In education, we have a tendency to reinvent the wheel. At its core, the challenge is not a lack of will to share; rather, our public education system isn’t built for sector-wide collaboration. Instead, it decentralizes structures and policies, leading to the unintended outcome of a hyper-local system. While adapting content to local contexts is...

We are looking forward to seeing many of you next week in Nashville at the 2018 iNACOL Symposium: Driving the Transformation of Learning! The Learning Accelerator (TLA) is thrilled to be presenting alongside many of our partner organizations and education leaders on numerous important topics in the blended and personalized learning space. Sessions...

As we described in the first post in our work culture series, The Learning Accelerator is a small, remote-first organization with a team of 12 people stretched over four time zones and eight states. Much of the work of our internal Operations team and our Happiness sub-team is focused on ensuring we have structures, processes, and rituals in place...

As blended teaching becomes more prevalent throughout the country, leaders in the field are looking for how to measure and assess quality blended teaching skills. As part of my TLA Measurement Fellowship, I distilled the information that I gleaned from a literature review (Pulham & Graham, 2018) to create an objective test of teacher skill in...

The public voting period for SXSWedu is upon us, and we would love your help in bringing The Learning Accelerator back to Austin! Would you mind taking a few minutes to vote for our sessions described below? (If you aren't registered to vote for SXSWedu sessions yet, you can click here to create your account and cast your votes. Voting ends August...

In June 2018, The Learning Accelerator (TLA) launched the Innovation Directors Network (IDN), a small but powerful group of school system leaders. These individuals sit at the nexus of academic and operational change, leading efforts to seed, test, and scale innovative instructional approaches across schools in their district or networks. Their...

Personalized learning can take many forms, and more effective personalization does not always mean more technology. The promise of blended and personalized learning is that educators can better meet the individual needs of each of their students, as opposed to providing a single approach to instruction and having students adapt to that. Technology...

As we enter August, the start of the school year is just around the corner for educators. Over the summer at The Learning Accelerator, we have been hard at work creating playlists full of resources and strategies to help educators prepare to welcome students back into their classrooms. We know educators are thinking about how to best setup their...

This blog first appeared on EdWeek’s Next Gen Learning in Action column.With all the interest in innovative school models, many schools are creating “flex time” periods during the day for students to increase student agency. We at Silicon Schools Fund and Relay Graduate School of Education set out to understand what makes flex time periods work...

I’ve been fortunate to live most of my web-browsing life as an able-bodied person. I’ve never encountered any difficulties being able to find, see, and otherwise experience online content, which is crucial in an age where people are so likely to consult Google for answers to their questions and dilemmas. The convenience is undeniable – especially...