Transformation Journey: Liberty Public Schools

Outline

• (00:00) Introduction
• (11:14) Building the Space and Team
• (17:46) Scaling the Model
• (21:15) Impact on Students and Educators
• (25:11) Looking Ahead

Introduction

Rebecca Midles: This is Rebecca Midles, and you are listening to the Transformation Journeys with Liberty Public Schools.

Liberty Public Schools sits just north of Kansas City, a district of about 12,000 students. It’s part of a real-world learning initiative, a goal of getting every graduate out the door with what’s called a market value asset, a real credential, a real experience and something beyond a transcript.

That kind of goal requires personalized, hands-on learning connected to the community the kids live in. Liberty is generously filled with thoughtful and committed leaders, and today you will hear from two I know well, Julie Moore and Sarah Wickham. This isn’t a story about a hundred kids in one wing of one building.

It’s a story about how a whole district learns to change itself by starting small, on purpose, somewhere protected enough to fail without anyone getting hurt. That somewhere is called Edge, a microschool. A few classrooms worth of students and teachers doing things differently inside a comprehensive high school.

But Edge was never really about Edge. It started with a vision for what elementary could feel like. It grew into real-world learning, a regional initiative to connect what students do in school to the life happening outside of it. And then educators on a flight home from visiting programs around the country started scribbling on napkins.

That napkin is where Edge began. What you’re about to hear is what happened after.

Julie Moore: I am Julie Moore, assistant superintendent for innovation and learning with Liberty Public Schools. About 12 years ago is when EPIC Elementary opened up, and EPIC stands for Every Person Inspired to Create, and it’s a project-based learning school. We saw students who entered into that school flourishing, and we saw when they went to middle school that they were ready to take on more. These students were able to be critical thinkers and collaborate, and learning was personalized for them. And then they’d get to middle school, and we were like, “Well, if we can do this at the elementary level, why can’t we do this at the secondary level?” About that same time that we started to see such success with the first few groups of students coming out of EPIC, we started to have conversations with Kauffman and with Getting Smart, and it was, “Do we do this real-world learning at the high school?”

Julie Moore: How do we make high school meaningful for our students? How do we prepare them for that what’s next?” So through that work, we were able to do several site visits across the country and see some amazing places, and just say, “What if? Like, what if we were to create this? What would it look like?” Never did we say, “We want to copy what someone else is doing.” We wanna look at other places and see what’s working for them, and then how that could fit in community with our stakeholders, how our kids would receive that, how they would flourish there.”

Sarah Wickham: I’m Sarah Wickham, director of real-world learning for Liberty Public Schools. Yeah. And the visit to San Diego with Getting Smart was really, I would say, a turning point for our team, just the opportunity to see some other examples of how high school can be structured different, not only logistically, but also conceptually for learning. On the visit, but then also on the airplane back, I remember we were jotting down ideas on the airplane napkin because all of these thoughts were racing around what’s possible.

Rebecca Midles: Liberty already had a school called EPIC, an elementary school around project-based learning. This successful school has young learners leading their own learning early. But there were years when those same learners hit middle school and landed back at a desk. So leaders started bringing design thinking and project-based learning into the middle schools.

Real pathways, not just a unit here and there. By high school, real-world learning was already taking hold, giving more students real-world experiences, but something was still missing. The team wanted something more intentional, a way to build truly personalized options, not just real-world projects layered into a traditional schedule.

That’s what sent them out on site visits, looking at what other places had built, asking what might fit in Liberty.

Sarah Wickham: There was probably a year and a half from the time the site visit to San Diego happened and the work of our high school study team had really lended to this conversation to when we actually opened Edge for students. And that year and a half was very fast and furious, it seems like.

After the visit to San Diego, and we had really kind of spent some time fleshing out the idea and presenting it and getting a thumbs up with some feedback, but yes, let’s move forward, I remember there being a conversation of like, “Could we do this in the fall?”

And I don’t really know who put the brakes on, but it was like, “That’s too fast.” Like, that wouldn’t be thoughtful. And maybe that was a collaborative decision. Julie, you might have a better memory of it than I do. But I do remember kind of that tension for a little bit. Not tension, but just there was some debate around what is the right timing.

I’m so glad in retrospect that we waited that additional year because during that year, a tremendous amount of time was spent bringing the teaching team together to do that curriculum work, do that pedagogical work, really kind of talk through philosophically about competency work and grading and how do we do this interdisciplinary work.

