It Takes an Ecosystem, Understanding the People, Places, and Possibilities of Learning and Development Across Settings is the sixth book of the series, Current Issues in Out-of-School Time. The book explores the benefits of developing connections across the systems in which adults engage with young people. This book guides the reader through research and examples of initiatives that demonstrate the positive and negative ways that interactions with all adults in the lives of young people shape their learning and development. This book provides evidence as to why this shift in thinking about the learning and development landscape to an ecosystem perspective envisions a more connected and equitable world. SCRI spoke with the book’s editors, Thomas Akiva and Kimberly H. Robinson.

SCRI recently sat down with Paul Reville, Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor and education visionary, to capture his thinking about post-pandemic schooling in America.

In 2019, BellXcel partnered with RAND on a first-of-its-kind study on summer teacher professional development, The Promise of Summer as
a Time for Teacher Professional Learning. SCRI talked with the study’s lead researchers Elizabeth Steiner and Laura Stelitano to distill the
findings for the broader K-12 field.

In 2020, BellXcel engaged McClanahan Associates, Inc. (MAI) to conduct a literature review to learn more about quality assessment (QA) in Out of School Time (OST) programs and understand the research support for BellXcel’s quality standards and indicators. In this SCRI Asks, Wendy McClanahan, president and founder of McClanahan Associates, Inc. (MAI), shares her unique perspective on quality assessment (QA) in out-of-school time (OST) programs.

This SCRI Asks features Q&A with Christina A. Russell of Policy Studies Associates and Corey Newhouse of Public Profit, editors of Measure, Use, Improve! Data Use in Out-of-School Time. They reflect on BellXcel’s chapter, Thinking Outside the Logic Model, written by our own Brenda McLaughlin and Bryan Hall, and share practical tips and guidance.

In this SCRI Asks we spoke with two of the editors, Gretchen Brion-Meisels and Deepa Vasudevan, as well as chapter coauthor Anna West, of At Our Best: Building Youth-Adult Partnerships in Out-of-School Time Settings. We discuss the importance of youth-adult partnerships and implications for practitioners.