Maureen Joy Charter School

Demographics

Percentage of students*

Why Maureen Joy Charter School was nominated

Maureen Joy's commitment goes beyond academics; they focus on nurturing the complete well-being of every student. Through innovative, high-quality instruction, collaborative school-community relationships, and fostering a sense of positive self-identity, they create a supportive learning environment where every child can flourish. They are also pushing the envelop on using real-time R&D and community-driven design to continually improve through rapid cycles of learning and prototyping.

Student experience design

A desire to define and measure student success more equitably is the main factor driving the creation of our new model. In the past, Joy’s lens on student outcomes was traditional– it measured all young people by the same standard and relied on state test scores as the main success indicator. These are hallmarks of the industrial model: the mainstream model for education seen in a large majority of schools across the country, which prioritizes obedience and conformity. This model is drastically misaligned to the skills and qualities needed for modern-day careers, and widespread data reveals that the industrial model is reinforcing and compounding the socioeconomic and racial inequities it was founded on. Our Board and leadership chose not to move forward with Joy’s previous model, due to our belief that the industrial model, in any form, is incapable of producing equity. Given how fundamentally incompatible the industrial model is with our vision, we have opted to build an entirely new model from the ground up that centers equity, liberation, and an expanded definition of success. Our redesign team’s first mission was to develop a Portrait of a Learner: an agreed upon set of school-level aspirations for what every young person will know and be able to do by the time they leave Joy. It defines the aims that young people will work towards: Agile, Critically Conscious, Creative, and Collaborative. Developing the Portrait provided an anchor to frame conversations with the Joy community about our collective aspirations for the young people we work with, and to challenge the beliefs that have been held implicitly in Joy’s past ways of operating. Each of our aims is designed with real-world authenticity in mind, so they’re deliberately interdisciplinary, and intentionally combine traditionally academic and non-academic skills. We’ve begun developing sets of indicators that identify the sub-skills within each aim and quantify levels of achievement. In the future, we plan to create robust toolkits for each aim that contain a holistic picture of what it looks like to support young people in developing the aim. In addition to indicators, these toolkits will have guidance for adults as to how to set the conditions for young people to develop and practice the aims. They will also explain the connection between the design decisions in Joy’s new model and the aims themselves, illustrating why we have chosen to allocate time in the way that we have, and how our various practices are aligned to the Portrait. It’s clear that given the scope and content of our Portrait, our model overall will need to look at learning very differently. We believe the best way to grant young people “at-bats” with the aims is to structure learning in an inquiry-based format, where projects are based in real-world design challenges. We believe that this approach to learning positions skills in their authentic context, and puts young people in the driver's seat: two conditions that we view as essential for achieving the aims in our Portrait. We’re particularly interested in exploring inquiry-based learning with a design thinking lens, because we see a lot of philosophical alignment with our beliefs about the purpose of education. Given that we believe education has both a personal and a larger civic purpose, we’re interested in incorporating design thinking as a process that helps young people grow their sense of agency and explore their place as citizens in a democratic society. We are also interested in mixed-age groupings because we believe strongly in personalizing learning for each young person while also nurturing relationships across ages and levels of experience. We’d like to design a learning experience driven by individualized goals and pathways, and move outside of the efficiency-based tradition for same-age groupings. Similarly, we’re inspired by school models that prioritize wide exploration of the arts and other activities typically viewed as extracurricular, and intrigued by the benefits that this could provide for individual growth and identity-development. We’d like to implement a cohort model with mixed ages, with a focus on developing a strong sense of community. We’re interested in integrating our cohort model fully into the “regular” learning structure, so that young people are positioned to access learning opportunities from a place of psychological safety. As we do this work, we intend to stand up an incubator for education innovation here in Durham, where educators across the state and beyond come to learn about what could be possible. We believe that there’s a unique opportunity at Joy, given the high level of support from the Board and leadership, and given the existing talent. In our experience, these conditions are rare and special.

Core Practices

Core Practices	Length of Use
Community And Business Partnerships	5+ years
Family And Community Support Services	5+ years
Competency Framework	less than a year
SEL Integration School-wide	3-4 years

All Practices

Bilingual Assessments

Hiring For Equity And Inclusion Values

Students Access Their Own Data

key reasons for innovating