Just over a year ago, the TLA team launched a project to better understand blended and personalized learning practices in schools across America. As a result of our research in hundreds of classrooms, today we are launching a new site called Blended and Personalized Practices at Work.
In Practices at Work, we share the approaches of six schools using technology integrally with in-person learning strategies to create data rich, personalized schooling experiences where students move with mastery. We’ve created the site to be highly descriptive and actionable, with hundreds of authentic, strategy-linked resources and artifacts.
Two deeply held beliefs drove the development of this site:
One, we must seek out new solutions to vexing problems faced by teachers and students. The practices we profile here do not define blended or personalized learning as a whole. Nor are they a singular roadmap for implementation. But you’ll see that, across these schools, educators are working together to map out new ways of working and doing, combining older practices with novel ones, to tackle problems big and small. Through these solutions, they are expanding our collective opportunity set of ways to meet the needs of students, teachers, and families.
Two, we will move faster and farther together by sharing ideas and practices as openly as possible. As Alex Hernandez rightly points out, our system-level work is less about defining practice in one way than it is about understanding specific challenges educators need to solve, developing hypotheses about how to solve them, and learning together based on results. The Practices at Work site is TLA’s first step in spurring that ecosystem learning by trying to show how six vanguard schools are tackling specific challenges through practice. We aim to capture and openly share them so that other educators tackling similar problems can understand, adapt, and improve upon them.
We hope you’ll go explore the practices of our first six school partners, whom we admire deeply for their work. We think you will too. When you do, share. And tell us how we did. #TLAPractices
