Kameelah Shaheed-Diallo
Senior VP for Strategy & Community Engagement, The Mind Trust Indianapolis
I think the innovation is important because our realities are very different today than they were, say, 50 years ago. If the purpose of education is to make sure that people have access to live the lives that they want to lead, we have to think about what jobs are available to those students. So the skills that children need today are different than the skills they needed 50 years ago so we have to make sure that we're creating learning environments that are going to prepare them for the jobs of tomorrow. I think the other part is just to make sure that we're creating environments for learning where students are able to express themselves in ways that just culturally are different.
It's not a kind of "sit and get" mentality now. Students need more engagement and involvement for learning to actually happen and for it to be meaningful. So environments where teachers can create those environments in ways that serve the students — and that may look different at one school than it looks at another school — but just the freedom to be able to do that, to meet the needs of the kids that you have in front of you, is really important.
For me it's just gotten more personal. I'm a mom and when I joined the organization, I was a mother thinking about school for my kids as well. But I think I've just become even more aware of how people make choices and what choices they have available. So when I think about what I want for my kids, it's not any different from what any mother wants. But the ability to realize that, it's really disturbing to know where those challenges are and where that's not being met. So just becoming more aware of that, I think, makes me more committed to doing the work that we do because every mother should be able to send their child to a school that's going to serve them well. And the realization that that's not happening, I think, makes the work that much more urgent but also that much more personal.
