“North Carolina public schools exceed goal to be first in U.S. by 2030.” “Students and teachers are excited for school.” “NC lights the path for learning innovation and lifelong curiosity.” “The JOY of teaching.” These are some hopeful headlines education researchers and education partners want to see for North Carolina.

Dreaming big, building actionable strategies, catalyzing innovative solutions through partnership and driving change were some of the themes for the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation’s Education in Motion Summit held Feb. 24 at the Friday Institute. This gathering was designed to ignite conversations to surface the evidence of what is working in education, accelerate that work and catalyze partnerships among educators, researchers and leaders.

“We can be the inspiration in the space that we are working in right now,” said Emma Braaten, digital learning director at the Friday Institute. “Sometimes that inspiration is for one individual. It might be for a community. It might be for the work at large. Educating, innovating and inspiring exists in our world today. And we are those changemakers; we are those leaders that make it happen.”

During the summit, nearly 100 education leaders, innovators and change makers from more than 50 organizations heard from experts discussing the education landscape in research, policy and practice. Participants explored signals and trends shaping  education, examined innovative approaches to partnerships and considered pathways to move past barriers to make progress. This summit created space for people to learn from one another, build connections and uncover solutions to educational challenges.  

“I wanted to just always keep my finger on the pulse of what educators are saying,” said Hope Davis, founder and chief technology officer for Teach Tech U. “A lot of times you hear districts kind of focusing on what they need, and everybody’s got a specific thing. So I really wanted to hear some of the general conversations and some of the larger, broader ideas that people were coming up with and some of the pain points.”

Breakout sessions engaged participants in collaborative discussions around barriers to progress and possible solutions to accelerate progress in key priorities in K-12 education including AI readiness and responsible technology integration, developing competencies and workforce readiness for student success, and sustaining innovation and change in school systems.

Evidence-Based Decisions

The Friday Institute’s work is grounded in translational research, where findings from research shape practice and experiences from practice inform research. This reciprocal connection between research, policy and practice is how the Friday Institute turns ideas into action that improve educational outcomes, empower key decision makers and promote systemic change.

“I think another big piece that we have to contend with is the research aspect, and really understanding how to leverage the evidence base,” said Ben Pendarvis, program director and facilitator at Open Way Learning. “I think Friday Institute has a really strong grasp on that. I was excited to come and find out who the people are here, how they’ve translated research into practice, how they support practices and the kinds of partners and collaborators that they have that they bring to the table.”

During the opening keynote, Aman Yadav, Lappan-Phillips Professor of Computing Education at Michigan State University, discussed the power of evidence in education, specifically regarding AI and what can be learned from the evidence that currently exists. He said while researching AI use among educators in Michigan, he learned that educators see AI as a solution for reducing teacher labor, but evidence suggested otherwise.

According to Yadav, without a shift in instructional practices, AI may not impact learning. And more importantly, AI is not a replacement for the teacher-student relationship. But unfortunately it may be leaned on when resources are lacking.

“One push-button education is not the model of learning,” said Yadav. “Teaching is relational. My fear in the long run, based on what we know about technology that I’ve shared here, is that well-resourced schools will continue to invest in teacher-student relationships and under-resourced schools will always fall back on technology.”

Friday Institute Executive Director Krista Glazewski sees this trend toward using AI an opportunity to invest in people, not just the tools and technology.

“In the moment we’re in, we’re seeing a possibility of technology’s capacity to scale content, automate decisions, accelerate everything, and our job is a little bit different,” said Glazewski. “We are committed to scaling things that cannot be automated: human judgment, care, dignity.”

Yadav said there is also a publication bias in the education field that shows AI’s significant effects, but when you compare it to negative ones, the difference is negligible. Leaders making decisions should be wary. When thinking about AI integration, he recommends considering all the shifts that need to be made in the landscape of the school or district, from schedule and curriculum to physical space and human infrastructure.

Championing Change

Empowering educators and leaders is essential to the Friday Institute’s pathway for success. Over the last 20 years, the Friday Institute has invited and challenged others to innovate with them by convening and catalyzing key partners to inform research-backed standards, policy and practice.

Guest speaker Deputy State Superintendent Maria Pitre-Martin has been a key partner for collaboration and an inspiration in education long before her time with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI). In addition to serving education for more than 20 years, Pitre-Martin was honored with the Friday Institute’s most prestigious award, the Friday Medal, for her commitment to and leadership in education. Not long after receiving the award, she returned to NCDPI where she continues to champion efforts to improve educational outcomes for North Carolina’s public schools.

