We’re Rebranding!

A Letter from Highlander Institute & Highlander Charter School Leadership:

After 18 years of our evolving partnership, Highlander Charter School and Highlander Institute have decided to move forward as two independent organizations.

This summer, Highlander Institute will be announcing our exciting new name and visual identity!

Highlander Institute and Highlander Charter School have shared a deep connection to centering students, creating engaging classrooms, and empowering individual learners. We have also shared social justice as a core value, symbolized in our names through a joint reference to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, paying tribute to their ongoing legacy.

As the first independent public charter school in Rhode Island, the Highlander Charter School has been an incredible partner and lab school for the Institute team. The partnership built on the Charter School’s mission to serve as a catalyst for social change, and its vision to design and provide research-based quality education opportunities to all learners. Both organizations shared a deep commitment to providing all children the opportunity and support necessary to meet their full potential.

The Institute’s growth and evolution was made possible by the Highlander Charter School Board. Their decision to merge the organizations in 2006 solidified the Institute’s standing and paved the way for our future as an organization capable of making a significant impact both locally and nationally. Over the past 18 years, Highlander Institute programming has shifted from a focus on literacy to education technology to personalized learning to our current model supporting Culturally Responsive School Change. We have consistently prioritized student-centered learning outcomes, innovation, community engagement, and improving student and family experiences at school.

This throughline continues to provide the foundation for our frameworks around instructional equity, inclusive change management, and liberatory data. We are proud to share that our partnerships are currently generating our most compelling student and teacher outcomes ever — particularly for historically marginalized student populations.

While 2023 will be our last year as Highlander Institute, our talented team and our approach to strengthening education systems will remain intact. We will launch our independent organization with all of the empathy, creativity, and impact that our stakeholders have come to associate with our work. Stay tuned for our big name announcement! And if you’re not already a newsletter subscriber, sign up now to stay informed.

Highlander Charter School and the rebranded Highlander Institute will keep growing, learning, and improving to better serve our communities. As independent organizations, we welcome this next chapter as a chance to redefine how we will continue to collaborate and support each other in the future.

Warmly,

Rose Mary Grant & the Highlander Charter School Team
Shawn Rubin & the Highlander Institute Team


Learn more about how Highlander Institute’s Culturally Responsive School Change model can generate more equitable outcomes for your school.

Scaling For Impact: Highlander Institute Goes to Harvard

During the first week of March, a five-member team from Highlander Institute attended the Scaling For Impact program at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Over the course of three days, 18 teams in the education space from across the country came together to discuss case studies, explore frameworks and guidance for scaling, pitch our work and receive feedback, and hear from expert faculty and advisors. This was the first time the program has been held since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the palpable energy and excitement of the in-person learning experience was electric. In reflecting on this experience, our team highlighted the following takeaways:

Investing in Deep Work IS Scale

Prior to this experience, when hearing the word “scale”, our minds typically jumped to the idea of expanding our work to more schools, more students, and more geographies. But as Chris Dede framed for us in his session, the education system is not like a fast food franchise, and people are not french fries. In many instances, focusing on implementing your model in depth through aligned, multi-year partnerships is a dimension of scale in its own right, preparing you to meet the needs of a local context.

Our Culturally Responsive School Change Model has been evolving, becoming more comprehensive since 2019. The disruptions brought on by the pandemic shifted our capacity but did not shift our values and our commitment to centering student experiences, shifting instruction through an instructional equity lens, and elevating stakeholder voices in decision-making. And as showcased in our 2022 Annual Report, this model is working, with our most successful stories of impact yet. Our approach is complex and purposefully aims to work amidst multiple layers (classroom, school, district, student, family, and community). It felt exciting to see this vision validated as we continue to build momentum.

Stories Bridge the Individual Why with Collective Care

One of the strongest rationales for any nonprofit’s work can be found in stories of how the work is experienced by individuals. Within our partner schools, stories help teachers understand how our professional learning may feel, the insights that might be gained, and the impact that is possible — and build excitement for implementation. Stories of students help us test our assumptions and stay focused on the student experience. If we don’t explain our services rooted in these stories, we’re missing a crucial opportunity for connection with people who are hearing about Highlander Institute for the first time.

