High school educators shape Stanford effort to extend pathways from under-resourced communities to college

How do you teach a Stanford course without setting foot on campus?

Since September 2021, high school teachers working with Stanford Digital Education (SDE) have done just that: They have brought Stanford courses into their classrooms, and opened their students’ eyes to new possibilities, while enabling them to earn both Stanford and high school credits. This effort has required that the high school teachers collaborate online with Stanford teaching fellows while using Stanford digital course materials with their students. 

The dual credit program, which is designed specifically for schools in under-resourced communities, has served more than 1,500 students in 35 cities and 17 states. There’s ample evidence that the online relationships between Stanford and its partner high schools have succeeded in delivering high-quality, unique courses. To build on that intense work together in the virtual world, program leaders welcomed their high school colleagues in person last month.

Six teachers and five administrators from participating Title I high schools traveled to Stanford in September — most visiting the campus for the first time — to explore how to create even more meaningful learning experiences and how to scale the courses to reach more learners. They came from Los Angeles; Nashville; Topeka, Kansas; Newark, New Jersey; and Niagara Falls, New York. Teachers attending the workshop had co-taught Stanford courses on civil rights history, computing, and ethics to students in their high school classrooms. 

The Sept. 9 pathways workshop — so called because of its focus on strengthening the pathway from high school to college — had the high school visitors join with members of the Stanford Digital Education team in a series of design thinking exercises led by facilitators from Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, or d.school.

The immediate aim was to elicit information about schools’ needs and course-related challenges — while forging more personal relationships with the staff who implement the program and teach the material.

“We can’t just construct a perfect model from the supply side,” Vice Provost for Digital Education Matthew Rascoff told participants at the start of the workshop, explaining why high school educators’ ideas are needed to shape the growth of the pathways program that he helped to establish. “There’s also the demand side: what is resonating with students,” he said. “This workshop is all about finding opportunities, where there’s some emergent pattern that we can invest in, grow, and amplify.”

Drawing on classroom experience to imagine new supports for students

The brainstorming that occurred ran the gamut from the personal to the pedagogical. It started with an exercise in which individual participants identified changes they could make to their regular routines to realize greater fulfillment in their lives. It ended with the participants being divided into small groups and crafting rough “artifacts” that expressed ideas for transforming pathways to higher education. In between, the educators engaged in critiques of the Stanford dual enrollment program and responded to prompts about hypothetical scenarios, such as how to spend $100 million in one year to transform the program or what steps to follow if looking ahead 100 years.

Participants imagined school-to-school mentoring, visits to the Stanford campus, internship opportunities in industry, and open-source, modular content that could help prepare students for college, with units on financial aid, applications processes, and the college experience. They wondered if family members could have the chance to learn and contribute beside their children.

The high school educators noted that more outreach to students’ homes could increase enrollment. “If I was a parent who knew that my child could take a Stanford course, I would make sure they were in that course,” declared Kendra Broome, the college and career ready director at Antioch High School just outside of Nashville. “They wouldn’t have the option not to be.” 

Lindsay Humphrey, who has taught Stanford Computer Science 105: Introduction to Computers every fall since September 2021 at Birmingham Community Charter High School in Los Angeles, emphasized the value of being able to teach the same course for several years. One benefit, she told the workshop, was that students who had excelled in the course can return the next year to serve as peer mentors. “For the students who become mentors, it gives them a profound sense of ownership of the course content,” Humphrey said. “And then the students being taught see: here's a student who is just like me. They walked this path, they were successful, and now they are reaching back to help me succeed too.” (For an example, see this video about her former student Frida Gonzalez.) 

Teachers also emphasized the importance of receiving Stanford support in preparing to co-teach courses that are new to them. Sara Schafer, who has taught Searching Together for the Common Good for two years at Topeka High School, appreciated receiving training with Stanford lecturer Greg Watkins before the term began: “If I had just been handed what this philosophy professor thought was important, I would have gone, Okay, I don't really get why any of this has anything to do with me.” To be an effective teacher of the course, “I had to see the vision and be trained,” she said.

Joining forces for systemic change

SDE’s pathways program is made possible through collaboration with the nonprofit National Education Equity Lab, which helps universities offer their courses to students in high schools serving historically underserved communities. It’s a great chance for high school students to be challenged by rigorous college-level material and to show that they can handle it. In SDE’s dual enrollment courses, classroom teachers lead lessons in tandem with a teaching fellow — often a Stanford undergraduate who has taken the course — following curriculum and assignments developed by Stanford faculty. Students watch lectures asynchronously and have the option of attending office hours with teaching fellows over Zoom. 

But the SDE–Ed Equity Lab courses provide students with more than a bright mark in their transcripts. It’s about helping to make the education system more equitable, and that mission provided the backdrop for the workshop.

“What would it look like if every kid had access to the education they needed, and how could institutions like Stanford be a part of that?” Priscilla Fiden, associate vice provost for digital education, asked the group at the start of the workshop. “What would success look like? What are the immediate next steps that we can take separately and together?” 

Over the course of the day, participants scribbled their ideas on dozens of post-its and placed them on poster sheets dedicated for comments about different elements of the pathways program. “We are swimming in post-its,” Fiden said after the event. “The teachers and administrators had so many great ideas. Now SDE needs to follow through.” 

Some suggestions will be easy to address. For instance, teachers and administrators mentioned that after their students left for college, they had nowhere to turn if their college was unfamiliar with the Stanford credits earned in the SDE courses. SDE is now going to provide a dedicated email address for students to use when they encounter such issues.

Cindy Berhtram, SDE director of project strategy and operations, added that the SDE team already is looking to follow up on the suggestion to make stronger connections with students’ parents. She and her colleagues are also working on some of the other suggestions, such as arranging for more preparation for teachers and providing schools with earlier course assignments. “While some of these changes will take time to achieve, others we can accomplish or start acting on in the next year,” she said. “That’s energizing to me.”

Questions remain about how to create a longer-term plan to tackle some of the more ambitious suggestions from the workshop. SDE leaders and the high school educators have been communicating about next steps. The visitors are going to be asked to join a high school advisory council to support the ongoing effort. “We may not have all the answers yet, but we are creating a community that can figure them out,” Berhtram said.

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Laura McBain, managing director of the Stanford d.school, and Louie Montoya, lead learning experience designer at the d.school, facilitated the workshop, while Olatunde Sobomehin, co-author of Creative Hustle, led a session.

Thank you to the pathways workshop participants 

Antioch High School, Antioch, Tennessee
Kendra Broome, college and career ready director 
Nekesha Burnette, principal

Birmingham Community Charter High School, Los Angeles
Isaac Alatorre, administrative director
Lindsay Humphrey, teacher

Reseda Charter High School, Los Angeles
Mario Flores, teacher

Niagara Falls High School, Niagara Falls, New York
Molly Chiarella, teacher
Bryan Rotella, assistant principal

Uncommon Schools North Star Academy Charter, Newark, New Jersey
Michael Taubman, teacher

Topeka High School, Topeka, Kansas
Dustin Dick, principal
Sara Schafer, teacher

Westchester Enriched Sciences Magnets, Los Angeles
Kalilah Dixon, teacher