The Blogs You Loved from 2019

December 20, 2019

Throughout 2019, educators and researchers from across the country have shared blogs about their goals, passions, challenges and triumphs working towards building and sustaining equity-driven and student-centered practices in classrooms, schools and local communities. Here are some of your favorites:

1. The Mastery Collaborative Approach: Student Centered, Culturally Responsive, and Competency-Based

“As a community, the Mastery Collaborative has found that being fearlessly student-centered means being culturally responsive, even as we perfect our mastery-based systems. These are two highly complex areas of research and practice—how can we combine them?

2. Critical Civic Inquiry: Students Master Academic Content through Action Research Projects

“Organizing groups, such as Philly Student Union, offer learning environments where youth come together to share stories, identify injustices, and organize campaigns to influence policies that affect their lives.”

3. The Research Collaborative and Equity: Framing the Conversation

“The team at the Student-Centered Learning Research Collaborative is asking these questions for one crucial reason: We will never achieve equity in education until we center the expertise of marginalized stakeholders.”

4. Linking Equity to Practice: A User-Friendly Tool to Document How Educators Center Students

“Although researchers are often thought of as academics squirreled away at universities or research centers, teachers should also take on research as part of their responsibility to advance equity in schools.”

5. Finding Voice, Taking Action: Sociopolitical Development for Middle-Schoolers and Beyond

“By implementing a Youth Participatory Action Research approach called Critical Civic Inquiry (Hipolito-Delgado & Zion, 2017), I guided students through a process of analyzing themselves, critiquing their surroundings, and arguing for equitable change.”

6. Transforming Research on Student-Centered Learning by having Students Lead the Investigations

“For 18-year-old Anyfern González, this meant taking the opportunity to partner with researchers and educators to explore how her then high school and community supported immigrant students.”

7. Creating diverse learning environments: What We Learned from Project Citizen

“In only a few short miles, the dollars we spend on American children greatly differ, and while I know there will be opposition from both sides, I fear that if we don’t embrace one another’s humanity, we cannot progress as a society.”

8. Explore the Student-Centered Learning Continuum (SCL Continuum)

“This continuum represents a research-based definition of student-centered learning, and is based upon a year of work with RAND’s education team, who conducted a thorough review of literature and tools used to measure student-centered learning and consulted experts in the field.”

9. Making Dream Group Work an Everyday Reality

“To help educators create learning environments where group activities are as rigorous as they are inspiring, collaborative, and equitable, we’ve curated a set of tasks and resources that demonstrate how the “unicorn lesson” can be an everyday experience for teacher and students alike.”

10. Researching the Effects of Placing Students at the Center with Culturally Responsive Mastery-Based Education

“Mastery-based education (MBE), also referenced as competency-based education (CBE), embodies the belief that students are central to the development of their education.”

This blog is part of the Student-Centered Learning Research Collaborative Equity Series by JFF and KnowledgeWorks and created with support from its fundersLearn more about this work. 

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