This paper from Springpoint draws on research from adolescent psychology, cognitive science, and positive youth development theory and practice. It provides examples of how practitioners can ground their schools in positive youth development theory, and highlights the voices of young people who speak to the impact of intentionally designed, student-centered schools on their lives.

A practical guide for practitioners and communities seeking to reimagine schools. Includes tools and resources that can be used to help design teams understand, design, synthesize, ideate, and iterate.

This brief was developed in response to school designers looking for insights into four areas of student-centered programming and scheduling: designing pathways to graduation that allow for flexibility and programmatic personalization, incorporating asynchronous opportunities for credit accumulation, facilitating a positive school culture and youth development in this context, and creating a staffing plan to meet these objectives. The brief highlights promising and effective practices from NYC’s transfer schools.

As part of Springpoint’s design guidance, implementation support, and technical assistance, partners have many opportunities to visit, observe, and learn from the innovative work of schools around the country.

This guide is a resource for school designers and leaders who would like to visit schools doing innovative work. It includes a diverse array of partners, and has been sourced through visits we’ve done as part of our work, as well as through recommendations from our partners and colleagues.

This video demonstrates, with voices from young people and experts, why youth development matters for schools. It explores best practices and school programs that focus on youth development.

This report explores the practice of mastery-based learning in six high schools in New England. Through profiles, artifacts, and interviews with the schools’ leaders, teachers, and students, the report offers insights into creating innovative, mastery-based schools. The profiles of each school, along with transcripts of the conversations, allow you to “meet” these innovators and explore their success through artifacts, which include competency frameworks, schedules, grading guides, family handbooks, and other useful tools that enable mastery-based learning.

Michele Cahill speaks with Sabrina Evans Ellis (Youth Development Institute) about youth development and its impact on school design. Cahill discusses her wide-ranging experience in designing schools with youth development principles in mind, and ways in which youth development research can support student success in high school, college, and career.

This multimedia monograph was developed by reDesign LLC in collaboration with Springpoint. It profiles Bronx Arena High School, an innovative, competency-based high school serving historically marginalized youth in New York City.

The monograph explores the practice of Bronx Arena, and their competency-based, technology-enabled approach. The school’s mission is to support and empower over-age, under-credited students to achieve academic success so they can earn a high school diploma and graduate prepared to enter college, post-secondary training, or a career path that matches their personal and professional goals and aspirations. The school is seeing remarkable results in only its fifth year since it’s founding.

This in-depth examination of cognitive research on learning covers achievement motivation, school engagement, and student voice. The chapter on Achievement Motivation does much to dispel the myth that some students are simply not motivated to learn, explains the relationship between effort and achievement, and also takes on student failure from the motivational perspective.

This paper is a codification of the successful South Brooklyn Community High School, a high school in NYC serving off-track students and achieving striking results. The paper includes sections on school planning and design, building community support and utilizing community-based organizations in schools, using youth development to develop effective instructional models,
post-graduate planning, professional development practices, and accountability planning.

This report aims to build a common understanding of young people’s developmental needs from early childhood through young adulthood and proposes a developmental framework of the Foundations for Young Adult Success. The framework is the result of synthesizing research, theory, and practice knowledge from a range of disciplines and approaches.

This video profiles South Brooklyn Community High School. It includes interviews with students, graduates, teachers, and leaders who discuss the school’s approach to serving over-age and under-credited students in an environment that embodies positive youth development.

This research paper includes: profiles of successful alternative schools, a discussion of the primary person approach, best practices on engaging young adult and returning learners, advice for post-graduation planning, and strategies for establishing and maintaining school and community partnerships.

This video from the Colorado Legacy Foundation discusses the key aspects of partnering with students to create a powerful, positive school culture.

This report explores the role of noncognitive factors in shaping school performance. It presents research on five factors—academic behavior, academic perseverance, academic mindsets, learning strategies, and social skill—and examines the impact that each has on academic performance. It also makes the argument about the false dichotomy between cognitive and noncognitive factors, presenting a strong case for how the factors might all fit together.

This video animation from Leaving to Learn explains, from the student’s point of view, ten expectations students should have about how schools can address their needs for engagement, relationships, and opportunities to pursue their personal interests.

This paper guides school designers in planning for a new school launch, with a focus on the unique opportunities and challenges related to having varied grade compositions in a new school model.

Geared toward educators, administrators, and policymakers, this guide provides recommendations that focus on reducing high school dropout rates. Strategies presented include identifying and advocating for at-risk students, implementing programs to improve behavior and social skills, and keeping students engaged in the school environment.

This overview explores the rationale behind mastery learning, an approach that breaks subject matter and learning content into units with clearly specified objectives that are pursued until they are achieved. Learners work through each block of content in a series of sequential steps.

Discussion of the current “state of affairs” of accountability in alternative education and the ways in which accountability can help ensure that the needs of at-risk students are met across all settings.

One strategy for getting students back on the path to graduation is Competency-Based Education (CBE). This brief provides an overview of strategies for supporting over-age and under-credited students using CBE. Especially helpful is a graphic on page 2 outlining the common policy components and approaches to CBE and those for supporting off-track students.

