The Hop, Skip, Leapfrog project is the result of a four-month research study conducted by the TLA team to identify and codify new strategies and innovations that emerged during the pandemic. Developed through interviews with system leaders and experts across the country, the project also seeks to make sense of lessons we can learn about sustaining and scaling new work, building greater resiliency and equity, over time.
The COVID-19 pandemic posed incredible challenges for American K-12 education. From navigating the shift to remote learning to putting in place new measures to support safety to identifying and responding to an increasingly wide set of needs, we’ve been forced to make radical changes in how, when, and where we are learning and working together.
These radical changes have built new skills, muscles, and mindsets at the individual, organizational, and ecosystem levels. During a time of incredible challenge, we saw so many examples of inspirational leadership, including authentic stakeholder engagement, innovative ways to support educators, and creativity that removed barriers and surfaced new practices and solutions.
It’s critical we recognize and harness these capabilities to advance more personalized, mastery-focused, and whole-child-developing approaches to ensure equitable, effective, and engaging learning for every child. By exploring their “leading edge”— wherever that might be relative to where a system or school is — education teams can plot their own way forward, setting their sights on meaningful, substantial change to reach the unique needs of every learner. We hope to help leaders and educators harness the opportunities that emerged during the pandemic to advance more personalized, mastery-focused, and whole-child-developing approaches to ensure equitable, effective, and engaging learning for every child.
Explore Resources
- An Intro to Hop, Skip, Leapfrog
- See Hops, Skips, and Leaps in Practice
- Explore Shifting Conditions
- Take It Further in Your Context
- Launching Forward: Leveraging Pandemic Innovations to Advance School Systems (Whitepaper)
- Leadership Podcast: What Will We Take With Us? (Podcast)
- What Has Emerged: Introducing the Hop, Skip, Leapfrog Project (Blog)
