All education leaders interested in scaling innovation face choices about how to lead system change in a way that maximizes benefits to teachers and students.

The Learning Accelerator has developed a new framework to help leaders understand and navigate through these types of competing approaches. The framework offers insight into the logic supporting the different choices leaders might make as well as actionable examples of the strategies districts use to enact them. Based on interviews with 35 district and CMO leaders across the country, as well as a national survey of nearly 100 other education leaders, “Look Both Ways” highlights seven common decision-making challenges and presents real-world examples that show how other leaders managed these tensions.

• Look Both Ways: A framework to help education leaders navigate through competing approaches to system-wide change
• Problems of Practice: Leadership Design Choices
• Looking Both Ways to Manage the Change (facilitation deck)

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, digital equity was a notable obstacle inside and outside of the classroom. Many students across the United States have relied on their schools for access to the Internet, but when they head home, they do not always have the same level of connectivity or device availability. While many communities and organizations have worked to take innovative measures to address the connectivity gap (through community partnerships, the creation of mobile hotspots, and other creative approaches), difficulties persist.

Despite these challenges, leaders and educators can take steps to better serve all students. Identifying challenges to access, securing important resources, and creating intentional assignments that are universally accessible to students can help school systems bridge the divide. Explore the resources below on digital equity to learn more.

• Strategies for Tackling Digital Equity
• Universal Design for Learning as a Framework for Digital Equity
• Tackling Digital Equity in the Classroom – Strategies for Teachers
• Artificial Intelligence – The New Digital Divide?
• Changing the Discussion: From Screen Time to Digital Equity
• Artificial Intelligence K-12: A New Report and Resource from CoSN (Podcast)
• Meeting the Needs of ALL Students – Addressing the Challenges of Digital Equity (Webinar)

IgnitED Research is a multi-part series from The Learning Accelerator that aims to increase the ability of educators to integrate learning science facts into their practice. These bite-sized introductions to the evidence base on several research-grounded topics, including:

• The myth of learning styles: There is no evidence to support the notion that teaching to a student's "learning style" leads to better or deeper learning.
• Feedback: Feedback is essential to learning.
• Mixed-ability (or heterogeneous) groups: Students of all abilities learn more in mixed-ability groups.
• Retrieval practice: Retrieval, or “calling information to mind,” is a robust strategy for improving learning.
• Learner-led classroom management: Effective classroom management requires giving students authority, along with responsibility, for co-creating classroom norms and routines.
• Prior knowledge: Activating a student's prior knowledge is a critical factor in long-term, lasting, and accurate learning.

Hear From Educators Directly

Each released Insight includes narrative and a brief video that outlines the research, digs deeper into examples of application in classrooms through educator interviews, and links to additional resources that can be used to apply each learning science topic in classrooms.

TLA has learned through its work with pioneering educators that leading and sustaining data-driven, personalized approaches to teaching and learning requires coherent, system-wide shifts in strategy and practice. There is no single correct pathway nor timeline for building readiness or action given the different contexts and assets that exist across a school system.

Despite differences, we have found there are common implementation components — “conditions for scale”— that support planning, adoption, and scaling of innovative initiatives. Leaders seeking to implement and scale work in classrooms must align critical supports, systems, and structures, as well as ongoing processes to establish, improve, and scale work over time. TLA’s Innovative Learning Implementation Framework outlines these common conditions components.

There is no one “right” way to use this tool, but we suggest that teams can use it to:

• Develop shared language across critical system and school actors;
• Identify and communicate across these different actors the necessary conditions for change, including often overlooked non-instructional areas;
• Assess current capacity and organize cross-departmental work ahead; and,
• Monitor and reflect on progress and sticking points.

This framework was developed based on TLA’s experience in the field as well as deep research and review of the great work of other organizations nationally.

