Mar 2024: What We Are Thinking About – Monthly Round Up

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This digest compiles key industry resources and insights shared in our March 2024 Membership newsletter. This month we covered several important topics in education: the effects of new laws on student data privacy, the importance of family engagement and how it’s changing, using love and empathy in teaching, and how schools use podcasts and YouTube to connect with families. Plus, we discuss the role of AI in education and beyond. Dive in for insights on making schools more engaging, empathetic, and tech-savvy.

Possip’s Manager of Knowledge and Content, Mandy Wallace, provides a compilation of what we’ve been thinking about this March.

We summarize each piece and suggest ways to leverage these ideas for better communication and engagement in your community.

Quick Links

What We Are Reading

How might Parents’ Bills of Rights impact the future of collecting student-related data?

In this K-12 Dive opinion piece, lawyers review recently passed State Bill 49 from North Carolina as an example of changes schools and edtech vendors need to be aware of. Here’s a quick summary:

Student surveys

  • Depending on the content and if federal funding was used to facilitate the survey, school must:
    • allow parental preview 10 days in advance 
    • affirmative opt-in from parents now required

Parent right to information

  • Parents can request more info than previously: “That can include instructional materials, including supplementary materials used, to the licensure and credentials of the student’s teachers.”
  • The article highlights an interesting example where adaptive learning tech platforms will have to be able to transparently give access to parents to the content shown to each individual child.
  • Notably, for both schools and edtech vendors, the law shortens the window in which schools must provide the info requested from 45 days to 10 business days.  

While this law only affects North Carolina, the writers allude to seeing more reforms of this nature across the nation. Possip doesn’t provide legal advice, please consult the laws in your state to ensure compliance!

What We Are Reading

One Size Does Not Fit All

Last week I was drawn to this Center for American Progress article. It’s packed with data and studies about family engagement and communication preferences (and some really interesting data visualizations!). I found myself wondering how and if school leaders like you have felt a shift in these preferences post pandemic. One thing is for sure: families appreciate two-way communication and multiple ways to be informed and engaged.

What We Are Thinking About

Love as a Classroom Strategy

I found this 2022 Harvard Business Publishing: Education article inspiring and hopeful. It’s based on Love as a Business Strategy: Resilience, Belonging, and Success (LAABS) and written with classroom teachers in mind, but I think the insights can resonate for everyone working with or for children in the education world. The key takeaways are centering all decisions and actions on the people in the center of them: embracing practices that imbue inclusion, empathy, vulnerability, trust, empowerment, and forgiveness.

What We Are Thinking About

Creating a welcoming school climate can be tricky – especially if your student body is geographically dispersed. Some schools and districts (including some of our Possip Partners!) use podcasts or YouTube channels to connect with families and students. 

Here are a few current channels and podcasts that are great examples, including a few by some of our Possip Partners!

  • School District of Brown Deer: Their community can ‘meet’ principals, get book recommendations from school librarians, and tune age-specific episodes from early elementary to students preparing for college.
  • Possip Partner! Hello Olentangy on Apple Podcasts: Their episodes feature students of all ages and initiatives on campuses. Their latest helps let their community know about a school funding issue on the ballot this March. 
  • Sarasota Schools – YouTube: Their Behind The Scenes playlist introduces the complex matters of budgeting and planning for construction and their superintendent’s Trading Places series introduces different roles people play throughout the school staffing community.
  • Possip Partner! Houston Independent School District – YouTube: Check out their Up Close and Students Present… playlists!
  • Possip Partner! Achieve Charter Academy – YouTube: Their YouTube channel highlights a virtual tour that introduces their Parent Room for family members to meet, bring supplies for teachers, or just enjoy during the school day!

By using video and audio mediums, you’re not just informing your community; you’re actively involving them. It’s a powerful way to foster a connected, informed environment where families can ‘meet’ the adults who interact with their children on a daily basis.

What's On Our Radar

Excited, inspired, dubious, scared. If you feel any of those emotions when thinking about generative AI, large language models, and the new world we’ve entered, I get it. I feel all of those at once. 

We are already living in a world where AI is incorporated into our everyday digital life with tools like spell check and predictive text in emails and text messaging. At Possip, we use a form of machine learning to help us quickly understand and sort Pulse Check responses before a reporter verifies and finalizes our reports for school leaders. If you’re unsure what AI is vs machine learning vs generative AI, here’s a great primer from Data Camp. 

Now generative AI has become a tool that, as one speaker at the AI Symposium I attended last week said, a “brain accelerator” for the masses. And we haven’t gotten it right yet, as seen in the Google Gemini story that is unfolding (I found this 12 min podcast episode from the AI Breakdown helpful as a quick overview if you aren’t familiar with the news story).

What generative AI as a tool means for our students’ work in school and their future jobs, our teachers, our personal and professional lives – and the way we think about skills we want our society to wield fascinates me. I’m excited to watch and be part of this moment in history, I hope you are too.

Want more? Read our February monthly round up here!

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