A unique aspect of the League is its ability to forge connections between districts, creating opportunities for two or more districts who may be facing similar challenges to collaborate around solutions and learn from one another. Examples of the power of these collaborations exist across the League.
Dr. Nathan Fisher, superintendent of Roselle School District (New Jersey), joined Digital Promise’s RAPID AI cohort to “find out if there were AI tools and solutions that would support how we’re preparing our kids for college, careers, and life, and also how we will keep our teachers up to speed with the various tools that are readily on the market.”
Kayla Swanton, director of instructional technology and library services at Adams 12 Five Star Schools (Colorado), is participating in Digital Promise’s Digital Equity Working Group to “begin to create a more cohesive vision of how digital learning exists in support of equity and how all of that work is connected. Our goals were centered around learning from other systems and how they’ve approached this work.”
Carol-Ann Winans, executive director of curriculum and instruction at Wantagh Union Free School District (New York), joined the League Learning Collaborative on student voice and engagement to “provide an environment in which we were truly gathering both the voice of the teacher and student observing exactly what we were trying to look into.”
These three leaders recently reflected on how this collaborative work with Digital Promise researchers and fellow League members are making a tangible impact in their communities.
Kayla Swanton, Director of Instructional Technology and Library Services, Adams 12 Five Star Schools (Colorado)
Swanton: A large part of my role is working with colleagues in IT who don’t necessarily have a background in education, but all of their work exists to support education. I also work very closely with school leaders who come in with a different lens of equity. One of my goals was to start to bridge those two spaces. The most salient “aha” that I had was in collaboration with my IT colleagues: equity doesn’t just mean equitable access. The framework that Digital Promise provided us emphasizes that access is one aspect of digital equity and there are all of these other pieces that exist around it. When I put that in front of my team, some of them were like, “Oh, I really hadn’t thought of these other things,” and it has led to really robust conversations around talent management of professionals in our schools and how we share those allocations. I’m excited to see where we’ll be able to take that. For next school year, we’re also building a two-way communication platform for teachers to be able to text with families and have it automatically translate.
Winans: Julie [the Student Voice and Engagement LLC facilitator] always talks about providing an environment for vulnerability. How do you establish an environment where everybody who is involved in the conversation is vulnerable enough not to say what they think the audience wants to hear, but to say what they want to say? You do this by structure, norms, and having a very clear purpose for what you are discussing. So in my case, our goal was “What is engagement and what does it look like?” And we made it very clear that we wanted to hear what the students and teachers each had to say, and took the suggestion of doing a pre- and post-conversation. In the pre-conversation, we talked about the experience: Teachers were nervous about going into somebody else’s classroom. Students were nervous about being followed around by a teacher all day. The more people shared, the more vulnerable people got.
Fisher: An approach we didn’t have early on was our teacher cohorts, really bringing teachers together and sharing out. We realized that we needed to be grade- and content-specific in our efforts. There are a lot of creative and immersive tools out there that people have access to that really shows the use of AI supporting the instructional side. But it helps us to make sure this is something that’s adaptable to our district’s needs. The great thing about the League is it gives you an opportunity to connect to resources that have been vetted and are grounded in research. They’re not random tools that you’re getting exposed to because it’s being vetted by your colleagues and your peers who are doing this innovative work.
Winans: So, I’m a new leader in terms of district leadership. Getting to listen to superintendents who have been fully vested and spending time with
Carol-Ann Winans, Executive Director of Curriculum and Instruction, Wantagh Union Free School District (New York)
real issues in their schools grounded me in a reality of the whole picture that comes with district administrative positions, seeing things through different perspectives, and the importance of thoughtful planning and execution. This gave me a lens to figure out that shift in practice [from teacher to administrator].
Fisher: This project has really awakened my leadership team because it forces everybody to think outside the box. One of the things they’ve been doing is identifying AI tools that could help elevate teaching and learning opportunities within their respective content areas. Our goal is to see if it’s measurable in our student outcomes. With AI implementation, we have increased our communications to our multilingual families because of the translation tools we’ve been using. Even for videos I’ve shot of myself speaking English, but changing my language to Spanish and Haitian Creole. Those analytics are high and parents are leaning in. That’s something I can hone in on—it gives me great pride to know that people are reviewing that information and responding. That means I’m reaching those families.
Swanton: The Digital Equity Framework is really, really robust. I keep the tab open to it because I peek at it often. There was one meeting…where we worked through a protocol of self-evaluation with different aspects of the framework. That meeting was probably the richest conversation we had because not only had we internalized the meat of the framework, but we dug in. It enabled us to identify a lot of celebrations, but also gave us some ahas of, okay, we need to either keep doing this or we need to start doing something else at some point.
Fisher: This AI cohort gave us an opportunity to have in-depth policy conversations. The kicker for my major takeaways was that we had leaders that were way far ahead of me in their district but they were telling me, “You can’t just focus on one AI policy.” You need to look at every policy as it relates to AI because every policy has some element to it, whether it’s business, operations, maintenance, a whole lot of other things. I grabbed my head and said, “Oh, I got a lot of work ahead of us,” but it also established momentum.
Dr. Nathan Fisher, Superintendent of Roselle School District (New Jersey)
Fisher: One of the things that really started moving me through my work was realizing that we had to engage our community stakeholders more. First it was a small group, and as I started talking to colleagues across the country, we were really talking about bringing in more people—community members, parents, students, and it just changed the entire context of this work. We had an opportunity to bring more folks into the conversation, to really talk about their uses for AI, and even our local chamber of commerce to find out what they are using in the workforce. It wasn’t something I was thinking about tapping into, but that extension beyond the school community was what we needed to be able to lock into.
Swanton: We had a few conversations around the role of technology and the learning environment as it relates to school funding. Technology needs to be part of what that measurement looks like at the district level. Because if it’s not helping students gain more success in those spaces, it’s ultimately not serving the district because it is a large investment. You can’t measure student success just in terms of the technology because it comes through in all of these other places, and for a large system like ours, it’s hard to wrap your head around what that data would look like. It was reassuring to hear how other leaders in the working group were grappling with that too.
Winans: Students need to be valued and have a true connection to what they are learning, and empowering students makes them more available for learning. The students kept on saying, “It doesn’t matter if you like the teacher, what matters is that you knew that teacher was pushing you to the best of your ability.” They also said, “It’s inevitable that you’re going to have a teacher that you may not mesh well with, but if that teacher puts in planning and has routines and switches modalities, it’s just the same as being engaged in a classroom with a teacher that they have a very good relationship with.” So it’s that balance between relationship, planning, and efficacy.
Are you interested in tapping into collaborative learning opportunities across the League of Innovative Schools? We’re now accepting applications for our 2025-26 cohort. Learn more and apply by April 30, 2025.