• Innovative Learning Implementation Framework

TLA has joined forces as a research partner to Lindsay Unified School District (LUSD) in its efforts to develop personalized, competency-based professional learning pathways for its facilitators (i.e., teachers). Through this work, LUSD is seeking to cultivate the same mindset in educators that it spent the past decade fostering in students — that we are all learners — and therefore professional growth for facilitators should be targeted, personalized, and data-driven. LUSD is investigating several strategies centered on instructional practices aligned to its student-centered framework for personalized learning to make this vision a reality.

Working together over the next year, we'll explore the link between various professional learning approaches and changes in student experience and achievement. Find links to recent results below and follow the ongoing research project through 2020.

• Personalizing Learning for Educators: Measuring What Works (research reports)
• Teacher and School Leader Grant: Impact At-A-Glance
• TLA Blog: Looking Back and Looking Forward: Lessons from Lindsay Unified School District
• TLA Blog: LUSD Personalizes Learning for Educators
• Getting Smart: Defining and Measuring the ‘Personal’ in Personalized Learning
• What Are Instructional Look Fors? (video)
• Instructional Look Fors Research at Lindsay Unified School District (video)
• Instructional Look Fors Guide (website)
• Getting Smart: 5 Research-Based Recommendations for Remote Learning: Lessons from LUSD
• Measuring Personalized Professional Learning: A Three-Year Study of What Works Best, For Whom, Under What Conditions, and Why (webinar)
• Setting up a Residency Program: The What, Where, and How to Make it Work for Your System (report)

Educators — and the coaches and administrators who support them — are increasingly looking for online professional learning that is differentiated to their unique needs and offers the ability to learn when and where they want. But what makes for a quality online learning experience?

TLA, in partnership with EdSurge, conducted a comprehensive review of the scientific literature on adult learning and uncovered six key drivers that make for quality online learning for practitioners. We interviewed platform providers to explore how these drivers are built into the products and had conversations with platform users to understand how they navigate the learning experience. We also developed vignettes to get a glimpse of these drivers in action.

• Are GIFs the Secret Sauce to Working and Learning Remotely? (introductory blog)
• In the Driver’s Seat: Online Professional Learning Design Features in Action (website)
• Research-Based, Online Learning for Teachers (literature review, PDF), accessible version
• District Tool for Assessing Online Professional Learning Platforms (spreadsheet)

Access to high-quality, rigorous instructional materials is a critical resource for educators. TLA has been working over the last five years to understand how open educational resources (OER), free- to low-cost modifiable materials, can be used to support personalized and innovative instruction to meet the needs of each student. This research is ongoing; the resources below summarize key learnings and offer guidance for educator implementation.

• Research Findings: Open Educational Resources for Personalized and Innovative Teaching and Learning Models
• Problems of Practice: Open Educational Resources
• Open Educational Resources: An Urgent Priority – An OER Blog Series

The K-12 learning landscape in the United States has shifted dramatically since March 2020. Educators have mobilized for remote learning, with remarkable efforts. The learning curve has also been steep. TLA is committed to offering educators high-quality, implementable guidance based on where they are and where they need to go next in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Our developing work and resources are designed with resilience in mind to help districts ensure personalized, mastery-based learning can happen anywhere, anytime.

• Remote/Hybrid Learning Guidance & Resources
• How can blended learning work in a remote setting?
• Driving Quality in Remote Learning: A framework for research-informed remote experiences for K-12 leaders
  
• Problems of Practice: Implementing Quality Remote Learning
  
• Problems of Practice: Strategies for Remote and Hybrid Learning Contexts
• Leader Power Moves for Remote Learning
• Remote Learning Training Modules for Staff
• Always Ready for Learning Resource Bank
• Prioritizing Human Connection When Social Distancing Is the New Norm
• What will we do when everyone comes back to school? Five steps toward developing resilient education systems

To address the recent, dramatic shifts in the K-12 learning landscape, school leaders and teachers are adapting and developing approaches that are more flexible and personalized than ever before. Systems need to be redesigned with resilience in mind to ensure that schools and districts can serve every child with rigor and equity, now and into the future.

