Youth voices matter. Far too often, transformative education efforts, albeit with the best intentions in mind, happen in service of students, but fail to truly center youth voice within the work. What would happen if we not only included youth and students as central end users in our work, but intentionally amplified their voices to transform their own education system? 

That’s precisely what happened in Denver over the past few months. Our partners at Turn Corps (in collaboration with RootEd and the Denver Scholarship Foundation), spearheaded a community-based outreach effort that intentionally amplified recent alumni and student voices in efforts to transform schools.

As we launch the new decade here at 2Rev, we enter with hope...as well as some anxiety and a growing sense of urgency. Given the volatility and uncertainty thrumming in the world around us - including the fact that 85% of the jobs that exist in 2030 have yet to be invented - we are more eager than ever to support K12 and higher ed learners to become more agile, resilient and successful.

How might we build an integrative, innovative community? What does it look like to actively dismantle fragmentation in a complex education system? Over the past two years, we have been working to answer these questions through our partnership with Virginia Beach City Public Schools, as a grantee in the Carnegie Corporation’s Integration Design Consortium.

The challenge of this work isn’t to train teachers and leaders in these instructional practices; but rather to change minds and do so at scale. In order to support educators in transforming learning, our team has needed to learn from a broad range of research on the complexity and difficulty of managing change. A few key insights have emerged that are increasingly shaping our work; I share now in the hopes that it can impact your work in support of transformation.

During the spring of 2019, we held a webinar series exploring the future of educator learning. Our goal was to inspire schools, districts, and organizations to reimagine professional learning and to provide tools and examples to support implementation.