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Q&A with Daphannie Stephens
Associate Director of School and District Services
Daphannie Stephens joined PartnersSI in September
2007 to lead our school services team. Prior to joining PartnersSI,
Daphannie was involved with the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable
Schools (BayCES) for nine years, first as a Project Manager for
the small schools initiative in Oakland Unified School District
and most recently as a School Change Facilitator, where she coached
school leaders to improve school performance. Daphannie brings
extensive experience to her new role at PartnersSI in leadership
coaching, strategic planning, program analysis and evaluation,
and managing change. She received her BA and MA in Education from
UC Berkeley and completed the administrative credential program
from the Principal Leadership Institute at UC Berkeley.
What challenges do public
schools and districts face in providing a high-quality education
to our African American, Latino and English Learner students?
The most predominant challenge is to institutionalize
the belief system that African American, Latino and English Learners
are highly intellectual students capable of engaging the most
rigorous instruction and meeting any standard set before them.
The second challenge is to develop the will to accept nothing
less but a high quality education for all students. The third
is to equip teachers with the skills, strategies and collaborative
and reflective practices that will allow them to adequately address
the complexities that they face.
What value does an organization
like PartnersSI bring to these schools and districts?
It's been my experience that everyone working in
public education has a full time job and then some. With this
kind of workload it's easy to get bogged down, lose your sense
of perspective and begin to focus on the urgent things as opposed
to the important ones. PartnersSI brings a fresh perspective,
is positioned to continue to see the whole picture throughout
the year and is able to provide resources and expertise to strategic
and important areas of the work that have often been underfunded
and overlooked. These include improving the quality of teaching
and the strength of leadership, and developing a results-oriented
culture for continuous improvement.
Tell us more about your
role at PartnerSI.
As the Associate Director of School and District
Services, my job is to ensure that our work is meeting the needs
of our school and district partners and implemented at a high
level of quality and rigor. Ultimately, I am charged with making
sure that our approach, the practices we are engaging and the
services we provide are achieving our intended outcome of increased
achievement for African American, Latino and English Learners.
Partners in School Innovation
is in a period of growth, with expanded partnership in San Jose,
new program initiatives and a talented staff to serve our schools
and districts well. Why is this an exciting time to be a part
of PartnersSI?
This is an organization committed to addressing
reform at the classroom level and I think that the thorough thinking
and research that has been dedicated to the work is paying off.
This is a learning organization. PartnersSI actually practices
the strategies that it asks classroom teachers to employ. We check
our practices against the resulting data and the best practices
are expanded.
Because of this our achievement trajectory is increasing
every year; in some instances it has acutally doubled. The more
we learn about what works, and the faster we can take it to scale,
the more steadily our results begin to increase. If this progress
continues at a consistent rate you can actually point to a time
and place not too far in the future when the achievement gap will
be closed in the districts we are serving. That is exciting. More
importantly, PartnersSI is positioned to help students have a
more meaningful experience in the classroom through supporting
teachers to address student's individual learning needs and offer
a broader range of instructional and assessment strategies that
will promote accelerated, relevant, engaging education.
Articles in this issue (Dec 2007):
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