Julie Moore: When we started this, we said, “We’re gonna start with just this handful of classes” and make that seamless interdisciplinary instruction among those classes.

So we started small, and then that next year we added a few. And as the years have gone on, we’ve added more. We have advanced placement classes in there. And we started out with some language classes, and then after a couple of years, just having a teacher maybe come in for one hour and not being a part of the system and being able to connect with the other teachers to see how it’s done, we kind of realized, maybe this isn’t the best. And so those kids could just go to the foreign language class on their own. What did come out of this, the slow progression of planning, was the teachers who are a part of Edge realizing, love bringing in culinary arts and looking at it from an international lens. And so you have a teacher who went and got certified in that area. And then you have a teacher who said, “Oh my gosh, with the arts and the photography,” and went and got certified there. And so some of the teachers, we kind of laugh about it because there’s a couple of teachers we’re like, “Are you up to like 30 different certificates?” But it works so much better for them to blend that all together. But it took all these years of kind of slowly figuring that out and saying, “Yeah, we tried to force this and it didn’t work. That’s OK. We don’t need to do that. Let’s go back and try something else.”

Sarah Wickham: Part of the work that we did with the teaching team was also calibrating around this idea of interdisciplinary learning and how do we use space differently to support that. And sometimes that means maybe math and science are gonna be in this joint space because that’s what the learning demands right now, and we have a space that’s set up to do that. But sometimes whatever subject area we wanna plug in does need to have its own separate time.

And so we really had a lot of pedagogical conversations around not forcing the fit when it doesn’t make sense, but also having the ability to combine and the space support that work when it does need to happen and when it does make sense. And so the teaching team, we did a lot of norming around, “This is gonna be different because you’re not each going to have your own classroom where you are assigned and that you own from when the first bell rings to the last bell.”

We had this amazing fine arts space at Liberty High School. We knew we were going to be building that out in another part of the building, so, like, how we’re gonna scale that. So we had the opportunity with this huge open space there, and originally it started with, we’re gonna put some spaces out here for kids who can come, and classes can come and work together and just make it more open, flex space. And then at the same time, we’re like, if we’re gonna have 100, 115 students all together, they need to be able to create their own space. So instead of saying, “Hey, to create this microschool, we’re gonna have to go off campus,” let’s keep it on campus so that the students can then go to other classes when needed, and they still feel connected to their high school. What started out as maybe everyone gets to use this space turned into, hey, everyone still gets to use it, but maybe not necessarily during the day. And so then I think realizing that we want a big open space where everybody can be together at some point, but then how do you have all those other breakout rooms? Some might be bigger, some might be smaller. We still wanted to offer biology and ELA and math classes within the microschool. So how do those spaces fit?

Julie Moore: So you might have five or six kids meeting with a teacher over a book or something they just read or getting ready for a presentation, and they’re off to the side, but you could still have all these other spaces being utilized. At first, there was that teacher apprehension of, “Well, why don’t we get to use it?” And then, “What is this thing you’re creating?” And I think it took a couple of years for teachers to realize that something special was happening.

Sarah Wickham: Going into our sixth school year, there are some spaces that some of them tend to live in a little bit more. But I think still that shared philosophy among the team of we’re gonna use the space to meet the function of learning is how they function.

Building the Space and Team

Rebecca Midles: Edge was meant to be a more personalized model of learning set inside a global context, something that families and learners had been asking for. It was also a chance for the adults to learn alongside them, to watch up close how young people learn when given the room to do it.

Rebecca Midles: When I think about the professional learning journey, so much of it was creating that North Star. When we articulated the original vision for Edge, we outlined 10 signature features that were gonna define this school experience was different than the experience a student might get in our comprehensive high school. And then being a learner alongside the teachers, like

Sarah Wickham: have been such a phenomenal group of professionals to work with, and so much of it, I think, we co-constructed. But I do think there was a lot of work that leaders did, that Julie did, that April, our principal at the time, did.

We spent a lot of time before that outlining sort of that North Star and those guiding principles that we wanted to achieve, and then just rolling up our sleeves and getting in with the teachers and co-constructing and collaborating and being willing to shift. There’s so much flexibility that I think is required.

This is a pretty logistical thing, but we were purely running paper-pencil schedules, and we quickly realized within six to eight weeks of working with high school 14- to 18-year-old brains that we wanted them to have that agency, but we, as adults, needed eyes on their schedules. We needed a digital tool to help facilitate that.

