School Redesign in Action 2025

Great Schools Partnership welcomes you to our 13th Annual School Redesign in Action Conference.

Dr. Regina Robinson, Ed.D. joined the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in September 2021 as a deputy commissioner overseeing workforce diversification, secondary pathways, early college, educational options, and planning and research at the department. Regina is a collaborative and skilled leader in education with a passionate expertise in student success for over 20 years.

As a promoter of student effectiveness and support, Regina understands students’ pathway from admittance to degree conferral, preK to career, and engages both higher education and preK-12 stakeholders on the critical components impacting student success. She has been a fierce advocate for K-12 students with disabilities in the Greater Boston area and in 2014 was appointed to the Boston Public School Committee, where she served for one term.

Since 2008, Regina’s vast service to organizations has ranged from board and community engagement and has been a guest lecturer at 10 colleges and universities across the Commonwealth, especially focused on topics of disability inclusion, advocacy, and family engagement. Regina possesses the unique ability to visualize educational attainment through many lenses: as a former college administrator, instructor, and local district leader to current K-12 parent advocate and statewide policymaker. As the parent of four children, one who is a star with Down syndrome, Regina is personally invested in access to education and career success for all students, from all backgrounds, and with all abilities. A recent doctoral graduate in Higher Education Leadership from Regis College, Regina’s research is focused on spotlighting gender, race and executive leadership in education.

Black male teachers are rare but essential changemakers in education. Research shows their transformative impact on student outcomes, yet systemic barriers persist in recruitment, retention, and advancement. In this session, we will explore groundbreaking findings from recent studies on the Black male teacher pipeline, highlighting actionable strategies for stakeholders to create sustainable change.

Join us to learn how research can inspire collective action and create equitable opportunities in education. When Black male teachers are in our classrooms, all students thrive.

Participants will:

• Examine key data and insights that reveal the urgency of diversifying the teaching profession.
• Engage in collaborative discussions to apply research findings to real-world contexts.
• Develop strategies to break down barriers and strengthen pathways into teaching for Black men.

In the State of Washington, a group of 40 schools—the Mastery-Based Learning Collaborative (MBLC)—has been working to design new approaches to teaching and learning in public schools, building systems and practices that are culturally responsive-sustaining and mastery-based. Mastery-based learning, sometimes referred to as proficiency- or competency-based learning, attempts to make schools more equitable by establishing clear learning goals for students, creating more accurate and helpful grading systems, improving systems of support, and putting students in the driver's seat of their own learning. These efforts can be attempted through many different strategies, some more successful than others. In this workshop, we will use the experiences of MBLC schools and a review of research to determine which strategies truly lead to better outcomes for students.

Participants will:

• Explore highly effective practices utilized by schools in the MBLC.
• Discuss strategies, resources, and examples that can be used to center educational equity in mastery-based learning work.
• Analyze why mastery-based learning strategies cannot be implemented without culturally responsive-sustaining methods.

Interrupting bias and prejudice is vital to creating an equitable and inclusive school system. Centering identities, building a sense of belonging, amplifying marginalized voices, and employing inclusive practices are essential for ensuring every student, educator, and staff member can thrive as their full selves. In this dynamic and interactive workshop, participants will explore effective strategies used in an urban school district in New Hampshire as they recognize and interrupt bias and prejudice. With a focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), this session will equip participants with an understanding of tools and strategies they can use to foster an inclusive environment that celebrates diversity and promotes equity at all levels. This workshop is ideal for education and community leaders, HR professionals, administrators, and other staff interested in learning more about how to implement a system-level approach to fostering equity across an entire school district.

Participants will:

• Learn how a systems-thinking approach to eliminating inequities works in a large, urban school district.
• Explore promising practices for creating equitable processes to foster an inclusive learning and work environment.
• Gain an understanding of how strategies, frameworks, and data are used to implement equitable and inclusive systems changes on all levels. 
• Understand how implicit bias and systemic prejudice exists in schools and affects decision making, classroom interactions, and student outcomes.

Professional learning groups (PLGs) are essential to building strong school cultures where every student can learn. Teacher collaboration improves instructional practices and student learning, leading to more equitable outcomes. Impactful PLGs require systems of support and accountability to thrive. In this session, we will outline stages of growth that can guide successful PLG implementation. We’ll explore ways to support PLG facilitators and participants as they strengthen their collaboration muscles. We’ll also provide powerful examples of accountability structures that use data to celebrate growth, plan for continuous improvement, and highlight successes.  

Participants will:

• Explore tools and resources to implement or refine PLGs in their school setting.
• Consider a data collection and analysis strategy that highlights PLG growth.
• Develop a plan for next steps to increase the effectiveness and intentionality of PLGs in their school setting.