• Always Ready For Learning Coaching Network: Pro-bono, sustained coaching support for school leaders
• Always Ready for Learning Resource Bank: Vetted and practical tools, insights, and guidance used by the Always Ready for Learning coaches and experts, made free and open to anyone for anyone to use
• Always Ready for Learning Strategy Lab: Networked learning community supporting six districts with their preparations in response to COVID-19 and planning for long-term sustainable change
• Parabola Project: Free resources and tools for school leaders from experts in health and education to minimize risks while maximizing learning with the reopening of schools
  

TLA launched the Innovation Directors Network (IDN) to bring together system leaders from around the country who are charged with scaling innovation initiatives across their districts and school management organizations.

With participants serving a highly diverse group of over 800,000 students nationwide, the IDN’s goal is to accelerate collective learning through knowledge development, sharing, and evidence-building. Through ongoing virtual and in-person meetings, this network is collaboratively identifying and testing approaches for solving commonly-held problems and sharing that knowledge broadly with the field.

• A Warm Welcome to the Innovation Directors Network!
• Leading Innovation? You'll Need These Six Skills
• Building Community and Connections: An update on TLA’s Innovation Directors Network
• Failing Forward: What school innovation networks have taught me about learning from failures
• Coast-to-Coast Connections: How a national network fosters better education for all students
• Are You Ready for Some New Teachers?: Resources for onboarding new teachers to innovative model
  
• Innovation Directors Network Meeting Summary: June 11-13, 2018

Advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within organizations requires a steadfast commitment to ongoing dialogue, learning from missteps, and changing hearts and minds. As workplaces (including those of many education organizations) increasingly adopt and embrace virtual work, it is critical for leaders to consider how remote work dynamics affect DEI across their internal culture and external work.

Yet, this work can be daunting for many remote organizations. Much existing guidance around the intersection of DEI and work focuses on traditional, in-person workplaces, and resources that might exist do so behind paywalls or through costly consulting services, out of reach for small businesses and nonprofits in need of support. There are organizations tackling this issue, but much like the innovation efforts underway to improve teaching and learning in schools, their work is happening in isolation. The field needs open knowledge and communities to do remote DEI well.

To tackle this challenge, TLA launched the Remote DEI Collective (RDC), a research and development community of practitioners aiming to advance DEI specifically within remote environments. Starting with a group of seven virtual, nonprofit and for-profit education organizations in 2019 and growing to 12 member organizations in 2021 alongside a partnership with Promise54, the community is building and openly sharing practices for the field; the Remote DEI Toolkit launched in Spring 2020 to showcase actionable insights, strategies, and resources for remote organizations.

Our partners include:

• 2Revolutions, a fully virtual education design lab that uses the design process to help school communities develop and implement solutions.
• Deans for Impact, a partially virtual nonprofit that works to ensure every child is taught by a well-prepared teacher.
• EdTec, a partially virtual social enterprise committed to improving public education by supporting charter schools with business, operations, and performance services.
• Gradient Learning, a fully virtual nonprofit that creates technology solutions to meet the holistic needs of every child while fostering success for all.
• Highlander Institute, a partially virtual nonprofit that partners with communities to imagine and create more equitable, relevant, and effective schools.
• Illustrative Mathematics, a fully virtual nonprofit committed to creating a world where learners know, use, and enjoy mathematics.
• Next Generation Learning Challenges, a fully virtual nonprofit supporting the educators who are reimagining public education.
• The Leadership Academy, a partially virtual nonprofit that supports and develops school and system leaders to lead equitable schools.
• PowerMyLearning, a fully virtual nonprofit that activates the power of collaboration between teachers, students, and families.
• Transcend, a fully virtual nonprofit that supports communities to create and spread extraordinary, equitable learning environments.
• Transforming Education, a fully virtual nonprofit that partners with school systems to support educators and leaders in fostering whole-child development.
• Promise54 (DEI expert partner), a fully virtual consulting organization that helps adults thrive so that they can do their best work.

The Always Ready for Learning Strategy Lab is a networked learning community from The Learning Accelerator, in partnership with Bellwether Education Partners, working to accelerate the development of a more resilient and equitable education future.

