Disrupting Inequitable Assessment & Instruction.
When I left my teaching position, I was determined to contribute to larger conversations about the inequitable systems that had shaped my classroom as a public educator in diverse middle and high schools in Brooklyn. My research has strong roots in practice, addressing the perpetuation of inequity for underserved youth.
Disrupting Design.
Designing for Joy
This piece explores the process of co-designing for equity in a classroom, including ways of tracing the consequences of design decisions and pivots taken with regard to design conflicts. We explore the use of equity trails (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010)—methods of collaboratively aligning social justice goals with instructional design, even as various community members have disparate or conflicting notions of social justice—in classroom social design research.
Free article access linked below!
Disrupting Assessment.
Dialogic Assessment
Instead of relying on rubrics or feedback decoupled from in-the-moment writing, dialogic assessment (Beck, 2018) is a humanizing and individualized method of teaching writing which brings together both instruction and assessment. I worked with a research team led by PI Sarah Beck to develop this method across NYC and Jersey City public secondary classroom spaces with teacher-student pairs to study issues of scaffolding, literary reading, and student agency (Jones & Beck, 2020; Jones, Storm & Beck, under review; Beck, Jones, Storm & Smith, 2020; Beck, Jones, Storm, Torres et al., 2020; Beck, Jones & Storm, 2019). Our work examines how teachers can work alongside students in formative assessment contexts to make effective instructional decisions in moment-to-moment interactions to support individualized and humanizing instruction for youth.
Assessment Use Argument
I wrote an Assessment Use Argument (AUA) critiquing local NYCDOE performance measures contributing to inequitable assessment ecosystems that negatively shaped my practice, which I submitted to a state-level journal (Jones, 2019) as well as the NYCDOE Central Office. This paper explored the problematic consequences of the assessment and urged educational leaders to consider its place in larger assessment ecosystems
Disrupting Instruction.
Reading Programs
I was hired by the NYCDOE as a mixed-methods consultant to evaluate a city-wide elementary clinical reading program within their larger Universal Literacy initiative. I was the primary in-the-field researcher documenting the rollout of the 1st and 2nd grade program in schools across all five boroughs, collecting and analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data. At the conclusion of the evaluation, I presented recommendations to policymakers and organizational stakeholders about the ways this clinical reading program played out within larger literacy ecosystems, including ways that it continued to reify inequitable literacy outcomes.
Linguistic Ideologies
To work against standard language ideologies that reify hierarchies of academic language, I analyzed my undergraduate emerging teachers’ poetic discourses in online Slack environments with implications for how teachers and teacher educators can more effectively foster equitable and social justice-oriented language ideologies in participatory digital spaces (Jones, 2020).