For many of our attendees, it’s their favorite part of our digital transition discussion events. The local panel of educators features the region’s (and often the nation’s) brightest and best education minds. In this Midwest edition, we feature Dr. Jessica Dain, Superintendent at Piper Unified School District 203, Dr. Tonya Merrigan, Superintendent at Blue Valley School District #229 and Ivy Nelson, Education Technology Manager at Belton School District #124. You’ll be hanging on every word in this lively and frank discussion, challenging preconceptions in our traditional education thinking.
For example, According to Dr. Dain, “I think for our district, the biggest thing that's come to the top of our discussion is a guaranteed and viable curriculum and moving to a real competency based learning environment that time even is going to change. So, if I'm a fifth grader and I'm proficient at all of the competencies, can I move and start delving into sixth grade? Or if I'm a typical 11th grader and I have mastered all of those priority standards that we feel like the competencies a high school student needs to have before they graduate, let's start college. And so let's bring in those pieces. I think one is the guaranteed and viable curriculum. Competency-based performance-based assessment on this, more than anything because teachers couldn't touch their kids. They had to figure out different ways to assess learning and how to intervene. So I think they've gotten really good at that craft, or it's brought us back to the conversation that now we need to get better. It can't just be our gut anymore, but when we didn't get to use the gut, we realized we needed to assess better. We needed to intervene, have interventions. We've been talking about we're in the industrial revolution 4.0, yet up until this school year, we were still educating in that 1.0, 2.0 model of the manufacturing line.”