The nine-month, pro bono, cohort-based learning experience is supporting seven districts in their safe reopening and planning for long-term sustainable change beyond the COVID era.

• Always Ready for Learning Strategy Lab
• OPINION: Fires, storms and Covid: How some school districts focused on equity during decision time
• Building the Car While We’re Driving It: Lessons Learned and Back-to-School Priorities in Four Districts
• What We Learned from the Strategy Lab
• A Reliable Hybrid Learning Model: Cedar Rapids Schools Respond to Setbacks
• Phoenix Charter Academy on The Primary Person Advisory Model
• How Monterey Peninsula Unified School District Reduced Their Failure Rate by over 60%

TLA and InnovateEDU have launched a national community of practice (CoP) for thought leaders and practitioners from a diverse set of school, networks, and districts focused on the development, implementation, and continuous improvement of talent systems to support innovative learning models in K-12 education. The first phase of this project seeks to build a CoP to identify shared challenges and develop collaborative multi-organization projects to address those challenges. Ultimately, these projects will be supported by a funding consortium to develop sector-wide solutions.

The overall goals of this community of practice are to:

• Bring school and district leaders, practitioners, and educational support organizations together into an ongoing CoP that supports innovative talent system model feature development and implementation.
• Define and agree upon a common set of system-level challenges faced by the community relative to educator preparation and development.
• Begin to share strategies and resources among the community to accelerate learning.
• Begin to develop a shared agenda to build capacity in the community and broader field.
• Brainstorm collaborative projects which can be used to kickstart efforts to bring together the shared agenda.

The following documents provide background around creating talent systems to support innovative learning.

• Talent Systems to Support Innovative Learning Research Summary: February 2018
• Talent Systems to Support Innovative Learning Meeting Summary: February 6, 2018

The Learning Accelerator oversees a year-long Fellowship of individuals who conduct research that advances our measurement agenda for innovative learning. Through these fellowships, we work to catalyze the measurement ecosystem (including future researchers, leaders, and educators) to work together towards the mutual goal of all students receiving an outstanding education, enabling them to reach their full potential.

• TLA Measurement Fellows
• TLA’s Measurement Fellowship: New knowledge for the field
• TLA Measurement Fellowship: A new blended teaching assessment tool emerges

Blended & Personalized Learning at Work is TLA's main resource collection site. Educators and education leaders can discover free, action-oriented strategies to implement blended and personalized learning, including how to:

• Adopt specific teaching practices at the student level.
• Create the conditions for success and scale at the school system level.
• Build human capacity and support the people who are doing the work.
• Measure progress.

Educators can also find expert Insights, solutions to specific Problems of Practice, and professional learning Playlists that connect to a wider world of blended and personalized learning resources.

• Blended & Personalized Learning at Work

TLA teamed up with Google for Education to develop an implementation guide and supporting resources to help teachers and school leaders understand and enact Google for Education's four key, research-backed learning principles for improving education:

• Personalized & Measurable: Adapts for each unique learner to meet them where they are
• Project-based & Self-managed: Champions learners taking active ownership of their learning
• Collaborative & Diverse: Forms meaningful connections to spark new and different thinking
• Authentic & Experiential: Applies knowledge plus experience to explore and create a world beyond Googleable questions

TLA and the Google team worked alongside educators who are pioneering the practical implementation of these principles with Google tools in the field and we have made this robust and actionable set of resources available for use across the globe.

• Driving Instructional Change with Google Tools: A Guide for Schools & Districts (website)
• Driving Instructional Change with Google Tools (slide deck)

Teachers shifting to remote learning are navigating a lot of challenges, including learning how to use technology. Many of those teachers and school leaders are trying these tools for the first time. GetSetUp and The Learning Accelerator partnered to offer educator-to-educator training on the tools teachers need to plan, connect, and provide instruction and support for students. Educators can sign up to join free group classes taught by other teachers on how to use tools like Zoom, Google Hangout Meets, YouTube for streaming classes, and various screencasting tools, as well as online teaching platforms.

