Webinars

The National Safe School Reopening Summit convened district leaders, educators, and students to share best practices and provide technical assistance to those navigating the return to in-person learning across the country.

A prepared and stable teacher workforce is foundational to California’s ability to achieve equitable student outcomes, close achievement gaps, and mitigate learning loss. But ongoing and deepening teacher shortages remain a major challenge, and emerging signals suggest that shortages may worsen due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This webinar explored the ongoing impacts of teacher shortages and the promise of teacher recruitment and retention strategies.

The nation’s work towards greater racial equity and a more just society in many ways begins with more diverse and inclusive learning environments. Yet public schools are increasingly segregated along both racial and socioeconomic lines. This briefing explored the benefits of diverse and inclusive schools, instructional approaches that create inclusive classrooms, the importance of culturally and linguistically responsive practices, and state and federal opportunities to support diverse and inclusive school systems.

Educators need ways to assess student learning that can also support students’ higher-order thinking skills, help improve teachers’ instructional practices, and give young people a chance to demonstrate college and career readiness. In this webinar, three district leaders discussed how they supported the implementation of performance assessments, how they adapted their work in response to COVID-related school closures, and how they are thinking about meaningfully assessing student learning as schools reopen.

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly expanded awareness of the deep and long-standing inequities in the U.S. education system. In this webinar, prominent education and civil rights leaders discussed how policymakers, educators, and advocates can seize this moment to reinvent schools around principles of equity, authentic learning, and stronger relationships in order to transform learning experiences and close opportunity and achievement gaps.

How are educator preparation programs applying what they learned during the school shutdowns in the spring to adapt to emerging conditions in the fall? In this webinar, panelists shared lessons learned on effective teacher and leader preparation strategies during COVID-19 and addressed how programs are continually reimagining their structures and practices while maintaining a focus on key commitments to deeper learning and equity.

This webinar addressed why and how to align k-12 performance assessment systems for use in higher education decision-making for college access and success. This alignment is especially critical for students from groups historically underrepresented in institutions of higher education, including students of color and students from low-income families.

Traditional college admissions measures do not always provide a full picture of what aspiring students know and are able to do, leading some higher education institutions to transition to more holistic approaches. On June 23, Reimagining College Access hosted a webinar to highlight examples from two New England colleges, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Wheaton College, which have broadened their approaches to admissions decisions by incorporating performance assessments into their applications.

A growing number of colleges and universities are expanding the ways in which they evaluate student admissions applications to gain insight into students’ deeper learning skills, such as collaboration, problem-solving, and communication. On May 27, the Reimagining College Access initiative hosted a webinar to look at the outcomes of a pilot program at City University of New York that uses performance assessments to admit qualified applicants with scores below the threshold on college entry exams.

Teacher and leader preparation programs continue to adapt how they prepare their candidates during the COVID-19 shutdown and in anticipation of a very different future for teaching and learning. As a follow-up to the highly popular April 23 webinar, this sequel dug deeper into the critical topics impacting teacher and leader preparation programs across the nation and address many of the questions raised by participants in the initial webinar.