Last year's student-led restorative practices workshop was so successful we decided to run it again this year! This workshop, co-led by students from throughout New England, will help participants better understand how to create and sustain restorative practices in their respective districts and schools. Come learn about this regional student collaboration, discover the changes students and staff have noticed since implementing restorative practices, and explore the path to sustainable restorative practices.

Participants will:

• Explore best practices around restorative practices in schools.
• Understand how to build and sustain restorative practices.
• Gain tools and strategies to support the implementation of restorative practices in their districts and schools.

A racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse educator workforce (DEW) is vital to improving learning for all students. “TNTP revealed that in 97% of school districts nationally and in every state, the percentage of students of color exceeds the percentage of teachers of color.” Even if you consider your school or district to be diverse, you still need to maintain healthy retention practices to keep it that way.
Recruiting, hiring and retaining are critical steps to increasing the diversity of our education workforce. All of these pieces are important at the same time. Which do you need to prioritize now? How do you do this? Come to our workshop and find out. 
Attendees at this workshop will learn new or expand their understanding of known strategies to intentionally and proactively recruit, hire, and retain a diverse educator workforce, hear stories, and have an opportunity to apply their new learning during the session. We encourage teams to attend to create the space to make their plans more actionable.

Participants will:

• Explore action oriented steps to promote individualized development of hiring processes (application, screening, interview, and job offer experiences)
  
• Spend time considering ways to implement an action plan for immediate use in practice
  
• Consider strategies for creating a roadmap to build your DEW coalition
  
• Collaborate with other session participants to elevate best practices from current work
  

For more DEW-related content that will help you build and maintain a diverse education workforce in your school community, check out our webpage and podcast.

How might we provide feedback to students that builds their thinking and learning? In this session, we will explore the types of tasks we use in math classrooms that allow for students to engage in deep mathematical thinking. Using scoring criteria aligned with the standards assessed in the tasks, participants will score a set of student work and explore next steps for student feedback and instructional planning. While our work will be grounded in secondary mathematics, the strategies are transferable to all content areas and grade spans.

Participants will:

• Use sample scoring criteria to score student work.
• Review a range of student work to provide feedback to students and determine instructional next steps
• Understand how to align a task with learning outcomes

School change is hard. Centering the experiences of those most marginalized in a rural, predominantly white district can feel impossible. Emma Vastola and Kate Leath from Two Rivers Supervisory Union (TRSU) will share how they have been working to address the culture of “sameness” and the subtle ways that a presumed lack of diversity can impact change. Join the TRSU leaders to learn more about how they have leaned on Universal Design for Learning, data-informed decision-making, and their Portrait of a Graduate to engage educators in equity-centered change.

Participants will:

• Learn about an ongoing change process in a rural public school district.
• Discuss strategies to facilitate conversations around educational equity.
• Identify next steps in their own school or district.

A Portrait of a Graduate is a vision that articulates the collective hopes and dreams a community has for its students, as well as the skills and attributes all students need in order to be prepared for college, career, and life. The process meaningfully engages a diverse strategic planning team that represents all community partners, ensuring an equitable and representative process that unites the community.

Learn key strategies for widespread community engagement that support partners in creating a collective vision. Consider, share, and discuss examples from SAU 29, as well as other districts. Get down to the nitty gritty and explore, develop, and work with the tools your team will need to make your community’s hopes and dreams a living reality.

Participants will:

• Build a common understanding of the Portrait of a Graduate and strategic planning process.
• Identify ways that SAU 29 engaged diverse community partners in their processes.
• Understand how data collection and analysis is central to and strengthens strategic plans.
• Develop an action plan based on community engagement.
• Explore ways to leverage the Portrait of a Graduate and strategic plan for sustained implementation.

At a time when educators feel stretched too thin, how can we make adult learning meaningful? To start, we need to think of our meeting agendas as moral documents. The way we spend our professional learning time reveals what we value. When our communities of practice and professional learning group agendas are designed for connection, reflection, and different modes of learning, they strengthen our purpose and collective efficacy. We strive for this approach with the Rowland Foundation’s cohort model, which first brought together Rowland Fellows in 2009 and continues to evolve. In this workshop, participants will experience adult learning strategies and facilitation moves that center beliefs and scaffold meaningful collaboration. Participants will have the opportunity to engage in collaborative practices, then debrief, reflect on, and apply new learning after each activity–so they can adapt these practices for their own work in schools.

