In the Spring of 2018, 2Rev engaged nearly 100 stakeholders from across Virginia Beach in a series of six participatory discussions about the future of learning and work, including what students will need to know and be able to do to be successful in that future.
Participants collaboratively identified barriers and opportunities to achieving this broader definition of student success. Then they prioritized the opportunities with the greatest potential to support VBCPS’ transformation into a system that successfully prepares all students for the future. Participants identified the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that they believe students will need in order to be successful in the rapidly changing future (which was extremely reminiscent of the VBCPS Portrait of a Graduate!). They also identified what ideal learning environments designed to deliver these results would be like, while highlighting dozens of outstanding examples within VBCPS. Lastly, participants thought critically about the barriers and opportunities that made it difficult to deliver these results for all students in VBCPS. While participants spoke about challenges in nuanced ways, clear themes emerged from across the sessions.
The five top themes included:
1) Mindset
2) Equity
3) Systemic and Structural Constraints
4) Teacher Capacity
5) Parent and Community Involvement
This information, coupled with the insight gleaned from the landscape analysis, became the basis for selection of the two prototype network topics that participants dug into this past year. Read more about the community visioning sessions in this blog post by 2Rev Consultant Rachel Lopkin, a leader of this work.
During the community visioning sessions, 2Rev facilitators asked participants to contemplate the greatest barriers to VBCPS’ vision. Here’s a synthesis of what they arrived at in one of the six sessions.