And so that was a quick shift of, this is a current need, and we’ve gotta make this work. And I think that is true about so many of the different, whether it was project design or competency work. All of that has been a very flexible learning process and co-constructing as we were going. And I would say that one of the things that we articulated from the beginning and has stayed true, and I think has been so critical to the success of the Edge team, was that we built in a common planning time for the entire team. And so for five years, they have had a dedicated hour of their day where they work together. And they really do. I mean, they sit in the same office and they work together. There is constant iteration and ideation and adjusting, and they’re all thinking it through in real time.

And I think that that has been such a secret ingredient of the success of the team.

When we frame learning through authentic problem-solving, whether it’s an elementary, middle or high school classroom, kids just, they light up in a different way.

They are more excited about their learning. They’re more engaged. And then to see their teachers, like, I think it’s also something that we really have to think about when I think about just educator burnout and how do we support our teachers. When I see teachers taking an effort to try to do this work, they are seeing their kids light up, and then they light up, and they’re just like, “This is worth it. It’s hard, but it’s worth it.” One of our Edge teachers was telling me how he’s eligible to retire, and he’s like, “I’m staying. This is what I wanna be doing, and I am making an impact. I am energized by this work, and I love this team.”

Rebecca Midles: It’s also been beneficial for that professional learning that they’re all participating in it. And it’s not that, well, let us send one and have that one come back and share with everybody else. They wanna go together. They wanna be that team, and we’re all getting this so that we can ideate when we are all sitting around first hour together, that we can talk about what we got from a conference or something they may have gone to and seen. And that’s really powerful because that team has been together for quite a while.

Julie Moore: We really encourage and invite staff to come over to Edge. So when they do showcases, staff from all over can come and see that, and they get to see their former students doing these things. That’s professional learning for our other teachers to see, oh my goodness, listen to these kids talk. I had that kid in fifth grade, and I can’t believe that he’s just talking to me like this. Or, I had this young lady in middle school, and she speaks so eloquently now. So that right there, just holding a showcase for people across the district to go and see is, they don’t realize necessarily that they’re providing professional learning for all these other teachers across the district to think about, “I could do something like that in my classroom.”

It has for sure changed the way we do hiring. I think prior we would’ve probably asked a lot of questions about “How do you stay organized?” and “How do you make sure that you can meet student needs?” The questions now are about how do you personalize? How do you make learning authentic? How do you get students to take ownership of their learning? And if you can come into an interview and answer that, that will be beneficial in every classroom, not just Edge, right?

As a district that has 100% of seniors earning a market value asset every year, we wanna know that every single student in every classroom is getting that experience. Does it have to be a global experience? No. But you’re going to do a client-connected project, or you’re going to take them on a field trip somewhere and help them understand, or you’re gonna let them do some kind of persuasive writing about an issue that you’re passionate about. Those are the things we wanna see.

So the questions have definitely shifted at the building level to, so what would this look like in your classrooms? Anybody can give you the right answer that maybe they learned in college, but give me an example of something you’ve done or something maybe you would wanna do.

And I think you can’t necessarily make that up.

Scaling the Model

Rebecca Midles: That shift didn’t stay inside Edge. It’s a question we hear from leaders everywhere. How big does a pilot need to be before it actually teaches you something? Liberty’s answer was 100 kids, one wing, one team.

Big enough to test something real, small enough to call it learning instead of risk.

Julie Moore: So I think some components that transcend, that I think really transcend for both students and for adult learners, is the shift to truly thinking about competencies and learning evidence rather than, I think there’s a shift teachers, educators and students that we have to make from assignments and activities and points to learning evidence and artifacts and skill demonstration, and that that doesn’t have to happen in a prescribed way. And it doesn’t have to happen in the same way for every student or every adult learner. But I also think that that applies so much to our adults. I do think the competency piece is powerful because we started with the idea of competency-based education at our middle-level schools, and the rollout was messy, as it is in many areas when they start that work.

We had a couple of schools that were doing humanities, so ELA and social studies being together, and then them saying like, “Here’s what it looks like at Edge. What could that look like in your classrooms?” We had those teachers talking to the middle school teachers about, “This is how we do it. This is what it looks like.” And so that transfer was able to go off more seamlessly just by having people to show them what that was. And I think with personalized learning, it’s OK to let people take ownership. It doesn’t matter what classroom you’re in. Kids can do this. And there’s such a worry from people about, I lose control. Yeah, but the student gains that control, and how powerful is that?

