KQED’s Proactive Education Strategy
Part I: A new model for public media education
Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there. ~Will Rogers
KQED’s Education leadership entered 2015 with a directive from its Board of Directors to reimagine the role of public media organizations in formal education, as well as the role of their department within the organization. Tasked with this mandate, Executive Director, Education Robin Mencher explained how they drew their thinking back to the origins of Sesame Street:
We took this [mandate] as a challenge to ask, “What is a unique and forward-thinking role that public media can play in learning today that is on the scale of the radical shift that Joan Ganz Cooney made when she came up with the idea to use TV as a way to prepare low income children for kindergarten?”
With this framework, KQED’s Education team devised a strategic vision that would position them to thrive in an increasingly competitive education technology environment while meeting the rapidly evolving digital media needs of teachers and students.
This bold perspective signals a significant shift in the way KQED’s Education team approaches what they do. It also provides a case study for how a legacy organization transitions from maintaining the status quo to reacting to market forces to proactively setting an agenda and carving out a new space in that market.
To make such a radical shift, the education team has had to adopt an entirely new approach to what they do and how they do it. Working with outside consultants, the team used the first part of 2015 to outline a strategic vision and theory of change for KQED Education. Grounded in KQED’s audience first strategy, education’s plan emphasizes participatory youth media experiences (that is, those that ask students to engage, respond, and create with digital media) created by education producers. To support these activities, the team also offers targeted, online teacher professional learning opportunities.
Approximately one year into the change process, education staff are working to implement their vision. The education team has allowed us to join them in the “messy middle” of their ambitious journey. Consequently, we’ll be able to explore both the triumphs and setbacks they experience, and how they learn from and adapt their strategies as a result. To begin, we’ll walk through KQED Education’s evolution from status quo maintenance to proactive planning.
Maintaining the Status Quo: Secondary Support
Producers Create Content - Educators Repurpose It
At Most public media organizations, education staff supplement primary media production activities. Media producers design and create content, and then education staffers repurpose or repackage some of that content for classroom use (at least for those stations that have education staff).
With the advent and spread of digital media use in schools and an emphasis on teaching 21st-century skills, maintaining this status quo does not allow KQED to meet the evolving needs of teacher and students. At the same time, this shift has presented educational media organizations with an opportunity to help teachers and students navigate the emerging digital learning environment. In reaction, KQED’s leaders began seeking ways to create deeper connections between their production and education staff and, consequently, between their content and formal learning settings.
Reacting to Digital: A Seat at the Table
Producers Create Content with Educators’ Input - Educators Repurpose It
In 2004, KQED assembled a cohesive team of producers from all of its media platforms (Radio, TV and Interactive) to experiment with multimedia science production in what became the QUEST project. To more closely align production and education activities, QUEST’s leaders offered education staff a seat at table as a fourth platform. Buoyed by funding from the National Science Foundation, which had a specific interest in teacher outreach and student engagement, this team collaborated to develop a coordinated strategy for producing and distributing science media over the air, online and in both formal and informal learning environments.
Inviting education staff to sit at the table with content producers revealed the possibilities and benefits of a coordinated strategy, but it also exposed the limitations of trying to serve multiple audiences and goals at the same time.
Reacting to Learning Needs: Education Producers
Educators Create Original Content and Mix with Existing Resources
As one consultant explained it, “re-engineering [existing content] is less effective and more problematic than building from the ground up.” Thus, in 2012 education staff members began to experiment with producing original content for teachers and students and mixing it with other KQED content.
Teacher focus groups and feedback indicated that education staffers were able to produce high-quality content aligned with curricular guidelines and standards and to include explanations of concepts and processes to enhance student learning. Even with producers grounded in education’s goals, however, it was too much of a burden for one piece of media to meet the needs of student engagement and good storytelling while connecting to science standards…all in approximately four minutes.
Proactive Planning: Media Learning Experiences
Educators Create Integrated, Participation-Based Content and Support Materials
Over the past year, KQED’s Education staff have been developing and implementing a new planning and production model aligned with their current strategic vision. According to Mencher, the model is based on the three components that make a great media learning experience for young people:
engaging, relevant content that connects learning to the real world;
youth participation experiences or activities; and
instructional supports for educators to connect the content and youth participation to curriculum and instruction.
The three components work together to offer a well-rounded, supplemental learning experience.
The team’s determination to reimagine what public media education could be and how they could engage and affect today’s young learners represents a fundamental shift in how KQED Education defines their role in the market and in the organization. Historically, this department has operated in reaction to external forces — first to the content created by KQED’s production arms and then to changes in digital media, education technology and formal learning. With this new approach, education staff not only create their own content, they do so to serve their defined audience and goals.
What’s so radical about that? Let’s take the emphasis on youth participation. For years, education staff have encouraged teachers to create media with their students through free trainings and support materials. Despite these efforts, the vast majority of teachers using KQED materials simply have students consume a piece of content, often as an introduction to a core study concept. Teaching practices and technologies continue to evolve, and the needle is tipping toward more project work and digital media use every year. Even so, the safe bet would be to react to the current market situation by continuing to produce learning content for student consumption. However, in line with KQED’s over-arching audience first strategy, the education team has made a strong commitment to their vision of public media as a resource that provides young people opportunities to interact with and create media around educational topics and issues.
How does that change what they do? Let’s look at one of Education’s recent products. Since 2012, science education staff members have created several series of short, multimedia e-books, including one that ties core science concepts to examples of engineering to solve real-world problems. Each of these Engineering Is e-books incorporates short videos produced by KQED’s Science and Education staff (content), text that expands on the issues and concepts shown in the videos (instructional supports), and an extension activity at the end that calls for students to share their thoughts on the e-book’s topic via KQED’s #DoNow initiative (youth participation).
The e-books contain high-quality content, have been well-received by teachers, and incorporate all three components of what would become the new model. Still, the education team has concluded that these e-books are not the best vehicle to achieve their core goal of youth participation. When staffers developed the e-books, they were thinking content first. That is, they knew teachers were looking for materials that bridged science and engineering and engaged students in real-world issues and that KQED Science had produced great video content related to this need. Had they been thinking audience first, the team would have started with the participatory element. In a participation-based e-book or product, the core activity may have students explore an engineering problem and create a video to describe it or to show how they experimented to solve it. The rest of the materials, including audio and video content, would support that primary engagement experience.
While the KQED Education team is still in the process of developing participation-driven products and initiatives to fit their new model, they are also wrestling with the practical aspects of rapid expansion in the department. New roles and responsibilities, shifting internal relationships and a bevy of new staff members have placed stress on existing structures, workflows and management. Education’s leadership is also building infrastructure, developing new partnerships, and creating an internal evaluation framework to provide feedback as they implement their strategic plan. In August, we’ll look at how the team is resolving these issues while maintaining focus on their ultimate vision of public media education.
