Big Ideas from Hop, Skip, Leapfrog: Seeing and Supporting the Whole Student

Malika Ali is a Managing Partner at the Highlander Institute and is responsible for the Institute’s evolving and iterative pedagogical approach to change, as well as program implementation across all classrooms, schools and districts. She is passionate about working to develop educators to be change agents of instructional and systemic equity and to nurture students’ cognitive development through culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy.

As part of our Hop, Skip, Leapfrog interviews with subject-matter experts across K-12, we asked her to weigh in on key learnings from this past year that leaders can continue to implement into a post-pandemic world. Read on for three big ideas from our conversation, in Malika’s own words.

Takeaway 1: Bring the whole child into focus – not just the student.

“Because of everything that has happened in the last few years, there is renewed energy, interest, and drive around all the layers of context surrounding each student. We have to think about a student not just as an individual, but as a person whose identities and experiences matter, and who exists in relation to systems. People have been thinking more deeply about questions such as: How is each child experiencing learning inside and outside of school? What do they need and want? What do they have access to, and what don't they have access to? What are we prioritizing for that child? What are the systems and structures that impact them and their families? The purpose in exploring these questions is not [to] make learning more relevant and effective, but [to] improve our communities through our learning spaces. So many educators began to see the connection between their roles in disrupting educational inequity with a whole-child approach.

In our partnerships with schools and districts (through which we support them to manage a process of community-driven school change), leaders were recognizing that we have to prioritize a comprehensive approach to addressing what our kids need. There are a lot of people asking the question: What is the purpose of education? And what's been really amazing has been seeing school leaders in particular commit to designing systems and structures in service of these questions. I watched families and administrators work together to ask themselves, ‘What are our responsibilities to every child and family? How do we actually put some structure around that?’

It’s been really interesting to see innovative collaborations between schools and community partners inside and outside of school spaces (i.e., learning pods). When we center students and families and begin to unearth strategies and practices that really work in terms of engagement, particularly for students who've been failed by the school system, we can then codify those practices and share them across learning spaces in the school, at home, and in the community. It is so important for all of us in this ecosystem to be learning together and to be thinking about how we can rally around a kid’s academic and social-emotional needs by centering students, families, and community mentors to paint a fuller picture of the child. We document what we are seeing from the pod leaders’ perspectives, who are bringing in a lot of family voices, and then from the teachers’ perspectives, in an effort to capture these strategies and have an ongoing conversation.”

Takeaway 2: Build relevant and meaningful learning experiences for students.

“Teachers stepped up to [handle] incredible responsibilities this year to support students' physical, social-emotional, and intellectual wellbeing, and there has been no doubt that they have helped hold society together through this pandemic. And there has been incredible learning. Many teachers found that teaching through a pandemic with socially distant in-person, hybrid, and/or distance learning meant that classroom management did not come from the teacher’s power as the ‘person in charge.’ Rather, students responded to genuine care, engagement, inspiration, and relevance.

Many educators recognized that the only way their students were going to show up on Zoom, have [their cameras] on, and be engaged [was through making] what they're doing actually meaningful to them. That was a good driver for a lot of teachers to produce or co-construct learning experiences with their students that were interesting and engaging. With this in mind, I think teachers are feeling more courageous to do things that they had previously been afraid to do in their classrooms because students are coming in with questions and are expressing the desire to center equity and justice and to have access to innovative learning experiences that equip them to transform their lives, their communities, and society. Teachers understand their role in the classroom as somebody who's going to do work to engage students, and the only way they can do that is if they are creating opportunities that are actually meaningful for their students.”

Takeaway 3: Reimagine the spaces and people students can learn from.

“The idea of being able to get out of the [traditional] school space and think about what learning looks like outside of a school building has been very interesting. We’re seeing local learning pods in nearby communities [that] are leveraging the funds of knowledge within the community in ways that enrich students' learning. These ninth graders have benefited from spaces to build community and process experiences. They are building academic mindsets and independent learning skills, mapping and expanding their personal, academic, and professional networks, and they’re getting connected to paid internships that align with their interests. Some of the pod leaders are interested in careers in education but are not certified teachers, so as we think about pipelines into teaching, leveraging assets within students’ communities is key.

I think [this] speaks to the role outside of the physical school building where we see learning happening, whether it’s at home with families, in a community space, or virtually. There have been a lot of great questions asked, such as, ‘How do we think about the role of ‘educator’ in an expansive way? Where do students have access to meaningful learning experiences? How do we build connections across all of these spaces of learning for the benefit of each student?’"

This blog is one in a series describing interviews from TLA’s Hop, Skip, Leapfrog project. Explore more resources.