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December 15, 2021

Access, Agency, and Pedagogy: Wichita Public Schools Prepares its Students for the Future

Roughly 11% of all students in the great state of Kansas pass through the hallways and classrooms of the Wichita Public School district. The mission of those that work and teach there is simple: to take each of those 50,000+ students and equip them with the 21st century skills and knowledge they need to succeed.

Wichita Public Schools

This mission statement isn’t merely aspirational; it is a structured, ongoing effort to use technology to transform how students learn as well as how educators teach. It is an effort grounded in a belief that those future-ready skills must be defined, first and foremost, by a commitment to equity, so that every student has that chance to do and be more. To advance that mission they have embraced Microsoft devices and technology, with teachers using Surface Pros, and students using Surface Go’s and other devices on a 1:1 basis.

As was the case elsewhere, Wichita’s teachers were asked to generate new lesson plans for remote learning and IT professionals were asked to design solutions for problems with devices, connectivity, and access. Wichita’s commitment to strategic planning, including investing in Microsoft’s educational technologies, helped the district navigate the pandemic and help avoid the many challenging scenarios that have hampered other educational organizations worldwide. In Wendy’s view, “We have benefited greatly from a strategic plan because it set a clear vision for us to follow despite the uncertainty of the moment.”

Equity Begins with Access

When it comes to education, access can take many forms. In a world in which remote learning is still part of the equation, the first priority is access to internet connectivity itself.

Having access enables students to use extra resources when doing homework, or to connect with teachers and classmates after school hours, when questions might be fresh in a student's mind. To that end, WPS worked with local partners to provide hotspots for students, so they could always be connected. Rob Dickson, the district’s CIO, notes, "Some students have a lot of challenges at home, but if you can really help those kids see themselves outside of maybe some bad experiences they've had, it helps. Great broadband for a good learning experience is a way to remove some of the barriers that would otherwise have been there."

Dyane Smokorowski, Coordinator for Digital Literacy for Wichita Public Schools, sees the act of providing access to students in essential terms. “Providing internet to students matters,” she argues, “especially for the children who might not know where they’re going to sleep for that night – it could be grandma’s house, it could be a friend’s, it could be a vehicle. But they still have connectivity everywhere they go. To me this is a social justice act. Connectivity isn’t just for the privileged; it’s for everyone. Everyone deserves to eat. We provide textbooks because everybody deserves to have information. And now, everybody having access to the Internet should also be seen as a right for every single child.” Even now, with students having returned to the classroom, the district continues to provide broadband access to a large number of students to ensure continuity of education.

The second way access manifests is in the technology used to facilitate education: does it actually give students a better or more fulfilling educational experience? Does it get in the way, or does it make the way forward easier? Wichita has fully embraced Microsoft Surface devices and Teams as their hardware and software platforms of choice, and that combination helped them navigate the school closures in 2020 as well as their return to the classroom.

Rob describes Team’s ability to foster communication like this: "I think that's what Teams does. It's amazing because we think about how a conversation is carried today and how kids have conversations today.” The emphasis that educators have placed on ensuring that students can still interact with one another and communicate emotions has increased during the COVID pandemic. As Dickson emphasizes, Teams was able to provide some of that social interaction through the high level of collaboration.

In January of this year, just to supply some sense of scope, the district was averaging more than 450,000 Teams calls per school day.

Sure, most of the students are once more learning in person, rather than over a screen, but as Dickson reminds people, the variability that is still present can’t be overstated. Students are still required to quarantine if exposed, and some schools are still offering hybrid classes that provide online and in-person sessions. With Teams, though, managing this variability has been easier. Previously, before implementing a 1:1 student to computer ratio and broadband accessibility, when a school had to shut down, the lesson plans that a teacher could implement were limited to what students could do outside the classroom. However, with the deployment of devices such as the Surface Pro 7 to teachers and the Surface Go to students, the amount and range for activities when in-person learning is not possible has increased significantly.

Access Begets Agency

The third way to think about access is about learning technologies that supplement learning for students who learn differently. Microsoft has chosen to build these technologies directly into their solutions, in part because schools don’t need to manage multiple vendors, and because accessibility tools shouldn’t be relegated to an afterthought. The benefit of this approach is that it offers a powerful tool not just for students with different learning abilities, but for many students who benefit from the functionality.

Amanda Young, who serves as Program Manager of the virtual school Imagine Academy, highlights this tendency: “When are teachers discover things like immersive reader, and learn how it helps, they realize it helps not just students with reading troubles. It’s excellent for all the students. Out littlest learners need those accessibility tools, too, not because they have a learning difference, but because they don’t know how to read or write yet. Their teachers see immersive reader and they tell us, ‘This is amazing. I can’t read the story to each individual kid, but this can help.’”

For students who do benefit from or need this functionality, there is something very empowering about it. They’re able to use their own words through dictation or get help reading through immersive reader. They don’t have to tell someone else or rely on someone else to read to them. As Amanda explains, “they can have the book read to them on their own ad feel confident that they’re not different than anybody else in that classroom. That’s why we’re in teaching. We want to see kids succeed.”

This ability to supplement traditional educational practices with technology gives many students a greater sense of agency in their own work, and it also gives some of them access to opportunities that many students might take for granted. Dyane points out that “too often when it comes to visits to local zoos or museums, often those kinds of learning experience are skewed to children with the most resources. But all these other children miss out. ‘You’ve got learning disabilities, so you need hours of remediation instead.’ With virtual connections, we are breaking down those barriers so that every child in every community and every geographic location can get access to those experiences. They can visit virtually and think ‘maybe I could work in a zoo, or in a museum. I could be a scientist.’ I think it can change the world of every student.”

Agency Transforms Pedagogy

For many, the shift toward technology came about by necessity; they had to quickly convert worksheets on paper into worksheets on the screen. The lesson plans remained largely unchanged, other than the medium in which learning could occur. At Wichita, that’s the beginning of the journey and not the end. To use technology effectively, the district leadership and the educators understand that pedagogy has to change with it: not mere substitution of analog for digital, but an augmentation of what is possible in general.

Amanda and Dyane cite tools like Whiteboard, a core collaboration component in teams, as well as digital inking and Flipgrid as tools that radically change how students interact and learn, and that offer new ways of designing lessons and fostering student engagement with the material.  Dyane emphasize that this is just the beginning: “When it comes to technology,” she notes, “the teachers are all now functional; they get it. Now we need to go back and show what really can be done and how you as a teacher can shift how you teach, and how we can reimagine learning experiences for all children.”

For Dyane, if you’re talking about really achieving that mission of building future-ready skills for every student, where success is defined by equity of learning, you need to break some barriers and that means “you’ve got to eventually shift your lesson design. You’re thinking like an engineer. And when we get to that approach then you see real change.”

Part of what Rob, Amanda and Dyane are talking about is a fundamental shift in how we think about pedagogy, and it’s being driven by what is possible by the technologies so many schools embraced over the last few years. But what has previously been rushed by necessity is not an opportunity to rethink how educators engage students who live in a world of real-time information retrieval.  Amanda states: “Today, the kid has answers in his pocket faster than the teacher can give them to him, so our jobs are no longer to just give information. Our job is to help students learn what do with that information, how to use it, how to disseminate it, how to assess it. We’re at this precipice where school could be something different.”

Working from Surface devices and connected to students and staff alike through Teams and apps and information, Dyane echoes Amanda’s hope: “When you can take the impossible and make it a reality, that’s the best use of technology.”

“I think that's what Teams does. It's amazing because we think about how a conversation is carried today and how kids have conversations today.”

Rob Dickson, CIO, Wichita Public Schools

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