Connections Matter for Ed.L.D.

When Tyler Thigpen, a current doctoral student, started his residency at Transcend, a national nonprofit that is trying to accelerate innovation in how we define “school,” he knew there were other Ed School students and graduates involved. He didn’t quite realize the extent, however, until they all got together for a retreat last summer.

“We were at the retreat, and I thought, wow, we’re only 11 teammates strong and four of us are Ed School folks,” he says. “And not just Ed School, but all Ed.L.D.”

And the four, including Jenn Charlot, Ed.L.D.’15, Brittany Erickson, Ed.L.D.’16, and Christine Ortiz, Ed.L.D.’17, are working together in ways that are very 21st century.

“We’re living what we consider to be the future of work, with individuals all over,” Thigpen says. There’s no physical office space. Teammates are in San Francisco; Madison, Wisconsin; Orlando, Florida; New York; Chicago; and Denver. Thigpen is back home in Atlanta.

He says all the work they do is also very transparent and involves lots of check-ins using Google Docs, Slack, Zoom, and social media. Their org chart is flexible.

“Most individuals in the organization have the same title of partner with no levels,” he says. Some workers take on managerial duties for accountability, mentoring, and coaching.

Says Charlot, “Projects have leaders, but we 'scrub' into projects based on our expertise and what the project needs. That way we match talent to project needs.”

She says that despite working virtually, the team has managed to cultivate a sense of community and connectedness.

“In some ways, we're more connected because we're intentional about connection. We use technology platforms such as Zoom, Slack and the Google suite to work collaboratively and fluidly,” she says. “What I like about this approach is that we're very efficient — and we're more focused on the end product.”

The routine includes weekly check-ins on Mondays, regular virtual team building activities, time to share challenges and “wins,” and a fun way of signing off at the end of the week.

“Every Friday at 5 p.m., we get online and give compliments to one another in alignment with our core values,” Thigpen says. “The process arose organically from people feeling sort of goofy at the end of the week — I guess I’m done now — and so now we have a way of connecting to thank others and bookend the week.”

Charlot says regional team members also have their own routines.

“For example, the New York crew gets together for dinner at someone’s house at least once a quarter,” she says. “And I can't forget Soul Cycle. Yes, we cycle together! A mix of fun and work allows us to get a lot accomplished. It took a little while to get used to, but now I love it.”

This way of working with one another is in line with how Transcend thinks schools should operate, Thigpen says: believing that genuine connections are at the heart of the work.

“You see this emphasis on relationships in all of our interactions, internally and externally,” he says.

Christine Ortiz also sees the importance of finding connections between her work, Transcend’s work, and the course work she has done in the Ed.L.D. Program. Currently an entrepreneur-in-residence at Transcend, she started the Equity Design Collaborative, which she says brings an equity consciousness to design methodologies. Some of the collaboratives products have been tested at Transcend. Her Ed School coursework has also made an impact.

“I took Critical Race Theory the spring of 2016, and my final project in that class was the first iteration of what is now the equityXdesign process that is at the core of the new venture,” Ortiz says. “While that course most directly impacted my thinking, the personal leadership strand of the Ed.L.D. Program and specifically immunity to change really allowed me to push my own identity development in ways that led to the ‘aha’ moment of trying to bring equity and design together.”

For Charlot, who is responsible for building what she calls a “dynamic knowledge base” with her team called Build Knowledge, the connections also extend to school partners who, they have found, give as much as they get.

“We source questions from our school partners, questions that may be blocking them from designing the kind of learning environment that their community needs,” she says. “The hope is that surfacing the research will help to accelerate the design of models that are more evidence informed. 

“I started out by saying that we were building a dynamic knowledge base. We consider it dynamic because as school teams implement their evidence-informed designs, we will take those learnings and update our thinking. We've been working with researchers to identify what research exists across all of our questions but what is super exciting is that as we learn, we can feed that information back to researchers —  thereby accelerating progress in our field.”

Read more about Transcend at: transcendeducation.org