Sarah Wickham: A big driver for us was that in our graduate profile as a district, one of the dimensions of focus was cultural. And so when we thought about that piece and what does that look like to bring that to life in school, one way to do that is to really think about just the problems that students get to engage in through their learning experience and sort of the cultural component of that.

As adults we’re trying to solve problems that we’re encountering every day in our different roles as educators, but that’s also what our students want.

The sustainable development goals surfaced as this possibility of real problems that are trying to be solved out in the world, and they are very meaty. What a great avenue to think about how you can apply different disciplines to engage with those problems in really meaningful ways for students. But also any of them you can look at from a very local, regional, all the way to a global lens. So just a really powerful vehicle.

Impact on Students and Educators

Rebecca Midles: There’s a podcast called What School Could Be with Josh Reapune that visited Edge this spring and sat down with two students, Scarlet and Morgan. I want to read you something Scarlet said about why all this matters. She said, “I honestly don’t think of anything I do in Edge as an assignment. It’s deeper than an assignment.”

That’s not a phrase a curriculum guide produces. That’s a phrase a kid produces when the design worked. If you want the full conversation, it’s called Leading and Learning on the Edge. We’ll link it in the show notes.

Sarah Wickham: I think back now, it’s funny because I spent a little bit of time with the Edge team this spring fleshing out a project-based experience. And to watch them plan now, it’s so organic and so much faster than I think about before we launched, and we would sit down as a team and try to build out these units and our ideas and align it to our grad profile and the competencies for each discipline area.

As educators, we all think about those student stories and transformation stories, but also those educator success stories.

And when they feel accomplished and valued and honored and recognized, like, that fuels me that I get to support and cheer people along on that ride. So that keeps me going.

This vision work was very much a team effort. I absolutely think teachers can be part of that, but that is a step that needs a lot of time and attention. Also there is a vulnerability. You’ve gotta be willing to co-construct with your team and reflect on what’s not working and adapt and, like, I don’t have all the answers to all the things.

I’m just willing to get in and try and help figure it out and see what we can do. And so there’s a vulnerability there because I think sometimes there’s an idea of leadership that you have all the answers, and that’s just not the case when you’re doing this work.

Julie Moore: You have to be willing to put yourself out there. You have to be, say, on the top of your game to know what that looks like. What are the things we wanna see? What are best practices? What can you offer the team as they’re gonna go out and take this risk with kids?

Sarah Wickham: But then I think also as leaders, seeing where support is needed and holding the line on that. So the example I gave earlier of the Edge team has an hour of common plan every day. That is hard to do in a high school. And that is a leadership decision to be emphatic that that is critical to this work, and to make sure that that is able to be supported and sustained in the long term. And so I also think figuring out as leaders where those hard lines are and helping to provide that support so that the work can sustain.

The best advice that our superintendent ever gave me was, “You have to network, and get out of your safe-space network. You need to go and network across the country.” And so for me, going and starting to network with people was powerful because I have to use my connections. And so then when the teachers in Edge were saying, “Well, we wanna do this, but we don’t know necessarily how to do that or who to contact,” I could say, “Oh, go to Rebecca Midles at Getting Smart,” or, “Go to this person.”

Julie Moore: It’s the power for us, I think, is being able to say, “I’m gonna help you figure this out by giving you the connections of different people or places that you can go or things that you can see.”

Looking Ahead

Julie Moore: It might not look like Edge, but we’ve been able to work on North Nation by Design and making that an entrepreneurial program for those kids who are like, “I wanna business, and I wanna do this on my own.” Well, let’s make it happen. And so I think any time you start with an idea on a napkin, you can make it that successful, you can do it with anything else. Where do we have these opportunities to make it happen? And you don’t have to do it all at once. But even starting small with something else, like next year we’re developing a creative arts academy, the whole idea is very similar to Edge, but it’ll start with a couple of hours, and then how do we build upon that? So very similar to the same structure. Let’s go slow, and let’s continue to add to it. We have amazing teachers, and we have great kids. Every single one of them deserves this. Not just the 100 students who might be in Edge, but all 12,000 deserve this.

Guest Bio

Links

• Liberty Public Schools
• Julie Moore
• Sarah Wickham
• EPIC Elementary School
• What School Could Be Episode with Liberty EDGE Students