The very human nature of the field of education makes storytelling an even more compelling conduit between the realities of today and the possibilities of tomorrow. As Irvin Scott emphasized in his talk during the Harvard program, successful organizations have a collective story, and ensure that all members see themselves in the organization’s mission and vision. We are excited to spend time over the coming months to infuse more storytelling into our professional learning services, communications work, presentations, and meetings.

Critical Friends are Invaluable

By creating opportunities to pitch ideas and receive feedback, Scaling for Impact reinforced the importance of external stakeholder perspectives. We were matched with a faculty advisor (shout out to the thoughtful guidance of Brittany Tabor Butler) who joined our conversations all three days and asked probing questions to clarify and push our thinking. After sharing our theory of change (day 1), our organizational identity (day 2), and our next steps action plan (day 3), we heard warm and cool feedback from fellow teams grappling with similar tasks. It was a powerful reminder that our team, who is so authentically invested in our work, should also remember to step back and ask others: What’s resonating? What’s missing or confusing? How can we continue to improve?

Members of Highlander Institute meet with their faculty advisor, Brittany Tabor Butler, during a Scaling For Impact Team Time session.

The Highlander Institute team is privileged to work with an amazing group of committed school partners who are deeply invested in our school change model and have been instrumental in helping us refine and improve. The work is challenging, and every time we are pushed to clarify our rationale, evidence base, objective — or co-design a way through systemic barriers — we become better equipped to support sustainable school change.

We are grateful for the incredible opportunity the Scaling for Impact retreat provided, and are eager to continue to embed these focus areas in our daily work streams. For more information about the program, please explore Scaling For Impact: Strategies to Enhance and Expand What Works in Education.

A608 After Hours Podcast Episode featuring Malika Ali

A608 After Hours Podcast

Malika Ali joined hosts Uche Amaechi and Monica C. Higgins for the January 26, 2023 episode of A608 After Hours, a podcast from the Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Learning Course out of Harvard University.

The podcast aims to bring voices from the field into the classroom to inspire, inform and ignite leadership dedicated to wrestling with today’s stacked challenges. Each week they interview a guest that is doing this important work and discuss how course concepts come to life in the field. Guests span multiple roles across different sectors and institutions, and come from varied backgrounds.

Click here to listen to the full episode.

from the episode

Exciting Work We’re Supporting in Schools

“We know from the research that kids in identity-safe classrooms who feel a sense of trust and belonging do better, their outcomes improve…It’s not just about a toolbox of strategies anymore. It’s really connecting to our kids’ humanity, allowing them to feel seen, understood, and valued, and to understand that we’re all in this together.” 

– Malika Ali, 1-26-23 Episode, A608 After Hours Podcast

On Education & Purpose

“Education is not just a path to social mobility or a way out of poverty. It is about wonder, curiosity, seeing the beauty in the world, and making the world better by improving our own surroundings.

We are a team of learners, not just in service of the task at hand, but because there are so many beautiful things in the world to learn about. We nurture that at Highlander Institute, and that translates into our work with schools, districts, and kids.”

– Malika Ali

ABOUT MALIKA

Malika Ali is passionate about community-driven change management to scale and sustain culturally responsive education driven by a liberatory data approach. As Chief Innovation Officer at Highlander Institute, Malika leads program visioning articulated through a comprehensive model for school change. She was a Rhode Island District Teacher of the Year, served on Governor Raimondo’s STEAM & Equity in Educator Preparation and was named one of the nation’s top emerging and inspirational Black leaders in edtech by LearnLaunch. As a daughter of strong and brilliant Eritrean refugees, she has spent her life critiquing the systems that perpetuate educational inequity and is proud to be part of the struggle to ensure that all children have access to and can take advantage of an empowering education.

Windows and Mirrors: Malika Ali featured on Education Suspended Podcast

Education Suspended: Windows & Mirrors with Malika Ali

Malika Ali joined hosts Jessica Pfeiffer and Steve Graner for Episode 49 of Education Suspended, a podcast focused on exploring, engaging, and dialoguing with those in education who are passionate about changing the status quo and evolving the archaic system we have inherited.