This report documents the pilot phase of a promising NYC professional development initiative designed to build the capacity of school leaders and teachers to prepare the city’s most vulnerable high school students to master the Common Core.

Meta-cognition and self-regulation approaches (sometimes known as “learning to learn” approaches) aim to help learners think about their own learning more explicitly. This is usually done by teaching pupils specific strategies to set goals and monitor and evaluate their own academic development. Self-regulation means managing one’s own motivation toward learning. The intention is often to give pupils a repertoire of strategies to choose from during learning activities.

This draft plan represents an initial step in identifying strategies for federal collaboration and provides a basis for future actions related to positive outcomes for youth.

This ebook examines the factors contributing to West Brooklyn Community High School’s striking success serving over-age and under-credited students. It highlights practices at WBCHS, including staff hiring, student enrollment, attendance outreach, counseling interventions, and family engagement. In addition, it examines core systems, structures, and practices, with appendices that include sample protocols, template agendas, checklists, and forms to use through each step of the process.

This study provides an overview of how states and state education agencies define alternative education. Broadly speaking, alternative education activities fall outside the traditional K–12 curriculum and frequently serve students who are at risk of school failure. States or school districts individually define and determine the features of their alternative education programs, so the key characteristics of these programs may differ in areas such as target population, setting, services, and structure.

Interventions that target social and emotional learning (SEL) seek to improve the social and emotional dimensions of learning—like interfacing with peers, teachers, family, or community—as opposed to focusing directly on the academic or cognitive elements of learning. This overview, focused on SEL interventions, delves into research, considerations, and cost of implementation.

Mastery-based learning systems prepare students for life after high school by providing targeted learning opportunities that focus on mastering skills and that are responsive
to individual student progress. This publication provides a set of tips, tools, and practices for educators who are committed to getting the best results for students who have struggled in the past. The approach described here is based on the work of the educators at Bronx Arena High School, a school serving overage, under-credited high school students in the South Bronx. The practices were developed through the New York City Transfer School Common Core Institute, in partnership with reDesign and Eskolta School Research and Design.

The way in which teachers engage in two-way, formative, skill-aligned feedback with students is central to student learning. Indeed, it is one of the most influential factors identified in education research. This publication describes a set of practices and tools for educators who are committed to using feedback as a powerful way of supporting students, particularly those who struggle academically. The feedback practices and tools described in this monograph have worked for Bronx Haven High School, where they were developed during participation in an innovative New York City professional development institute for high schools serving overage, under-credited students who have struggled to find success in school.

This publication describes a set of practices and tools designed to build students’ persistence in tackling challenging math tasks. The lessons and insights described here, however, extend beyond the math classroom and can be applied across content areas. When educators use a consistent, structured approach to supporting student persistence—fostering a growth mindset and providing instruction on independent problem solving, metacognition, and strategies for improvement—students become not only confident in their ability to learn but indeed hungry to learn. The practices and tools described in this monograph worked successfully for North Queens Community High School, and were developed while the school participated
in the Transfer School Common Core Institute, an innovative New York City professional development institute for high schools serving overage, under- credited students who have struggled to find success in school.

Collaborative academic discussion can transform a classroom. Indeed, research indicates that when students regularly speak and listen to their classmates about the meaning of complex texts, the result is improvement in higher-order reading and writing skills as well as increased academic engagement. This publication presents a set of instructional practices and tools that have enhanced the literacy skills of students who were once lagging behind in high school. The tools were developed through the innovative work of Metropolitan Diploma Plus High School during that school’s participation in the New York City Transfer School Common Core Institute, a professional development initiative for schools serving overage, under-credited students who have struggled to find success in school.

This article gives a lens and context to “psychological interventions” that can help students navigate some of the developmental achievements promoted by positive youth development. Yeager and his team inform readers more about the way developmental goals complement academic goals rather than replace or support them. It includes concrete practices that can be built into the design of a school, while also providing some brief theory to help norm understanding.

When designing our school, we decided to literally knock down the walls between classrooms, specialize our staff into academic and non-academic teachers, and use technology to create personalized learning experiences for our students. Our goal was to provide every learner with the right content, at the right time, in the right way—regardless of grade level or arbitrary assignment to a classroom.

This handbook documents the theoretical underpinnings of a powerful teaching and learning model — the Framework for Effective Instruction (FEI) — that serves over-age and under-credited students. The handbook outlines the essential elements of the FEI, and focuses on how they can be adapted and integrated within a transfer school context.

This in-depth study on the impact of a user-designed mindset intervention program on student achievement explores the validity of such programs when replicated. The study focuses on 9th grade students from high schools across the US and Canada and reported promising findings around mindset intervention programs with this population of students. The paper also discusses policy and school-based recommendations utilizing the information and data found.

A study by the Massachusetts Advocates for Children that highlights the impact trauma has on children and their learning. This study defines trauma and indicators of trauma in students, which are not always as obvious as many believe. More importantly, it provides recommendations for how school can be a place that is responsive and supportive in helping students navigate the far-reaching social, emotional, and academic effects of past trauma. A great beginning for anyone interested in learning environments responsive to trauma.