At Fountain Valley High School, the leadership team has long realized that leadership in large, comprehensive schools needs to be shared and systematically distributed to key stakeholders. So, Principal Morgan Smith employed a leadership structure that allows the school’s vision, values, and beliefs to drive critical decisions, while both informing and being informed by the work of multiple teams that make up the school’s leadership structure. As principal, Morgan empowers assistant principals, key teacher-leaders, key staff-leaders, and community leaders to make decisions.

How do you ensure that the perspectives of all families are incorporated into decisions at the schoolwide level as well as at the individual student level?

Roosevelt’s leadership team identified two opportunities that were already part of their community that they would be able to leverage to create a more cohesive school experience for students: the schoolwide Artful Learning curriculum, and the Roosevelt PRIDE Promise statements developed by the school staff.

With education’s current focus on testing and results, it’s easy for both students and educators to lose track of what student readiness means. This infographic poster highlights some of the key skills students should have when they graduate from high school. This poster can be freely reprinted for display in classrooms or common areas as a reminder to both students and teachers that lifelong learning and true readiness goes beyond fact memorization and test scores.

Interview with Dr. Courtney Robinson about the annual College Application Day at Ocean View High School. All seniors apply, during the school day, to multiple postsecondary institutions based on each student’s interests and aspirations and have experts onsite all day to support them through the process.

What’s the secret to empowering students? How can we unleash their hidden potential? While I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer this question fully, I have gleaned a few important strategies from working at Inflexion and living with a veteran teacher who is really skilled at tapping into students’ strengths.

Like it or not, the cultural identity of your school drives everything else you do. Who you truly are and what you believe about yourself at the core is defined by what you do. In an increasingly competitive climate, it’s more important than ever to clarify who you are and what you value.

Occupations with higher hourly wages face a substantially lower likelihood of being automated. We need to help students develop strong skills through a robust training and education agenda to ensure that they benefit from changes in technology, and are able to stay employed as the workers of the future.

Our conversations at Inflexion this past week have been dominated by the familiar sadness, anger, and empathy we have every time there is another mass shooting. But this time it has been coupled with a deep respect and awe for the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who are demanding laws change in our country to make schools safer. Note: This post discusses gun violence—specifically in schools—we recognize this content may be difficult for some readers.

Over the past several years working with Inflexion, we’ve observed the immense value to school leadership teams of simply taking a pause, and having the opportunity to step back and gain a new perspective and the insights that come with that.

This last year has been full of airplane rides and early mornings for the School Partnerships team here at Inflexion as we work with school leadership teams up and down the West Coast. Listening to the radio on one of my late night drives home from the airport, I caught part of a Freakonomics interview with the managing director of a team that started as part of the British government known as the Nudge Unit.

The Inflexion Approach is rooted in organizational theory and recognizes the critical role identity plays in developing schools and systems that serve all students well.

If the Center for Disease Control can facetiously use a hypothetical zombie apocalypse to emphasize the importance of emergency preparedness, why not use the same scenario to engage students in conversation around the skills they need for life readiness? The first protocol in this resource introduces the Four Keys to students and can be used to facilitate a general conversation about all of the Keys. The subsequent protocols give students the opportunity to spend more time thinking about the specific skills and learning techniques identified in each Key (THINK, KNOW, ACT, GO).

The leadership team realized that for their Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS), it was critical that individual student’s unique strengths, interests, aspirations, needs, and family & community supports are recognized so that effective decisions can be made to maximize students’ inclusion in the school.

Over the past year, as the leadership team at South Junior High in the Anaheim Union High School District worked on MTSS implementation, they realized how challenging it is for large schools to know the academic, behavioral, and social-emotional needs of each and every student that walks through the doors.

In 2015, Valley High School’s academic outcome data showed that students needed explicit support and practice developing the literacy skills necessary to be successful in postsecondary opportunities without remediation. Valley had been the lowest performing high school in the county for several years in a row, and had a reputation as a school with a multitude of discipline problems and low academic rigor.

Opening a new high school in an established district is a challenge that can be daunting in many respects. Mountainside High School in the Beaverton School District (Beaverton, Oregon) is no exception. A team from EPIC worked with the Mountainside leadership team to help clarify the importance of shared cultural identity and its role in the success of the school.

With the goals of college readiness and student engagement in mind, WHS built a Senior Inquiry course that mirrored an approach to instruction often seen in postsecondary institutions– one that is cross-curricular and student driven.

An April 24, 2017 article in Getting Smart, Santa Ana Unified Creating Incredible Pathways for Students K-12, features Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD) and includes Inflexion’s work with Valley High School over the past three years (2014-2017).

In order for schools to operationalize college and career readiness for all students, it is critical to identify the outcomes schools should be addressing and students should be expected to demonstrate to ensure they are ready to succeed in life beyond high school.

During 2015-2016, the Inflexion* team supported Valley’s goal to have all of its students participating in academies by providing technical assistance in the development, growth, and implementation of a wall-to-wall academies model. With over 40 years worth of research showing that the academy model is one of the best strategies for high school improvement and reform.

Due to the leadership team’s hard work, SHS was awarded a five-year grant to start the Afterschool Miller Program to give students a safe place to learn and explore their interests after school.

Over the past 2014-2015 school year, the leadership, students, and community at Valley High School in Santa Ana, California, worked with us to clarify their vision and to create strategies to make them even more effective at moving their students toward success.