to leading something new, exploring uncharted territory, and collaborating with the team to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Are you cultivating any partnerships as part of the redesign?
Our new partnership with Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC) is a direct result of what we heard in the Understand phase. One survey showed that 100% of our students think that college is important for their future, so we knew this had to be baked in as a major component of our new school model. Through the partnership with BHCC, students will eventually have the option to earn an Associate’s Degree as part of their work at Phoenix Academy. We’re excited that this partnership will open doors for students and provide access to new experiences for all our students.
How has Springpoint’s support and coaching supported your Build phase work?
Springpoint’s experienced learning partners are invaluable in helping us design our competency-based education model in a way that allows students to accelerate at personalized paces. Particularly as we map out pathways for students, Springpoint has pushed our thinking and helped us understand what our ideas will look like in practice. Our learning partner intimately knows the opportunities and challenges of competency and asks us questions that would take us longer to ask ourselves.