Knowledge, Networks, & Tools for Innovative Learning

Find our latest research reports, advice, and valuable tools to make promising education models a reality for students. Learn about our growing network of innovation pioneers who are testing, adapting, and building the evidence base for personalized, mastery-based practices.

Research & Thought-Leadership

TLA works with educators and the organizations that support them to understand and share emerging strategies and collective challenges. We produce unique insights and field-leading research, some of which are highlighted below.

Managing Change: Critical Leadership Design Choices

Digital Equity

IgnitED Research: Connecting Learning Science to Instructional Practice

Innovative Learning Implementation Framework

LUSD: Innovative Learning Pathways for Educators

Online Professional Learning

Open Educational Resources and Personalized Learning

Managing Change: Critical Leadership Design Choices

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.

Digital Equity

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.

IgnitED Research: Connecting Learning Science to Instructional Practice

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.

Innovative Learning Implementation Framework

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

LUSD: Innovative Learning Pathways for Educators

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.

Online Professional Learning

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)

Open Educational Resources and Personalized Learning

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.

Networks

TLA connects educators and leaders across the country to learn together and drive the adoption of high-quality innovative teaching and learning practices. Explore some of our key networks below.

Pro Bono Coaching

Innovation Directors Network

Remote DEI Collective

Strategy Lab

Talent Systems to Support Innovative Schools

Pro Bono Coaching

The Always Ready for Learning Coaching Network is a national, philanthropically-supported initiative offering K-12 school district leaders pro bono, customized guidance to help improve teaching and learning. This coalition of leading education experts work with schools to determine concrete steps and connect them with the tools they need to ensure learning can happen anytime, anywhere.

Always Ready For Learning Coaching Network

Innovation Directors Network

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.

Remote DEI Collective

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.

Strategy Lab

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

The year-long, pro bono, cohort-based learning experience supported seven districts in their safe reopening and planning for long-term sustainable change beyond the COVID-19 era.

Talent Systems to Support Innovative Schools

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.

Tools & Guidance

TLA has developed projects to help address common challenges, including connecting and accelerating educator learning, matching school districts with implementation experts, and providing real-world implementation strategies to accelerate the shift to innovative learning models.