Our principals are required to be exceptional in a lot of facets of executive leadership. Foundational among these skills is the ability to create, articulate, and execute on a vision of excellence for teaching and learning. Vision is a crucial condition for success in a school. More and more school leaders are realizing that to fully realize the power of personalizing instruction, their visions need to include adaptive and responsive instructional materials that meet the needs of all students.
Open Educational Resources (OER) are openly licensed materials that teachers can revise and remix to support student learning, and they have become a primary tool for schools looking to increase equity and personalizing instruction. Here is a look at a resource The Learning Accelerator (TLA) has created to help leaders and educators get started with OER.
Sometimes, schools are utilizing OER without even realizing it. In other cases, principals and teachers are yearning for innovative ways to bring the right materials to the right students without compromising a rigorous bar for success. In either case, this is where vision comes into play. Visions inspire change and motivate others to take action, and students ultimately benefit when leaders are able to develop clear visions for how OER can be adopted and implemented in schools. TLA has developed several resources to support school and system leaders in developing this vision:
- Using OER in a District Context: This snapshot highlights one strong example of how a district in New York is innovating around the use of OER by making it easy for its educators to adopt materials approved for both quality and copyright.
- Locust Grove Middle School’s Shift to Personalized Learning: Change management in schools is tough work and can be a slow, tedious process. This resource helps leaders understand how vision and change management are connected and provides insight into how one might craft a vision and a change management plan for OER adoption.
- Resource Reallocation Options with OER: One of the many benefits of creating a culture around OER implementation is the promise that dollars that were previously spent on traditional textbook adoption can now be reallocated for other capacity-building activities, such as professional learning and development for teachers. This resource shares insight on this process from a district outside of Kansas City.
To learn more about how OER is changing teaching and learning, view our other OER resources and check the TLA Blog throughout the week as we continue to celebrate Open Education Week with posts about useful resources for OER vision-crafting, adoption, and implementation.
Next post: TLA’s Top OER Resources for Supporting and Developing Teachers
