The Transcend Design Collaborative
Join us on a journey to reimagine school.
Dissatisfied yet optimistic
The Transcend Design Collaborative is for driven and curious school leaders and teachers who are committed to reimagining and redesigning school. They believe school should be transformative – for kids, for families, for our society.
These leaders hold unrelenting optimism alongside an assessment that our current approach to school is not yet realizing our aspirations. They embrace the tension, and choose action, inquiry, learning and a commitment to being on the frontlines of educational change.
2019 – 2020 Collaborative Cohorts
The Work Ahead
Your Journey to Reimagine School
Over the course of the Collaborative, regional school teams will build their conditions for innovation so that they can develop extraordinary equitable learning environments within their communities to achieve better outcomes for all students.
The approach we take to innovation is a five-step research and development cycle. Every journey is unique: We coach partners to engage in their own version of this cycle.
Plan and Manage Change
Establish goals, a timeline, and a strategy for the work and manage factors critical to navigating the change. These activities occur throughout an R&D Journey, no matter the community.
learn
Your journey begins with curiosity: You’ll investigate your local context through empathy interviews, conduct an equity audit, seek inspiration from unlikely places, dig into what research says about how learning really works, and more. With your team and coach, you’ll develop a detailed picture of the current reality on campus.
define
Using this data, you’ll work with your team to craft a vision for an extraordinary, equitable school model that reflects your community’s core beliefs about learning, as well as their concerns and aspirations.
build
Inspired by this vision, your team will create a prototype of a student experience that closes the gap between your community’s aspirations and current realities. We’ll give you the tools to build from scratch, or borrow solutions from schools that have grappled with similar challenges.
test
This is where the rubber meets the road: It’s time for the hard work of implementing your prototype, assessing to see if it works (for whom, and why), making changes, and repeating this research and development cycle.
The collaborative’s outcomes
Your Journey Artifacts
School design teams will leave the Collaborative with three products that will help them drive their work forward.
School Model Articulation
Teams develop a comprehensive school design model that articulates their vision for an extraordinary, equitable learning environment.
