On October 11, many attendees of the 11th Annual Conference participated in an Idea Exchange. These small group, informal conversations each brought together up to 10 participants to explore a topic of their choice in health and education, including carrying out the recommendations of Student Success 2025.
These Idea Exchanges provided participants a chance to draw connections between these two “silos,” share and learn collaboratively from others, receive answers to their questions, find ways to get involved, connect work underway, and identify opportunities to make progress. Each group was asked to identify one “Big Idea” —the greatest opportunity for Delaware to make progress over the next decade within their topic.
Check out a distillation of the all the “Big Ideas” below. Feel free to share your favorites and help bring these “Big Ideas” to life!
| Core Area |
Big Idea |
| Early Learning |
- Create a formal relationship between Delaware Stars and the Delaware Division of Libraries for information and resource sharing and for cross-promotion of programs.
|
| Personalized Learning |
- Create a statewide coalition of education units working on development and implementation of competency-based curricula and programming.
|
| System Governance, Alignment, and Performance |
- Use the school restructuring in Christina School District to implement more robust models of educator and administrator support and coordination of student data across health and social services to better support and engage families
- Create a youth-led collaborative stakeholder initiative to empower and develop youth voice beginning with adding a student to every school board
- Create a coalition of stakeholders to determine best practices and coordination of dual enrollment to best serve the students of Delaware
- Build a collaborative with the Kids Department, Office of the Child Advocate, Delaware State Education Association, and Delaware Department of Education to address social emotional learning and trauma in a systematic way
- Create a collaborative of representatives from all Delaware IHEs and teacher preparation organizations to facilitate and combine efforts around increasing teacher diversity and recruitment
|
| Fair and Efficient Funding |
- Communicate to those making financial decisions, like administrators and legislators, the benefits that the arts provide in all areas of education
|
| Educator Support and Development |
- Provide professional learning that meets the needs of in-service teachers, teacher residents, and teacher candidates. Micro credentialing in areas teachers need most such as socioemotional learning, mental health of teachers and students, trauma informed education, and teacher mentoring
- Create a clearinghouse of professional development opportunities that currently exist to align future collaborations
|
| Postsecondary Success |
- Create a culture change in the university, focusing on faculty, staff, and students, to establish clear and concrete entry points for engagement, to increase flexible ongoing experiences year round, and to break transportation barriers
- Feature business leaders in video content that can be used in classroom curricula that demonstrate professional behaviors and workplace readiness skills
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