Imagining September: Principles and Design Elements for Ambitious Schools During COVID-19

In May 2020, we facilitated four online design charrettes with a variety of school stakeholders—students, teachers, principals, district leaders, parents, consultants, state officials, and others—to develop a design process for fall 2020 school planning. We describe these charrettes and provide resources for facilitating similar events in an additional report at https://edarxiv.org/ufr4q: Imagining September: Online Design Charrettes for Fall 2020 Planning with Students and Stakeholders.This report shares insights from those design meetings. First we identified seven themes that emerged from our design charrettes:1. Relationships are the Foundation of Schooling2. Liberatory Approaches to Equity3. Amplifying Student Agency4. Marie Kondo-ing School Priorities5. Building Time will be Gold6. Nurturing Home and Community Learning7. Iterative Organizational LearningFor each of these principles, we developed a small set of “storyboards,” short vignettes of future class- room life in the 2020-2021 school year as told from students and faculty. Through these stories, educators can begin to imagine what hybrid schooling might look like next year.These storyboards range widely in grain size from “tentpole” ideas that could organize a school’s entire reopening plan to smaller programmatic pieces that could fit into many different types of responses. It would be nearly impossible to include all of these design elements in a single reopening plan, and some of them contradict one another. However, reviewing these storyboards can help school communities begin their own process of storytelling about schooling next year.