• GetSetUp: Remote Learning

Looking for answers to specific problems? TLA's Problem of Practice guides offer concrete ways to address common challenges to innovative learning that we have discovered through our research and networks. Each collection details a specific problem of practice, why it is important, what the research says, and offers actionable solutions, resources, and real-world examples of how others have succeeded. New topics and guides are added regularly and current guides include:

• Station Rotation
• Supporting Students with Learning Disabilities
• Leadership Design Choices
• Research Primer
• Open Educational Resources
• Teacher Onboarding
• Data-Driven Instruction
• Remote Teaching and Learning
• Strategies for Remote and Hybrid Learning Contexts

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 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. 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.

• Hop, Skip, Leapfrog
• Hops, Skips, and Leaps in Practice
• Shifting Conditions
• Take It Further in Your Context
• What Has Emerged: Introducing the Hop, Skip, Leapfrog Project

The Innovative Learning Expert Hub (ILEx) is a new pilot project developed by The Learning Accelerator and Catalyst:Ed. In our respective work with education leaders and professional service experts, we’ve learned that access to quality external consultants and supports can be a common, critical component to success. This is especially true for smaller projects, where schools might be taking the first steps toward their vision for innovative learning, breathing new life into a stalled effort, or shifting into continuous improvement mode after a multi-year implementation. The ILEx offers education leaders committed to exploring and scaling innovative learning models a way to find high-quality consultants to work with and learn together.

If you are a leader ready to get support for your innovative learning journey, please visit the ILEx. There, you can see sample projects or request a conversation with the Catalyst:Ed team who will work to understand your needs and develop a customized project scope to address your challenges on your timeline and at a reasonable budget. After approval, Catalyst:Ed will reach out to its network of vetted innovative learning implementation experts and work with you to select a partner to help you reach your goals.

• ILEx: Innovative Learning Expert Hub

Across the country, educators, leaders, and school support organizations are working to implement new, innovative, and personalized approaches to student learning. Accelerating this work requires sharing across organizations, platforms, and frameworks to help practitioners develop their skills and knowledge. The Learning Commons is a shared, online space where educators, teachers, designers, and leaders can find, save, and share ideas, tools, and open content linked to specific teaching competencies.

How Does The Learning Commons Work?

The Learning Commons is a free, open site where educators can search for professional learning resources provided by different learning content providers, educational research institutions, professional development organizations, and school districts to find the professional learning support they need to implement innovative approaches to teaching, including blended and personalized learning, in their classrooms. Teachers, designers, and leaders of learning can discover curated content playlists, self-paced competency development tracking, and community-vetted resources. Resources can be saved and shared through personalized content playlists.

• The Learning Commons

The Parabola Project is an initiative that aims to rapidly develop free and open evidence-informed tools to help school and system leaders identify options for school reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Parabola Project draws on expertise from both the education and health communities with the goal of minimizing health risks to students, staff, and teachers, while maximizing learning for all students.

• Parabola Project
• School Reopening Readiness Guide
• Ariadne Labs and The Learning Accelerator Launch the Parabola Project to Help Schools Minimize COVID-19 Health Risks While Maximizing Learning

School and system leaders undoubtedly want to remove barriers to equity, but it can often feel difficult to find the right time to make these changes. However, we believe that school and system leaders can make meaningful, positive change in their schools even under very challenging circumstances with the right team, tools, and process – without waiting for the perfect time to do so.

Developed by The Learning Accelerator with Bellwether Education Partners through our support of school systems in their urgent response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Real-Time Redesign toolkit provides leaders with a realistic, inclusive, and rapid process for making targeted improvement toward more equitable and resilient teaching and learning – in any context – through a series of guided activities paired with examples from real schools.

• Real-Time Redesign Toolkit
• Cedar Rapids Community School District Case Study
• Monterey Peninsula Unified School District Case Study
• Mastery Charter Schools Case Study
• Advice: Common Pitfalls & Tips for Success in Design Work