Participants will:

• Consider the relationship between values and action
• Experience reflection and metacognition strategies that deepen learning and ensure its application
• Explore different modes of learning that build relational trust, deepen cognition, and make space for joy and connection
• Commit to strategies to incorporate into your professional setting

Extended learning opportunities (ELOs) give students the ability to connect their career goals with their education pathway. The individualized experiences enable students to build connections with their communities and explore personal interests throughout their high school career. These mostly off-campus connections cultivate students’ passions while nurturing the confidence and responsibility necessary for success after graduation.

The focus of this workshop is to reflect on possible processes for building and sustaining robust ELO programs in a variety of community settings. We will consider the strategies and tools used by an established program in central Maine in order to inspire educators to think creatively and build meaningful programs for their own student populations. Additionally, educators will share strategies for building a network of community partnerships, identifying meaningful options for students, and mentoring students through their ELO experience. Our ultimate goal is to inspire participants to effectively address students' unique learning needs, meet schools' curricular objectives, and fulfill communities' demand for a skilled workforce. By embracing this vision, we aim to make Extended Learning Opportunities a standard practice rather than an exception.

Participants will:

• Explore the definition of extended learning opportunities and their role in supporting student learning.
• Consider key benefits of ELOs for students, schools, and community partners in their own context.

Many learner-centered educators believe in the power of community partnerships to create more relevant, empowering and open-walled learning experiences for young people. This interactive session will explore the opportunities and challenges of building effective partnerships with universities, cultural and environmental institutions and local businesses. Grounded in participants’ own experiences and questions, the session will also leverage extensive student voice and experience data from an innovative middle school program in Salem, Massachusetts in which students leave the classroom weekly on local learning immersions that leverage long term partnerships.

By attending this workshop, our hope is that partners come away having explored ways to design and implement successful community partnerships, with a focus on preparing partners to engage and affirm all students; creating meaningful curriculum and skills integrations; and establishing innovative human capital and systems solutions that make open-walled learning more sustainable for schools.

Participants will:

• Understand the keys to school community partnership: Student Voice, Inclusive Environments, Engaging Experiences, Two-Way Dynamic
• explore what a two-way partnership looks like in practice by hearing from local community organizations, WPS team members, and Salem Public Schools leaders to design equitable learning (including media and artifacts from co-designed learning experiences). 
• work in groups based on whether educators are just getting started or have experience with partnerships to plan for deepening their programming, leveraging resources in the WPS Action Guide for School Community Partnerships. 

Are you interested in exploring the dynamic world of competency-based education (CBE) in practice? Join us in unpacking the stories of change and design. Educators and students from the ACE Program at Brookline HS (MA), BFA Fairfax (VT), and Chelsea Opportunity Academy (MA)  will share their journeys to CBE. These learning communities represent rural, urban, and suburban settings, and different entry points to CBE with new school designs and transformation from traditional educational practice. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn, engage, and connect around the culture, structures, and pedagogy of CBE in practice.  
 
Workshop outcomes: 

• Participants will deepen their understanding of competency-based education in practice.
• Participants will learn from the specific examples and stories of other learning communities and engage with the idea of multiple pathways to CBE.
• Participants will make connections to their own school redesign in action journeys to date and moving forward. 

Multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) is a framework designed to guide educators to meet the academic, social-emotional, and behavioral needs of all learners. In this session, we will learn from the experiences of two districts—Revere, MA, a mid-sized urban district, and Mt. Desert Island, ME, a rural district—as they build systems and routines that use MTSS to achieve just outcomes for all students. Their journeys showcase the importance of including educators with a variety of roles, from the classroom to central office, when planning and enacting sustainable, equitable MTSS. Join us as we discuss the beliefs, practices, and structures needed to transform our schools from spaces that allow only some students to thrive to institutions that ensure all students succeed.

Participants will:

• Deepen their understanding of MTSS in relation to educational equity.
• Examine tools that can be applied in districts and schools to deepen MTSS implementation.
• Consider challenges to equitable MTSS implementation and ways to mitigate these challenges.
• Begin to develop an action plan based on the resources that already exist in their local school or district.

This workshop focuses on guiding participants through the strategies and best practices for adopting a rigorous literacy curriculum that leads to equitable outcomes for all students. Delve into strategic approaches for evaluating existing resources and identifying needs through a curriculum audit. Explore how to leverage audit findings to make informed curriculum adoption decisions through interactive and experiential activities. Consider how to foster and plan for a culture of collaboration, professional development opportunities, and ongoing support and coaching. We will also discuss the value of building networks with other districts and schools using similar resources to support shared learning and continuous improvement.

Participants will:

• Understand how to use tools to evaluate existing literacy resources with an equity lens and identify gaps to guide curriculum decisions.
• Design an actionable implementation plan that addresses collaboration within and between schools, stakeholder buy-in, effective resource use, and professional learning.
• Identify approaches for providing ongoing coaching, professional development, and cross-district collaboration.