Reimagining Our Events: Virtual Workshop On May 13th
Like most of our colleagues, we’ve been working from home to do our part for social distancing. Because of COVID-19, the way we work has changed, but our mission to empower our community to prevent disproportionality hasn’t. While we practice social distancing, we’re working together to reimagine how we take care of our community’s social and academic needs.
Here are some things the Equity, Disproportionality & Design team have been working on while we join the community in dealing with COVID-19.
Our May 2020 Design Workshop Event Will Be Virtual
Our third and final community design workshop of the year will be held by video conference. We’re redesigning our workshop format so our community has a creative and inspiring session that also supports the health and safety of our community.
It’s been rewarding to see our design work groups building their projects. We can’t wait to share them, so we’ll be using this design workshop as a virtual show and tell. Involving our community in preventing disproportionality has been a goal from the start. That’s what makes it so exciting to use this workshop as space for those community voices to be heard in the project work. We can’t wait to share:
A new community survey experience
A family friendly data report that shares community resources and builds awareness about disproportionality
A database that catalogues preventive disproportionality ideas
A training activity that makes the connection between data and people
A library of equity and disproportionality learning materials that invites the community to learn and take action
We hope you can join us virtually to discuss and celebrate our work so far. There’s still much to do in our mission to empower the community to prevent disproportionality, but this event will be an important milestone in our journey. Join us by Zoom on May 13th at 4:00 PM
Brainstorming
First, the ED&D community brainstormed to share ideas for building a shared understanding of disproportionality in schools.
Prototyping
Next, the community work groups developed prototypes of interesting ideas to learn what they might look like in real life. Prototyping helps us “build to think.” This practice will equip us to share meaningful services with community members.
Refining
How might we organize disproportionality research materials that inspire action and represent all voices? In this example, an ED&D design group progressed through the initial stages of design: building empathy, brainstorming, and prototyping. They’re now refining their ideas in preparation for our upcoming design workshop. If you want to hear more about the journey, come to our Zoom session on May 13 to hear directly from the design team themselves! Join us by Zoom on May 13.
Turning Efforts Locally to Help the Community at Davila Day School
Heidi Lyon, Principal at Davila Day School, Olivia Rivera, Executive Consultant, and Michelle Sturm-Gonzalez, Coordinator, have been teaming up to design a distance learning plan for our students at Davila Day School. Davila Day School is our school designed for Deaf and hard of hearing students. Supporting Davila’s teachers to give students a positive virtual learning environment was an opportunity to explore how we can use virtual tools to make students feel cared for and excited to learn.
Heidi, Olivia, and Michelle are collecting lessons they’ve learned from working with teachers to build a great virtual experience for their students. They’ll be sharing these experiences very soon in a webinar.
We’d love to connect with others around ways to make virtual learning meaningful for students with disabilities. You can contact Olivia Rivera to get a conversation going.
Visit the San Diego County Office of Education’s website for more on how they’re supporting students affected by COVID-19.
Preventing Disproportionality With Our Data Tool
Our team and partners are building a disproportionality data tool to help educators learn about which students need us most. Some SELPAs are starting to try it out and giving feedback about how we can make it a tool for action.
Together with our community, we want to reimagine how a data tool can inspire action to prevent disproportionality. We imagine educators using the tool not as a solution on its own, but as a way to spark collaboration, honest conversation, and new learning about students who need them the most. We want these conversations to lead to ideas, big and small, that educators can try in the field.
Well-built tools empower their users to accomplish a task. So we believe that our disproportionality data tool can’t stand on its own. It needs a common language we can all use to talk about inequality and it needs a diverse network that helps us look at data from many perspectives. Most of all, preventing disproportionality means turning towards action after analyzing data. We're building our data tool to fit in with the rest of our ED&D services. We plan to combine our data tool with training, networking, community involvement, and intervention resources. That combination will help educators find big and small opportunities to prevent disproportionality in their schools.
Our team will be using empathy interviews and video calls to learn as much as we can from beta testing our data tool. We want to hear your stories about using your favorite data tools out in the field! If you have a story to share, contact Ryan at restrellado@sdcoe.net.
Team ED&D will be speaking at California MTSS 2020
Olivia, Marcus, and Ryan will be speaking at the MTSS 2020 conference in Anaheim on July 28-July 30. We’ll be leading a conversation about using empathy interviews to include the school community in academic and behavior instruction planning. We’d love to see you and make new friends! You can register for the conference here.
Until next time, stay safe, healthy, and take care of each other. Hope to see you online soon!