The podcast explores Malika’s transgenerational story, which is rooted in the pursuit of education and drives her own desire to empower students. Malika discusses the importance of instruction that is relevant to students and curriculum that provides both windows and mirrors — for students to see themselves in lessons and better understand how they fit into the world.

from the episode

Defining Relevance

“Relevance is about: 1) Not just having the learning be abstract; and 2) Not just centered on dominant groups…We have everyone look at their curriculum, audit it for relevance, see does it affirm student identities and elevate non-dominant perspectives, and create space for students to have the windows (to see other cultures and ways of being) and mirrors (to see themselves reflected in the curricula).” 

– Malika Ali, Episode 49: Windows and Mirrors, Education Suspended Podcast

How to Design More Equitable Schools

“I believe that communities have the power and capacity within them to successfully and effectively solve whatever challenges come up. We need to build the spaces for them to collaborate, to learn, to design, to do, and to lead. The more those spaces exist, the more we see innovative, relevant, meaningful change happen for school communities by school communities. I love that concept of ‘nothing about us without us’. So we never want to be coming in saying ‘this is what people should do’. We can come in and bring resources, tools, research, and support. We can empower and provide spaces of learning and in facilitating that, find that the brilliance is there – and it’s always been there. People just want the spaces to talk.”

– Malika Ali

About Malika

Malika is passionate about community-driven change management to scale and sustain culturally responsive education driven by a liberatory data approach. As the Chief Innovation Officer at Highlander Institute, she leads program visioning articulated through a comprehensive model for school change. She was a Rhode Island District Teacher of the Year, served on Governor Raimondo’s STEAM and Equity in Educator Preparation Committee, and was named one of the nation’s top emerging and inspirational Black leaders in education innovation by Learn Launch. Malika holds an M.Ed. in Education Policy and Management from Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.A. in Public Health from Brown University.

As a daughter of strong and brilliant Eritrean refugees, Malika has spent her life critiquing the systems that perpetuate educational inequity, and she is proud to be a part of the struggle to ensure that all children have access to, and can take advantage of, an empowering education.

2023 NCME Annual Meeting

Join Karina Rodriguez (Highlander Institute), Lauren Kendall Brooks (AERDF), and Teaira McMurtry (University of Alabama at Birmingham) online for a virtual session as part of the 2023 NCME Annual Meeting.

Session Title: Beyond Basketball & Bodegas: Pursuing True Cultural Validity in Formative Assessment

Date & Time: Thursday, March 30, 2023 from 1:00PM – 2:30PM CT / 2:00PM – 3:30PM ET

Description: Tropes related to basketball, clothing, hair, and superfluous community contextual details permeate the narratives that constitute “multicultural” test items from teacher-derived formative assessment to large-scale assessment tools. As instrument developers pursue inclusion and representation through test content, they walk a fine line between being complicit in using racist, ableist, and gendered language and creating a test environment that honors the linguistic and cultural heritage of its intended users. Through the eyes of a community of developers brought together for a new inclusive, equity-informed R&D initiative, this session will feature lessons learned from the implementation of a culture-forward approach to validity for K-12 formative assessment. This panel will highlight how cultural validity must expand to include the positive experiences of multi-generational American students who sit at the intersections of oppressed identities, and why our evaluative processes that govern some of the most critical gateways within their educational experiences must change. Through a dialogic process with attendees, this session will feature how we can collectively tackle the better psycholinguistic approaches in technology-enhanced and technology free assessment prototypes and why community must be a partner in this process in order to expand a new approach to asset-based, culturally representative assessment content.

2023 School Redesign in Action Conference

Join Malika Ali (Chief Innovation Officer) and Shawn Rubin (Executive Director) in Newport, RI for the 2023 School Redesign in Action Conference, hosted by Great Schools Partnership.

Session Title: Culturally Responsive School Change

Date & Time: Tuesday, March 28, 2023 from 10:30AM – 11:45AM ET

Description: Collaborating with students, parents, and teachers within a school improvement process increases dialogue, improves solutions, and strengthens accountability across a building. Highlander Institute’s partnership with Baychester Middle School has provided a strong foundation for sustainable instructional shifts. Participants will learn how this school reflects on student experience data, co-constructs a culturally responsive vision, and implements high-leverage strategies at scale – and how these moves have improved student experiences and academic outcomes.