Building interest in innovative blended learning partnerships for North Carolina school districts

For educators and students, the pandemic highlighted and accelerated many challenges around teaching and learning. The pandemic led us to ask questions like: How do we prepare for and respond to potential learning disruptions like COVID-19, weather-related issues or other emergencies? How do we ensure that students can continue learning, whether that learning takes place digitally or in in-person spaces?

These are just two of the important questions that guided the work of Rethink Education, an initiative of the Office of Virtual Instruction Services Division at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI). This initiative was made possible by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Rethink Education is focused on applying what we learned from responding to COVID-19 and improving blended learning, implementation support for educators and content for North Carolina K-8 students.

As part of NCDPI’s grant, our team partnered with RTI to cultivate district interest in these critical new trainings and supports, and provide families with access to the information they need to best support their child’s success.

Through our partnership with RTI, we created and amplified compelling messaging and creative content that:

• captured the need for this work,

• cultivated district and educator interest in Rethink opportunities and partnerships,

• highlighted the progress Rethink continues making,

• and spoke to what matters most to districts as well as parents and caregivers.

Here’s some of what our team did:

• Helped create custom videos. In partnership with RTI, our team helped develop two distinct videos to tell the Rethink story – one live video featuring leaders and one animated video. We managed the process collaboratively, from start to finish:

  • We started with a full team brainstorm to identify goals, our most important audiences and what we wanted them to take away from these videos.

  • And, we scripted and storyboarded to make sure we conveyed our most important points using best practices for video storytelling.

The result? Lively, crisp and informative videos in two different formats that the Rethink team can use in presentations, at the start of new district partnerships, through newsletters and more!

• Delivered toolkits to help districts announce partnerships and engage educators. Throughout our partnership with RTI, we created comprehensive toolkits to make it as easy as possible for districts to share critical information about Rethink opportunities. We developed easy-to-use, sharable and customizable content, from social media messages to designed one-pagers to newsletter blurbs to email content. These toolkits helped districts keep their communities informed about how Rethink partnerships will help reshape learning, and they made it easy for partner districts to engage educators who can benefit from important Rethink professional development opportunities.

• Edited and designed content guides to parents. We edited and designed 11 content guides so that parents and caregivers can support their child’s learning, whether that’s virtual learning or in-person. Now, North Carolina families can access timely, important resources for seamless student learning.

• Designed custom social graphics and managed social strategy. As a new statewide initiative, meeting audiences where they are with essential information is so valuable. We created a data-backed social strategy to make this happen. We:

  • sought to amplify key messages about the initiative across social channels to inform educators and districts about Rethink,

  • used social channels to highlight all of the exciting work happening in schools and how educators are bringing their training and learnings to life,

  • created a clear process and editorial calendar, and

  • established and tracked clear metrics for success, so we can determine what target audiences most want to hear on each platform and when the best time to reach them might be. Using quarterly reports, we adjusted our strategies and focused on what’s working (e.g., the hundreds of custom social graphics we created were consistently a huge hit!).

And, over time, we progressed across all of our key metrics – increasing followers, impressions and engagement across all channels since the start of our partnership!