Learning communities provide unique opportunities for discussion, reflection, and growth. This is one of the reasons collaborative learning networks have been a focus of Learning Forward’s work for decades.

In the past year, COVID-19 has presented many new challenges for educators, not only in teaching and connecting with students but in their own learning from one another. The necessity of physical distancing has required all of us who engage in networks to be nimble and adapt our strategies to an online environment.

Although frustrating, this need can be turned into opportunities to productively change the way we work. Now is the time to redefine not just how students learn, but also how we as educators create systems and processes to better support adult learning, collaboration, and collective impact. We can double down on the “why” of engaging in networked improvement efforts to benefit students, families, and communities.

That is the philosophy of the Texas Network for School Improvement (TxNSI) Hub, a collaboration among Learning Forward, Educate Texas, and the Dana Center to enhance middle school educational opportunities, especially in math. The hub supports a network of Texas schools working to increase the percentage of Black, Latinx, and middle schoolers experiencing poverty who are academically and behaviorally on track to graduate high school ready for college and career success. The hub focuses on supporting schools to use continuous improvement processes to accelerate equitable changes.

We believe that those processes can still thrive in the unexpectedly virtual world in which we now find ourselves. To understand how, Michelle Bowman, Learning Forward’s vice president, networks & content design, recently participated in a panel discussion about the pivots needed to support learning in an online setting. The other panelists were Ryan Gallagher, director of continuous improvement at High Tech High in San Diego, California, and Karen Zeribi, founder and executive director of Shift, which uses improvement science and human-centered design to support systems change.

To continue the learning from the panel, convening partner Catalyst:Ed developed the report A New Paradigm for Collaboration: Virtual Network Support to capture the lessons from network leaders on facilitating virtual network support and collaboration through an equity lens. The tool on the following pages is based on that report.

As we stressed during the panel and in the report, it is essential to embed equity throughout the work of continuous improvement, whether in person or online. Having difficult conversations about race and equity was already daunting in person. The addition of the remote setting can seem like an insurmountable barrier.

However, given the demands of a global pandemic, the disparate impact this has on people of color and communities experiencing poverty, and the systemic racism that underlies that impact, we must ensure that we are having these conversations, even if we have to have them in a virtual space. Now is the time to open our eyes to differences, take time to acknowledge and appreciate them, and learn from them.

You can use the tools here to create an online space that makes it possible to focus on continuous improvement with an equity lens.

We encourage users of the tools to keep in mind a comment Bowman made during the panel discussion: “We need to go slow to go fast.” It takes time to build relationships, establish trust, and support one another. Taking that time will allow long-term progress and ongoing continuous improvement.

Virtual network support tools can be downloaded here.