Q&A with Carrie Hillyard on EVSC joining Digital Promise League of Innovative Schools
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The Evansville Vanderburgh School Corp. is one of the newest members of the Digital Promise League of Innovative Schools. The network connects and supports more than 150 forward-thinking school districts across 34 states.
EVSC Chief Transformation Officer Carrie Hillyard spoke with Inside INdiana Business about the coalition’s mission to collaborate on shared priorities and achieve equitable student outcomes.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did the EVSC apply for the Digital Promise League of Innovative Schools?
Last spring, I was able to travel and participate in something called the ASU+GSV Summit. They have this in San Diego every year. I was there as part of an alumni group. I participated in the Cambiar Catalyst National Fellowship, and they have a relationship with Digital Promise in the League of Innovative Schools.
I was able to learn about the League of Innovative Schools and talk to several superintendents and systems leaders who have been participating for the past several years. They all spoke so highly of it, like it was one of the most valuable things they’ve done as improvement and transformational level leaders.
We came back and talked about it as a team, and [EVSC superintendent] Dr. [David] Smith was excited about it. We felt like EVSC would be a great fit for this because you have to apply, and you have to be accepted.
How does the league align with the EVSC’s goals for innovation and equity?
They’re looking for school systems and school system leaders that meet a certain type of requirement. That is, you are thinking equitably around improvement. You are thinking outside the box and trying to leverage both qualitative and quantitative data in terms of how you go about improvement. And you’ve had a proven track record of success when it comes to doing some cutting-edge, innovative things.
Dr. Smith was the one who applied on behalf of EVSC, and they heard about a lot of the initiatives that have been part of his leadership under his tenure as superintendent. They got excited thinking about having such an asset that’s part of their coalition nationally.
It benefits all of us. It benefits the coalition as a whole for them to bring in another district with cutting-edge ideas and innovations. It benefits us because we’re surrounded now by a national group of like-minded system leaders who are tackling the same types of problems, barriers and complexities.
What was the application process like?
It consisted of three essays and some other questions as well as information that we had to provide about the district. We have to meet a certain threshold of student poverty and other complexity factors, maybe even a multi-language learner percentage, to show that we’re a system that has a lot of complex things to work through in terms of thinking about how we go about improvement.
After that application is reviewed, there are interviews through the League of Innovative Schools, both with their staff as well as current superintendents who are part of it.
EVSC joined the league in October. What’s it like, and what’s ahead?
They will be offering convenings in person twice a year. What’s neat about those is that school districts who are part of this collaborative are hosts. We won’t be hosting one anytime soon since we’re brand new. But this spring, there’s a convening that will be in Pittsburgh, and it will be held by the local superintendent and school district that has been part of the collaborative and has some experience with it already.
It’s so nice because not only are you able to collaborate but then you can go in person and see these practices in person. You can see what the kids are doing, what the teachers are doing, what the communities are doing around the schools and ask a lot of questions. You get to experience a lot of different best practices all over the nation.
There are three collaboratives happening right now, and Evansville is part of one of those collaboratives. These are also facilitated by practicing superintendents who have been part of the league. We come together around common problems that have been identified as part of the Digital Promises Challenge map. They have 38 challenges that they’ve mapped out from input that’s elevated from school systems in terms of real challenges we’re tackling across the nation.
One of those challenges that we’re focused on is around system-level change. In Indiana, we’ve been focused on expanding career pathways and different opportunities for post-secondary success. But in this collaborative, our lens is around how to leverage student voice and engagement to help us improve around those challenges.
In our case, we’re also looking at graduate voice because we want to know from those who have experienced the different types of programming and learning opportunities we put in place, how did it work for them now that they’re graduated, in college or in their careers? We want to know how we could do better for our current students and future students.
How will the EVSC measure the impact of being part of this league?
We are diligent about that as part of our ongoing continuous improvement work. We will be setting some KPIs [key performance indicators] and metrics around that. Not only our fidelity metrics to implementation of the process and how many students we’re engaging in this case, but we want to measure the kind of impact we have. And also, does it truly inform our improvement process? Because that’s most critical.
One of the other things that we’ve struggled with, and I know the state of Indiana as a whole has been trying to think about this as well, but in K-12, for so long, we’ve been focused on that impact through graduation. But this is a chance for us to think about how we systematize learning from those beyond that graduation point and use that group of stakeholders to inform our improvement for K-12 as a whole.
That’s been a hard thing to do for K-12 by itself because they’re graduated. We don’t necessarily have all the contacts, records and systems in place, but the state of Indiana is moving in that direction. We want to do that qualitatively, too, by staying connected with those who finish from the Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corp.
What challenges do you anticipate in implementing new ideas or technologies from the league, and how will you address those challenges?
There are always implementation challenges, and that’s part of having an agile process in place and having the kind of metrics in place that we need to adapt based on how this is going. That’s part of our standard practices here now; we don’t just expect something to go perfectly. We have processes in place, checkpoints along the way to know how we need to modify.
In this case, if we get out there and realize we’re having a hard time with the student voice project to connect with maybe not our college population but our career or military population, then we’ll go back and we’ll start to think through it. How do we work around that? How do we address the barriers we’re experiencing to make sure that we can engage those stakeholders in our improvement?
How do you plan to share knowledge and best practices from the league with other school districts?
That’s one of the exciting things, too. EVSC participates in the local regional improvement network with Talent EVV, part of E-REP [Evansville Regional Economic Partnership]. It’s a five-county improvement endeavor that’s facilitated outside of our school system, but all the school systems are participating.
We’re part of those core teams, and we’re going to be able to pull in learnings from that. In terms of how this impacts talent development, upward mobility, population growth, all these different topics, we’re focused on improving together as a community. This will feed right in because we’re part of that work already.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Some other opportunities that come with this are first pilot access to emerging technologies. That means our teachers in our school district could apply to do certain pilots, maybe even artificial intelligence pilots that I know have been coming out of Digital Promise.
When you become a member, you have access to a library of research and best practices that they’ve been building up over several years. We don’t have to come in and start learning from where we are. We can go back into the learning that they’ve been developing since 2011.
Even though this is a national network, it has global extensions. We get to learn from not only a national network but also a global network in terms of our reach and best practices. If we have a question about a topic, we can connect with the lead who can say, “We have this partner that we can connect you to who has done an amazing job of working through this.”
We have that at our fingertips now. Before, we would have had to do our own research and try to figure out who’s learned from this same type of problem.