During Pitre-Martin’s session, she spoke about how she champions change as a part of NCDPI by highlighting the goals of its comprehensive strategic plan, “Achieving Educational Excellence.” In that plan, NCDPI set a “big hairy audacious goal”: to make North Carolina’s public schools the best in the nation by 2030. Pitre-Martin said that although audacious, NCDPI’s goals are achievable by following three pathways to changing the system: 1) Have a strategy that celebrates the good in public education and galvanizes champions; 2) Highlight narratives that connect emotionally with stakeholders and highlight real people; 3) Address the state of being it takes to get the work done.

“The theme of today’s convening is education in motion, which suggests moving and moving forward,” said Pitre-Martin. “It also alludes to shaping the future of research, policy and practice, which, all of us in this room who’ve been in the business for a long time know that is the challenge: to really take what we know is good research, put it into our policies and then actually put it into effective practice that can make a difference for our students.”

Building Trusted Relationships

Making real systemic change can’t be done alone. The Friday Institute understands that this work isn’t done in silos but together with its partners. 

“Education doesn’t improve by memo,” said Glazewski. “It doesn’t improve by mandate. It improves by relationships, by follow-through, by shared language, by shared commitment to problems, by the willingness to do what’s not glamorous—the work of implementation, real constraints, real kids, real teachers, real budgets, real political weather.”

During the “Partnerships that Move the Needle” session, Friday Institute Assistant Director of Program Evaluation and Educational Research Erin Huggins shared her experience building a trusted partnership alongside Maggie Woods, Office of Digital Opportunity director for the Division of Broadband and Digital Opportunity at the North Carolina Department of Information Technology (NC DIT).

“These types of partnerships aren’t necessarily about tools and structures,” said Huggins. “They’re about building trusted relationships. It’s about relationships that are anchored in statewide goals, not just your institutional goals, because when a goal is bigger than one organization, it’s about serving your communities. It’s about serving our state. It’s about serving our country. That’s when collaboration starts to look different.”

Their partnership team currently works on the North Carolina Digital Opportunity and Learning Initiative, which closes the digital divide and provides digital opportunities, training and access to digital resources for all North Carolinians. The Friday Institute has become a trusted partner for research and evaluation across the state, and it was a partnership built over almost a decade.

“A good partnership doesn’t happen just in isolation,” said Huggins. “The digital opportunity landscape really does feel like a family. We go to conferences, we spend most of our time sitting in corners chit-chatting and catching up. Everyone cares very deeply about each other and the work, and we’re coming at that from a place of true collaboration and partnership where we’re all trying to lift each other up, rather than competing for resources.”

Woods said that what made the partnership a success was having a shared definition of success, producing joint work products and making data and resources a shared asset. 

“The collaboration is really when that kind of ownership of what we’re doing gets kind of blurry, and I think that’s a good thing for us, at least in our work,” said Woods. “We stopped looking at, you know, this is DIT’s work. This is the Friday Institute’s work. This is what other things are doing, and it just all became the work. Like, we were all in it together. We were co-designing. We were sharing accountability for thinking.” 

Summit participants had the opportunity to build relationships as well during breakout sessions to see how they could create pathways to success. 

“This last breakout was probably the more robust, action-oriented kind of conversation that we had,” said Pendarvis. “[We] connected with one of the folks in my small group around their work around family engagement, finding that to be a critical lever and demand from schools. In our conversations with schools, I was very curious. I’ll be curious to learn more from her about how she’s doing that.”  

Turning Moments into Momentum

The Education in Motion Summit was just the beginning of the conversation for moving education forward. Participants shared that during the event they built relationships they planned to continue, found potential partners for shared work, identified actionable strategies to apply in their work, clarified a priority problem worth addressing and gained fresh insights about the current education landscape. 

“Friday Institute is playing such a great role in the partnering and collaborative nature of the Institute, and we have experienced that value and impact of those partnerships and continue to want to do more of that,” said Akua Carraway, program associate at the North Carolina Science, Mathematics, Technology (SMT) Education Center. “We at the SMT Center value those opportunities to collaborate and work together with the Friday Institute and look forward to other opportunities.”

The Friday Institute is committed to sustaining the momentum. 

“We don’t exist to have done an event,” said Glazewski. “We exist to work on behalf of all students, all teachers, all educators, all leaders in North Carolina and beyond. We will use this moment as the moment that it was today but not leave it as a moment but as the next step in the shared momentum that we’re building together.” 

The Friday Institute intends for the Education in Motion Summit to be an annual event,  with plans to hold a second summit in February 2027. To connect with the Friday Institute and stay informed of future convenings, contact Emma Braaten ([email protected]).