In Spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a sudden rupture in the normal day-to-day of schooling. Predictable structures and ways of doing school came to a halt as leaders and communities moved to rethink possibilities and procedures for the remainder of the 2020–2021 school year and the years to come. Since that time, while many parents and educators have called for the “return to normal,” some education scholars and leaders have called for a broader reimagining of schooling and the pursuit of a “new normal” that breaks from the longstanding patterns of inequities that have only been exacerbated by the current health and political context. As many educators, parents, and families celebrated the return to some version of in-person schooling in 2021–2022, some school leaders pursued opportunities to extend and expand lessons, learnings, and innovations from distance learning. While much of schooling looked the same, notable shifts offered opportunities for greater equity and sustainable change. Promising avenues emerged for future research.
In this brief, we highlight four innovations from the practices of educational leaders as areas for further research: rethinking technology, schooling for the whole child, maintaining deeper family connections, and considering schools within a larger network. We draw from semi-structured interviews with three California K-12 education leaders to illuminate the innovations leaders co-created, witnessed, or hoped for in their district in the pursuit of equitable systems change. We recruited leaders through the 21st Century California School Leadership Academy (21CSLA) and selected a cross-section according to their different leadership positions within school sites and districts. Interviews were recorded and transcribed and then coded with flexible coding. Following coding, we condensed the codes into areas of innovation and selected the four areas most aligned with the purposes of this brief. For each of the innovations below, we highlight perspectives from school leaders. Following, we offer questions corresponding to each innovation for scholars to consider as areas for further research.