Community Partnerships
The far-reaching impact of the work of Stanford Graduate School of Education is demonstrated by the many projects that serve as connections to a broad community of educators and leaders. These relationships support teachers, students, policy makers, and other professionals. Their sphere of influence—ranging from local to international—continues to grow.
Challenge Success
Formed in 2007, Challenge Success grew out of the success of the highly successful Stressed Out Students Project at Stanford University. Founded on the belief that real success results from attention to the basic development needs of children and a valuing of different types of skills and abilities, Challenge Success seeks to inform, inspire, and equip youth, parents, and schools to adopt practices to expand options for youth success. The organization offers high-quality professional development workshops for elementary schools, and conferences for schools, parents, and youth to address issues of student health, school engagement, and academic integrity.
East Palo Alto Academy
East Palo Alto Academy is a small public charter high school in the Sequoia Union High School District. The school seeks to prepare traditionally underserved students for college and career by enabling them to graduate with the full array of knowledge, skills and dispositions needed for success, and with the ability to learn independently through their lives. Since it's creation, Stanford has partnered with the school to investigate ways to enhance learning, particularly for low-income students and English Language learners. EPAA serves as a professional development site for the GSE teacher certification program, and GSE faculty work with EPAA students, do workshops at the school and run pilot programs to test new approaches to instruction. Teachers from the high school also receive professional support from programs and faculty at Stanford. Undergraduates at Stanford also tutor EPAA students.
Haas Center for Public Service
The Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University connects academic study with community and public service to strengthen communities and develop effective public leaders. In recent years, the Haas Center and the Graduate School of Education have deepened their partnership through faculty involvement in course development, program design, and related research with the Center's youth and education programs. Graduate School of Education faculty are also involved in the growth of the student public service leadership program, and students are encouraged to become involved in Haas Center community-based educational work.
John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities
The John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities (JGC) partners with communities to research, develop, and disseminate effective practices and models for developing well rounded young people. By bringing together community leaders and sharing new knowledge, JGC supports them in implementing quality programs for and with their young people. Its work is focused in the following San Francisco Bay Area communities: Redwood City, San Mateo County Mid-Coast, Oakland, and San Mateo and Alameda counties.
Ravenswood Reads
Ravenswood Reads supports readers in kindergarten through third grade by pairing Stanford tutors with children to help improve their decoding and comprehension skills. The program focuses on providing a service to schools in East Palo Alto and creating a service-learning experience for Stanford students.
San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD)
The Stanford University and San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Partnership supports and promotes innovative, practical research, and engages practitioners, policy makers, and academics in a dialogue about research findings and implications for data driven decision-making. The partnership helps San Francisco acquire, interpret, and use Stanford research, and enables Stanford to learn from real world practices taking place in San Francisco’s schools, with the goal of advancing student achievement in San Francisco and beyond.
Over 100 Graduate School of Education and SFUSD personnel participate in about 25 different Stanford research and practice projects. Since the the partnership formalized in 2009, the Stanford projects taking place in SFUSD have grown more and more aligned with the priorities of the school district. The partnership produces rich, rigorous research that addresses some of the most pressing problems for San Francisco schools and beyond!
Santa Clara School District
The Learning Differences Initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and Santa Clara Unified School District have signed a Research Practice Learning Partnership agreement to reimagine inclusive education. The partnership covers three newly built schools with diverse demographics: Agnew Elementary School (currently TK-3), Huerta Middle School (currently 6th-7th), and MacDonald High School (currently 9th). Educators, leaders, teacher educators, and researchers will work collaboratively on workforce dilemmas, problems of practice and learning, and innovations based on research addressing learning differences.
Stanford History Education Group
SHEG is a collaboration among many people: full-time staff, graduate student RAs, practicing teachers, and undergraduate volunteers and interns. SHEG sponsors an ongoing research group for students across the university interested in issues of how history is taught and learned. We also host visiting scholars whose work addresses issues of historical understanding and history education.
Stanford Principal Fellows Program
Launched in 2008, the Stanford Principals Fellows Program is a year-long professional program designed to challenge and strengthen exceptional, early-career principals. Its goal is to develop principals with the knowledge, skills, and vision to lead equitable, transformational schools where all children can succeed and thrive. Participants attend intensive retreats and monthly working seminars where they investigate the challenges of 21st century school leadership and the skills required to meet them. The work centers on instructional leadership.
Stanford-Sequoia K-12 Research Collaborative
The Stanford-Sequoia K-12 Research Collaborative is a partnership between the Stanford Graduate School of Education and nine local school districts: Sequoia Union High School District, Redwood City School District, Ravenswood School District, Menlo Park City School District, Las Lomitas School District, Portola Valley School District, Woodside School District, San Carlos School District and Belmont-Redwood Shores School District.
The practitioners and researchers of the Stanford-Sequoia K-12 Research Collaborative aim to work reciprocally to conduct research that informs innovative and sustainable practices and leads to equitable educational experiences and outcomes for students. Since the Collaborative’s official launch in 2017, 20 GSE faculty, staff and students have partnered with 25 school district leaders on research projects that are helping these school districts, along with educators more broadly, support the success of English Learners.
